OpenReserve, founded by alums of the fintech MoneyLion, has received conditional approval for a national banking license from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the company said Thursday.
“We’re aiming to be the de facto unified ledger for American companies: where credit access through real-time underwriting is continuous, access to capital is continuous, and connectivity to the overall American capital markets is real-time,” proposed CEO Dee Choubey wrote on OpenReserve’s webpage.
The company submitted its OCC application in April, but with the conditional go-ahead, executives are taking OpenReserve “out of stealth,” Choubey and fellow co-founder Rick Correia each wrote in LinkedIn posts Thursday.
“This is an opportunity for us to change the plumbing [of the financial system] and unlock … trapped capital,” Correia said in an interview with Guy Wuollet, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
The venture-capital firm led a $25 million capital raise for OpenReserve.
The proposed bank plans to offer deposit and lending products, including tokenized capabilities, as well as payments and treasury services, digital asset services and foreign correspondent banking, the OCC noted in a conditional approval letter published Wednesday.
OpenReserve also plans to create a stablecoin subsidiary to handle issuing, custody, conversion and payment of the digital assets, the OCC said. The company will also let users pay remittances using digital assets, according to the letter.
Among the OCC’s conditions, OpenReserve must maintain a tier 1 leverage ratio of 12% or more throughout its first three years of operation. It also must submit to the OCC a complete description of its information systems and operations architecture, including a schematic drawing, a risk assessment and a management plan. OpenReserve must also perform an independent security review and test of its electronic banking platform.
The company has yet to receive approval from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve.
OpenReserve’s C-suite appears packed with experience. Apart from Choubey and Correia, David Schwed is listed as the company’s chief technology officer. Schwed is a past chief information security officer at Robinhood and previously served as global head of digital assets technology at BNY, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Jame Sloan, a 21-year veteran of the OCC who now serves on the board of Anchorage Digital, is listed as OpenReserve’s chief risk officer.
“Every generation gets its moment when the machinery of money is rebuilt, and the institutions willing to do it the hard way get to define what comes next,” Choubey wrote on OpenReserve’s webpage.
Choubey founded MoneyLion in 2012, and served as its CEO until its purchase by Gen Digital finalized last year. Correia, who had served as MoneyLion’s president and CFO, from 2016 onward, served as head of MoneyLion for Gen after Choubey left the CEO role, according to LinkedIn.
“The conditional approval letter means America’s main banking regulator has reviewed our plan and said: proceed,” Choubey wrote on OpenReserve’s webpage. “De novo national charters are rare, and we are treating ours with the extreme seriousness that rarity deserves.”
