One of the biggest obstacles Andres Santos faced upon moving to the United States from Mexico for graduate school was signing up for a bank account. He tried to do it online but kept getting rejected, and when he visited a bank branch in person, he was asked to provide paperwork he didn’t have. The process took weeks, and when he finally obtained an account, he was required to keep $1,500 in it at all times or risk a $14 monthly fee.
“That’s hard to go through,” he said. “Some people just prefer not to go through that ordeal because it is so full of friction, only to end up with a card where you’re paying fees.”
Santos knew he was not alone in struggling with this when he co-founded the neobank Comun with Abiel Gutierres, chief technology officer, in 2022. The idea was to find a way to reach the Latino community across the country and allow many of them to benefit from bank services for the first time.
Startup neobanks, which provide digital banking services to their users through partnerships with traditional banks, enter an enormously crowded market. As of 2022, more than 400 neobanks exist worldwide and serve more than 1 billion users, according to a report by the consulting firm Simon-Kucher. The firm reported that 50 neobanks launched worldwide in 2021 alone.
Comun’s strategy is to focus on a “niche” by targeting the sizable U.S. Latino population — more than 60 million people according to data from the Census Bureau — a large number of whom are unbanked or underbanked.
Another strategic angle for Comun was to make transactions easier for the recipient. Users can send international remittances without the receiver needing to have a debit card or bank account — they can pick up cash at more than 300,000 locations across Latin America.
Comun has raised $30.5 million since its founding, including a $21.5 million Series A round over the summer. Santos said the company is currently handling more than $1 billion in transactions a year and has processed more than $1 million in remittances to users’ home countries since launching the service in March 2024. He said the company currently has more than 100,000 users, mostly based in Texas, California, Florida, Illinois, Arizona and New York, and that it is growing by 50% each month. He declined to share the company’s revenue.
Comun allows people to sign up for a checking account, debit card and direct-deposit services using a valid ID from the applicant’s country of origin online on their app. No Social Security number is required. Clients can send money to relatives in 17 Latin American countries at lower prices than institutional competitors, Santos said. In addition to their online services, he added, clients can deposit cash at more than 100,000 locations nationwide. Most of the people on Comun’s staff of over 45 employees speak Spanish.
Comun, as its name implies, was built on the concept of community. People who are unbanked pay high fees for check-cashing services, wait longer to receive funds, and encounter difficulties saving money, paying bills or qualifying for credit.
“Our view of what we’re trying to do is a better version of a community bank that’s not limited by geography but by community,” Santos said. “There’s a lot we’re building to improve services to the families that are in Latin America. We’re building to help them continue to scale in the U.S. So that means getting access to building credit, better services at lower prices, and just being a good financial partner for that family.”
Hermene Gildo signed up for Comun in June after being unable to register for a bank account at other U.S. banks. Gildo, who lives in Staten Island and works as a cook at a Mexican restaurant, mostly uses Comun to send money to his relatives in Guatemala.
“If I need to send money to my wife and family quickly, they receive it in minutes,” Gildo said in Spanish. “In an emergency, I will receive fewer charges.”
He appreciated how easy it was for him to sign up — five minutes through the app, he said — and that the staff spoke Spanish. He was once charged for something without consent, and Comun’s staff helped him recover his money.
Over 33% of all unbanked households in 2023 were Hispanic despite that ethnicity making up 14.8% of households, according to the 2023 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households. The report found that Hispanic households were five times as likely to be unbanked compared to white households.
“It’s been a demographic that has completely been underserved by the traditional banks out there,” said Antonio Osio, a general partner at ANIMO Ventures, one of Comun’s early investors. He added that co-founders Santos and Gutierres have been able to understand their customers in a way that sets them apart because they are building a product for people with similar backgrounds and experiences.
“There’s a huge need for them and for financial services. And not just banking accounts but also remittances, cash deposits, insurance and investment products,” Osio said. “To that end, Comun wants to build that financial hub for the Latino community and eventually the immigrant family.”
