Americans leave $10–20k of petty cash idle in checking, earning nothing. Fold Max is a stored-value account that puts that cash to work — unlocking best-in-world rewards on spend the customer already does, funded by the yield Fold earns and run with no bank partner. FY27 economics, on multiples, anchored to today.
The target is not savings being chased for yield. It is the idle operating cash — the $10–20k Americans keep in checking to pay bills from — that earns essentially nothing where it sits. Fold Max relocates that cash into a stored-value account: the customer still spends from it and refills it as they always have, but now it works. The same $15k, side by side:
The customer gets a 4% effective return on cash that was dead — better than any checking or rewards card in market. Fold keeps a 1.5% net spread on every relocated dollar, before interchange and breakage. The money is never locked; it is stored value the customer spends and refills. Fold simply captures the float the checking account was wasting.
Reward rate is tiered by how much petty cash the customer holds in Fold Max. The more dead checking balance they relocate, the higher the reward tier they unlock on their platform spend — a direct incentive to consolidate idle cash into Fold. The yield Fold earns on the stored value funds the reward; the spread is Fold's, and it requires no charter and no banking partner to operate.
| Stored Value | Fold Yield /yr | Reward Tier (CC) | Reward to Holder /yr | Holder Effective ROI | Fold Spread /yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10,000 | $550 | 1.5% | $0 | 0.0% | $550 |
| $15,000 | $825 | 2.0% | $600 | 4.0% | $225 |
| $30,000 | $1,650 | 2.5% | $1,200 | 4.0% | $450 |
| $50,000 | $2,750 | 3.0% | $1,800 | 3.6% | $950 |
| $75,000 | $4,125 | 4.0% | $2,700 | 3.6% | $1,425 |
| $100,000 | $5,500 | 5.0% | $3,600 | 3.6% | $1,900 |
Reward tier applies to platform spend (credit card + bill pay) up to a $10k/month combined cap. Fold spread = yield earned on stored value less rewards paid. Interchange on spend, breakage, and tier overages are additive and excluded.
Stored-value balances convert to revenue at a blended net take of ~6% per year — a figure that is already a margin, not gross interchange ground down by reward payouts. With no partner taking a cut and no charter chokepoint, Fold retains the full spread, and EBITDA conversion runs 57–72%. Three FY27 adoption scenarios, valued on a blend of revenue (neobank comps ~3.4×) and EBITDA (specialty-finance 10–12×) multiples, then discounted one year at 25%:
| Scenario | Stored-Value AUM | Revenue | EBITDA | FY27 Value | PV Today | Prob. | Weighted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Failure | — | — | — | — | $50M | 10% | $5M |
| Conservative | $1.2B | $112M | $64M | $388M | $310M | 35% | $109M |
| Base | $3.75B | $285M | $189M | $1,322M | $1,058M | 40% | $423M |
| Aggressive | $10.8B | $738M | $532M | $4,240M | $3,392M | 15% | $509M |
| Probability-weighted value, today | $1,045M |
Americans hold hundreds of billions in idle checking balances earning nothing. Fold Max does not need to win deposits from a yield war — it needs only to be the obvious home for petty cash, because no checking account or rewards card returns anything close. Growth is self-funding: the spread on relocated balances pays to acquire the next cohort. As stored value compounds toward tens of billions, the spread compounds with it.
At $40B of stored value: $2.2B gross yield, ~$1.0B returned to holders as best-in-world rewards, ~$1.2B retained spread — at margins a partner-dependent neobank can never reach, because Fold keeps the whole spread. Customer counts shown at $15k average stored balance.