Beam is a new high interest account that is FDIC insured and has no fees. They claim that they will offer users anywhere from 2-4% APY. You can watch their youtube video below, the gist of their pitch is that financial institutions make a lot of money from putting your savings account money to use and savings account holders deserve more of this money.
APY Range
They advertise a rate of 2%-4% APY. In their F.A.Q they state that the minimum any user will receive is 2% and then there will be additional features in app that let users earn more.
Referral Program
Beam currently lets you refer friends. You’ll move up the waitlist for each friend that you refer. In addition the top ten referrers will win a 7% APY interest reward for 100 days. No maximum balance is mentioned. My referral link is here. Feel free to share your own links or use other readers in this linked post. Do not share them in the comments below as I’d like to keep that clean for discussion of Beam itself.
Avoiding Fees
They have no fees at all according to their F.A.Q.
Our Verdict
If this account has no requirements to receive the 2% rate then it will be the clear best basic savings accounts as the current best is offering 2%. At the moment there isn’t enough information to decide if opening an account makes sense or not as we still don’t know if there is any cap on your deposits. A 4% rate would make it competitive compared to other rewards checking accounts, again depending on the deposit caps and also the requirements.
According to Angel.co they have raised funds from IDG-Accel China Team and are led by Aaron Du (formerly at JP Morgan Chase). Personally at this stage I have a healthy amount of skepticism about Beam, we simply don’t know enough about Beam to make any definitive statements. I’d also like to know who the backing bank is at it’s unlikely they are building that infrastructure from scratch.
Hat tip to I_Am_Now_Anonymous on /r/churning
