BankingForward

BankingForward's mission is to bring advances in financial technology to front-line community banks. Our first focus is on building our own bank, to provide banking products and services to low- and moderate-income consumers and small businesses. Today, the combination of small dollar balances and costly manual processes makes these customers uneconomic to serve. We intend to demonstrate that by leveraging best of class technologies and processes we can cost-effectively, responsibly, and profitably serve these customers. After vetting and integrating best in class technologies for ourselves, we plan to share our technology platform with other community banks. We know that many write off community banks as institutions gradually going extinct, on the logic that high fixed costs, narrow product sets, sub-scale processes inherently limit their profitability relative to larger institutions. Our perspective is different. We value community banks' unique strengths: their advantaged insight into local economic conditions and their place as trusted providers with a long record of service to their neighbors. All else equal, those strengths should drive superior returns, as well greater customer satisfaction. Our role is to level the playing field, by providing participant institutions with the same scale economies and breadth of offerings as the most advanced large banks.