Now Nicolette has won $500,000 in Yotta’s end of summer lottery. The New York-based company also runs weekly cash giveaways where account holders earn a recurring ticket for every $25 in their savings account.

With her winnings, Nicolette plans to pay off her Hyundai Elantra and buy a larger SUV for her cleaning and home services business, which will help support her two children.

“I was in shock for a couple of days. I was speechless,” said Nicolette, who posted her reaction to the award on Instagram. “This will help me get my business up and running.”

With 45 employees and about $300 million in total savings accounts, Yotta expects to grow as its name gets mentioned on social media by people talking about winning and saving money.

“People are bad at doing things that are good for them in the long run if they’re not fun in the short term,” Yotta founder and CEO Adam Moelis told MarketWatch. “We’re trying to make savings immediately gratifying rather than something that pays off five years down the road.”

Yotta is not the only fintech company that combines games, competitions and financial services. Other companies offering prize money include PayPal’s PYPL,
+6.26%
The Venmo device, which held #VenmoMe Giveaway last month to award eligible account holders a total of $10,000 in prizes of $20 or $50 each. Block Inc. SQ,
+7.24%,
formerly known as Square, gave away $10,000 in a recent #CashAppFriday competitions.

Moelis, whose father is Moelis & Co. CEO MC,
+2.82%
Ken Moelis launched Yotta in 2019 as a way, he said, to meet a strong market need to increase Americans’ savings. He modeled the business after a British government program called Premium Bonds that offers competitive money as an incentive to save.

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Yotta’s business model was made possible by the American Savings Promotion Act, which Congress passed in 2014, and by updates to existing competition laws.

Despite spending an estimated $80 billion on lottery tickets, Americans struggle to build up significant savings, and about half of them don’t have enough money saved to cover emergencies, Moelis said.

Yotta works with a chartered banking partner, Evolve Bank & Trust of Tennessee, to hold its savings accounts and insure them under FDIC guidelines.

Explaining the company’s business model, Moelis said Yotta is able to pay about 2% interest on savings accounts and use some of the cash flow to run a contest where people pick numbers ahead of weekly drawings and receive cash prizes for picking the winning number. .

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“Our math is similar to how all banks make money,” he said. “Big banks pay hardly anything on savings accounts and their cost structure is in real estate and marketing. Instead of spending on marketing and real estate, we can pay out more returns. We can grow through word of mouth without sponsoring football stadiums.”

Moelis started Yotta after working in the multi-strategy investment group at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS,
+3.23%
and as a data analyst at the market research firm YipitData.

Nicolette’s $500,000 prize was part of a second chance at the end of the summer. The jackpot started at $250,000 and grew by $50,000 each week until someone won. The $500,000 prize represents the largest prize in the history of US price-linked savings, according to Yotta.

Combining gaming and economics isn’t a bad thing if done right, Moelis said. In the case of Yotta, the competition rewards people for saving their money and depositors lose no money if they fail to pick a winning ticket number.

“I don’t think it’s inherently bad,” Moelis said. “It depends on what is incentivized by the game.”

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Emily Bary contributed to this report.