Finxact, the leader in Core as a Service banking, announced today that Live Oak Bank (Live Oak), the nation's leading small business bank, has successfully converted all of its retail and commercial deposit accounts to the Finxact core.
The conversion marks a much-anticipated inflection point for the industry with a greater than $8 billion bank fully replacing its legacy deposit infrastructure with an ecosystem of best-in-class solution providers all connecting via APIs to a cloud-native open core platform.
The journey for Live Oak began nearly five years ago when Live Oak Chairman & CEO James S. (Chip) Mahan, III, and Live Oak Bancshares President Neil Underwood, along with several regional bank CEOs, challenged the Finxact founders with the mission of developing a core for the modern era of banking. From the beginning, Mahan and Live Oak publicly expressed their confidence in the Finxact team. Finxact engineers began developing the platform in early 2017. The Finxact core was ready in the spring of 2020 for Live Oak to originate almost $2 billion in PPP loans during the height of the pandemic. In September of the same year, Live Oak introduced new commercial savings and term deposit products on the platform. This just completed conversion of all its retail and commercial deposit operations marks its most significant and penultimate step before the conversion of the remainder of its loan portfolio.
The Live Oak open ecosystem model contrasts starkly with the walled garden approach which has prevailed for decades owing to its obstinance more than its efficacy. The bank's retail operations rely on 16 best-in-class suppliers that specialize in solutions ranging from omni channel loan origination to issuer card processing to customer servicing all having in common seamless API connectivity to its real time core running in the AWS cloud.
"We had a vision for the way a modern core could be a platform for the business of banking. The Finxact team has delivered that platform. I believe they brought a unique combination of technical innovation and US banking expertise to the table giving us the ability to convert swiftly and run nimbly on next generation technology," said Chip Mahan, Live Oak Bank Chairman.
Finxact is a high performance, highly scalable, real-time position keeping platform that includes a comprehensive and extensible financial services model exposed as APIs. By accessing its open APIs and extensible components, banks are able to invent, curate, and launch products at the speed required to meet customer expectations in today's marketplace
"Live Oak is a story of innovation and bold decision making. Because of its leadership the bank will be more adaptive and able to compete at a different level. But there will be broader implications of their actions. Through their vision and determination, Chip Mahan and the Live Oak team have pioneered a critical improvement in the way core banking will be done in the US going forward," said Frank Sanchez, CEO and founder of Finxact.