Archway announces $15m in Series A Funding

By Leandra Monteiro

Archway announced the launch of its platform for banks to modernise and personalise digital customer interactions, backed by a funding round of $15 million led by Madrona and WaFd Bank.

The more than 10,000 community and regional banks in the US are critical elements to healthy regional economies, but they are hampered by the lack of technology to compete with their national and global counterparts. Archway’s platform enables banks to easily integrate their core banking products into the latest web, mobile, voice, and AI technologies. Centralising the data from disparate systems allows banks to have a holistic view of their customers to serve their banking needs better.

“The consumer fintech revolution has reimagined what is possible for banks, but the technology is hard to build and expensive to integrate. Banking infrastructure is heavily regulated, and many banks have systems that work well for the business of running the bank but are not optimized for customer service, which puts the bank at a disadvantage,” said Dustin Hubbard, president of Archway. “With a cloud-native approach, we are abstracting the complexity for banks and enabling them to easily integrate the technologies their consumers want.”

“In a world where consumers can bank anywhere and expect Uber- and Amazon-like banking experiences, the banking community needs a platform that can serve both the bank’s business needs and the needs and desires of its current and future customers,” said Steve Singh, Madrona managing director. “Archway has already proven its ability to build and deploy services that banks and consumers want, and we are excited to partner with the team to continue to build.” As part of the funding, Singh joins the Archway board of directors.

Archway first tackled the difficult problem confronting many of these banks — siloed data about their customers. By creating a datalake that provides a 360 view of each customer, banks can understand their customer base and serve them better. Another one of the early services launched is an integration with TalkDesk, a call center solution widely used in the banking industry, and Amazon’s Lex, a conversational AI service. Consumers can now call their bank, be recognized by voice, and quickly access account information. The Archway team is rolling out other integrations, including forecasting, loan processing, and other standard banking services.