CASE STuDY: On Our Block
Turning Mission Into Revenue: How a Community Banking Initiative Became a Scalable Growth Engine
OVERVIEW
On Our Block® was launched as an internal venture inside MoCaFi to solve a strategic challenge:
How do you stay true to a mission of financial inclusion while building a profitable, scalable business model?
The result was a new revenue-generating platform that connected major financial institutions to overlooked communities through trusted local activations, financial education, and measurable impact programs.
What began as a hypothesis became a trademarked business line generating recurring revenue, national partnerships, and long-term strategic insight into the future of community banking.
THE CHALLENGE
By 2023, MoCaFi had evolved from a prepaid debit card startup into a fintech infrastructure platform serving governments and philanthropic organizations.
At this point, MoCaFi had:
Raised $29.9M Series C funding
Reached a $100M valuation
Served 20+ government agencies
Distributed $200M+ of public impact payments
But a core challenge remained:
Serving financially vulnerable consumers was mission-critical—but difficult to monetize sustainably.
The business needed a model that could:
Advance financial inclusion
Create diversified revenue
Deepen institutional partnerships
Build long-term pathways into mainstream financial products
The Strategic Question
How might we leverage our network across 25+ underbanked neighborhoods to attract institutional capital and prepare residents for wealth-building products like:
Interest-bearing savings accounts
Homeownership financing
Small business credit
Long-term banking relationships
This became the foundation for On Our Block®.
Built, Proven, and Evolved in the Real World
We developed and launched a hybrid digital + community growth platform that enabled banks, financial institutions, and corporate partners to deploy Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) dollars into trusted local programs.
ON OUR BLOCK PERFORMANCE
EXECUTION
On Our Block® scaled nationally through programs in:
Los Angeles
St. Louis
Birmingham
Cleveland
Chicago
New York City
Delivered Results
18 community banking activations
1,882 underbanked residents engaged
Financial coaching, events, and education delivered at scale
Content repurposed into a fast-growing digital brand
BUSINESS IMPACT
Revenue
Built to $1M Annual Recurring Revenue
Sustained for 2 consecutive years
Evolved into a trademarked platform offering
Growth Efficiency
Leveraged program content to grow the On Our Block® brand to 100,000 social followers
Enterprise Partnerships
7 major institutions deployed more than $2M in impact funding through the platform, including:
Mastercard
Edward Jones
KeyBank
TransUnion
BNY
STRATEGIC INSIGHT
The biggest takeaway was larger than one business line:
A social finance platform that combines trust, data, and institutional capital could become a next-generation model for community banking.
Instead of asking underserved communities to adapt to legacy systems, financial systems can be redesigned around how communities already operate.
EVOLUTION
Like many impact-focused initiatives, growth slowed as corporate and government priorities shifted around DEI and philanthropic spending.
In response, the next product roadmap explored:
Consumer-owned data models
Marketplace partnerships
Blockchain-enabled infrastructure
Reduced dependence on sponsorship revenue
That strategy continues through the incorporated spinout: