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When 60% of SoFi's customers told the digital bank in a survey that they preferred to buy, sell and manage their crypto with a licensed bank rather than the digital-asset exchange they dealt with, Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Rishel paid attention.
Rishel, who joined SoFi almost four years ago, has helped oversee a transition at the nationally chartered bank toward digital assets and payment rails. The bank began allowing its customers to access the Bitcoin Lightning Network last year to make cross-border payments and joined a growing chorus of financial firms when it issued its own stablecoin in December.
"We're using the infrastructure we've built over the last decade and applying it to real-world challenges in financial services," Rishel's boss, SoFi CEO Anthony Noto, said last year in the statement announcing the SoFiUSD stablecoin. "Companies today struggle with slow settlement, fragmented providers, and unverified reserve models," which SoFi plans to address by "combining our regulatory strength as a national bank with transparent, fully reserved on-chain technology to provide a safer and more efficient way for partners to move funds." (Rishel declined to be interviewed for this story.)
In the more traditional parts of the banking world, SoFi is using AI to streamline customer interactions and offers an AI investing coach that can analyze a SoFi customer account as well as external accounts to make investing suggestions based on improving how cash is being used.
SoFi has grown revenue from about $250 million in 2018 to over $3.5 billion last year, while membership during that same time expanded from 650,000 to 12 million, according to a presentation by Noto at a KBW conference in December. SoFi has a leg up on its crypto-native competitors who hold and issue digital assets. It has an account at the Federal Reserve, giving it access to basically riskless lines of credit and liquidity. Shares of SoFi have gained about 40 percent in the past year.
The bank's international money transfer service allows members to send funds across borders using the Bitcoin Lightning Network. For U.S.-Mexico remittances, for example, a user could deposit dollars and the recipient withdraw pesos, while the intermediary in the deal is the Bitcoin digital payment network.
"Blockchain and digital assets are a technology super cycle, similar to AI, that will impact every element of the financial services world," Noto said in December.
