Roy and Bertrand Sosa

Brothers Roy and Bertrand Sosa moved to Austin, Texas, from Mexico as teenagers in 1986 because their mother wanted to pursue a career as a doctor in the United States. Having grown up in a cash-based society in Mexico, the Sosa brothers wondered how people without credit cards functioned in American society. In the late 1990s, the dot-com boom was making online purchasing more common, and the idea for NetSpend was born.

Modeled after pre-paid phone cards, the goal was to provide consumers who lack established credit or banking relationships with pre-paid debit cards that offered the same flexibility and convenience as traditional debit and credit cards. The Sosa brothers launched NetSpend in 1999 from their one-bedroom apartment with $750. The company went public in October 2010 and was purchased in 2013 by Total System Services for $1.4 billion.

In 2011, the Federal Reserve estimated that 70 million people in America with more than $300 billion in annual income don’t have a savings account or access to credit. NetSpend is the largest prepaid debit card processor addressing this market with more than $4 billion in transactions each year for more than 2 million customers.

While still at the helm of NetSpend, the Sosa brothers created a “double bottom line” investment partnership called MPOWER to make investments that have high profitability and high social impact. In 2006, they launched MPOWER Labs, Inc., a research and development incubator and business accelerator for growing businesses that bring new and needed products and services to the underserved.

Updated September 2024