ModernFi’s Network Covers 40% of US Reciprocal Deposit Market

Series B Close and Regulatory Leadership Appointment

ModernFi closed a $30 million Series B and, separately, hired Gale Simons-Poole as its first head of regulatory affairs. Canapi Ventures led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, Curql, Remarkable Ventures, and new investor Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) participating, per the company's announcement. The round pushed total capital past $60 million and repositioned a deposit-management startup as regulated infrastructure.

The Series B announcement frames the capital as a bet on deposit stability in the post-2023 banking environment, with Andreessen Horowitz General Partner David Haber quoted as saying the company is "providing these institutions with the tools they need to compete and flourish" and "ensuring that smaller institutions aren't left behind." The pitch rests on a footprint the announcement itself documents: ModernFi CUSO serves more than 75 leading credit unions and banks, and the National Bank InterDeposit Company (NBID) includes institutions representing more than 40 percent of the existing reciprocal deposit market. The company's bank-side customer base ranges from $500 million to $100 billion in assets, a span built across two products. ModernFi CUSO, the credit-union deposit network launched in 2024, now lets members offer up to $15 million in NCUA insurance per account. NBID, a reciprocal deposit mechanism that launched in 2025 in collaboration with participating banks, sits alongside the original marketplace ModernFi was founded on in 2022. The Series B is earmarked to accelerate adoption across financial institutions, expand the team, and deepen integrations with digital banking and core providers, the company said.

Simons-Poole most recently served as Chief Risk Officer at BHG Financial, where she led regulatory and compliance matters for BHG lending programs and scaled BHG's enterprise risk program. Prior to BHG, she spent seven years with Promontory, the regulatory consulting firm, according to a separate Business Wire announcement.

The board already runs heavy on regulatory pedigree. Rodney E. Hood, who served as acting comptroller of the currency from February to June 2025 and previously chaired the NCUA, was reappointed to ModernFi's board in September 2025. In the announcement, Hood cited "ModernFi's rapid adoption by hundreds of institutions" as his reason for returning to oversight, and CEO Paolo Bertolotti tied Hood's experience to "the highest standards of compliance, governance, and safety" as the platform scales. Read together, the Simons-Poole hire and the Hood reappointment point in the same direction: ModernFi is building a bench of former regulators around a deposit network that wants to be treated as core U.S. banking infrastructure.

An Embedded‑Finance Platform Spreading Across U.S. Banks

The $30 million ModernFi raised is doing one job: turning a deposit-networking startup into a piece of U.S. banking plumbing that community banks, regionals, and credit unions actually route liquidity through. Inside that book, the company works with institutions as small as $500 million in assets and as large as $100 billion, a span the TechCrunch seed-round coverage noted few deposit-network competitors serve with a single product.

The expansion has two parallel tracks. On the bank side, NBID launched in 2025 as a collaborative vehicle for participating banks, sitting alongside the original demand-deposit marketplace ModernFi was founded on in 2022. On the credit-union side, ModernFi CUSO (described in the Series B release as the first-of-its-kind network for credit unions) has grown to serve more than 75 leading institutions, and lets members offer up to $15 million in NCUA insurance per account.

The Series B flows directly into three product-expansion workstreams the company has already telegraphed. ModernFi's release says the capital will accelerate adoption across financial institutions, expand the team, and deepen integrations with digital banking and core providers. The last being the lever that turns ModernFi from a standalone app into a button a relationship manager can push inside an existing core. Founder and CEO Paolo Bertolotti, in the 2023 TechCrunch interview covering the seed round, sketched the same roadmap at a smaller scale: term deposits as a second funding source beyond demand deposits, more funding types on the marketplace, and engineering hires aimed at bank-partner integrations. The Series B is the capital to execute that blueprint rather than the blueprint itself.

The features that ship on top of that plumbing are what make the platform feel embedded rather than bolted-on. ModernFi's deposit network helps institutions protect large deposits, improve liquidity access, and reduce operational burden, and the company has positioned the build around institutions the post-2023 banking events left exposed. The Series B announcement frames that history bluntly: "the events of 2023 made clear how fragile their [community banks'] position can be without modern infrastructure," and calls the round a recognition of ModernFi's role as critical infrastructure for deposit stability and liquidity management. The unit economics follow from that positioning: ModernFi does not charge transaction, account, or setup fees, instead taking a slice of the yield banks pay on deposits, per the TechCrunch profile.

The Simons-Poole hire lands on the same product surface. Her remit overlaps directly with the features banks now demand from deposit partners: reciprocal-deposit documentation, sweep program compliance, third-party-risk questionnaires for core integrations, and NCUA coverage mechanics for the CUSO. The combined effect: ModernFi is shipping the compliance scaffolding those institutions need to defend those deposits to their own examiners, not merely adding banks and credit unions to a network.

Competitor Moves: Plaid, FIS, and Others React

ModernFi's $30 million raise and its hire of Simons-Poole landed on a deposit-infrastructure market where the rival infrastructure providers have their own recent moves on record. Plaid, FIS (trading as Fiserv), and a longer tail of core processors have all made public announcements in the surrounding window, and ModernFi is now competing for the same scarce compliance and engineering talent.

Plaid is the most capitalized rival in the adjacent infrastructure stack, though its product sits one layer up; Plaid links consumer bank accounts to apps, while ModernFi links banks to one another for deposits. The company raised $575 million in 2025 from Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, BlackRock, NEA and Ribbit Capital, then completed an employee share sale in February 2026 at an $8 billion valuation, per the Plaid Wikipedia entry and CNBC coverage cited there. That capital base has translated into a hiring posture tracked on the Zero G Talent job board: Plaid added 106 roles in the past seven days, with compensation bands for selected staff-level roles as follows.

The mix of machine-learning, product-marketing, and U.S. sales hiring matches the hiring signature of a company repositioning its APIs around agentic workflows and bank-grade compliance.

The clearest external signal of that repositioning came on May 15, 2026, when Plaid and OpenAI announced a partnership letting ChatGPT users link bank accounts through Plaid, per the Plaid Wikipedia entry. ModernFi's own pitch, community and regional banks running on modern infrastructure in the wake of the 2023 regional failures, is a different customer than Plaid's, but the two companies are now competing for the same scarce compliance and engineering talent.

Fiserv has joined Visa and Mastercard in a coalition writing rules for AI-agent payments, per the Plaid Wikipedia entry, a seat at the table that signals where the next two years of product roadmap will land for core-and-channel incumbents. Temenos, the core-banking vendor on the other side of the Atlantic, hired Daniel Schmucki as CFO and is publishing Azure-hosted AI-banking reference architectures, per the same source. The category ModernFi is opening up (modern, transparent, compliance-first interbank infrastructure) has become the implicit benchmark the rest of the industry is now hiring and product-planning against.

Regulatory Tailwinds: OCC Guidance and Third-Party Risk Focus

ModernFi's decision to bring in a former regulator as its first head of regulatory affairs lands at a moment when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the FDIC have made third-party risk management the central supervisory concern for banks that outsource core functions to fintech partners.

What the OCC's Third-Party Risk Doctrine Actually Says

The OCC's 2023 interagency guidance, "Third-Party Relationships: Interagency Guidance on Risk Management," sets the baseline every bank examiner now applies when a deposit, lending, or payments program is run through an outside vendor. The bulletin makes clear that activities performed by third parties are examined "to the same extent as if they were being conducted by the bank itself," meaning a bank that wires deposits through ModernFi's network still owns the compliance outcome. In 2026, the OCC has followed up with a cluster of supervisory updates: bulletin-2026-41 revising policies for bank enforcement actions and Matters Requiring Attention, bulletin-2026-42 opening a notice of proposed rulemaking on those MRAs, bulletin-2026-43 tightening suspicious activity report confidentiality, and news release NR-IA-2026-71 prioritizing material financial risks. Read together, they signal examiners are being told to grade banks harder on the seams between the bank and its vendors.

Why Examiners Are Already Nervous

The supervisory reflex did not appear from nowhere. In 2018, the FDIC hit Cross River Bank with a $641,750 civil money penalty and forced it to build a "Compliance Management System that effectively identifies, addresses, monitors, and controls consumer protection risks associated with third-party activities," per a Duke Law FinReg Blog post. The same post documents how the rent-a-charter model concentrates risk on the bank side of the table: WebBank, the Utah industrial loan company that became the structural backbone of marketplace lending, has cycled through a 2005 cease-and-desist, a 2010 consent order over its Genesis credit card partnership, and a 2018 enforcement action. The Duke analysis notes that roughly one in three WebBank loans are held for sale versus a peer average near zero, and that two contractual lending programs generated 29% and 40% of WebBank's revenue in 2018 and 2017, respectively. Concentration like that is precisely what the 2023 interagency guidance was written to surface.

Why a Regulator Hire Reads Differently in 2026

That is the context in which Simons-Poole's appointment matters. ModernFi is selling into bank compliance teams that have just watched a wave of enforcement actions, that operate under the 2023 interagency rule, and that now face the 2026 OCC revisions. A Head of Regulatory Affairs who has sat on the examiner side of those conversations can speak the language of MRAs, vendor due diligence, and ongoing monitoring, the exact vocabulary bank GRC officers are screening for. The OCC's own 2018 policy statement set the philosophical frame, quoted in the Duke FinReg Blog: "companies that engage in the business of banking in new and innovative ways should have the same opportunity to obtain a national bank charter as companies that provide banking services through more traditional means."

Hiring Surge: Product, Engineering, and Compliance Roles

ModernFi's $30 million Series B is, on paper, a capital event. In practice, it is a hiring plan with a payroll line attached. Founder and CEO Paolo Bertolotti said in the 2023 TechCrunch seed-round interview that the company's funding would underwrite growth across "engineering, bank partnerships and compliance," and the Series B announcement confirms that mandate has only widened. The company will "expand its team" and "scale its institution success teams to support the growth of new partners," per the BusinessWire release.

The engineering and product hiring tracks directly to the integrations roadmap. ModernFi's Series B is earmarked to "deepen integrations with digital banking and core providers," which means hiring software engineers who understand core banking APIs, deposit-account ledgers, and the unglamorous plumbing of balance-sheet reconciliation. The demand deposit product is live; term deposits are next, and Bertolotti has publicly described "quite a lot to do on the analytic side" around balance-sheet management, per the TechCrunch seed profile.

Compliance is the second front, and the Simons-Poole hire is the signal flare. Her remit at ModernFi covers regulatory and compliance matters across an institution base that already crosses NCUA-supervised credit unions and OCC-supervised banks. The board itself reads as a compliance résumé: Hood, who was confirmed twice by the U.S. Senate for the NCUA Board and chaired it in 2019, and who served as Acting Comptroller of the Currency from February to June 2025, has been reappointed to ModernFi's board. Simons-Poole built and scaled an enterprise risk program at BHG Financial and spent seven years before that at Promontory.

The competitor set is hiring offensively too, which puts pressure on ModernFi's offer letters. Plaid's job board shows 106 roles added in the past seven days alone, with compensation bands for staff-level engineering and product roles running $230,000 to $406,800 a year. That is the prevailing market ModernFi has to match for any engineer who can build deposit-marketplace plumbing and rival the same candidates Plaid, Fiserv, and the core-banking vendors are all chasing at once.

Analyst Outlook: Revenue Growth and Market Share Projections

ModernFi has not published forward revenue guidance, and no Wall Street analyst currently covers the private company. The cleanest read on momentum comes from the operating data points it has disclosed, and those point upward. For a company founded in 2022 by Paolo Bertolotti and Adam DeVita, the cadence of capital (three priced rounds in roughly three years) signals investors are underwriting accelerating, not steady, growth.

The revenue model helps frame what that capital is buying. ModernFi charges basis points on deposits routed through its network, per TechCrunch coverage of the Series A, which means revenue scales directly with deposit volume and the number of participating institutions. On that measure, the footprint is expanding faster than the funding pace implies. NBID already includes banks representing more than 40% of the existing reciprocal deposit market, and ModernFi CUSO serves more than 75 leading credit unions and lets those institutions offer up to $15 million in NCUA insurance per account.

The competitive framing sharpens the market-share read. Caplight's similarity ranking lists the three named alternatives as IntraFi (81% similarity), R&T Deposit Solutions (78%), and Fiserv (78%). ModernFi itself sits as the newer entrant in a market where the wholesale funding exchange between banks (the over-the-counter channel ModernFi is digitizing) already exceeded $2.3 trillion in size, per S&P Global data cited in TechCrunch's seed coverage.

Headcount tells the same story. ModernFi's worker count doubled in 2023, and Bertolotti told TechCrunch the Series A capital would fund growth across engineering, new product development, compliance and regulatory adherence, and business development. With the Series B, the company has explicitly earmarked the round for accelerating adoption, team expansion, deeper core and digital-banking integrations, and institution success teams. Monthly web traffic to the platform rose 126% month-over-month to 17.3K, per Caplight, and key.com was added as a customer in late 2025, two more leading indicators that the Series B inflection is showing up in demand-side activity.

The honest caveat: with no analyst coverage and no public filings, every revenue or share number above is implied, not reported. What the disclosed data does support is a directional case (deposits under management, institution count, and capital raised are all compounding), and the Series B size plus the Simons-Poole hire and Hood's board reappointment are the next two catalysts to see whether that directional case becomes a reported one.

What This Story Does Not Cover

The boundary of this analysis is drawn around ModernFi's Series B close and the Simons-Poole appointment, plus their immediate operational consequences inside the embedded-finance and deposit-management stack. Several adjacent topics surfaced during research and are deliberately left out.

First, this piece does not catalog the broader Series B cohort of fintech or embedded-finance startups. The Series B wave context (rival raises across infrastructure, payments, and core banking) is a separate story.

Second, the article does not adjudicate the OCC's broader third-party-risk agenda. The regulatory-tailwinds section explains why compliance talent is valuable to ModernFi; it does not pass judgment on whether the OCC has struck the right balance between bank safety-and-soundness obligations and innovation headroom.

Third, competitor coverage is scoped narrowly to firms whose deposit-management or bank-infrastructure roadmaps intersect directly with ModernFi's. Plaid appears in the hiring and competitor sections because its bank-API footprint makes it a natural adjacent. Fiserv, Jack Henry, nCino, and Temenos show up only where there is a verifiable development tying them to deposit networks, embedded finance, or third-party-risk posture in the same window.

Fourth, customer-side evidence is constrained. Those are platform-level figures. Individual depositor experience, complaint patterns, churn rates, or net-promoter scores are not in the research.

Finally, analyst projections of ModernFi's revenue or market share are scoped to what is on the record. Where the research offers a number tied to a dated source, that number is reported with its date. Where it does not, the analysis stays qualitative.

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