Marijuana Startups Like Tokken Aim To Provide The Cannabis Industry With Banking Services, But Will Legal Shifts Put Them Out Of Business?
Growing up, 36-year-old Lamine Zarrad learned the hard way what it’s like to be a disenfranchised outsider. Born in Azerbaijan, Zarrad and his parents fled ethnic conflict in the former Soviet republic in the 1990s and ended up living in a freezing former lithium processing factory in Moscow. Surrounded by contaminated machinery, they survived on condensed milk and corn flakes distributed by Western NGOs.
That's why, after emigrating with his family to the United States as a teenager and embarking on a wide-ranging career that included a stint in the marines and a job at Merrill Lynch during the 2008 financial crisis, he got a job as Denver-based bank examiner for the Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and quickly identified with an entire industry filled with outsiders: The burgeoning marijuana market. Just as he had been, the industry was financially disenfranchised.
While cannabis businesses make up one of the fastest-growing industries in the country, many of...
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