Neobank Lance targets gig economy's income volatility

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The New York City-based challenger divides a user's payments into sub-accounts for salary, tax withholdings, business expense balance and a savings account.

Lance, a new challenger bank for freelancers, is hoping to grab a significant share of the approximately 60 million gig workers in the U.S.

The fintech closed a $2.8 million seed round Tuesday, with investors including Barclays, BDMI, Great Oaks Capital, Imagination Capital, Techstars and DFJ Frontier, among other angel investors.

Lance, whose Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC)-insured deposits are held at Charlottesville, Virginia-based Blue Ridge Bank, uses automation to address the typical volatility of a freelancer’s income by creating a series of sub-accounts for the user. 

Lance distributes a portion of a user’s payments toward their personal salary, tax withholdings, business expense balance and a savings account. 

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Netflix Announces MECH CADETS Animated Series Based on BOOM! Studios Comic

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Get ready for a new animated series based on the BOOM! Studios comic Mech Cadet Yu by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa!


Netflix announced today MECH CADETS (2023), a 3D animated series based on the BOOM! Studios comic book series Mech Cadet Yu by writer Greg Pak and artist Takeshi Miyazawa. The animated series is executive produced by BOOM! Studios, Japanese studio Polygon Pictures Inc., and Aaron Lam who serves as the writer and an executive producer of the series.

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This startup allows workers to access earned wages early

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Jason Lee, DailyPay Founder & CEO joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel with the latest on the on-demand pay platform.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. In today's startup spotlight, we're taking a look at the intense battle that businesses are currently finding themselves in for talent. As a refresher, right now, we're sitting on what is a record amount of job openings here in the US. When we look at that, in a very intense battle to fill those openings and entice workers. Employers are not just upping what their employees are paid, but how they are paid with flexible new services.

And one of those services, DailyPay, lets users tap paychecks in real time so they don't have to wait for payday to roll around. The company just closed a $175 million series D funding round. And for more on that, happy to welcome into our starting spotlight segment here, DailyPay's founder and CEO Jason Lee joins us right now. And Jason, congrats on the round. Good to be chatting with you here. You work with some big names-- McDonald's, Kroger, and some other ones out there. But what are you seeing in terms of those companies and others trying to use your services to attract new talent?

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Why Innovation, Not Diversification, Is Key To The Oil And Gas Industry’s Survival

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Yesterday I wrote about some tone-deaf advice provided by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to the oil and gas industry. Granholm advised oil and natural gas companies they must diversify if they want to survive. The Secretary would have been more on-point had she advised them to innovate, because that’s what is inevitably going to happen. History tells us that that is what this industry always does to survive and thrive in a constantly changing world. 

The elephant in the living room, of course, is emissions. The industry has been pressured by regulators and activists for decades now to clean up its emissions, and more recently has found itself under increasing pressure from investors and banking institutions to not only cut its methane and carbon emissions, but to be able to publicly document the progress. That pressure has now been extended down the chain to the international end users of the big volumes of U.S. production that is exported each day.

This is where Project Canary, a public benefit B-corp., comes in. As Chris Romer, CEO of Canary told me this week, “Even the oil companies agree that the ESG movement is a 100-ft. tsunami that is only 10 feet out of the water. It’s becoming table stakes now, and in the near future, not only their investors, but the banks are going to insist that the “E” in ESG has to be data-driven. That’s the entire hypothesis of Project Canary.” Basically, Romer believes that companies in the oil industry will no longer be able to satisfy ESG-concerned investors that they’re taking the “E” in ESG seriously by making a pledge to become net-zero by some year out in the future without being able to demonstrate real, annual progress.

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