Technology
05/23/2018

CBW and Yantra Bring ‘Common Sense’ to Fintech Space


CBW-5-23-18.pngIt’s not common to see global fintech firms and healthcare companies eagerly partner with a small bank in Weir, Kansas, but dozens of companies from an array of industries have done just that.

But the chief technology officer who’s led the way with a unique approach to blending technology and banking describes what he’s done over the last nine years as nothing more than “common sense.”

“The wheel was revolutionary for about a minute before everybody else realized they could do it too,” said Suresh Ramamurthi, the CTO of CBW Bank and CEO of Yantra Financial Technologies, the tech firm he established to bring efficiencies to banks and other companies who want to process payments or manage risk.

The state-chartered bank with just $33 million in assets, located in small town Weir, Kansas, is about as far from a major financial hub as any place in America, but the bank helped put the town back on the map. The town first rose to prominence as the place where the flyswatter was created. CBW remains one of the only things still remaining in the town’s center. Less than 1,000 people live there, and it’s the only branch the bank operates.

Ramamurthi and his wife, Suchitra Padmanabhan, acquired the bank in 2009, mostly with personal savings. He came from a career in the tech sector which included a brief stop at Google, while Padmanabhan had a career at Lehman Brothers. CBW had a rough balance sheet, and the two had to spend some time getting the bank back on a solid footing. Ramamurthi and Padmanabhan have been featured in The New York Times and Fortune, and have earned national awards and praise for their innovative approach to banking and technology. The praise is not because they give away cookies and cider in the branch as the Times reported, or that it still is one of the primary lenders to local farmers and home buyers, but because of what they’re doing with fintech.

Ramamurthi, leaning on his experience with Google and tech background, also started Yantra Financial Technologies, a fintech firm that initially focused on speeding up the payments process, which at that time could take days or even weeks if, for example, transfers were being made around the globe. From that beginning has evolved the Y-Labs Marketplace, which enables companies, regardless of sector, to explore banking and payments, specifically, within that marketplace.

CBW and Yantra are the winners of Bank Director’s FinXTech Innovative Solution of the Year, one of three annual awards that recognizes successful collaboration between banks and fintech companies. The awards were announced at Bank Director’s FinXTech Annual Summit, held this May in Scottsdale, Arizona.

CBW and Yantra have published about 500 application programing interfaces, or APIs, which allow third-party developers to build apps and connect them to the bank’s core data systems, while maintaining compliance, which in itself could be a huge financial and legal burden. It’s how banks can keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital marketplace without developing the apps themselves, and allows banks and other firms to come to market at a 21st century pace.

That, Ramamurthi says, is where the common sense lies.

“In banking, your core competence should be in the (area) that (is) the most expensive area for banking, which is compliance,” he says. “If you can digitize all aspects of compliance, then you have an advantage.”

The Y-Labs Marketplace, which Ramamurthi runs as the CEO, has grown its client list to more than 100 that includes mostly other fintech firms like Moven and Simple—known well in the banking industry—in addition to insurance companies, a claims processor, healthcare companies and hospitals, which have used the marketplace to improve their payments systems, while also automating their compliance verifications and other tasks that are often costly and time consuming.

The bank itself remains quite small, though it continues to grow steadily and supports the local community. Ramamurthi has been widely recognized as an innovator and is upending the industry by establishing what he describes as a foundation that will eventually lead to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning for the banking industry.

And there’s no indication that CBW or Yantra plan on slowing the effort to innovate.

Later this year, he said they plan to launch a “very special” mobile app, which he described as “a common-sense approach to how mobile apps should be for banking.”

Although Ramamurthi declined to discuss details, the app will “rethink” the relationship between customers and the bank, which has traditionally started with common retail accounts and then developed into loans and other more complicated arrangements, he said.

Jake Lowary