A Dallas community bank has partnered with the fintech Raisin to offer complex deposit accounts that customers can build themselves without entering a branch.
MapleMark Bank, whose parent company is Maple Financial Holdings, hopes the new offering will help it expand its customer base beyond businesses and ultra-high-net-worth clients.
MapleMark is Raisin’s first U.S. partner, the two companies announced Wednesday. The commercial and private bank will use Raisin’s software, which lets bankers and clients easily customize deposit accounts, to appeal to a wider audience beyond the middle-market companies, private-equity groups and affluent individuals it currently serves. It also coincides with MapleMark’s yearslong mission to shift more activity online from its three branches.
“From a banking perspective," the new deposit products will provide "a high-quality funding base that provides liquidity and the ability to lend and grow and thrive as a bank,” said Willy Wolfe, chief financial officer at MapleMark. “From the customer perspective, it’s a platform where they can personalize returns on their savings.”
Raisin’s technology will automate the creation of products that resemble market-linked certificates of deposit and other CDs; provide a front-end sales tool for bankers and bank websites; and handle all record keeping. Bank employees can navigate a series of drop-down menus to build a term deposit account that, in most cases, will become available to retail customers in less than an hour, said Paul Knodel, CEO of the New York-based Raisin U.S.
“Our founding principle is we want to create savings without barriers,” he said.
Customers can tailor three offerings from the $800 million-asset MapleMark and Raisin using a calculator on the bank's website. They will be able to play around with different maturity dates and disbursement amounts and see how those changes affect their interest rates.
One is a liquidity CD, where customers can choose a term and arrange for regular disbursements before the CD matures — say, because they need the money to pay for college tuition or cover fixed costs in retirement. A second is a market-linked CD, where the interest rate is pegged to the return of a market index or basket of stocks (in MapleMark’s case, a collection of diversified cross-sector stocks), but the principal amount is protected even if the market goes negative and insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
“The ability to have this online and model it directly through the Raisin platform is unique,” said Wolfe. “If customers want to think about different lengths of time and amounts, they can do this themselves without coming into the branch.”
Finally, Raisin lets MapleMark automate a CD ladder strategy. Normally, customers would manually open, for instance, a combination of one-, two-, three-, four- and five-year CDs. But they must remember to reinvest the money each year to continue the ladder. Raisin will let the customer choose the length of the ladder and how much they want to invest, then automatically reinvest each rung as it matures.
MapleMark will test the features with family and friends in April, and plans to launch the products to its general customer base two to three months later.
The 100-year-old MapleMark began its digital journey in earnest in 2017, when it relaunched as a largely online bank with a light branch presence. It upgraded to an FIS Horizon core and started using Bottomline Technologies to handle account opening for individuals and Q2 for business banking. An application programming interface from FIS will link its core system with Raisin.
Raisin "is the next evolution to up our game and broaden our product set,” Wolfe said.
Knodel said Raisin will partner with several other U.S. banks over the next few months. The company initially hesitated to replicate its deposits marketplace in this country because its products would be considered brokered deposits under U.S. regulations.
“We realized that the pure brokered-deposit offering was less appealing than if we could somehow offer core deposits,” Knodel said.
The company does plan to launch a U.S. version of its European savings product marketplace. But first it’s working through regulatory compliance questions and gathering a larger handful of U.S. banks that will participate.
