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For CEO Gilles Gade, technological agility has allowed Cross River Bank to thrive in all market conditions, from the mortgage crisis, through COVID-19 and now the advent of AI.
"We built our core engine to be agile enough that it could adapt to any new rail that comes our way," he said. "We're [technology] agnostic, so interoperability is the key to unleashing our potential to constantly innovate."
Cross River's emphasis on flexibility came out of necessity. During its founding in 2008, the bank faced strong headwinds in deploying the capital it raised given the financial world's pullback from risk. Gilles moved Cross River into active participation with TALF, the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility the Treasury implemented to jump-start the asset-backed securitization market. The move worked out: five quarters after its founding, Cross River turned its first profit.
"You can't control the wind, but you can adjust the sail," Gilles said.
The most significant way Cross River catches the wind is with its Cross River Operating System (COS), the proprietary banking core Gilles led development on. COS was constructed from the ground up as an API-driven platform, avoiding the batch processing approach of many legacy bank systems. COS treats interoperability as a core requirement, allowing partners to trigger ACH, RTP or FedNow, among others, through a single API call.
It has made Cross River a favored regulated banking partner of fintech innovators, counting Stripe, Affirm and Coinbase among its 120 technology relationships. The platform has processed more than one billion transactions with uptime greater than 99.9%. Cross River also is able to churn its $8 billion balance sheet between three and eight times annually, making it one of the most powerful sub-$10 billion banks in the industry.
In November, Gade moved Cross River into stablecoins, positioning the bank as one of the first federally regulated banks to bridge the gap between fiat currency and digital assets without multi-day settlement periods. Visa and Plaid are among its early adopters.
Today Gade is considering how to adjust to the upheaval AI is bringing to every business. He sees it being especially helpful for improving compliance and risk management. Cross River is honing AI to eliminate the noise—and high error rates—off-the-shelf AI engines bring to transaction verification. Cross River's AI will be optimized for Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering, fair lending and overall compliance needs.
"This is a paradigm shift for the entire industry," Gilles said. It's another opportunity for Cross River's quick thinking backed by nimble tech.
