How a community banking initiative became a scalable growth engine — generating recurring revenue, national partnerships, and long-term strategic insight into the future of community banking.
On Our Block® was launched as an internal venture inside MoCaFi to solve a strategic challenge:
How do you stay true to a mission of financial inclusion while building a profitable, scalable business model?
The result was a new revenue-generating platform that connected major financial institutions to overlooked communities through trusted local activations, financial education, and measurable impact programs.
What began as a hypothesis became a trademarked business line generating recurring revenue, national partnerships, and long-term strategic insight into the future of community banking.
By 2023, MoCaFi had evolved from a prepaid debit card startup into a fintech infrastructure platform serving governments and philanthropic organizations.
But a core challenge remained: serving financially vulnerable consumers was mission-critical — but difficult to monetize sustainably.
How might we leverage our network across 25+ underbanked neighborhoods to attract institutional capital and prepare residents for wealth-building products?
This became the foundation for On Our Block®.
We developed and launched a hybrid digital + community growth platform that enabled banks, financial institutions, and corporate partners to deploy Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) dollars into trusted local programs.
Scaled nationally through programs in
Delivered results
Sustained for 2 consecutive years. Evolved into a trademarked platform offering.
Social followers grown by repurposing program content into the On Our Block® brand.
Impact funding deployed by 7 major institutions through the platform.
Enterprise partners
A social finance platform that combines trust, data, and institutional capital could become a next-generation model for community banking.
Instead of asking underserved communities to adapt to legacy systems, financial systems can be redesigned around how communities already operate.
Like many impact-focused initiatives, growth slowed as corporate and government priorities shifted around DEI and philanthropic spending. In response, the next product roadmap explored:
That strategy continues through the incorporated spinout.
Scratchwork OS™ gives you the same framework used to build On Our Block® — customized around your business, your customers, and your growth goals.