The bank behind your bank

In 2023, the FDIC invited Derek Higginbotham to a conference he had never heard of: the Interagency Minority Depository Institution and Community Development Financial Institutions Bank Conference. He was running a fintech bank at the time, serving many of the same communities that CDFI and MDI banks had served for decades, just from an entirely different direction.

The challenge, as the caller put it, was to find out how the two types of institutions could work together. He knew no one in the room.

A dinner, and an idea

At the end of the first day a community bank president introduced himself, worked out Derek’s background in about thirty seconds, and noted that it was strange, but interesting, that he was there. Then he told Derek to follow him.

That led to a birthday dinner with a dozen community bank presidents and a late-night jam session where the idea of Stitch was born. The premise was simple to say and hard to do: community banks have the relationships, but the products a small business now expects from its bank get built elsewhere. Someone had to build a bank, in full, and let community institutions offer its products under their own brand.

Two people telling the same story

A year later Derek left his bank to pursue Stitch. Dave Glaser had left his CDFI. Multiple mutual friends had been hearing the two tell the same story from opposite ends.

Dave had spent years watching community lenders lose good borrowers to speed they could not match. Derek had spent years building that speed, but had a gnawing concern that too much human touch was being lost.

The meeting was inevitable. At a deli at 15th & 15th in Salt Lake City they went from introductions to building Stitch.

What Stitch is

Stitch is a state-chartered, FDIC-insured bank that curates or builds modern small and medium business banking products, manages the vendor relationships behind them, and helps with the compliance, oversight and funding they need, so community banks and community lenders can offer those products under their own brand.

Think of us as the bank behind your bank. Your customers keep their relationship with your institution. As your trusted bank partner, we help with the oversight, compliance, and solutions those customers need, but that don’t make sense for you to operate or hold on your own balance sheet.

Our first product is rapid-decision small business lending: term loans and lines of credit from $10K to $500K, cash-flow underwritten, funded in days, not weeks, on complete applications. A business card, for purchases, spend, and charge, is next. We are building with purpose one product at a time, with community lenders in mind, always.

If you run a community bank or a community lender, we would like to hear from you.