Dan O'Malley and the team at Eastern Labs will soon be rolling out their first development by the end of the year. The product and the rollout emphasize the need for banks to transform and embrace evolution in the digital era.
"Many banks recognize that they need to see digital changes as something that can happen inside the bank if they want to stay relevant in an environment filled with companies trying to cut them out of the financial equation.
"There are a lot of advantages to being a bank," said O'Malley, who previously was chief executive of PerkStreet Financial, a cards reward startup that shuttered.
A bank comes with assets startups don't have, like access to data and customers.
Of course, banks also come with decades-old technologies, expensive branches and fierce regulation.
But O'Malley, along with the PerkStreet team members who joined him at Eastern last year, believed they could build things more quickly if they incubated ideas within a bank.
"Speed is key," O'Malley said."