About Cross River Bank
Cross River Bank was founded in 2008 by Gilles Gade as a traditional New Jersey-chartered community bank, but grew to become a major player in the "banking-as-a-service" industry by pursuing a distinctive strategy: rather than competing primarily for retail deposit customers the way most community banks do, Cross River built technology and partnership infrastructure that lets fintech companies, which are not themselves chartered banks, offer regulated financial products such as lending, debit cards, and payment processing by operating "as a service" behind the scenes, using Cross River's bank charter and associated regulatory approvals to legally originate loans, hold deposits, and process payments on the fintech's behalf.
This banking-as-a-service model has made Cross River a foundational, if often invisible, piece of infrastructure behind a large number of well-known consumer and business fintech products, providing the regulated banking rails that let these companies operate without each needing to separately obtain and maintain their own bank charter, a lengthy and complex regulatory process that would be impractical for most startups to pursue independently, especially in a company's early years. Cross River has partnered with a very large number of fintech companies across lending, payments, and other financial services categories, and has also played a significant role in various government relief programs, including originating a substantial volume of Paycheck Protection Program loans during the COVID-19 pandemic on behalf of fintech lending partners. Operating as a banking-as-a-service provider has exposed Cross River to heightened regulatory scrutiny from bank regulators, who have increasingly focused on ensuring that banks partnering with fintech companies maintain adequate compliance oversight of those partners' lending and consumer protection practices, given the significant growth and evolving risk profile of the banking-as-a-service industry more broadly. Cross River has raised private growth equity funding, including from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Eldridge, reaching a valuation in the billions of dollars.
