Digital banking app Current announces new partnership with The Bancorp Bank

Current, a New York-based digital banking fintech, announced that it’s partnering with The Bancorp Bank to offer an “enhanced suite of services across its entire product line, including its basic, premium and teen accounts.” The 6-year-old company has been partnering with Choice Financial Group and Metropolitan Commercial Bank to offer its products. Under the new arrangement, The Bancorp Bank will provide back-end banking services and card issuing sponsorship for Current, but Choice Financial Group and Metropolitan Commercial Bank will continue serving customers whose accounts they service now, a Current spokesperson told TheFR.

Why should we care?
Current, which has nearly 3 million customers, has been experiencing fast growth. Current says the new partnership will allow it to innovate – presumably on new product offerings – and reach more people. Ensuring partner banks can keep pace with customer growth is an issue facing other digital banking fintechs, including HMBradley, which last week decided to go invite-only as some of its partners expressed that they couldn’t keep up. Current, which aims to reach customers who live paycheck to paycheck, differentiates through back-end technology, including a ledger, that it built on its own. Through it, the fintech can offer debit, ACH, direct deposit, peer-to-peer payments, mobile check deposits, cash deposits, points rewards, and points redemptions. “[They] were taking a unique approach in the industry by building their own banking technology that dramatically lowered costs and to this day still gives them the ability to build products no one else can," Frank Rotman, founding partner at QED Investors, said in a recent interview. The company closed a $220M Series D fundraise led by Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year.