CBW Bank, the innovative bank in Weir, Kan., known for its partnerships with fintech pathfinders such as Moven and Ripple Labs, will expand its global remittance service within the next 18 months.
The announcement that the service would be expanded came from the bank’s CEO, Suresh Ramamurthi, at Bank Innovation 2015 in Seattle this week.
The bank, founded in 1892 but known for its recent cutting-edge innovations, operates the site globalremit.com, which currently allows users to send money to India for the fee of $2.50. The service began in May 2014, and does not only service existing CBW customers.
CBW’s expansion of its global remittance business offers unique evidence that even a tiny bank in Kansas can create a global payments venture that charges but $2.50 a transfer while bypassing the entirety of the established worldwide payments infrastructure. Or, to put it another way, if CBW can do it, any FI can.
CBW’s service is built on software from Yantra Financial Technologies, a payments startup founded and run in parallel to CBW by Ramamurthi.
Ramamurthi has been vocal about how banks are integral to financial innovation, which was what led him, a technologist who formerly worked at Google, to buy the bank, a one-branch bank in the southwest corner of Kansas, and use it as his innovation workshop.