Creators make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the global economy representing more than 50M businesses — including musicians, authors, entertainers, influencers, song writers. Despite this growth, creators are often underserved in the financial services industry. Traditional financial institutions tend to overlook the needs of creators and established challenger banks offer only broad solutions.

However, emerging neobanks have started to tailor their services to solve the unique challenges of this growing demographic. In particular, Nerve delivers a banking solution that specifically serves creators. Besides standard features of a financial services app, this platform provides customers with a multitude of customized services, including the ability to receive instant payments, access real-time data, and collaborate with other creators.

Increasing the Speed of Payments

For many creators, income depends on the engagement they receive on platforms (such as TikTok, Instagram, Spotify). While the engagement from a creator’s following forms a steady stream of income, the timing of payments from social media and distribution platforms are often delayed, making it difficult for creators to pay bills in a timely manner. Additionally, many enterprises utilize third-party processing apps to pay creators, which are inefficient due to added transaction fees.

Nerve aims to optimize the payment process for creators and the businesses that serve them through the availability of its public APIs. Companies that serve creators can easily embed Nerve’s APIs into their existing platform to streamline the process of making and receive payments. Nerve’s APIs dramatically reduce transaction fees while offering customers instant access to their funds.

Intercept Music, a software-as-service entertainment technology company, embedded Nerve’s public APIs to make instant payouts to musicians and labels on its music marketing and distribution platform. Intercept Music users can select Nerve from the platform’s dashboard to easily manage payouts, advances and royalty splits. The new capabilities will complement Intercept Music’s platform by enabling artists to distribute, promote and earn income from their music in one place.

Additionally, Nerve offers a Business-to-Business (B2B) payments platform that notifies an enterprise when a creator has an account and prompts them to make payments through the app. The platform provides businesses a streamlined way to pay artists faster while reducing wire fees by half. In addition to automating payments, the platform improves workflow management by automating manual processes, such as W-9 tax forms and Know Your Customer verification.

Empowering Creators Through Collaboration

Unfortunately, it is common for creative groups to have disagreements about their money and how to spend it. To reduce these misunderstandings, Nerve’s Collabs offering enables creative groups to open joint FDIC-insured* debit accounts — creating financial transparency among group members. Working in tandem with Nerve’s account switching feature, users can toggle between their individual and group accounts without needing multiple login credentials.

Nerve offers two types of collabs, formal and casual. Formal Collabs are those involving formal entities registered with a U.S. state and require a verification of a group’s business status. Casual Collabs, on the other hand, are for informal creative groups who don’t have a corporation status. Each Collab has two types of members: admins who have control over the account and view-only members who can access a fully transparent list of income and expenses. Nerve’s Collabs feature creates a centralized account for creative groups to view transactions, enabling each member to know the financial health of their business.

BANKING RELATIONSHIPS FOR CREATORS

In addition to offering hyper-personalized services to meet the specific needs of customers, Nerve makes the process of establishing a business banking account easy for all creators. Typically, when creators try to set up a business account with a traditional financial institution, they don’t qualify due to the strict documentation requirements in completing the registration process. As a result, many creators utilize their personal checking account for business expenses. This creates several challenges for creators when filing taxes or applying for a loan because their institution is missing a key component of their financial history.

Nerve makes the process of obtaining a business banking account achievable for all creators — no required docs to set up a business banking account. With Nerve, creators can digitally set up an account within two minutes while traditional financial institutions can require customers to spend roughly an hour completing the registration process.

As the creator economy continues to grow, the need for customized banking services will only increase. As a banking app built by creators for creators, Nerve aims to provide its customers with financial services that meet their unique needs and empower them to achieve financial wellness.

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