Our acquisition of Zenbanx

We have never been shy about SoFi’s ambitions to become the center of our member’s financial lives. Offering deposits, credit cards, and payment solutions is key to that ambition, and we think we can offer something better than incumbent players with the same kind of innovation we’ve brought to other areas of finance, like student loan refinancing, personal loans, and mortgages.

Today, we got a lot closer to being able to provide those products with the acquisition of Zenbanx, a Delaware-based company that offers a mobile banking account that lets people save, send and spend in multiple currencies.

SoFi and Zenbanx share a vision that banking can and should be a lot better, and that’s what’s at the heart of this deal. Zenbanx founder and CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann was on the front lines of the branchless banking revolution in the late 1990s as the founder of both ING Direct USA and ING Direct Canada. Under his leadership, ING Direct USA became the largest direct bank in the country, largely because they could do things over the phone and online that incumbent banks couldn’t.

Zenbanx’s focus on a fast and simple mobile experience on top of solid banking technology makes them a natural fit for SoFi and our members, who demand to be able to manage their money whenever and wherever. They’ve also been at the forefront of conversational banking built into popular messaging apps, an area core to our current development.

The majority of Zenbanx staff will be joining SoFi, and Arkadi will join my management team leading the development of new banking services. Zenbanx customers will be able to continue using their accounts until the new SoFi personal finance products are launched in a few months, at which point they’ll be transferred onto the SoFi platform.

The ways in which people interact with their money – borrowing it, moving it and investing it – are all intrinsically connected, and we’re confident that Zenbanx will prove to be a perfect teammate as we move into more of these facets of personal finance. Together, we’ll continue to work toward our end goal of changing your relationship with both your money and your financial institutions.

With the addition of Zenbanx, SoFi is poised to make banking much more frictionless. We can’t wait to show you what’s in store.