Ivy Rebrands as Augustus After OCC Charter Approval

Financial services firm Ivy has rebranded as Augustus on its road to becoming a bank.

The German company announced the name change Monday (May 11) along with some progress on the banking front, as it has received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a full-service U.S. national bank.

Augustus said its goal is to become the first clearing bank “for the AI era,” founded on a “stablecoin and AI-native core,” as the company said in a news release.

“This approval has been driven by our core thesis: the dollar is the best product in the history of the world, with practically infinite global demand – but distribution is broken,” the company said in a Monday LinkedIn post announcing the name change. “The existing clearing model runs on legacy correspondents that are closed 115 days a year, built for humans, and take two days to settle.”

Ferdinand Dabitz, the company’s 25-year-old co-founder, will be the bank’s CEO. Augustus said this makes him the youngest chief executive of a federally-charted American bank in at least 140 years.

Joining him as the bank’s president is Greg Quarles, former CEO of Green Dot Bank, United Texas Bank, and H&R Block Bank and himself a former OCC official.

Augustus is part of a wave of FinTechs seeking banking charters from the OCC recently, a trend PYMNTS chronicled earlier this year.

“Traditionally, FinTech companies have built around banks, not as banks,” that report said. “The strategy was simple: partner for access to payments rails, deposit insurance and compliance infrastructure; don’t built it from the ground up yourself.”

That model brought with it speed but left companies dealing with fragility, as sponsor banks could alter terms, and regulators could reexamine guidance. In addition, public scrutiny increased following high-profile failures revealed the limitations of banking-as-a-service.

However, receiving a charter is “not a monolith,” that report said, as de novo charters in the U.S. apply to  range of banking business models. Each are covered by different regulators, operate under different statutes and carry with them a variety privileges. While the headlines can blur these lines, the operational consequences are far from vague, the report added.

A bank charter “is not a trophy, and it certainly isn’t a product label, but it’s a public trust,” Rodney E. Hood, former acting comptroller of the currency, told PYMNTS affiliate Competition Policy International, in an interview at the start of the year.