To stay competitive as a small Midwest community bank in an increasingly digital financial market, OMB Bank decided to become a fintech sponsor bank.
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“A physical branch isn’t the main driver behind customer acquisition or retention anymore, because their branch is in their pocket,” OMB Chief of Staff Jessica Sims told American Banker. “We see the fintech community as just an extension of our local, physical community. While they’re not in our backyard like some of our other customers, they are our long-distance community.”
The Missouri-based community bank started as an agriculture-focused bank 26 years ago, according to Sims, but wanted to expand its online account openings and market potential.
To do so, OMB Bank partnered with the BaaS middleware and embedded banking provider Treasury Prime
Treasury Prime advertises itself as a software provider that lets banks put rules into place to manage their fintech partner relationships, and it connects its fintech clients and its bank clients for direct partnerships.
Treasury Prime recently launched an LLM-powered iteration of its matchmaking system called
“For a long time we were doing this manually, but with thousands of fintechs coming into our network we decided to invest in AI to help our banks get the right leads at the top of their email inbox,” Nowicki told American Banker.
OMB Bank joined Treasury Prime’s bank network to look for fintechs seeking a sponsor bank. Consumer-facing fintechs will often partner with chartered banks to provide financial account services, such as deposit holding and card issuance, that require a regulatory license.
Participating in the network, according to Sims, would open up opportunities for additional account generation for the $1.4 billion-asset community bank through customers opening accounts through partner fintechs.
“We believe bank relevancy relies on embedded finance,” Sims said. “Not exclusively, not for all banks, but for us. We’re invested in new technology and ideas.”
A year and a half later, OMB became the official sponsor bank for
“The accounts that are opened through the Backpack program are FDIC-insured OMB accounts,” Nowicki said. “Backpack was a client that was originally due to be launched at another institution, but for a number of different reasons things got delayed. Then OMB came online and it was a great fit for everyone.”
OMB Bank has already begun using the upgraded Treasury Prime marketplace platform to continue adding other fintechs to its network of third-party account partners.
“As I’m in the marketplace, it’s gone from probably completely manual on my end to totally automated for me [and] the time saved is incredible,” Sims said. “As I’m building out what we’re looking at for the next quarter or 12 months or 24 months, I can very easily make changes to the kinds of fintechs we are looking to partner with. It’s tremendous for us to be able to easily adjust for where we are going in the future.”