Frank Sanchez has unfinished business with the bank computer

Frank Sanchez’s introduction to banking technology came with a decidedly unbankerly interest in making confetti. In the late 1960s, his father took Frank and his brother into bank operations centers on weekends. Their father wrote programs. The boys discovered what could be done with the keypunch machines. Before money became information on a screen, it left rather satisfying little holes in cards.

The family connection became a working one. Sanchez has described starting Sanchez Computer Associates with his father and brother while he was in college, working from a Pennsylvania self-storage facility and recruiting dorm mates to write software. Silicon Valley has its garages. Pennsylvania, apparently, could offer a unit with a roll-up door.

It is an origin story with less theatrical distance between childhood and profession than most. The rooms where his father worked became the kind of rooms Frank would spend a career trying to improve. He had seen the machinery before he had a title, a sales pitch or a company to sell.

02Astrophysics, finance and a very practical machine

At the University of Connecticut, Sanchez studied astrophysics and finance. The pairing is an unusually good preparation for a career spent thinking about money in motion: one subject asks how things move; the other supplies people with a reason to care. He attended from 1975 to 1978.

His early professional identity was technical. At Sanchez Computer Associates he led technology and product development, became president and chief operating officer in 1994, and took the chief executive role in 1999. He was the principal architect of PROFILE, the company’s banking software suite. The progression matters. The executive had first been responsible for the thing the company actually made.

PROFILE became part of the infrastructure behind internet banking. Early internet-bank users included ING, Bank One and American Express. This was work beneath the visible surface: the customer might admire a convenient website while the software underneath kept track of the account.

The company was acquired in 2004. Sanchez then held senior posts at FIS, including responsibility for enterprise banking and research and development. Building a product and overseeing it inside a larger organization gave him two different views of how banking technology changes.

03The customer’s chair is an uncomfortable education

Zenbanx supplied a third view. Sanchez co-founded the digital bank and served as its chief technology officer; SoFi acquired it in 2017. For someone accustomed to supplying banks with technology, operating on the customer side was a useful reversal of the seating plan.

He found that creating products, meeting customer needs and responding to competition could be difficult even with software regarded as modern. Some things the team wanted to do could not be done with its core. Experience was now arguing with experience: decades of building banking systems had not made their constraints disappear.

When he began Finxact with his brother Michael, he took a direct hand in the new architecture. His work included the data and process models, schemas and requirements. He also gave himself an unofficial job description: “Chief Focus officer.” A founder can always acquire another title; this one at least came with a fairly clear task.

Development began in late 2016, with Finxact dating its founding milestone to January 2017 in Jacksonville. The new venture gave Sanchez room to reconsider the design rather than keep extending what already existed. The frustration at Zenbanx had become a specification.

“Chief Focus officer.”Frank Sanchez’s unofficial title, 2017

04An engine, with room for other people’s ideas

A core banking system keeps the records behind accounts and processes transactions. A bank may offer a handsome app, but the promise made on that screen still has to be carried out somewhere. Sanchez’s field of interest is that somewhere.

Finxact began without inherited code or modules. Its engineers chose Go and a container-based approach orchestrated with Kubernetes. The platform was designed around a transaction engine and interfaces through which other software could work with it. In ordinary language, a bank could connect services around the core instead of asking one supplier to provide every piece.

That choice also made partners part of the proposition. In a 2022 conversation with Fiserv’s David McIninch, Sanchez discussed open APIs and an ecosystem for banking transformation. The interface is a technical detail with organizational consequences: it gives another team a defined way to contribute.

The financial model behind the software is extensible, allowing clients to add attributes and accommodate different kinds of assets. Finxact’s design makes room for products that do not all resemble the same conventional deposit account. It is a demanding ambition, because flexibility has to coexist with precise records.

There is an appealing restraint in this kind of work. The end customer need never know whose transaction engine sits behind a service. A successful piece of infrastructure can be almost offensively modest about taking credit. The balance appears, the payment moves, and the machinery continues its business.

05The weekend when the drawings became operations

A design acquires a different weight when a bank moves live accounts onto it. Live Oak Bank converted its retail and commercial deposit accounts to Finxact over the weekend of August 20, 2021. The end-to-end conversion and validation took 44 hours, finishing 16 hours ahead of schedule.

Those are unusually tangible numbers in an industry fond of describing the future. A conversion has a beginning, an end and records that must agree. Finishing early is welcome; finishing correctly is the point. Live Oak’s move placed Finxact in the everyday business of keeping a bank running.

Sanchez credited the bank’s leadership, including Chip Mahan and the Live Oak team, for the decision. His connections to bankers had helped make the company possible; a banker’s willingness to change systems now helped demonstrate the product.

The scale question continued after that milestone. In November 2023, Sanchez co-authored a performance paper with CTO Jim Joyce, software architecture executive Mike O’Toole and development performance director Stephanie Knudsen. It reported testing against a volume of 70 million accounts.

The active/active results averaged 23,620 transactions per second and 51,381 API calls per second. These were controlled benchmark results, with different workloads behind the two measures. Their interest lies in the question being asked: could this architecture handle the demands that large institutions place on a core?

06A founder learns to travel inside a larger company

Fiserv completed its acquisition of Finxact on April 1, 2022. For Sanchez, it meant another transition from independent company building to working within an established financial technology business. The recurring challenge was how to carry the product’s purpose into an organization with a much broader reach.

His message to clients around the transaction emphasized continuing the engineering roadmap while drawing on Fiserv’s people, servicing capacity and other products. The hoped-for benefit was practical: more institutions could use the technology, with a larger organization supporting delivery.

By September 2023, his update described expansion in Jacksonville alongside team growth in Pune and Bangalore. It also described work connecting Finxact with Fiserv services around payments, customer experience and bank operations. An open architecture still required people to do the connecting.

In 2024 he pressed for earlier delivery of commitments and repeated three priorities: security, stability and scalability. The vocabulary is less glamorous than the usual language of invention, which is rather its virtue. Banking customers have a legitimate preference for excitement to occur somewhere other than their account records.

The April 15, 2026 announcement of Finxact’s Best SaaS for FinTech award identified him as Head of Finxact and Vice Chairman, Fiserv. It reported more than 30 million live accounts. The youthful visitor to bank computer rooms was still occupied with what those rooms needed to do next.

07Five million dollars for the next workshop

Sanchez’s interest in engineering also took a physical form in Jacksonville. In 2022, The Bolles School announced his $5 million gift toward a Center for Innovation. He spoke about education keeping pace with fields including computing, artificial intelligence, transportation and robotics.

Here the investment went into space where younger people could learn to make things. The planned building brought science, mathematics and technology together with areas for programming, engineering and design. A school workshop has a different timetable from a software business, but both require somewhere to begin.

In October 2023, Hope and Dana Fender committed a matching $5 million. The building took their names and Sanchez’s: the Frank R. Sanchez & Hope and Dana E. Fender Center for Innovation. Its 47,000 square feet span three stories, with spaces intended for collaboration as well as individual study.

At the September 28, 2024 grand opening, more than 500 members of the school community attended. Faculty demonstrated classrooms and tools, and Sanchez was among those who spoke. Fireworks followed over the St. Johns River. Banking infrastructure seldom gets fireworks; classrooms occasionally have better public relations.

The school lists him among its 2026-27 trustees. His support therefore extends beyond the name on the building. The public record places him both among the donors who helped create the facility and among the people responsible for the institution’s direction.

08The taste for useful machinery

For a compact expression of Sanchez’s taste, consider the conference table at Finxact’s Jacksonville office in 2019. It was built around a Boeing 747 turbofan. He wanted a setting that suggested engineering optimism, welcoming to visiting bankers without becoming opulent. “It all comes down to the product and solid engineering,” he said.

The table is an extravagant way to make a practical point. A machine normally hidden inside something much larger became the object around which people gathered. That is a fair description of his professional preoccupation, too.

Across the companies, the roles and the school project, the recurring subject is the equipment that lets other people work. Sanchez has occupied enough sides of the banking relationship to know how an elegant idea can become somebody else’s daily frustration. Finxact grew from that experience. The unfinished business is keeping the machinery useful as the people depending on it ask for more.