Simple (formerly BankSimple) is coming after your customers and it wants bankers' help.
The Portland startup which has placed its technology platform on top of the Bancorp Bank is actively looking for potential community and big bank partners, says Shamir Karkal, the fintech company's CFO and co-founder.
After all, Simple can't hold cash. It's not a real bank in the strictest sense of the word, though the 70-employee company has shown traditional bankers the power of smartphone software.
This fall, Simple began offering a Goals feature as part of its mobile app. The add-on helps customers sock away cash without breaking their bottom line. The savings tool mimics some of the financial decisions folks make when, say, they only have $1,000 left in their checking account at the end of the month, but have a plan of saving $1,200 every four weeks with the goal of putting away $2,400 over the next eight.
"Here's a factoid you might be interested in," says Karkal, 34, who spoke to Bank Technology News after his presentation at the Mobile Banking & Commerce Summit in Miami. "Using our Goals feature, the single biggest goal that people are saving for is buying a house."
He's alluding to where Simple might go next: offering mortgages. ("I'm not saying that," he cautions. "But that would be a way to go.") The company would of course need to partner with banks in order to make those types of loans.
In 2010, Simple set out to build "a bank that doesn't suck," and since then has launched a branchless banking app that has functionally left beta and begun offering remote deposit capture.
Today, Simple is onboarding depositors with a wait time of about two weeks. There is a wait list, but that serves more as a tool to control the flow of new customers.
What underlies that glacial pace are community bankers that can't spend $10 to $15 million revamping their company's core in order to plug in new mobile applications, and $10-billion-plus asset size banks are too weighed down by bureaucracy to innovate, says Karkal.
"Everybody really wants to do it, but this is one of the largest industries on the planet, and it's heavily regulated," he says. "So the deep fundamental change that is really needed, doesn't happen overnight."
