Key Takeaways
- Común, a Spanish-by-default banking app, has grown to 276,000 open accounts and more than doubled its revenue to $12.5 million, earning a first-time spot on Forbes' 2026 Fintech 50 list — while its total funding has climbed to $49.5 million.
- Neither Común nor Miami-based Majority requires a Social Security number to open an account; both accept foreign IDs, and Majority charges a flat $5.99 monthly membership for a full banking package with no overdraft fees.
- The category is volatile: at least six Hispanic- or immigrant-focused banking startups have folded or been acquired in four years, most recently Seis, which shut down in January 2026 after losing access to a key payment network.
A market traditional lenders still don't reach
About 12% of Hispanic adults in the United States have no bank account at all, roughly double the rate for the population as a whole, according to the Federal Reserve's most recent household survey. That gap is what a small cluster of Spanish-language banking apps has built its business around, targeting cash-paid workers who can't clear the Social Security number requirement most U.S. banks still impose.
New York-based Común is the clearest example of that bet paying off, at least for now. The app has grown to 276,000 open accounts, and last year its revenue more than doubled to $12.5 million — enough to land Común a first-time spot on Forbes' 2026 ranking of the fastest-growing fintech companies. Accounts can be opened with more than 100 forms of foreign identification, including ITINs, consular ID cards, and foreign passports, sidestepping the paperwork that locks many immigrants out of accounts at Chase, Wells Fargo, or Bank of America.
Why Común defaults to Spanish
Común was founded by Andrés Santos and Abiel Gutiérrez, two immigrants from Monterrey, Mexico, who met in New York after Santos finished an MBA at MIT and Gutiérrez left a job at fintech Brex. According to American Banker's 2023 coverage of the company's seed round, Santos said the goal was to "make it easier to thrive as an immigrant family in the U.S." — a mission that shows up in the product itself: Spanish is the app's default language, and users can switch to English rather than the other way around.
That access is backed by physical infrastructure. Común's users can deposit cash at more than 88,000 retail locations nationwide — including Walgreens, Dollar General, and Walmart — through the AllPoint+ network, letting cash-paid workers fund their accounts without ever stepping into a bank branch. The company's funding has grown alongside its user base: after a $4.5 million seed round in 2022 and a $22 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in 2024, Común raised another $19.5 million last October at a $200 million valuation, putting its total funding at $49.5 million.
Majority's flat-fee alternative
Miami-based Majority takes a different approach to the same problem. Founded in 2019 by Swedish immigrant Magnus Larsson, the app charges migrants a flat $5.99 monthly membership that bundles a checking account, a debit card, community discounts, discounted international calling, and peer-to-peer transfers, with no Social Security number required and no overdraft fees. Deposits sit with Axiom Bank, N.A., a Majority banking partner that carries FDIC coverage.
Larsson has described the pitch as stripping away the layers of cost that migrants typically absorb elsewhere. TechCrunch reported that most of Majority's customers face a string of predatory charges on remittances and cross-border transfers, and Larsson said the company's model keeps a single transparent fee while "taking away the other fees." Majority also runs an "Advisor Program," a nationwide network of support staff who are immigrants themselves, layering human help onto the digital product.
A volatile category with a recent casualty
Growth in this niche hasn't guaranteed survival. According to Forbes, at least six affinity-banking startups aimed at Hispanic or immigrant customers have shut down or been acquired in the past four years, competing against both traditional banks and digital heavyweight Chime. The most recent to fall was Seis, a Y Combinator-backed, San Francisco-based app that had opened more than 500,000 accounts and reached $10 million in annualized revenue within 16 months of launching.
Seis announced its shutdown in late January 2026. Founder Trevor McKendrick wrote on X that "immigration patterns changed & we saw less demand for our product," but that wasn't the whole story: separate reporting from FinTech Futures ties the immediate trigger to Zelle cutting off Seis's access to its peer-to-peer payment service, a core feature the company said it could no longer operate around sustainably. Común's Santos has argued his company is less exposed to that kind of swing, since roughly 65 million people of Hispanic descent already live in the U.S. — meaning growth doesn't have to depend on new arrivals.
What the remittance numbers mean for the category
The stakes extend well beyond app downloads. Remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean grew 132% over the past decade to $168.6 billion in 2025 — the fastest growth of any region in the world — as part of a broader global flow of roughly $728.6 billion to lower- and middle-income countries, according to a report from the United Nations' International Fund for Agricultural Development. That figure reflects money reaching the region from every sending country, not the U.S. alone, though the report notes the United States remains Latin America's dominant remittance source.
Every percentage point shaved off a transfer fee compounds across that volume, which is exactly the wedge apps like Común and Majority are using to compete with the storefront cash-transfer shops and legacy wire services that have long served this customer base. Whether that wedge is enough to keep the category from thinning out further, as it has for Seis and at least five other failed rivals, remains the open question hanging over all of them.
