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the billionaire of the chinese coffee shop wants to have food fight with starbucks. his stock in china is up to 50 million.

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(Photo by Simon Song/South China Morning Post via Getty Images).
South China Morning Post via Getty Images

A scrappy startup that aims to overtake Starbucks in the world's second-largest economy has grown so much that an early investor is now a billionaire. Luckin Coffee, a fast-growing Chinese company with 2,370 stores in the country, has filed to go public on New York's Nasdaq stock exchange. Charles Zhengyao Lu, who was one of its earliest backers and is now its chairman, has become billionaire thanks to his prescient investment in the Xiamen-based firm.

Luckin Coffee is burning through cash in its quest to become the top coffee chain in China, racking up a net loss of $241 million on $125 million in revenues in 2018, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing also revealed that Lu and his wife, Lichun Guo, own a 30.5% stake in the company, making them its largest shareholders. Forbes estimates that Lu's stake is worth nearly $800 million.

Lu first made it big after founding car rental company Car Inc. in 2007. A former executive in the telecom industry, Lu guided Car Inc., which offers short-term and long-term rental cars to customers in over 300 Chinese cities, to an IPO in 2014, raising over $400 million on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Car Inc. soon launched a ride-hailing startup, UCar, in 2015.

UCar differentiated itself from its competitors by buying its own fleet and offering professional drivers. Lu, who stepped down as Car Inc.'s chief executive in 2016, now runs UCar as CEO and chairman, and has diversified the business to include car dealerships and car financing services. The startup is now listed on China's over-the-counter stock exchange and has a valuation of over $6.5 billion. His stake in Car Inc. is worth nearly $500 million, making his total net worth an estimated $1.3 billion.

But it's Lu's investment in Luckin Coffeethat is now his most valuable holding. Jenny Zhiya Qian, a former chief operating officer at both Car Inc. and UCar, launched the low-priced coffee chain in October 2017 after raising over $150 million from Lu and others. Luckin Coffee proceeded to open stores at breakneck speed, expanding from its first location in Beijing to its current total of 2,370 stores in just 18 months.

By January 2019, Luckin Coffee had served up some 90 million cups of coffee and announced plans to reach 4,500 stores by the end of the year, surpassing Starbucks as the largest coffee chain in China. The American icon, which opened its first store in Beijing in 1999, has 3,600 locations in the country; it plans to open 600 new stores annually through 2022 and has been expanding its delivery services.

Unlike Starbucks' expansive cafes, which encourage lounging, over 90% of Luckin Coffee's shops are pick-up stores located in high traffic areas like office buildings and college campuses. The cashless stores (customers pay using Luckin's app) typically have limited seating and simple interiors, allowing Luckin Coffee to use the cost savings to undercut Starbucks on pricing. Its in-app orders also boast a delivery time of 18 minutes or less in major cities, and the company has partnered with China's largest food delivery firm, Meituan Dianping, to offer its products on its app.

Luckin Coffee, which has raised $550 million its initial angel round, seems set on competing for market share rather than turning a profit just yet. Its latest funding round-which was led by BlackRock and closed on April 17-valued the firm at $2.9 billion. It has not yet disclosed a targeted IPO price range.

Luckin Coffee founder Jenny Zhiya Qian has amassed an impressive fortune as well. She owns a 20% stake in the company valued at over $500 million.

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The New Billionaire Behind The Chinese Coffee Chain That's Challenging Starbucks

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A scrappy startup that aims to overtake Starbucks in the world's second-largest economy has grown so much that an early investor is now a billionaire. Luckin Coffee, a fast-growing Chinese company with 2,370 stores in the country, has filed to go public on New York's Nasdaq stock exchange.

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chipotle finally made food for people who are vegan and vegetarian.

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chipotle adds vegan and vegetarian menu options. - cnn

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Chipotle introduces vegan and vegetarian bowls

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After targeting keto and paleo dieters, Chipotle is courting vegetarians.

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the apple card has no late fees, no long string of numbers and it will come out this summer.

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Will you sign up for the Apple Card? You probably will, frankly. Apple's latest innovation, which arrives this summer, is a credit card that comes with all kinds of conveniences: No late fees! No long strings of numbers! No wait to qualify! No card, either, if you're using it the way Apple intends. This is the money of the future-instant, invisible, and a little bit innovative-and it's all nested beneath the beautiful glass screen of your iPhone.

Apple has a way of turning our everyday activities into little moments of art. The iPod changed the way we listen to music. The App Store and the multitudes it contained gave us dates on demand, personal chauffeurs, and endless photo streams of our friends' lives. It hopes to reinvent the magazine business. And change the way you stream TV and movies. Now, it's gunning for the last piece of our lives that Silicon Valley hasn't quite commandeered: your wallet.

But the Apple Card is only the latest example of how our spending is changing. Money and technology have been holding hands on the park bench for years, just itching to get closer. Venmo and Square Cash popularized the act of paying our friends with our phones; Apple Pay and Android Pay paved the way for paying with your phone in a store. Amazon dematerialized the shopping mall (and its checkout lines). Apple isn't even the first tech company to slap its logo onto a credit card: Uber makes one; so does Amazon.

Along the way, our expectations around spending have slowly shifted. Why should we have to find an ATM and pull out cash just to pay our share of last night's dinner? Your camera is an app, your music is an app, your news is an app. Why shouldn't your wallet be an app, too?

A credit card in Cupertino clothing pushes these expectations even further. "The industry has mainly been competing on price and rewards. This is a virtual card, and the user experience is unique," says Kalpesh Kapadia, the CEO of Deserve, which makes cards for young people or people without a credit history. "That will force other players in this space to up their game on user experience."

The perks here aren't revolutionary. Apple gives card-owners 2 percent cash back when they use their iPhone to pay, or 1 percent cash back when they swipe the physical card, built not from plastic but from titanium. Purchases at Apple stores earn 3 percent cash back. Sure! Fine.

But don't be fooled. What Apple is really doing is, as Kapadia says, upending the user experience. Those cash back rewards? They show up the next day, in the Daily Cash app, makes spending money feel like a fun game. You reach customer service through Messages. You can see where a particular charge was made in Apple Maps. Spending summaries show up in beautiful, color-coded graphs, and you use an aesthetically pleasing wheel to decide how much of your balance you want to pay down. It's all very soothing and makes the act of spending money feel fun, even productive.

What does Apple get out of this? For one thing, it lets its ever-growing ecosystem of apps, services, and hardware take over even more parts of your life. Want to spend money beautifully and seamlessly? You're going to need an iPhone.

It also gets to shape what the future of spending looks like, in ways both small and big. Consider that a few years ago, the idea of paying for anything with a smartphone would have seemed ridiculous. Now, no one blinks an eye when you tap your screen against a card reader in the check-out line. Oh, you still carry a wallet? How quaint!

Those changes can feel like big wins for you and me. Don't we all want less friction in our financial transactions? And the big tech companies have a tremendous ability to change how retailers take our money. Apple Pay, which was introduced in 2014, is now accepted as a payment method in 74 of the top 100 retailers in the US; Android Pay and Samsung Pay, which offer similar convenience for non-iPhones, have also grown in popularity.

Imagine how Big Tech could also change the status quo for payment security, by replacing those tired and vulnerable credit card numbers with smarter forms of authentication. Imagine, too, how all of these consumer conveniences might overshadow our suspicions about handing over the finer details of our financial lives to Big Tech. Apple says it won't snoop on your spending, and that's nice. But that's not to say that the next company to issue a credit card-Google, or Facebook-won't sell your monthly statement to the highest bidder. Data is the new money, but also, money is data.

That's all to say that what the tech giants do matters when it comes to money and the way we spend it. And it's not just Apple. There are wild, weird ideas across the land. Forget paying for stuff with your iPhone-Amazon has experimented with a payments system that uses facial recognition to automatically charge you for whatever you take from a store. Facebook is supposedly creating its own cryptocurrency, one FaceCoin to rule them all. WeChat, the Chinese social media platform, has driven cash to near-extinction in China with WePay, its own mobile payments system. Those shifts aren't just the latest technological fad. They're changes that will impact our society for years to come.

Whether it's racking up points on the Apple Card or betting on the cryptocurrency du jour, the way we spend is changing. This week at WIRED, we're dissecting some of those changes-like the shame that comes when social platforms like Instagram know exactly what you've bought and how to limit your shopping habits and not get ripped off on Amazon. Oh, and we'll finally answer the question of whether you should pay $1,000 for a new smartphone.

More Stories on How We Spend

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Why the Apple Card Is the Gleaming Future of Money

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Will you sign up for the Apple Card? You probably will, frankly. Apple's latest innovation, which arrives this summer, is a credit card that comes with all kinds of conveniences: No late fees! No long strings of numbers! No wait to qualify! No card, either, if you're using it the way Apple intends.

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Burger king made a model of 3g and it turns out that it actually works. the 3g was aqcuired for 4 billion.

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hallenge: Make a 60-year-old hamburger chain into something cool. Daniel Schwartz accepted that assignment six years ago after 3G Capital took over Burger King and named Schwartz chief executive. He was 32.

Burger King was a tired outfit, with a confusing menu and sales going sideways. Its restaurants averaged half the revenue of McDonald's. But where there is underperformance, there is opportunity. Schwartz slashed overhead at the Miami headquarters. He streamlined food preparation. He dished out stock to middle managers. He shrank the payroll and the capital budget by selling company-owned stores to franchisees.

In the years since, Burger King has become Restaurant Brands International (following some more classic 3G dealmaking). Restaurant Brands is now a growth stock. Burger King opened up 1,000 restaurants around the globe last year, to 600 for McDonald's. McDonald's stores still have a bigger average volume, but Burger King's are gaining on them; in the U.S., BK boosted its average volume per outlet by 30%, to $1.4 million, while McDonald's had a gain of only 20%. All of Burger King's success is, of course, in stark contrast to what's going on at Kraft Heinz, another 3G turnaround that went the other way. In February, Kraft Heinz said it was taking a $15.4 billion write-down, a signal that its classic food brands were losing value.

The situation is different at Burger King. At the parent-company level, where revenue consists mostly of franchise fees, Restaurant Brands took in $5.4 billion last year, up 17% from 2017. McDonald's revenue was off 8%.

"How many companies that have been around since the 1950s grow the top line at 10%?" says Schwartz, 38.

For a fast-food conglomerate that oversees 26,000 locations with combined sales of $32 billion, Restaurant Brands is quite agile. Three months ago the company introduced the Whopper Detour promotion, in which Burger King offered its signature item for a cent if the customer ordered food on the BK phone app within 600 feet of a McDonald's location. In February came the 45-second Super Bowl ad featuring historic footage of Andy Warhol slowly unwrapping and methodically eating a Whopper. The BK app topped the charts in Apple's App Store during the campaign; throughout the Super Bowl, "Andy Warhol" was the most searched term on Google.

Maybe Schwartz can even make his hamburger chain cool enough for New Age customers. Plans are under way to introduce a plant-protein patty from Impossible Foods, the startup backed by investors like Bill Gates and the venture capital arm of Alphabet. This is a big deal for Impossible, with an expected rollout in 7,000 Burger Kings soon.

The past decade has been a whirlwind for Schwartz, who combined a certain amount of luck-in the right place at the right time-with a large amount of energy. A lanky guy who has a big smile and a tendency to speak with his hands, Schwartz left Cornell in 2001 with a degree in applied economics. Four years later, he landed a job at 3G Capital, the private equity firm that became famous for engineering the Anheuser-Busch InBev merger (and later infamous for the sickly Kraft Heinz merger).

Schwartz became a 3G partner at 27. "The group believes in investing in young people and giving them opportunities," he says. "I worked hard and proved that I really cared. More so than anything else, I put the business and the firm ahead of myself." His wife tolerated the long hours, perhaps because, as a physician in residency, she worked late too.

McDonald's has ruled as America's top burger for decades, but Burger King is making gains with newly refurbished locations made to resemble this conceptual drawing.

Schwartz went hunting for deals. Burger King looked intriguing. "I'd ask my wife or my mom, 'If McDonald's is worth $70 billion, what do you think Burger King is worth?' They'd say, '$30 billion?' " Schwartz recalls.

Paying a 46% premium for the publicly traded shares, 3G acquired the chain for $4 billion, including debt. Schwartz then raised his hand to help run it. "I wanted to be part of this. And I didn't want to just sit in an office and get monthly reports."

At 29, Schwartz became BK's chief financial officer. He sold the corporate jet. He told employees to use Skype to make free international calls. And to get a feel for the whole business, he worked shifts off and on at Miami Burger Kings, cleaning toilets, cooking burgers and manning the drive-thru.

In 2012, 3G took Burger King public again, and Schwartz got the chief executive slot in June 2013. In the next 18 months, Burger King stock doubled, while McDonald's lost 8%.

Focused as he was on selling hamburgers, he hadn't left behind his deal-making instincts. Rechristened Restaurant Brands, his company acquired Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons in 2014. In 2017 it spent $1.8 billion in cash to get the Popeyes chicken chain.

Warren Buffett is a fan, having put up $3 billion in equity to help finance the Hortons deal. So is Bill Ackman, whose Pershing Square hedge fund owns 5% of the stock; 3G owns 41%.

The second-largest shareholder: the employees, with more than 5% of stock. Thanks to a match for those who invest their bonuses in RBI shares, nearly all 300 middle managers (average age: 37) own shares; at least 100 have become millionaires. Schwartz is sitting on about $100 million in stock and options.

"I'm comforted as an owner when all of the key employees own a lot of stock," Ackman says. "It makes them much less focused on short-term things. They're much more focused on 'Will this make the business more valuable in five years, ten years?' "

Recently, Schwartz was moved up to executive chairman, and longtime Burger King exec Jose Cil, 49, became CEO. "We take bets on people," Cil says. "When they are ambitious and willing to work harder than anybody because they're driven by something beyond a paycheck, they want to do something big."

Schwartz lives in Florida with his wife and three kids. He has been working out of RBI offices in Miami and Toronto, but now he's going to be spending more time at the 3G office in New York, with assignments that range beyond the restaurant chains. "I'm not gonna be CEO at another company," he says. "But we aspire to do more, and over time we can buy another business down the road."

Or perhaps repair some of the businesses that 3G already owns. Could someone who has engineered a turnaround at Burger King work some magic on old ketchup and cheese brands? His diplomatic answer: "Maybe you could ask me that question in six months, when I hopefully get a little bit closer to the business of Kraft Heinz."

3G's business is as much about building as buying and selling. Schwartz says: "Most traditional investment firms, if they were in our shoes, probably would have sold [RBI] many years ago. Not only did we not sell, we bought more brands along the way. We are building this into a big company with a long-term mindset."

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Whopper Of A Turnaround: At Burger King, The 3G Capital Model Actually Worked

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hallenge: Make a 60-year-old ham­bur­ger chain into something cool. Daniel Schwartz accepted that assignment six years ago after 3G Capital took over Burger King and named Schwartz chief executive. He was 32. Burger King was a tired outfit, with a confusing menu and sales going sideways. Its restaurants averaged half the revenue of McDonald's.

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the gross of the avengers: endgame could reach up too at least up too $900 million dollars.

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Yes, tonight is the big premiere for Avengers: Endgame. The review embargo drops tomorrow afternoon, and it opens in China on Wednesday (or technically Tuesday thanks to time zone magic). So, before the end begins, I wanted to make up a cheat sheet of sorts for the various domestic opening weekend records (and the big global launch record) it might break when it opens Thursday night. These are not predictions, merely possibilities. Let's presume that Peter Parker and the Deathly Hallows Part II is at least halfway decent (or works as a mainstream crowdpleaser). If the Russo Bros.' IMAX-filmed season finale performs at relative best case scenario levels, what records might fall this weekend? Well, without further ado...
Biggest Thursday preview grosses:
Avengers: Infinity War earned $39 million in Thursday previews last year, which was second only to Star Wars: The Force Awakens' $57 million Thursday gross and Star Wars: The Last Jedi's $45 million Thursday gross. While it may be a close call, I don't necessarily expect Endgame to best this specific record. The MCU has never banked on massive preview screenings, earning its success via being a general audience attraction that is as appealing to the "Gee, let's see a movie tonight!" crowd as the hardcore fan base. But I do expect Infinity War 's $45 million Thursday preview gross to be topped, giving it the biggest MCU preview gross ever.
Biggest "pure Friday" gross:
Despite several bigger opening weekend figures and not coming close to the opening day/Friday record, Jurassic World still holds the record for the second-biggest "pure Friday" gross, with $63.2 million sans its $18.5m Thursday preview figures. Avengers: Endgame finally topped that figure last year with a $39 million Thursday gross and a $106 million Friday gross, translating into a $67 million "pure Friday" gross. I expect a similar result this time around, although it's possible that the opening day could be more Thursday-slanted this time out. After last year, I'd be a little surprised if this record doesn't fall, even if the overall Friday may or may not top the $119 million opening day gross of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Biggest opening day/biggest Friday gross:
Counting its $57 million in Thursday previews, Star Wars: The Force Awakens earned a colossal $119.119 million on its first day in domestic release. The next biggest days are Avengers: Infinity War ($106 million), The Last Jedi ($105 million), Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc.'s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II ($91 million), Avengers: Age of Ultron ($84 million), Jurassic World ($82 million) and The Avengers ($80 million). I'd argue that Endgame is sure to end up among the top two or three (at worst) biggest opening day numbers of all time. A 13% jump from Infinity War 's $106 million Friday gets it to $120 million, which is good for the (unadjusted) record.
Biggest Saturday gross:
Since the last three Star Wars movies were a bit frontloaded on their opening weekends, with around 2x their Friday grosses, the biggest Saturday grosses belong to Avengers: Infinity War ($82 million), Jurassic World ($69.6 million) and The Avengers ($69.5 million). Most of those films (along with Black Panther) dropped just 13-15% from Friday to Saturday, while The Force Awakens and Age of Ultron dropped 33-42% from their opening day grosses.

Infinity War is the outlier, with a 23% drop from Friday to Saturday. So, to catch this record, Endgame will either must vastly outperform The Force Awakens on Friday or merely get close but fall less on the second day. Both are possible.
Biggest Sunday gross:
The three biggest Sunday grosses are Avengers: Infinity War ($69.2 million), Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($60.553 million) and Black Panther ($60.067 million). The Force Awakens and Age of Ultron dropped 11% on Sunday from Saturday, while Black Panther fell just 9%. Both films benefited from that next Monday being a holiday. Infinity War didn't have that advantage, but its 16% Saturday-to-Sunday drop was about in line with the 18% drops of The Avengers (early May) and Jurassic World (mid-June).

The key to The Avengers' huge success was that it was so buzzy and well-liked that it legged it like a mid-summer release while school was still in session. Infinity War played closer to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in terms of multipliers, and the deluge of post-debut competition may blunt Endgame 's legs. But if it opens big enough, that may be mere trivia.
Biggest opening weekend:
Here's the grand prize: Can Avengers: Infinity War surpass the $258 million opening weekend of Avengers: Infinity War? That would also put it just over the inflation-adjusted $257m debut of Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($248 million in 2015). Up until 2015, the MCU summer kick-off movies pulled consistent over/under 2.5x multipliers, but Age of Ultron (2.27x), Captain America: Civil War (2.38x) were frontloaded while Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2.61x) got things back to normal.

Infinity War pulled a decent 2.43x multiplier from its $106 million Friday. For the record, if it only breaks the various above records by a little bit, then we're looking at a $58 million Thursday, a $126 million Friday (which would be a $68 million "pure Friday), an $83 million Saturday and a $70 million Sunday. That would be a debut weekend of around $279 million.
Biggest worldwide debut weekend:
Like Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Infinity War is opening this Friday in North America instead of next Friday. Aside from giving the MCU flick more space between itself and both Detective Pikachu (May 10) and Aladdin (May 24), Walt Disney wants the global debut record again. With China now opening this weekend along with the rest of the world, they are all-but-guaranteed to get it.

As of now, the four $500 million+ worldwide openings are Walt Disney's Avengers: Infinity War ($649 million), Universal/Comcast Corp.'s Fate of the Furious ($542 million), Disney's Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($529 million) and Universal's Jurassic World ($525 million). With China now opening alongside the rest of the world this time ( Infinity War opened with $191 million last year) and set to earn potentially ridiculous numbers (it's tracking at around $253 million in China and might out-open Baahubali 2 in India) globally.

If it earns identical figures around the world, including China, as Infinity War, we're looking at an $830 million global debut. Yes, it could go a lot higher, like over $900 million, but we'll cross that bridge when the time comes. For the record, Infinity War earned around 2.4645x its global launch ($2.048 billion). For the "Hey, it could top Avatar!" folks, it would have to maintain that multiplier despite potentially brutal competition with a global launch of at least $1.132 billion this weekend.

Titanic's second-place slot ($2.1 billion, counting the reissues) may be in peril, but I don't think the gold medal is. Let's see if it can top $1 billion this weekend and then we'll talk about odds of it taking the grand prize. Besides, if Endgame snatches the top-grosser title from James Cameron, he's just going to steal it right back with Avatar 2 next year.

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'Avengers: Endgame' May Destroy These 7 Box Office Records

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Yes, tonight is the big premiere for Avengers: Endgame. The review embargo drops tomorrow afternoon, and it opens in China on Wednesday (or technically Tuesday thanks to time zone magic). So, before the end begins, I wanted to make up a cheat sheet of sorts for the various domestic opening weekend records (and the big global launch record) it might break when it opens Thursday night.

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the cellular provider is now providing a checking account for customers who have t-mobile.

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If you thought T-Mobile was just a mobile carrier, the company wants you to think again now. Starting today, the cellular provider is now offering its own Money checking account. The catch? The accounts are exclusive to T-Mobile's mobile customers.

If you're wondering why you would want to sign up for a T-Mobile checking account to begin with, the company is hoping to sway you with an annual interest yield that's considerably higher than the national average at 4 percent.

However, that interest will only be available if you deposit a minimum of $200 per month into the account. That's a pretty standard requirement for most accounts of this nature, so it probably won't be an issue for most users.

There's a secondary limitation too, though: the 4 percent APY stops kicking in on balances above $3,000. Anything higher than that will reduce it to 1 percent.

Like many modern checking accounts, T-Mobile's Money accounts support most mobile payment services, like Google or Apple Pay. And, of course, you'll receive your own T-Mobile Money debit card, if you prefer to go the physical route for payments. Other perks of using T-Mobile Money include the lack of fees or minimum balance requirements, overdraft protection, FDIC insurance, and "24/7 customer support."

Unfortunately, there are two major drawbacks here, and they're the same problems you've probably faced if you've used other online-only banks in the past. First, depositing cash into your account will be a major nuisance (if not an impossibility in most cases), and withdrawing money will likely incur a fee unless you're fortunate enough to have an Allpoint ATM within easy driving distance (you can check here).

Still, if you can look past those issues and you already happen to be a T-Mobile customer, you don't have much to lose by giving their new Money account a shot. You can sign up for it right here.

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T-Mobile rolls out its 'Money' checking account to all US customers

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If you thought T-Mobile was just a mobile carrier, the company wants you to think again now. Starting today, the cellular provider is now offering its own Money checking account. The catch? The accounts are exclusive to T-Mobile's mobile customers.