Quote: Axos Bank services customers through cost-efficient technology to be able to provide high-value products to its consumer and business customers.
Axos Bank was a “fintech” long before the “fintech” nomenclature became common parlance. As one of the first direct banks, founded on July 4 of 2000, they opened their doors as a consumer digital bank, offering checking, savings, and CD products nationwide. Axos Bank’s opening on the Fourth of July was selected to symbolize independence from traditional banking and highlight an innovative business model that serviced customers entirely online – quite an innovation at a time before Google was public and the iPhone wasn’t even a glint in Steve Job’s eye. In the last decade, the public company has incubated and launched a number of new businesses, including correspondent lending services to non-bank partners, business and commercial banking, treasury management, an API platform to service financial technology companies, and a white-label digital banking platform. They have also established numerous industry-leading strategic partnerships with Fortune 500 companies including with Costco, H&R Block, and Nationwide Insurance.
As the need to control more of their technology stack in-house became increasingly evident, Axos Bank began constructing their “Universal Digital Bank” platform to deliver a superior online banking experience to its customers and provide a white-labeled service to financial technology providers.
“Universal Digital Banking” has elements that will enable Axos Bank to leverage client and third-party data to provide timely, relevant, and personalized offers to its clients. Axos Bank runs one core banking system across the entire organization and one enterprise data warehouse, allowing them to coordinate their personalization strategy across different business units. By building its own personalization solution, Axos can continue to modify it as they develop further data-driven insights.
Axos Bank services customers through cost-efficient technology in order to offer high-value products to its customers. The company provides an innovative bundled offering suite for financial technology companies that they believe no other federally-regulated institution is capable of providing. Axos Bank offers BIN sponsorship, lending sponsorship, lender finance services (warehouse and permanent lending facilities for financial technology provider’s loans), a comprehensive suite of payment APIs, treasury management services specifically designed for financial technology firms, and a white-labeled technology platform to cross-sell banking products not offered by their partners. One can truly say that no other bank provides the breadth of services that Axos Bank provides to financial technology firms.
Axos Bank is one of the few financial technology firms with a federal banking charter, allowing them to lend in all 50 states, access the payment networks, and ensure all their deposits with the FDIC. As a financial technology company, Axos Bank controls its technology stack and user experience, allowing them to innovate more quickly and react to changes in the marketplace. A financial technology provider approached Axos Bank about integrating their payment APIs into their core platform in order to utilize the data provided by these APIs to create specific “work queues” that result from ACH payment returns. Given the large volume of transactions, this integration saved significant personnel costs that would otherwise have been required if a traditional cash management platform with a more simplistic integration had been selected.
Axos Bank will continue to add products and services to its “tile/application” suite “behind the password” and make those services available to their partners via API. The company believes that financial technology firms will need to re-bundle products to be able to extract the maximal value from their customer base, and Axos Bank can be a strong partner in this process. “We believe we have the most diverse and innovative product set to serve financial technology companies, and we continue to be interested in partnering with firms to enhance our service offering,” says Gregory Garrabrants, President and CEO of Axos Bank.
