Daylight raises USD 15 mln

Daylight plains to use the new capital to build the financial products and services to help queer people live their best lives, starting with a subscription plan called Daylight Grow designed to help prospective queer families with financial planning.

Daylight Grow targets the major hurdles many queer couples encounter in starting a family.

When the product launches in early 2023, Daylight Grow will offer a personalised ‘family creation plan’ covering financial, legal, and logistical milestones tailored to individual states and needs, ‘family planning concierges’ to provide financial advice and logistical support, a ‘family-building marketplace’ with vetted family attorney networks and recommendations for IVF and surrogacy clinics, and in-person financial and fertility education events.

Daylight Grow will also offer access to family-building loans, a potential game-changer for queer customers who’ve dealt with discrimination from traditional banks.

Daylight was launched in 2020 and has raised USD 20 million in capital to date.

Financial inclusion and the LGBTQ+ minority

There are over 30 million LGBTQ+ Americans with a spending power of around USD 1 trillion and yet the community still lacks access to the suite of products and services they need.

However, most mainstream banking products weren’t designed with US-based queer folks in mind. For example, Daylight provides debit cards with customers’ chosen names, which aren’t always the same as what’s on their ID. It offers members 10% cash back every time they spend with a queer and allied business that Daylight has partnered with. And it offers guided goals for gender-affirming procedures like top surgery and facial feminization.

Daylight is a part of a wave of recent neobanks organised around aspirational causes and missions. Greenwood gained the interest of the public eye as its purpose is to serve Black and Latinx people and business owners. Cheese Bank is another digital bank that was born from the need to support minorities, aiming to help Asian communities and immigrants through a cashback rewards program.

Financial discrimination for the LGBTQ+ community

Certainly, members of the LGBTQ+ community face fiscal challenges that many cisgender, straight adults never do. Some suffer the consequences of being kicked out of their homes by unaccepting parents. Others find themselves on the hook for HIV/AIDS treatment, hormone therapy, and fertility procedures. Most queer people gravitate toward pricey metro areas because they’re more accepting and progressive, and many queer people lack a safety net.

For those reasons and others, LGBTQ+ people frequently earn less, live in poverty and have less in pension savings than their cisgender counterparts. The situation for transgender people is particularly dire, with the poverty rate for the transgender community in the US averaging around 30%, according to a 2019 study from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. Transgender people are also twice as likely to be unemployed and four times as likely to have a household income below USD 10,000; the 2021 US federal poverty guideline was USD 12,880.