Crew Introduces High-Yield Checking with Built-In Budgeting Tools

Lehi, Utah, March 18, 2025

Crew is unveiling a new suite of budgeting tools designed to help families take control of their finances. By integrating budgeting directly into its banking platform, Crew aims to make managing money more intuitive and effortless.

Crew is a Lehi, Utah-based financial technology company, not a bank. It offers banking services provided by FDIC member, Bangor Savings Bank, including the Crew Mastercard® Debit Card. In January 2024 the company had two big announcements: the launch of their family focused banking experience and a $2.5 million pre-seed investment led by Kickstart Seed Fund (Salt Lake City). Pelion (Salt Lake City), Sepio (Alamo, CA), Signal Peak Ventures (Salt Lake City), Convoi Ventures (Orem, UT), Spacestation (Layton, UT), Influence Ventures (Salt Lake City), and several unnamed angels investors.

"Our goal with Crew is to simplify budgeting and make it more accessible to a broader audience," said Gentry Davies, Crew's CEO and former head of product at Divvy until 2022. "Most budgeting tools require manual effort because they operate separately from your bank account. Crew changes that by integrating budgeting directly into the banking experience."

Much of the Crew team previously came of age in their careers at Divvy, a Utah-based expense management solution for companies and tech unicorn covered extensively by TechBuzz, including its $2.5 billion acquisition in May 2021 by Bill.

The Crew team resonated with Divvy's concept of a credit card with a built in budget. Corporate leaders could easily add employees to a budget and let them spend out of it, but it was impossible to spend more than was in the budget.

“I’ve never had this much actual control over our spending, and at the same time people have never felt this free,” said Steve Domino, Crew's Co-Founder and CFO.

He calls this paradox the magic of a budget. "As it turns out, knowing how much money you have to spend is really freeing," stated Domino.

The Crew team wants users to transcend a typical "vibes based" budgeting approach in which they pause before buying something to ask the question, “does this feel like something I can afford?” Such a budgeting approach can go only so far, they argue.

Instead, the Crew team believes that everyone, regardless of income or situation, should be able to experience this financial freedom of being intentional about spending as a means for making it easier to achieve important financial goals.

Crew accomplishes this freedom by offering parents a simple signup flow easily add accounts with set budgets for their children. Crew's platform simplifies the process of keeping accounts organized and to move money back and forth between accounts. Parents are responsible for the accounts until the kids turn 18 when the kids have the option to split off on their own with Crew.

Crew allows users to create unlimited “pockets” to organize their money and automate paycheck allocation through its Autopilot feature. Users can spend from any pocket using a single card or reassign transactions after purchase, ensuring flexibility in managing finances.

Crew combines traditional checking and savings accounts into a single high-yield checking account, offering a 3.7% annual percentage yield (APY).

[Note: APY is variable and may change after account opening. The advertised 3.7% checking APY is accurate through Mar 31, 2025 and may change at any time. There is no minimum balance or deposit required to obtain the advertised APY.]

"Most checking accounts offer little to no interest—certainly not nine times the national average savings rate," said Davies. "With Crew, customers can structure their finances however they prefer while still earning a competitive interest rate."

[Note: regarding the statistic mentioned above was provided by Crew and refers to the national average interest rate of 0.41% that was retrieved on 2/22/25 from the FDIC National Rate Caps Home here, and updated on 2/18/25.] 

For more details, visit trycrew.com or contact support@trycrew.com.

New customers who sign up with Crew using code BUDGET by April 31, 2025, will receive a 0.5% APY boost for three months, bringing their rate to 4.2% APY