MoneyLion Founder Gets $25M From a16z for OpenReserve Digital Bank

FinTech company OpenReserve has gotten conditional approval for a U.S. banking charter.

The company received that permission from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency this week, CEO Dee Choubey said in a post on X Thursday (Sept. 3).

“Preliminary conditional approval to charter a de novo national bank is a privilege our team does not take lightly,” wrote Choubey, who also founded MoneyLion. “It is a significant milestone and the beginning of the most demanding phase of the work.”

Also Thursday, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) said it was leading a $25 million seed round for the company.

Writing on the a16z blog, general partner Guy Wuollet said OpenReserve is addressing a critical need in the financial world that is “stuck in the past.”

“We need a bank that’s always on, always open, always available. A bank that never closes. A continuous bank,” the post said. “We need a bank built like a blockchain, the financial infrastructure with the strongest resilience, uptime, and accessibility on the planet. We need a bank with instant settlement and support for atomic transactions.”

OpenReserve will be that bank, Wuollet argued, able to combine the regulated credit of a traditional bank with the continuous money movement offered by stablecoins.

Choubey told Bloomberg News that the OCC approval gives OpenReserve the ability to issue its own stablecoin, with the goal of facilitating transactions even when the Federal Reserve’s window is shut. The company also aims to tokenize deposits for instant money movement and settlement on the blockchain.

“The architecture of our core allows interoperability,” Choubey said. “As long as they’re Genius Act-compliant stablecoins, we now, the bank, can accept that as collateral,” he added.

PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the banking industry’s ongoing embrace of blockchain, as exemplified by a group of 21 global banks planning to launch a dollar-denominated stablecoin next year.

“Banks are not abandoning tokenized deposits in favor of stablecoins. They are increasingly building both,” the report said.

“That turns what has often been framed as a contest between competing versions of digital money into something more consequential: an effort by banks to assemble a portfolio of programmable money and eventually route transactions toward whichever form has the right combination of liquidity, portability, regulation and reach.”