More Than Fees: Jenius Bank’s Mission to Help Customers Live ‘Richer Lives’
Jenius Bank has surpassed $2 billion in deposits by focusing on "evolved banking" — providing personalized financial insights through account aggregation while eliminating fees to help customers gain financial confidence and make better decisions.
By Justin Estes, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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In less than two years, Jenius Bank has surpassed $2 billion in deposits and loans while launching a next-generation banking platform designed to transform how customers understand and manage their finances.
On a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast, host Jim Marous spoke with John Rosenfeld, president of Jenius Bank, the digital banking division of SMBC MANUBANK from Japan, about the bank’s approach to creating meaningful differentiation through personalized insights and technological innovation.
Q: Can you walk us through Jenius Bank’s journey from initial concept to where it is today?
John Rosenfeld: Jenius Bank has been on a fantastic voyage. And it’s really pursuing something that’s interesting, which is to humanize digital banking and to create a better option than what is generally available in the industry.
The concept was born about four years ago when a group said: ‘Hey, SMBC, this very successful commercial bank in the United States and a wildly successful broader bank in Asia, we could launch a consumer business and do it digitally, starting from scratch and doing it right.’ Start with a whiteboard and say, if we could create a better bank, what would it look like?
About two years ago, we launched our first product, personal loans. Shortly after that, we launched our savings product. We basically have the two simplest products in banking. No fees on either of these things, by the way. We offer a very competitive rate on savings, which is likely better than you can find anywhere else, because we’re digital and pass that benefit back to our customers.
Q: How do you think differently when building a bank from scratch versus improving an existing one?
Rosenfeld: It was interesting for me as well as many other folks, because they’re used to coming into a business that’s already running and figuring out how to make it better. It’s almost like building a new house.
It’s a whole different story when you are building a house on a clean piece of land. First, we need to establish power, then we need to secure water, and then we need to build a foundation. But it makes you think differently, so we don’t have to fall into the same paradigms. So, we talk to customers and say, ‘Well, how would you like it to work?’
But sometimes you have to come up with creative ideas that customers can’t even envision. I used to use an example: if I walked up to someone 30 years ago and said, ‘Hey, what do you think if I created a telephone you could carry around in your pocket?’ Thirty years ago, people would say, ‘What?’ I mean, they envision this big thing you pick up and you dial.
Jenius Views Give Personalized Insight
Q: Your new platform provides personalized insights based on spending behavior. How does this technology work?
Rosenfeld: We developed two concepts within a paradigm, if you will, where there’s core banking, which is what every bank does, allows you to put money with them, allows you to go online, see how much you have, see how much you’re earning, allows you to move money in and out, review your statements, read your terms and conditions, all that stuff that every bank does. We call that core banking.
We developed the concept of evolved banking, which encompasses everything beyond core features that not every bank offers. And we grouped all this into something we call the Jenius views. So, if you download our mobile app, you’ll find this tab at the bottom.
Dig Deeper:
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And within this space, you’re able to link your accounts from other banks, other brokerages. You can view credit cards and your entire financial picture in one place. Again, this allows the consumer to give us access to their other information, enabling us to consolidate and provide them with valuable insights.
Q: How does this "evolved banking" approach differ from what other banks are doing with similar data?
Rosenfeld: While there are some banks that are doing this, what we call aggregation services, many of them are doing it to gain a view of the customer’s financial situation and then potentially use that information to try to figure out what else they can sell them.
We took a different approach. We said, what if we used all that information to actually give customers insights and help them avoid fees, making smarter and more confident financial decisions?
Now, why would a bank do such a thing that’s not necessarily going to bolster their profits?
We thought about this and concluded that if we could establish a new level of trust with consumers, the next time they have a financial need, we hope they’ll come back to us first.
Throughout the entire process of building out these ideas, we had a saying: ‘We’re going to replace the spreadsheet.’ And everyone’s like, ‘What do you mean by replace the spreadsheet?’
I started talking to other people, and a bunch of them have spreadsheets. I was thinking, ‘Well, geez, why do they all have spreadsheets?’ The reason most people use a spreadsheet is that they haven’t found a tool that does it as well as they can. And I said, ‘Well, we can do it better.’
Redefining Richness Through Financial Confidence
Q: Your research found that people define richness less by luxury items and more by financial freedom. How does this shape your approach?
Rosenfeld: It’s at the core. So, we conducted extensive research to gain a deeper understanding of what makes customers or consumers feel more comfortable with money and what makes them feel less comfortable. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who say that they lose sleep over their money or that it’s impacted their decisions about when to get married or have children.
The idea that money is such an emotional driver that it has nothing to do with how much you make or don’t make, but rather whether you are making good decisions. Are you comfortable with your decisions? Are you confident?
Richness is not the number at the bottom of the page. It’s really how you feel, you feel confident you’ve made good decisions, that you’re not wasting money or making mistakes. If you feel confident, generally, it doesn’t matter how much you’re making, you’re going to enjoy life more.
Q: How are you helping customers gain the confidence to make better financial decisions?
Rosenfeld: With the capabilities that are evolving in the data space and analytics and machine learning and AI, if a consumer gives someone full access to every penny that they have and not access to move the money, but access to the information, think of how much you can do with technology to identify those things that you may not have noticed.
For example, ‘Hey, your mortgage payment is due next Thursday, but your paycheck doesn’t arrive until Friday.’ Now, your bank should be aware of this because these are routine transactions that occur every month.
But how many banks ping their customers to say, ‘Hey, we got a problem this month. We’re a day off. We need to move money.’ However, we should be able to identify these issues and provide customers with guidance on how to avoid them.
Creating a Fee-Free Banking Experience
Q: How important is the elimination of fees to your business model and customer relationships?
Rosenfeld: The lack of fees on our savings or a loan product was really driven by wanting to create something better and more compelling than what’s available in the industry. We created a bank that’s incredibly efficient because we don’t have buildings, we don’t have paper, we don’t mail things. So, we don’t spend any money on postage.
Q: How do you balance operational efficiency with providing 24/7 customer support?
Rosenfeld: What we do spend our money on is the customer experience. And whether it’s digital or whether it’s verbal. Our phone centers open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Very few banks in America will answer the phone at 3:00 AM, but we figure, hey, our customer is digital. The internet doesn’t shut down when everyone goes to sleep. So, why should we? And so, it’s really about creating a new paradigm for banking that’s different from what was previously available.
Finding the Right Customer for a Different Banking Model
Q: Who is the ideal Jenius Bank customer, and what distinguishes them from traditional banking customers?
Rosenfeld: The target was really what we call high-potential digital optimizers. And we call it that because high potential means they’re going somewhere and are ambitious. They want to progress in building a better lifestyle and achieving more.
The digital aspect is that we really need people who are somewhat web-savvy, but also digital natives. People who are comfortable banking with a bank that doesn’t have branches, recognizing, of course, that it’s still 100% FDIC insured, have all the same protections that any other bank does.
And then the key piece is that we want people who are trying to build a better financial life to gain confidence and learn more about how to manage their money. Because all those tools we talked about they’re going to fall flat on someone who doesn’t care. They’re not our ideal customer because they won’t derive as much value from us as we intend to provide.
Q: How do you reach and connect with this target audience in a crowded digital banking market?
Rosenfeld: We have a huge number of young customers who are very comfortable doing things through the internet. When we lived through the whole pandemic recently, obviously, it was difficult times, but what it drove a lot of us to realize was that there are a lot of things we don’t have to leave our homes to do. And banking became one of the most apparent ones. You can deposit checks by taking a picture on your phone. It’s driven a faster adoption of new technology.
The Road Ahead
Q: How has building Jenius Bank from scratch been different from your previous banking experiences?
Rosenfeld: I’m having a blast. What makes my day is the people that I get to work with. And it was so much fun, about four years ago, calling up some of the people I had the most respect for in the industry and saying, ‘Hey, we’re about to take a ride. You want to join us?’
And they’re like, ‘What do you mean?’ I tell them, ‘We’ree going to build a bank from scratch. All those things that frustrate you about the banks you’re at now, we don’t have to do any of those. We’re going to build it from scratch using brand-new technology. We’ve got the funding, we’ve got the charter. We have a vision.’
A large number of these people thought it sounded exciting and joined us, and we now have over 400 employees. These folks are all building a new dream. And so, yeah, we have a lot of fun.
As personal finance continues to intertwine with technology, Jenius Bank is positioning itself to help customers not only manage their money but truly understand it, creating a banking experience focused on building financial confidence rather than just facilitating transactions.
