Augustus has received the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s conditional approval to operate a national bank, the company announced Monday.
The company, rebranded from its earlier iteration Ivy, said it aims to revamp a “clearing model [that] runs on legacy correspondents that are closed 115 days a year, built for humans, and take two days to settle.”
“Legacy banks are made of paper, Augustus is made of code,” co-founder Ferdinand Dabitz said in a statement. “It's obvious we need to upgrade clearing to the [artificial intelligence] era. But only this unique regulatory moment at the intersection of US financial regulatory innovation, the Genius Act, and AI enables us to finally do so.”
Dabitz, 25, would be CEO of Augustus Bank, N.A. – becoming the youngest CEO of a federally chartered bank in more than 100 years, the company said. The bank would be based in Dallas, according to its application.
In a LinkedIn post Monday, Dabitz touted the company’s namesake, the Roman emperor Augustus as “the inventor of modern currency.”
“When he came into power every province had their own coin,” Dabitz wrote. “He centralized the mint, the coinage and invented what we still know today: The national currency system.”
He also called the emperor “the original underdog.”
“When he was named Julius Caesar’s heir, there were easily 10 people who were objectively more likely than him to win in the following struggle for power. He still succeeded, against all odds,” Dabitz wrote.
“Today, I’m proud of a team that also succeeded, against all odds,” he added, asserting his team is “re-inventing money one more time.”
Augustus’ banking C-suite would be stocked with finance veterans. Greg Quarles, the bank’s presumptive president, has served as CEO of Green Dot Bank, United Texas Bank and H&R Block Bank, according to his LinkedIn profile. Quarles also spent more than 17 years at the OCC, where he was an examiner and assistant deputy comptroller.
Joe Schenone, the bank's presumptive CFO, logged stints at SmartBiz, LendingClub and MUFG, according to LinkedIn.
Andy Riggs, the bank's presumptive chief credit officer, joined Augustus last month from Western Alliance, according to LinkedIn.
“It is incredibly hard to rethink banking from the inside. To re-design banking from first principles, you have to build from scratch,” Quarles said Monday in a statement. “I'm grateful to the OCC for its leadership — they have recognized that a lot has changed since the great financial crisis essentially paused American new bank creation.”
The OCC has seen a marked uptick in bank charter applications over the past year. Some applicants, such as the fintech Mercury, are seeing a roughly four-month span between getting conditional approval and a full go-ahead from the regulator.
“Hard currencies are the best product in the history of the world, but distribution is broken,” Dabitz said in his LinkedIn post. “If we want to secure Western Currency dominance, we need to fix that.”
In his own LinkedIn post Monday, Schenone added: “The next wave of GDP isn't going to be generated by humans clicking buttons. It's going to be agents executing autonomously.”
