Episode 186: Solving the Cannabis Banking Dilemma with Green Check Verified

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We're here at MJBizCon, and I'm talking to Kevin Hart, who is the founder and CEO of Green Check. All right. I am fascinated to talk with you about this financial sector of cannabis because you provide

banking solutions for people in the cannabis industry and that has got to be a sort of a wild sector to work in. Well, it has been. So a very interesting backstory.

I was first approached to build a point of sale system for the cannabis industry. It's part of my tech background, global CPG brand and then I found out about the banking challenge and that became a much more interesting data puzzle to me. I fancy myself a data nerd, I'm not an AI engine on wheels or anything like that,

but that became very interesting because as we're looking at the point of sale landscape to me that wasn't as intriguing, but every cannabis business who stay here in an event like this, they need two things, the top rate. They need the product, the cannabis, and they need a bank account. So if you can

insert yourself into that process, you have a good chance of being successful. And then the other challenge was obviously the demand was always going to be everybody's going to need bank account. So this is going back to 2016, 2017. 13 states, $3 billion, but the projections were always going to be there

that was going to grow and they've been pretty accurate in terms of market growth. And so again you can look at things from a demand perspective or a supply problem. I wanted to attack the supply problem. How do you convince banks and credit unions that they can serve cannabis businesses? Because it's not

federally illegal to bank cannabis. It's federally illegal to sell cannabis. The banks aren't selling it. They're just providing services. And so we took two years to design our company, understand how it should work, and we built our product, we launched it, and by any measure in today's world, we are the

largest provider of banking services to the cannabis industry. We've signed over 175 different financial institutions including Guam and Saipan but mostly domestic UF. We have 13,000 cannabis businesses on our platform and we process over a billion dollars a month of sales deposits into our connected financial

institution. We're probably the best kept secret in cannabis. I, you are. Because so much of what I do as a writer, writing about cannabis has to do with 280E, the banking issue, the fact that dispensaries were victim to smash and grabs during the pandemic because people just knew that they would be sitting on piles of cash.

Tons. Crazy stories. Yeah, tell us a story. Any kind of story about a problem that you solved? Well, so early on, you know, we'll leave the names out of it. We'll even leave the state out of it but people will be able to deduce this. We had a phone call with

somebody and it was 10 minutes late and things happened. So eventually this gal calls us and she said sorry I'm late but I live up in the mountains and I don't get cell service so I had to drive down the mountain to find a spot so I can call you guys. I run multiple dispensaries. I spend one day a week as

the owner of these dispensaries driving around going to Western Union to get checks and money orders for all this cash that I have and I literally spend a day, that's all I do from dawn to dusk is driving around. And I have to do that every week and she goes, and I am tripping over boxes of cash in my

house. Now, she had never met us so it's kind of risky actually sharing that kind of information. We're looking at each other on the phone and go, did she really just say that? It's something, you know, we're nice people.

We're not going to say anything, but nobody should have to live that like that. and she shouldn't have to take that time away. So we actually did, we were successful, and we got her a bank account.

And we've done that for thousands of other businesses. Yeah, the basic safety of going from being a high risk potential target to just being able to put your money into a bank must be such a relief for the folks

that you help who have never been able to have a bank account for that business. Exactly. So it's a myth that you can't have a bank account.

You can have a bank account. You can have a loan. You can have payroll services. We have wealth management people on the platform

because they run successful businesses and they just don't wanna leave the money in a bank account even though interest rates have improved on the CD side.