“Our three biggest competitors as a company are not other companies. They are actually three human traits, which are awareness, apathy, and inertia… You'd be shocked how many people haven't looked at their bank statements, don't know how much they're earning.”
WSJ's Take On the Week · October 2026
Asked why so much cash sits in accounts earning little, Zimmerman says the obstacle isn't rival products but people's habits. Miriam Gottfried had just pointed to inertia: opening and managing another bank account takes time.
Transcript
Well, there's a lot of excitement right now about AI, and I think it's well-founded. But really, what people are excited about is automation. How that automation happens is less important to people, but they like the idea of someone helping them out in an active way.
Because the real hurdle is the inertia, right? Correct. Filling out the application for another bank account takes time, and then managing these various accounts takes time.
It's exactly right, Miriam. And we've often said that our three biggest competitors as a company are not other companies. They are actually three human traits, which are awareness, apathy, and inertia, right? So awareness is: I didn't know I could be doing better. You'd be shocked how many people haven't looked at their bank statements, don't know how much they're earning. They couldn't tell you as they're walking down the street how much they're earning on cash or even how much they earned the last two years or three years or 10 years. So overcoming that awareness gap is important. The second is apathy, right? Oh, I don't care. It's just cash.
People don't really think they're
earning that much within it. And
we've been conditioned that way, right? We've been lulled into this idea that cash doesn't yield anything. It doesn't need to yield anything. It's utter nonsense. It's a
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