Nathaniel Harley, MANTL CEO and Co-Founder — Fueling Innovation in Community Banks and Credit Unions
Gabriela Ariana Campoverde sat down with Nathaniel Harley, CEO and Co-Founder of MANTL, a software platform specializing in online account opening and deposit growth strategies for community banks and credit unions.
Founded in 2016, MANTL has helped banks raise more than $1 billion in core deposits — with the highest performing account opening solution on the market. This past spring, this fintech raised $40MM in a Series B round. MANTL is on a mission to expand access to financial services by challenging the cost structures of traditional banks with its robust APIs, conversion best practices, and seamless user experience.
In this episode we discuss:
- How MANTL’s platform serves thousands of Americans today: “Our mission at the end of the day is to really expand access to financial services, and we do this by helping the traditional financial institutions take on the legacy infrastructure that has hindered access to digital banking over the past number of years. We are very much part of the new wave of technologists that are trying to transform the underlying cost structures of the traditional banks.”
- The negative impact legacy infrastructure has on the user experience for account holders, banks and credit unions: “We are very much focused on fixing legacy infrastructure, which has been one of the biggest obstacles to really limiting modernization in the US banking system today. The way the industry works is 96%. of the 10,000 community banks and credit unions in the US actually rely on third party vendors for their technology. The issue is that these vendors have actually underserved these banks. They have outdated technology. They’ve taken an acquisition approach to innovation over the past number of years. 43% of legacy bank core systems are actually running on languages written 60 years ago. The issue is that the gap between these regional and community banks and credit unions versus the money center banks who spend billions of dollars in technology, and the new fintechs, who ostensibly are just building a better UX at the end of the day, has really been widening over the past number of years. One data point that we look at the top 15 banks 25 years ago, held about 16% deposit market share. Fast forward to today, they had about 56% of that market share, and that’s because they’re investing billions of dollars in technology to really grow and help modernize whereas these banks, the regional and community banks and credit unions are very much reliant on these outdated legacy vendors.”
- Why community banks and credit unions matter: “There is a strategic advantage to being smaller, to being nimbler to being more responsive, right to actually having that better relationship. Community banks are able to understand their community better than the money center banks who essentially take a cookie cutter approach and a one size fits all right. If I’m a farmer out in The West or wherever it may be, there’s a very good chance I may not be able to get the loan I need for my farm, right from a money center bank, but the community bank who understands the risk understands the importance of the small business within the community, that’s who you’re going to go to. I think they excel from that standpoint. I also think they can offer better products, they can offer better services, they can take, as I was saying, a more nuanced approach to lending. There’s more of a desire to build a relationship with customers, and really branches and ATMs outside of the historically high income areas that the big banks targeted. That’s where the community banks ultimately really shine. So our outlook on community banking, you know, we think that the headline is if you give community banks the right tools, they will be able to compete online.”
- And much more!
Full interview → Spotify | Soundcloud | Apple
About Nathaniel Harley
Nathaniel Harley is the CEO and Co-Founder of MANTL.
Prior to founding MANTL, Nathaniel served as COO of Spoon University, a food publication by and for college students. This was the first start-up which he joined and was backed by Techstars. MANTL was his second company with the accelerator. Before joining the start-up world, Nathaniel was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he studied Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences.
Nathaniel is passionate about building products that will help people. You can follow him on Twitter @nathanielharley.
About MANTL
MANTL helps banks and credit unions grow deposits and streamline back-office tasks with an omni-channel account opening platform that integrates with their cores. For additional information on MANTL, please visit www.mantl.com | Twitter: @mantl_tech
Gabriela Ariana Campoverde is Co-Host of the Wharton Fintech Podcast and a second-year MBA student at The Wharton School and Masters student at Penn Engineering. She is passionate about building products for work-class, immigrant communities across the US.
For more FinTech insights, follow us below:
Wharton Fintech
Website | Medium | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram
Gabriela Ariana Campoverde
