A recent Bloomberg Business article states that CannaNative is trying to link leaders from the 566 sovereign Indian nations with finance professionals and legal marijuana businesses. CannaNative’s goal, according to the article, is to use expertise gained from managing casinos to create banks or credit unions that would accept deposits from the legal marijuana industry, which generates an estimated $3 billion in revenue each year. Since the Indian nations are not subject to U.S. Banking laws, an American Indian banking system would be able to tap into the legal marijuana industry, a market that national banks won’t touch, per the article.
“The Indian casinos are basically small little banks,” CannNative’s founder, Anthony Rivera Jr., told Bloomberg Businessweek. “They receive deposits in the form of gaming, and they manage that cash in a way which his highly regulated,” he added. Consequently, CannaNative is following the casino model by hiring managers from marijuana companies to teach tribes how to set up financial institutions for the marijuana industry, the article states.
Tribes may legalize marijuana for medical, agricultural, and recreational use in the same way that individual states do based on an October 2014 Department of Justice memorandum.
The full article is linked below:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-15/finding-a-place-for-cannabis-cash
