Adam Jackson
On August 3, Green Market Report hosted its 2023 Finance Summit. At the Summit, the winners of the 2023 GMR Cannabis Finance Awards were announced.
The winner of Top Fintech was Green Check Verified, a provider of compliant cannabis banking solutions and services that help cannabis businesses and financial institutions collaborate.
Since its establishment in 2017, GCV has flourished, serving more than 6,500 cannabis-related businesses and partnering with more than 130 financial institutions, setting the standard for compliance in the cannabis sector.
CEO Kevin Hart was first approached to build a point of sale platform in 2015. He quickly shifted gears to address the cannabis banking challenge in early 2016.
“After meeting with several large operators, particularly Harborside in Oakland, I realized that the only true and reliable path forward to meet the demand for cannabis banking was to bring the supply side, banks and credit unions into the mix,” Hart said.
That realization led to the conceptualization of the entire Green Check ecosystem. GCV’s recent acquisitions of Komplyd and PayQwick expanded the platform’s data connectivity and provided cannabis operators with a full suite of financial solutions for their everyday business needs.
Hart’s proudest achievement in his role is “easy” to name, he said.
“The team and culture that we have built here at Green Check in servicing both the 7,000-plus cannabis businesses and the hundreds of banks, credit unions and business partners across 38 states that we have on the platform solving the very problems we set out to enable,” Hart said.
“No company has done more, and we are still just getting started.”
Hart said that education remains the biggest hurdle, as some financial institutions wrongly believe it is federally illegal to bank cannabis, and some cannabis operators think they have to overpay or lie to get full services. GCV addresses these misconceptions through bootcamps and webinars, “winning hearts and minds every month.”
“The ‘belief’ that something can’t be done is always the biggest rock to move. And that is on both sides of the equation for us,” Hart noted.
