Pride Month: Q&A with bunny.money founders about saving for good

June is Pride Month—a time for us to come together to bring visibility and belonging, and celebrate the diverse set of experiences, perspectives, and identities of the LGBTQ+ community. This month, Lindsey Scrase, Managing Director, Global SMB and Startups at Google Cloud, is showcasing conversations with startups led by LGBTQ+ founders and how they use Google Cloud to grow their businesses. This feature highlights bunny.money and its founders, Fabien Lamaison, CEO, Thomas Ramé, Technology Lead, and Cyril Goust, Engineering Lead. 

Lindsey: Thanks Fabien, Thomas, and Cyril. It’s great to connect with you and talk about bunny.money. I love how you’re bringing a creative twist to fintech and giving back to communities. What inspired you to found the company?

Fabien: One of my favorite childhood toys was an old-fashioned piggy bank. I remember staring at it and trying to figure out how much of my allowance should be saved, spent, or given to charity. As you can imagine, there were lots of ideas racing through my mind but saving and giving back were always important to me. Years later, I realized I could combine my passions for banking, technology, and helping others by creating a fintech service that makes it easy for people to save while donating to their favorite causes.

Lindsey: My brothers and I did something similar where we allocated a portion of any money we made as kids to giving. And I too had a piggy bank - a beautiful one that could only be opened by breaking it. Needless to say it was a good saving mechanism! It’s inspiring to see you carrying your personal value forward into bunny.money to help others do the same. Tell us more about bunny.money?

Fabien: bunny.money plays with the concept of reimagining saving—and offers a way to positively disrupt conventional banking. For us bunnybankers, financial and social responsibility go hand in hand. We empower people to build more sustainable, inclusive financial futures. Looking ahead, we not only want to help people set up recurring schedules for saving and donating, but also offer more options for socially responsible investing and help companies better match employee donations to charitable causes and build out retirement plans.

Lindsey: It sounds like you’re not only disrupting traditional banking services but also how people manage their finances. How does bunny.money serve its customers?

Fabien: bunny.money is a fintech company founded on the principles of providing easy, free, and ethical banking services. Our comprehensive banking platform enables customers to quickly open savings wallet and schedule recurring deposits.

Thomas: bunny.money is also a fintech bridge that connects people and businesses to the communities and causes they care about. With bunny.money, customers can make one-time or recurring donations to the nonprofits of their choice. bunny.money doesn’t charge recipients fees to process donations. We give customers the option of offering us a tip, but it’s not required.

Lindsey: So with bunny.money, what are some of the nonprofits people can donate to?

Fabien: Over 30 organizations have already joined bunny.money’s nonprofit marketplace, including StartOut, TurnOut, Trans Lifeline, and Techqueria. Some are seeing donations increase by up to 20 percent as they leverage bunny.money to gamify fundraising, promote social sharing, and encourage micro-donations from their members and supporters.

Cyril: bunny.money also helps people discover local causes and nonprofits such as food banks requesting volunteers, parks that need to be cleaned, and mentoring opportunities. I’m particularly excited to see bunny.money help people build a fairer, greener society by donating to environmental nonprofits, including, Carbon Lighthouse, Sustainable Conservation, Public Land Water Association, back2earth and FARMS. We also decided to “lead by the example” and pledge to give 1% of our revenues to 1% for the Planet.

Lindsey: Given your business and the services you offer, I imagine you’ve encountered immense complexity along the way. What were some of the biggest challenges that you had to overcome?

Fabien: One of our biggest challenges was helping people understand saving for good, and purpose-led banking, which is a relatively new idea in fintech. Although there are plenty of mobile banking apps, most don’t offer an easy way for people to improve their personal finances and donate to their favorite causes in one convenient place.

Cyril: On the technical side, we needed to comply with strict industry regulations, including all applicable requirements under the Bank Secrecy Act and the USA PATRIOT Act. These regulations protect sensitive financial data and help fight against fraudulent activities such as money laundering.

Lindsey: Can you talk about how Google Cloud is helping you address these challenges?  

Thomas: Protecting client data is a top priority for us, so we built bunny.money on the highly secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud. Google Cloud automatically encrypts data in transit and at rest, and the solutions comply with all major international security standards and regulations right out of the box. Although we serve customers in the U.S. today, Google Cloud distributed data centers will allow us to meet regional security requirements and eventually reach customers worldwide with quality financial services.

Fabien: We wanted to build a reliable, feature-rich fintech platform and design a responsive mobile app with an intuitive user interface (UI). We knew from experience that Google Cloud is easy to use and offers integrated tools, APIs, and solutions. We also wanted to tap into the deep technical knowledge of the Google for Startups team to help us scale bunny.money and affordably trial different solutions with Google for Startups Cloud Program credits.

Cyril: As a Certified Benefit Corporation™ (B Corp™), it is also important for us to work with companies that align with the values we champion such as diversity and environmental sustainability. Google Cloud is carbon neutral and enables us to accurately measure, report, and reduce our cloud carbon emissions. 

Lindsey: This is exactly how we strive to support startups at all stages - with the right technology, offerings, and support to help you scale quickly and securely, all while being the cleanest cloud in the industry. Can you go into more detail about the Google Cloud solutions you use—and how they all come together to support your business and customers? 

Fabien: Our save for good® mobile app enables customers to securely create accounts, verify identities, and connect to external banks in just under four minutes. 

Thomas: With Google Cloud, bunny.money consistently delivers a reliable, secure, and seamless banking experience. Since recently launching our fintech app, we’ve already seen an incredible amount of interest in our services that enable people to grow financially while contributing to causes they are passionate about. Right now, we’re seeing customers typically allocate about 10 percent of each deposit to their favorite charities.

Cyril: The extensive Google Cloud technology stack helps us make it happen. We can use BigQuery to unlock data insights, Cloud SQL to seamlessly manage relational database services, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to automatically deploy and scale Kubernetes. These solutions enable us to cost-effectively scale bunny.money and build out a profitable fintech platform.

Thomas: In addition to the solutions Cyril mentioned, we use Cloud Scheduler to manage cron job services, Dataflow to unify stream and batch data processing, and Container Registry to securely store Docker container images. We’re always innovating, and Google Cloud helps our small team accelerate the development and deployment of new services.

Lindsey: It’s exciting to hear your story and the many different ways that Google Cloud technology has been able to support you along the way. You’re creating something that affects change on many levels—from how people save and give to how businesses and nonprofits can engage.

Since it is also Pride month, I want to change focus for a minute and talk about how being part of the LGBTQ+ community impacted your approach to starting bunny.money?

Fabien: I believe we all belong to several communities (family, friends “tribes,” sports, group of interests) that are different layers of our own identity and way of life. I’m part of the LGBTQ+ community, and I’m also an immigrant for example. I’m now a French-American, as is my husband, and we live in San Francisco. But even as a couple, we still had to live apart for several years—he in Paris and I in San Francisco—as we worked through issues with his U.S. work visa (same sex weddings were not possible at that time at the federal level, we couldn’t be under the same visa application).

Fortunately, the LGBTQ+ community can be like an extended family, both professionally and personally. Personally, I’ve had the support of friends as my husband and I dealt with immigration and work challenges. And professionally, I’ve experienced incredible support in the startup world with nonprofits such as StartOut, which provides key resources to help LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs grow their businesses.

Lindsey: I can only imagine the emotional toll that being apart created for you and your husband and I’m so glad that it eventually worked out. My wife is Austrian and while we are fortunate to be here together, this intersectionality has created an additional layer of complexity for us over the years as we have started a family. 

Do you have any advice for others in the LGBTQ+ community looking to start and grow their own companies? You mentioned StartOut, and I know there are additional organizations LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs can turn to for help, including Lesbians who Tech, Out in Tech, High Tech Gays (HTG) - Queer Silicon Valley, and QueerTech NYC (Meetup).

Fabien: I would suggest really exploring what you’re passionate about. I’ve enjoyed focusing on saving and finances since I was young and have always been passionate about giving back. Being part of the LGBTQ+ community—or really any community that’s viewed as an “outsider”—gives you the opportunity to think differently. When you bring your passion and life experiences together, you can start to imagine new ways of doing things. By engaging in your communities, it can be easier to find others who share your experiences, interests, and even values. You bring the best from each world.

Since LGBTQ+ founders and entrepreneurs might belong to several groups, it’s good to explore all available avenues and resources, including the organizations you mentioned earlier. We can always learn and accomplish more when we work together. I’ve experienced that both in the LGTBQ+, immigrant and Fintech communities.

Lindsey: The importance of community underlies so many aspects of your identity as a founder, as someone who has moved to the US from France, and as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. I’m so glad that you’ve sought out - and received - support along the way. I agree it’s so important  for others to seek out this community and support.  

And to close, would you be able to share any next steps for bunny.money?

Fabien: We’re looking forward to helping customers build more sustainable and inclusive financial futures on our platform. We’ll continue contributing to positive change in the world by rolling out new AI-powered services to enable ethical investing and personalized giving and impact programs. As we build this first banking app for personal and workplace giving, our goal is to benefit all communities by bridging the gap between businesses and people—which is why we’re excited to continue working with partners like Google for Startups and GV (GV offers us valuable mentor sessions during our accelerator program at StartOut).

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