A pair of financial industry veterans are taking what they have from decades of work at Capital One and building a Portland-based fintech startup designed to make it easier for people to manage all their financial accounts.
Co-founders Rob Thacher and Anne-Jeanette LeBell are building BankShift, an app and service that will allow consumers to create a dashboard of all of their financial accounts — bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallets, investments and other financial vehicles — and move money between those accounts or pay bills.
Their company is called ShiftSense and it was founded August 2020. Thacher is working on it full time and LeBell is working to transition to the startup full time, as well as move to Portland. Though the startup released a consumer facing app in late February, the duo see financial institutions as their long term, main customer.
The idea is a financial institution would signup with BankShift to offer their own customers more features and services and thereby boost customer satisfaction. Having worked at large institutions both founders know the time and complexity of trying to launch new features in-house and see BankShift as a way to circumvent that while still giving customers what they want. They also see this as a way for smaller banks and credit unions to compete with big players.
“We want banking parity across banks,” she said. “It’s the next step in consumer experience.”
LeBell noted that the product helps existing institutions stay competitive with digital native banks and others that are vying for traditional bank customers. The startup uses government issued I.D. and biometrics to verify identity for security.
Working with a banking customer the dashboard can be a branded experience, she said. Customers already have multiple accounts and this way a bank could potentially be the main hub for a person’s financial life. Consumers could access and manage money without leaving their main bank’s app.
“(Banks) can pretend those other accounts don’t exist or show up next to them and be a better experience,” she said.
The fintech space has matured and now there are services such as Plaid, Dwolla and Coinbase that can provide the infrastructure needed for a product like BankShift without the startup itself building tools from the ground up.
BankShift’s own consumer app was launched as a way to get early customers and feedback using real world situations. The startup launched a subscription consumer service in February and it has paying customers using the app, LeBell said.
The startup has a team of about 10 with some fulltime and some contract. So far, the company has been self funded. The duo are raising a round now to further the business-to-business strategy and secure first partnerships.
The startup is part of the Techstars and Western Union accelerator.
The company is based in Portland because Thacher already lives here and it’s a city LeBell has been trying to move to for years. She first started coming to Portland regularly when a bank she worked for signed on with software maker Corillian Corp back in 1999. She’s familiar with the fintech scene locally and jumped at the chance to join Thacher with his Portland-based venture.
