Legacy fintech and traditional banking options are leaving too many people behind. Here’s a look at a brighter, universal future for the finance world–one built on systems designed with the modern world in mind.

Fintech isn’t a niche anymore–it’s the norm. When clients and customers turn to a bank or a non-bank financial institution, there’s an expectation that loans, deposits, and transactions can happen online. 

But that’s not always the case. The big banks and institutions of the financial world may have the resources to throw billions of dollars at coding bespoke digital bank solutions for their customers, but the thousands of small, regional, and community banks, as well as many non-bank lenders in America, don’t. 

The traditional process for developing digital financial services is convoluted, expensive, and slow–because we’re working with outdated technology that has had third-party integrations tacked onto it as society’s needs develop. 

The process hasn’t evolved. What the financial world’s been longing for is a system built from the ground up with the current fintech reality in mind.

It’s for these reasons that excitement is starting to swell around the global expansion of Evolve Credit, a fintech SaaS platform that offers no-code tools for local financial services providers who want to customize digital services to their community’s needs. 

Recently coming into the US market, Evolve Credit has emerged as a global fintech leader and is closing their most recent seed round in the seven figures. Not only is this fintech positioned to shape the future of finance, their flagship product, Configure, addresses the problems of a widening multi-trillion dollar financing gap–driving intrigue from investors looking to create meaningful change. 

To understand this new vision for digital financial services, we reached out to Evolve Credit’s Co-Founders: CEO Akan Nelson and CTO Daniel Osineye.

“Many of the legacy fintech players represent a world of constraints,” Nelson says. “From day one, we’ve built our system to be able to work for any organization, anywhere, and of any size.”

With Configure, even a 5-man credit union can establish and maintain their own digital lending suite. Their communities get access to an intuitive and responsive landing page and member portal, while these institutions use an admin dashboard that gives them total no-code control over the entire thing.

To accomplish this, Nelson, Osineye, and their team have broken down, distilled, and rebuilt the process for how a bank can do business.

“At its core, innovation isn’t necessarily about creating new pieces but about putting existing pieces together in ways no one else has,” Nelson says. “That’s what we’ve done with Evolve Credit; we’re reimagining banking technology that’s more resilient and harder to replicate than anything else.”

This reimagining has long been needed, as over 7 million US households still lack access to banking of any kind. Evolve Credit’s mission to empower small banks and non-bank lenders to expand their reach digitally is critical to America’s financial infrastructure. 

Traditional fintech solutions are inaccessible for many financial institutions because most providers won’t even work with a lender or bank unless they first have the resources to develop an app on their own.

“That assumes that the customer has the resources and the capacity to do those things,” Nelson says. “Many providers say, ‘if you can’t afford to build your own mobile app, then maybe you shouldn’t be digitizing.’ That’s an incredible problem because the kinds of organizations that aren’t digitized are probably servicing demographics that no one else wants to serve.”

Let’s say you can get over the barrier of making your own app, there are still more barriers to entry for a financial institution trying to go digital. A core banking system provided by traditional tech players, such as Oracle, is only one piece of the puzzle. 

“The provider will give you a core,” Nelson explains, “but then it’s up to you to either pay them more to set up additional systems or pay third parties to set up things like deposit, lending, and account management.”

Companies like Oracle are massive players in the industry and no longer willing to be flexible for each customer. This means developing something that’s tailored to your services, customers, and region requires working with a number of different providers. 

Instead of participating in this model, Evolve Credit has reimagined the process of digitizing. Their SaaS tools are universal–and can be customized based on the services an individual institution seeks to offer. This is accomplished by separating each service into modules that can be plugged together as the lender or bank needs.

“For example,” Osineye explains, “if an institution wants to use us for deposits, they’ll be able to adopt just that, rather than having to pay for an entire box of products they can’t afford and don’t need. We take one module at a time and build it into a full product that anybody can pick out of the box and use right away.”

As a bank or non-bank lender scales, they don’t have to bring on third-party providers in order to add services. All the tools they could need in the foreseeable future can come from Evolve Credit, allowing them to incorporate additional features and new modules as necessary. 

“The way we’re building our technology helps these institutions scale faster while reducing performance issues,” Osineye says. “A problem with legacy systems is that when one service goes down, there’s a likelihood that others will be affected. The difference with Configure is that our modules are isolated end-to-end.”

Instead of relying on the strength of a singular core, which is why many online banks so often see blackouts and service interruptions, Configure’s modular approach creates stability.

“We’ve broken down, distilled, and simplified what a financial institution does digitally,” Nelson says. “All these things are separated and then can be connected like puzzle pieces. They’re all completely independent while being built on top of the same technology, which is Evolve Credit.”

That’s a big-picture overview of a complex technology, but it’s a glimpse into what industry insiders and investors can expect from the future of finance. Through Evolve Credit–and Configure, their SaaS tool–every bank and non-bank lender can transform themselves into a stable, reliable, and accessible fintech.

For more information on what Evolve Credit offers the future of finance, visit their website. For investment opportunities, message CEO Akan Nelson on LinkedIn.