Steven Schnall once sold peepholes door to door. It was a pleasingly efficient line of work: the absence of the product supplied the sales demonstration. Someone behind an apartment door would ask who was there, and the young salesman had his opening. Decades before Quontic offered a payment ring, he understood the commercial possibilities of making an everyday inconvenience difficult to ignore.
His career acquired larger numbers and more complicated paperwork. It retained that early interest in people whose needs were sitting in plain sight. The borrowers who would help define Quontic included immigrants, small business owners and workers whose earnings refused to behave like a salaried employee’s pay stub. Schnall saw a market in the difficulty of explaining them.
The sales pitch came first
He grew up in Clearwater, Florida. His childhood enterprises included cinnamon toothpicks and slingshots fashioned from discarded telephone wire. These were modest products for a youthful customer base, with the useful advantage that neither required a financial-services license.
In 1989, he graduated from the University of Florida with an accounting degree and moved to New York. Price Waterhouse offered a respectable beginning. He lasted about ten months before leaving for the mortgage business. A dependable professional path had evidently failed to hold his attention.
The new venture went badly. Schnall later described being pushed out by partners and left with debts he could not meet. His account of the experience included a lesson painfully familiar to anyone who has mistaken friendliness for a contract: important arrangements need to be written down. The genial salesman had encountered the cost of taking other people’s promises at face value.
A second start, then a public company
With a $15,000 loan, he began again. New York Mortgage started in 1992, with the cramped resources of an apartment business. A mortgage company deals in other people’s addresses; his own initially had to accommodate rather more commercial ambition than the floor plan anticipated.
The operation expanded into a national mortgage business. In 2004 came the public-market chapter, New York Mortgage Trust. By then, the business had roughly 1,000 employees and 65 offices across 25 states. Schnall had gone from finding a way to start over to managing an institution with a public share price.
He sold the mortgage lending operation in 2007, before the financial crisis. The distinction matters: the lending business was sold, and the publicly traded trust had its own corporate life. A biography can become misleading when several businesses are squeezed into one convenient sentence.
Two years later, he returned to lending through a different door. Golden First Bank, a troubled institution in Great Neck, had $24 million in assets when he bought it. He recapitalized the bank and renamed it Quontic. At a moment when lending had become a distinctly uncomfortable occupation, he chose a bank as his next enterprise.
An orange bank at the subway stop
Astoria gave the new bank a neighborhood. George Lazaridis, Schnall’s longtime friend, business partner and fellow Quontic co-founder, brought deep local connections. The branch stood by the Broadway subway stop, its orange presence becoming one way people recognized it.
For Schnall, the area offered business owners whose ambitions were easy to understand even when their finances were harder to file. One favorite example was the King of Falafel & Shawarma. He remembered its owner banking with Quontic when the business was a single food truck outside the branch. By 2017, he was talking with pleasure about its expansion into more trucks and a restaurant.
Mortgage lending posed a related problem. A taxi driver, an entrepreneur or a self-employed worker might have an income and a record of saving without the standard employment documents another lender expected. Quontic developed mortgage products for such circumstances. Evaluating those borrowers required attention to their particular finances.
In 2015, the bank received certification as a Community Development Financial Institution. Lending to underserved people and communities now had a formal place in its institutional identity. Schnall’s business was acquiring a mission with obligations attached.
- 01Attract depositsDigital accounts reach savers beyond the neighborhood.
- 02Fund lendingThose deposits support the bank’s mortgage business.
- 03Understand the borrowerAlternative documentation serves different income circumstances.
A schematic of the model, rather than a measure of any individual account’s impact.
The expensive business of being early
Schnall expected consumers to move away from branches. His reluctance to build a conventional branch network came with a practical difficulty: a bank still needs deposits while it waits for consumer habits to catch up. Quontic relied heavily on brokered deposits and other funding, drawing regulatory concern and accelerating its digital plans.
“And I was right, but I was early. So, I was wrong in the beginning.”
Steven Schnall, reflecting on branchless banking
The admission gives the story some welcome friction. A good forecast can be an awkward operating plan. Quontic needed the skills to attract and serve customers online, along with the information to understand how the business was performing.
Patrick Sells became an important collaborator. His background in marketing and technology brought a different perspective into banking. They worked on changing both the machinery and the habits of the organization. Schnall put the human difficulty plainly: “We’re moving a mountain culturally.”
Quontic.Works, launched in June 2019, connected information across systems that had not communicated well. Reports that had consumed substantial time could be produced far more quickly. There is little romance in data plumbing, but a banker proposing adventurous products benefits from knowing where the pipes lead.
The shift also changed where colleagues could live. By April 2021, Schnall described a management team spread across the country: finance in Dallas, marketing in Washington, information security in Las Vegas and other executives elsewhere. Some had never visited headquarters. Recruiting nationally widened the pool of people available to the bank. It also made the Rockefeller Center office a less reliable map of the organization. Schnall was willing to consider using less headquarters space in the future, provided the bank could measure productivity. For an entrepreneur who also developed property, square footage was evidently open to negotiation.
A little less wallet, a little more nerve
The more visible experiments followed. In December 2020, Quontic launched Bitcoin Rewards Checking with NYDIG and FIS. Eligible debit purchases earned rewards in Bitcoin. It gave a checking account a distinctive appeal in an increasingly crowded digital market.
That appeal had a business purpose. Customers who used the account brought deposits and transactions. Digital deposit gathering helped support the lending operation. A crypto enthusiast and a borrower in Astoria could be participating in different ends of the same banking model without ever meeting.
Then came the ring. Quontic announced its U.S. payment-ring launch in April 2022. Customers could link the wearable to a checking account and pay at contactless readers. Banking had entered the jewelry drawer, where at least it would have better company than a forgotten debit card.
Schnall used his ring on the New York subway while carrying his morning coffee. The convenience was small and specific. There was also the less photogenic matter of stocking different finger sizes: the bank maintained 20 sizes, and adding colors would multiply inventory. His enthusiasm for the idea sat alongside the arithmetic of supplying it.
In May 2022, Quontic opened an outpost in Decentraland. The virtual space was intended for connection and education, with banking services imagined further ahead. The experiment belonged to that period’s exploration of the metaverse; its launch was a statement of interest in what might come next.
A banker with other addresses
His business interests were wider than the bank. They included Restaurant.com and Realmor Capital, as well as residential development in New York. In Tribeca, he and his wife, Sherri, worked on a condominium project at 15 Leonard Street and kept the townhouse attached to it.
The property business produced a particularly New York encounter. Taylor Swift’s security team approached him about obtaining indoor parking next door. The discussion eventually involved the possibility of shortening his lap pool to help create a private route. Even in a city accustomed to extravagant property negotiations, the request had a certain flourish. No agreement was reached.
These projects put him on both sides of the housing conversation: financing homes for borrowers and developing residences himself. The settings differed considerably. The recurring occupation was finding a transaction that could be made to work.
A smile had a job to do
Quontic’s workplace values included “Say cheese,” a reminder to smile when things became tense. Another emphasized progress. Schnall wanted an organization willing to try unfamiliar things and learn as it went. A bank attempting that much change would have ample opportunity to practice.
The relationships inside the business mattered to its lenders. Loan officer Steven Ho credited Schnall, Lazaridis, Sells and their colleagues with helping him develop his career. He wanted to make the management team proud. It is a revealing ambition in a business usually described through production figures.
He also invested attention in the people doing the work. Quontic created a chief empowerment officer role, with responsibilities spanning culture, communication and social impact. The vocabulary could be playful; the organizational decisions gave it somewhere to land.
Beyond his companies, Schnall was a founding director of Urban Angels, which provided meals for people without homes, and served on the board of The Arthur Project, a youth-mentoring nonprofit. Opportunity occupied him outside the mortgage application as well.
The University of Florida recognized him as its Warrington College’s Distinguished Alumni Entrepreneur in 2018. In May 2022, he became a New York finalist for EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year award. He died on August 2 that year, aged 55, leaving Sherri and their two sons.
Quontic continues to honor him as its co-founder. The peephole salesman’s career had reached payment rings, public markets and a virtual bank building. Its recurring question remained thoroughly human: had someone mistaken a difficult explanation for an impossible customer?