The Occupy Money Card

• The Occupy Card will provide the basic financial services that people need and use on a daily basis without the cost, or the balances required for a regular bank account.

• The Occupy Card will be an individual’s debit card, a savings facility, and a “virtual checkbook” all rolled into one easy-to-use package: a “bank on a card”.

• The Occupy Card is an innovative financial product that everyone can use.  There will be no upfront cost. The card will be 99c per month. –When was the last time you saw a cents sign for anything, let alone a financial service?
• FDIC Safety – As the service is covered by FDIC insurance, Occupy Card holders get the same level of safety as a traditional bank account.

• The Occupy Card provides everyone with a safe way to pay for items in stores or on the Internet, and a way to send your landlord the monthly rent check without getting nickel and dimed or building up debts.

• The Occupy Card has a host of mobile apps and other services including mobile deposit capture of checks.

This card will directly tackle the concerns of the unbanked and the underbanked.  Users of The Occupy Card will be able to participate in the cashless economy at a significantly lower cost.

The Occupy Card will be a highly useful, high-quality product, based on an innovative concept and platform.  Many will see Card use as “A Protest with Every Purchase,”  BUT, the card isn’t only for Occupy supporters. People who are unbanked, underbanked, and even just angry banked, will all benefit from using the Card because it is a better and cheaper product.

Who is Behind the OccupyCard?

Founding Board

The Occupy Money Cooperative is governed by a board of directors who will guide the development of the Coop in its early days.  Eventually, the membership of the Coop will vote for board members in a democratic and participatory procedure.

Carne Ross

Carne is a former British diplomat who founded and now runs the non-profit diplomatic advisory group,Independent Diplomat. He is also a writer and commentator on international affairs (and banking). A resident New Yorker, he founded the alternative banking working group with an announcement in Zuccotti Park.

Carne Ross is a trained negotiator, economist, and author. His latest book The Leaderless Revolution was published in 2011.  He blogs on international relations, the crisis of capitalism and banking.

Robert Hockett

Robert Hockett is a Professor of enterprise-organizational, finance-regulatory, and monetary law at Cornell University Law School, and has been involved with the OWS movement since its first weeks in Zuccotti Park. A Fellow of the Century Foundation and regular commissioned author for the New America Foundation,

Hockett also does regular consulting work for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund in Washington, Americans for Financial Reform, and a number of federal and state legislators and local governments. He holds advanced degrees from the University of Kansas; the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar; and Yale University. Following law school, he also clerked for the Honorable Deanell Reece Tacha, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

Paul Ferris

Paul is an engineer, marketer and technology-expert with an international background in the financial services. His passion for new approaches in payments and investments have been applied by global financial firms and local micro-credit communities.  He has 20 years of experience as a businessman and entrepreneur, helping companies meet their obligations and improve their business by combining technology and decent marketing in large scale campaigns.

He is active on Board, management and community-level in charity initiatives; from building a land-mine hospital in Cambodia, to launching safe learning centers for poor kids, through to supporting Oxfam, Fairtrade and other initiatives tackling inequality.He spent far too much time at University flying hang gliders as well as learning about engineering, business and economics.

Christian Brammer

Christian trained as a banker – he did a full rotation through Deutsche Bank before becoming a longtime Director. Christian was also a Managing Director at Rabobank in London.

After growing estranged from wholesale and investment banking, Christian moved to the Adirondack Mountains where he spent the best part of three years designing and building a house for his family. More recently he has taught about capital markets at Skidmore College, and tried his hand at acting with a local theater group. He was also Director of Risk Management at Cornwall Capital, a successful short-side hedge fund, during the 2007 financial crisis. Currently Christian is working as a risk management consultant.

Cathy O’Neil

Cathy O’Neil is Senior Data Scientist at Johnson Research Labs.

Cathy earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was postdoc at the MIT math department She was also a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She is co-authoring a book (with Rachel Schutt) called “Doing Data Science” to be published by O’Reilly in Fall 2013. She previously worked as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. For the last couple years she’s been a data scientist in the New York start-up scene. She writes a blog at mathbabe.org and is involved with the #OccupyWallStreet Alternative Banking Working Group.

Ray Gillenwater

Ray is a former executive at BlackBerry and a current entrepreneur and investor. Ray has a passion for activism and is focused on disrupting inequality via technology. Apart from TOMC, Ray is focused on his own nonprofit, The Spark (www.thespark.org).  About The Spark:  The Spark is the counterbalance to corporations and governments that defy the public interest. Users post and vote on PROBLEMS that we face as a global community. The most popular problems are voted to the top. Users then post and vote on SOLUTIONS so that the community can take ACTION. Once The Spark reaches critical mass, the global community will have a voice that is too loud to ignore. Spark the change YOU want to see in the world. Public Beta coming in 2013.