News Pod #32 - Avant & NASCAR Deal, bunq denied US Bank Charter, and Checkr acquires Truv

So this one, the headline was NASCAR and Avant announced multi-year partnership to launch new co-branded credit card for fans.

This was a press release on NASCAR's website.

This went out, let me see where it's dated.

I think it was a couple days ago.

I know about a week ago, August 13th.

It caught our radar earlier this week.

And it's as part of the agreement, Avant will become NASCAR's exclusive provider for co-branded credit card products in the United States beginning Jan 1, 2027.

So this hasn't started yet, but they've already announced.

As many of you know, Credit One was the incumbent bank in this partnership.

I'm surprised they didn't continue the deal.

Credit One has always appeared to me to be well-funded, one of the leaders, and it's subprime lending.

And now we have kind of...

I wouldn't say a newcomer because Avant's been around for a while, at least a decade, according to kind of...

I'm just going off of memory here.

But this signals to me they're doing really well.

They're strong.

They're investing in the future.

This particular partnership, I've actually had the benefit of being at one of these races back when I was at Credit Karma, Credit One.

The Credit One team invited me out.

It was the Sonoma race.

So I got to see... firsthand some of the brand assets that Credit One got during that race.

I remember very vividly, and I'm not a NASCAR fan, by the way, but just going off of the memory of the race, the cars were branded Credit One, and obviously NASCAR is huge on TV, so the deal goes beyond just the tactical account creation from the co-brand relationship and also just extends into... various promotional branding elements that NASCAR and their universe of assets can provide.

So I think this is a really strong signal for Vaughn.

If you've been listening to the pod and kind of are writing in the newsletter, you know that I believe strongly that the brands that are going to grow through the next decade and kind of this AI world are going to be brand-led.

There are going to be a lot of strong brand investments because I believe the odds of getting a consumer are going to go up materially if the consumer mentions you by name in their prompt, whether that be voice or text or whatever format that takes over time.