Cross River Bank Looking To Raise $200M From Investors

Cross River Bank is “in early discussions with prospective suitors about raising roughly $200 million,” an effort that could put the Fort Lee, N.J.-based lender’s valuation at $2.5 billion or more, according to a Bloomberg report.

Cross River has handed out more than $46 billion in loans to financial technology startup companies since 2008 and garnered Paycheck Protection Program loans for more than 375,000 businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cross River announced the formation of venture capital arm Cross River Digital Ventures in June, about a year after earmarking $106 million in loans as “opportunistic capital” for future growth, saying that part of the company will focus on lending, payments, investing and financial tech.

CRB Group, the parent company of Cross River Bank, acquired PeerIQ, a data and risk analytics company, last month.

“Cross River already powers some of the largest companies in FinTech, and this new endeavor will help us identify and make additional strategic investments,” said Chief Executive Officer Gilles Gade said at the time.

Jesse Honigberg, technology chief of staff at Cross River, talked with PYMNTS earlier this year about real-time payments (RTP), which are initiated and settled nearly instantaneously. Companies must meet certain requirements so The Clearing House will certify them for using the system.

“Integrating to the network required certification in multiple environments, with multiple different test cases,” Honigberg said. “It was quite a bit of work.” He said that financial institutions should “be prepared for some complexity, but with the right level of tech competence, it can be done.”

A real-time payments “rail” is the digital infrastructure that facilitates such payments. Such setups usually process transfers 24 hours a day. Financial players can either integrate directly with payment rails or gain access by going through third parties that already have those integrations.

Cross River had five employees dedicated to its RTP integration project for five months to onboard it and sought to keep their workloads manageable by focusing first on facilitating specific, clearly defined use cases rather than attempting to enable everything all at once.

That meant launching capabilities to allow clients to send and receive funds via the RTP network, but holding off on adding functionalities such as request for pay, which was not widely supported until later, for example.