Green Dot is in the midst of a technology transformation that it estimates will save the digital bank $35 million annually by 2024.

The shift will have the banking fintech owning its own tech stack and banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform, said Amit Parikh, executive vice president of BaaS at Green Dot.

“It is a big change,” Parikh told Bank Automation News. “It is not just a technology change; it changes a lot of our processes internally and so it’s a complete transformation that we’re doing inside of Green Dot that takes not only our technology team — but our operations team, our marketing team — everyone is part of this transformation that emanates from putting in our own platform.”

With the creation of simpler processes that allow faster implementation, $5 billion Green Dot will no longer have to navigate multiple platforms, he added.

“It was frankly very, very difficult to manage and so one of the huge benefits also of implementing our own platform is the simplicity,” Parikh said.

“One of his key things is you have to own your own platform, and your own infrastructure, in the payments space,” he noted.

The tech-focused transformation began this year and will continue into 2023, Green Dot Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer George Gresham said during the bank’s February earnings call. He estimated that, on top of the $35 million in savings, there would be an additional $14 million of annual technology savings.

Tech-focused priorities

Gresham outlined four tech-focused priorities for the digital bank:

1. Consolidate processing activities into an in-house capability;
2. Implement a modern, real-time enterprise risk management tool;
3. Create a modular digital front-end framework, which is expected to be complete by the end of 2022 or early 2023; and
4. Conduct a cloud-native stack conversion to be completed by 2024.

“Once completed, there are not only substantial near-term cost benefits to be realized, but there are important strategic benefits as well,” Gresham told analysts on the call.

Founded in 1999, Green Dot provides BaaS to clients such as Walmart, Uber, Amazon Flex and Intuit.

The digital bank decided in October 2021 to switch its core to the Temenos Banking Cloud platform to streamline its banking and payment services.

“It is a modern core banking platform, and allows us a faster time to market,” Parikh explained. “When we want to innovate on top of that platform, we are starting from a base that’s already been created and we are configuring on top of the Temenos platform.

“This is about us owning our own infrastructure, reducing our costs, and faster speed to revenue because of the innovation,” he added.

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