On September 7, 2021, Live Oak Bank announced that more than 60,000 customer accounts had moved to a new core banking system. The interesting word was “deposit.” This was a milestone within a larger conversion, rather than a declaration that every corner of the bank had changed. In a business built on keeping promises about money, the order of operations matters.
- Finxact supplies the ledger and transaction engine beneath banking services.
- Open APIs let institutions assemble products and connect outside providers.
- Phased migration buys learning time while adding temporary operating costs.
The supplier was Finxact. Its proposition sounds almost modest: give institutions a real-time record of money and let them build around it. But a bank’s core shapes its working day. It affects when balances change, how products behave and how easily a new service can join the others. A lovely app can only conceal so much.
The ledger is the product
Finxact sells business software to banks, fintechs and companies embedding finance in their own services. It supports deposits, loans and transaction processing. Institutions can configure products and connect services through APIs, the interfaces software uses to talk to other software. The commercial model is consumption-based SaaS: the infrastructure is a service, with usage influencing its economics.
One revealing detail sits in the documentation. Finxact distinguishes an account from a “position.” The account describes an agreement between customer and institution. A position holds a balance. One account can contain several positions, potentially representing different assets or currencies. Instead of forcing every new idea into a single balance-shaped box, the bank gets a more flexible container.
Illustrative structure, not a customer configuration.
That distinction has practical consequences. A product designer can think about the relationship first, then the balances and behaviors inside it. In an eight-minute demonstration published in 2022, Finxact showed account origination, automatic savings, rewards and buy-now-pay-later behavior using two API endpoints, with services from MX and Marqeta. The demonstration is a useful glimpse of the machinery; a production bank still needs controls, integration and testing.
Payment movement gets its own plumbing. Introduced in 2023, Finxact Payment Rails adds native ACH, RTP and wire capabilities, including settlement and reconciliation functions. Finxact.io supplies documentation, sandbox environments and learning resources. These tools address a mundane obstacle to new infrastructure: people have to learn how to use it before they can trust it with a working institution.
Real-time processing does not make the operations department disappear. The public documentation still lists daily checks, transaction reconciliation, general-ledger balancing and error resolution. That is a useful corrective to the language of banking reinvention. The core can make information available sooner, but an institution still needs people and procedures to investigate exceptions. For an implementation team, those ordinary tasks make good acceptance criteria: can staff trace an entry, understand a balance and resolve a problem? Product flexibility has to survive contact with the working day. For a buyer, this suggests a better demonstration than a tour of polished screens: follow a transaction through the surrounding systems, including an exception. The quality of that journey tells a team more about readiness than an interface alone can.
Move the deposits first
Live Oak’s announcement gives the architecture a concrete test. The bank’s deposit customers had actually moved. Its surrounding ecosystem included Apiture, Savana, Payrailz and DefenseStorm. The core was part of a group of specialized systems, each with a job. Choosing a flexible foundation also meant choosing and coordinating the pieces around it.
Announced September 2021
Other customers illustrate different entry points. First Horizon uses Finxact for consumer deposits at its VirtualBank brand. Primis chose the platform to assemble a digital banking stack. These are useful distinctions for a buyer: a digital brand, a new product and a broader core conversion place different demands on a team. “Modernization” is too roomy a word to serve as a project plan.
Sanchez co-founded Finxact with his brother Michael after decades in banking technology. The Jacksonville office contained an unusually literal engineering statement: a conference table built on a Boeing 747 turbofan found on eBay. “It all comes down to the product and solid engineering,” he told the Jacksonville Daily Record. The furniture was more theatrical than the business.
The challenger gets a distribution network
In January 2019, Finxact raised $30 million from investors including the American Bankers Association, Accenture Ventures and SunTrust, alongside existing backers. The trade association’s involvement was telling. Banks wanted more freedom to choose products and partners; their own industry organization helped finance a supplier offering it.
Then an incumbent bought the challenger. Fiserv announced approximately $650 million for the ownership interest it did not already hold, completing the acquisition in April 2022. Sanchez’s explanation emphasized reach: Fiserv brought resources and servicing capacity. The logic was straightforward. Building banking software and supporting many institutions are related but different undertakings.
Today Finxact competes for modernization work alongside cloud-core suppliers such as Thought Machine and Mambu, as well as established banking platforms. APIs alone do not settle that contest. Finxact’s particular combination is its account model, real-time engine and access to Fiserv’s wider suite, including cards, payments and digital channels. Buyers must assess the whole delivery arrangement.
The market has widened. FirstRand selected Finxact in February 2025 for work supporting FNB and RMB, becoming the first institution outside the United States to commission it. In April 2026, Fiserv reported more than 30 million live Finxact accounts. That measures accounts, rather than individual people, but it gives the platform’s production footprint a useful scale.
The expensive part is the overlap
Flagstar’s August 2026 selection supplies the next test. Its plan calls for phased consolidation onto Finxact. Banking Dive reported planned migrations in summer 2027 and summer 2028. Those dates describe work ahead. They also explain the compromise: moving groups of products and customers limits how far an unexpected problem can spread.
“The trade-off is that you carry the cost of those environments”
Flagstar executive, Banking Dive, August 2026
The same report describes a change in operating philosophy: let the desired customer experience guide technology decisions. Our reading is that a faster ledger helps only when the people around it can change how they work. An institution seeking a turnkey transformation without integration ownership would struggle with that bargain.
The useful lesson travels beyond banking: select a bounded first move, test the dependencies and budget for the overlap. Finxact gives institutions more ways to assemble a service. Deciding what to assemble, and how safely to get there, remains the bank’s work.