This New Bank Account Incentivizes Families to Fight Fraud
Austin Capital Bank's savings account, FreeKick, empowers – and even pays – parents to combat fraud targeted at their children's identities. And it does so while helping these young people build a credit history, all for free. Here's how the Texas community bank hired a small army of developers to go after two of the biggest banking challenges: Fighting fraud and building a pipeline of young, new customers.
By Matt Doffing, Senior Editor at The Financial Brand
One of the first major data breaches to be announced in 2025 — at a company called PowerSchool — compromised the personal information of tens of millions of children across the United States and Canada.
It’s just one example of how perpetrators of identity theft and financial fraud "are specifically targeting children, especially under age 13," says Erik Beguin, the founder and chief executive officer of Austin Capital Bank.
Beguin has given a lot of thought to this "massive and growing" problem, and his tech-savvy digital bank has developed a unique savings account product to help parents protect their children.
A deposit of at least $1,000 in its FreeKick savings account comes with credit monitoring for two parents and up to six offspring ages 0 to 25. There are no fees for a FreeKick account or for the identity protection services.
What’s more, it is an interest-bearing account with tiered rates, so Beguin notes that parents are, in effect, getting paid to protect their family. (FreeKick was offering 5% APY for accounts with the maximum deposit amount of $10,000 as of March 2025.)
The account also offers a credit-building option for the children, which we’ll discuss in more detail later.
Key Point:
For K-12 schools, cyber incidents are so prevalent that, on average, there is more than one incident per school day, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA.
"Absolutely every family should have identity protection for their children," Beguin says, citing an Experian statistic that suggests one in four children will be a victim before they turn 18. "The problem is: while every family needs identity protection, subscription services are very expensive."
He points to competing services like LifeLock and Aura, for example. LifeLock has an introductory rate of $38.99 monthly for monitoring two parents and up to five children, increasing to $79.99 monthly after the first year. Maintaining that coverage until children reach age 18 can be upwards of $15,000, Beguin says. While Aura’s fees are lower, it would still cost at least $7,500 to keep its identity protection service for 18 years.
"We created FreeKick to change the paradigm for identity protection of minors. For parents to be able to protect their family by saving instead of spending," Beguin says.
How the FreeKick Savings Account Works
The $459 million-asset Austin Capital Bank has only one branch — in its hometown of Austin, Texas — and it prides itself on being tech-savvy. It relies on an in-house team of 50 technology professionals to work on developing creative digital products.
The bank set up a separate website at FreeKick.bank specifically to offer this unique savings account nationally. "We use a ‘.bank’ domain to protect parents and families from website spoofing fraud attempts since only an FDIC-insured institution can have a ‘.bank’ URL," Beguin says.
FreeKick is a single deposit account held in the parent’s name. As with any typical deposit account, there are no early withdrawal penalties. Users can close the account and cancel the identity protection at any time for free.
But Beguin says it works like a certificate of deposit in other ways. It is a nontransactional account that allows users to choose one fixed deposit amount ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. Leaving that amount deposited for 12 months gets 12 months of family identity protection for free. And the higher the amount deposited, the higher the interest rate it earns.
Austin Capital had rolled out its first iteration of this account in the spring of 2023, but it was revamped and relaunched in February 2025 to be more user friendly and totally free. The earlier version had an annual fee that went down when the amount deposited in the savings account increased. But "consumers found the mix of fee and deposit requirement options confusing," Beguin says. So now "we’ve eliminated all fees."
The FreeKick relaunch comes in a year where Beguin says the top priority for Austin Capital will be to help people protect themselves from financial fraud. The bank also has more products in the works to that end.
Beguin declined to provide any color on the popularity of FreeKick so far, noting that Austin Capital is privately held. But he pointed to organic asset growth as one sign of the bank’s overall success. In 2024, assets increased by $170 million from a year earlier — an impressive 59% growth rate.
Read more:
Why Hackers Covet Children’s Personal Data
One reason children’s personal data is such a draw for hackers is that the Social Security Administration randomized how it assigns social security numbers in 2011, Beguin says. That means the numbers are no longer linked to the state where someone is born or a birth date. So, when fraudsters use those numbers to create synthetic identities — by combining a mix of real and fake information about a person — it is much harder to detect foul play.
"Criminals love random SSNs for identity fraud," Beguin says. "So every child born after June 26, 2011, is an ideal target."
That puts schools squarely in the crosshairs. For K-12 schools, cyber incidents are so prevalent that, on average, there is more than one incident per school day, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA.
Beyond the schools themselves, service providers like the software company PowerSchool are a virtual treasure trove. The hacker in the PowerSchool incident claims to have acquired personal data on 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers.
PowerSchool software is reportedly used by at least 16,000 K-12 schools in the United States, Canada and elsewhere for administration, grades and other functions. More than 6,000 of PowerSchool’s clients were affected by the breach, which exposed the social security numbers of current and former students and staff going as far back as 2009. The stolen data also included details such as names, birthdays, phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, health information, disciplinary records, custody agreements and more.
"We have a host of new technologies and products in the pipeline focused on addressing financial fraud, which we plan to release throughout the year."— Erik Beguin, Austin Capital Bank’s founder and CEO |
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Beguin says another factor that makes children’s data attractive to identity thieves is that minors aren’t using their credit profile so it’s a blank slate. And since relatively few children’s identities are being monitored, criminals can often use those identities to commit fraud for years before being detected.
"I have a FreeKick account for my own family and I honestly breathed a huge sigh of relief after running the first ID monitoring reports for my minor children and seeing they were clear with no findings," Beguin says.
"Now I simply check every month to make sure there are no findings. It’s great peace of mind."
How FreeKick Helps Build Teen Credit History
Yet another compelling feature of FreeKick is that it allows children and young adults to build their credit history. Like the identity protection, this service is also free.
Parents can activate a "credit builder" option for any children who are at least 13 years old with just the press of a button. This sets up a 12-month revolving line of credit, with an interest rate of 0%. It can be cancelled at any time or renewed annually.
Once a child is of age — as long as the line of credit is open and active — he or she can activate credit reporting, again with the press of a button. This effectively jumpstarts their credit profile with up to five years of history, Beguin says.
When those buttons get pressed, a lot goes on behind the scenes to make everything happen, he adds. "But for the users, it’s super simple."
Many parents think adding a child as an authorized user to a card is a way to build credit for the child. But Beguin says that tactic isn’t really helpful.
The child gets a credit score, but no profile of their own. And once the child is removed as an authorized user, all the credit history goes away, he says. "They are building no credit age, history, or payment history of their own."
Besides that, the parent’s activity on the card — a missed payment, for example — can negatively affect the child’s credit score, he adds.
Below, Beguin shares more detail on Austin Capital’s strategy, including more about how he chose its top priority for the coming year and how FreeKick fits in.
The ‘Epidemic’ of Fraud Is Underreported
Beguin says Austin Capital Bank’s top priority in 2025 will be to develop innovations that address financial fraud and scams.
"We believe financial fraud has reached epidemic proportions," he says. "The COVID-19 pandemic served as an incubator for financial fraud. It’s our position that fraud losses by consumers, businesses and financial institutions — while massive and growing rapidly — are all materially underreported."
Often, consumers feel shame and are too embarrassed to admit they fell victim to fraud. Business owners, on the other hand, may fear that if they fall victim to fraud — and it becomes public — they will suffer reputational damage. Additionally, Beguin thinks many losses for banks are mischaracterized as credit losses when, in fact, they are fraud losses.
"Fraud is a massive issue facing our industry and nation," he says. "As a digital-first bank, we not only have the expertise to respond to fraud, but we have custom-built, proprietary technology focused on fraud detection, prevention, and remediation.
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Developing Proprietary Tech into Higher ROI Services for Customers
Austin Capital Bank is quite different from most community banks smaller than $500 million in assets. It has no lenders. Its technology team, on the other hand, is made up of nearly 50 professionals.
The team focused on digital development was tasked in 2024 with "exponentially increasing our in-house data analytics capabilities, which we then accelerated to real-time," Beguin says. "We plan to deploy those capabilities within our products and internally in 2025. Additionally, we have a host of new technologies and products in the pipeline focused on addressing financial fraud, which we plan to release throughout the year. This is a continuation of a path we’ve been on since 2017 and 2018 when we launched our first digital products on our own proprietary technology platform."
Now, Austin Capital is leveraging the lessons learned from offering its current products to improve them and create new products and services.
"One of the products we improved this year is our FreeKick family savings account," Beguin says. "In 2025, we’ve dramatically simplified the product by eliminating all subscription fees and increasing the interest rate we pay on deposits."
Beguin believes the bank’s approach changes the market paradigm: Instead of paying for family identity protection and spending to build credit, FreeKick users get paid (in the form of interest) for protecting their family and saving to build credit.
When he assesses how well Austin Capital is doing at the end of the year, Beguin intends to look at more than typical banking metrics like revenue, assets, and earnings growth.
"Our success will be measured by the number of consumers and small business owners we protect from fraud losses, which also minimizes fraud losses for the bank," he says. "If we can save one person from losing their life savings, this initiative will be a success."
