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Select, a digital membership community, bets on Miami as it serves up financial services as well as lifestyle perks

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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By Nancy Dahlberg

Another New York startup now calls Miami its forever home, and this relationship comes with benefits.

Coming off a strong year of growth in 2022, Select Innovations, a startup offering a digital membership community and concierge service, is rolling out upmarket financial services and is betting on Miami continuing to play a role in its success.

 “We connect members with exclusive events, savings and perks at over a million different locations all across the world,” says Select’s founder and CEO Carlo Cisco.

Carlo Cisco, founder and CEO of Select

Select partners with top hotels, restaurants, retailers, entertainment venues, and sports teams in order to be a full lifestyle offering that arranges exclusive benefits and discounts for members, such as 15-30% off the restaurant bill, a free round of drinks, up to 60% off hotel rates, and special offers from brands like Tumi, Caraway and Brooks Brothers, for example. “We also do some really cool events down here in particularly around Art Basel and F1,” said Cisco.

Today, Cisco is announcing that Select’s new headquarters will be in Miami, and they are scouting for an office location. Already, the Magic City is Select’s third-largest of its 23 markets, behind only the much larger New York and LA markets. Miami also is home to the largest grouping of Select’s team, which numbers 11 full-timers and 20 including part-timers.

Cisco is a University of Miami alum and founded his first business, an event planning and promotion company, while in school. After that, he worked in finance roles and left to help build Groupon Japan before jumping back into the startup world. He founded Select in 2014 and launched it in 2015. Cisco and his husband moved to Miami from New York area in early 2021. “We had a feeling that we would love it and we absolutely love it.”

Select announced this spring that the startup will be rolling out the Select World Elite Mastercard, in partnership in partnership with MasterCard and Deserve, that will offer all of Select’s membership benefits, Mastercard’s World Elite benefits and 2% cash back on most spending.  The annual fee is $450, the same as Select membership, but membership is included for credit cardholders. The Invitation-only Beta is slated to begin in June; waitlist registration and card details are found at selectcard.co.

Cisco says Select added more new members in 2021 than in 2020 and 2019 combined, ending the year with the company’s first profitable month. Year to date,

Select’s revenues are up over 44% and profitable, he adds.

“We anticipate greater than 100% membership and revenue growth this year and are outpacing our forecast,” said Cisco. “The company’s been doing really great since I came back down here. I don’t know if there’s an environmental element to that or not.”

What’s next for members of Select is more financial services building on the credit card rollout. “We plan to essentially use that as a foundation to broader upmarket financial services offerings. We plan to leverage the large paid membership community that we have, all the business relationships we have from the benefits, and start to do private market investments.”

On the roadmap is a Select Syndicate. The Select Syndicate will leverage Select’s investor and startup ecosystem networks to enable accredited members to participate in high-quality startup investments at varying stages, Cisco said. “We just think we’re really well positioned with our investor base for deal flow. We’re really well positioned with our customer network and our business network for value add, so to us, it just feels like a natural extension of what we do.”

Member experiences and events are included in Select’s perks.

Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]

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Nancy Dahlberg
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