Real Conversations with the People Shaping

“It’s easy to fake for a meeting. It’s easy to fake for an interview.” Jared Robinson, SVP and Director of Fintech at Legend Bank, shares how his team vets fintech partners, and why some red flags show up before the first contract is ever signed. One fintech told Jared their CEO would double as the BSA officer. That’s a compliance box getting checked, not a compliance program getting built. When the incentives don’t line up, the partnership won’t either. So how does Legend Bank get past the polished pitch? They spend real time in person. Dinner, the hangout after dinner, the meeting the next morning. After twelve-plus hours together, you see who someone really is. It all comes back to the first of the famous Five C’s of credit in banking: character. In this clip: Why a CEO serving as BSA officer is a misaligned incentive How in-person time reveals a partner’s true character What the Five C’s of credit teach us about choosing fintech partners 🎧 Catch the full conversation on The Propagate Fintech Podcast, where we talk with the people building, buying, and banking on fintech. 👍 Like, subscribe, and drop a comment: what’s the biggest red flag you’ve seen in a bank-fintech partnership? #Fintech #BankingAsAService #CommunityBanks #BSA #Compliance #BankFintechPartnerships #PropagateFintech

When Legend Bank started building its banking as a service line of business in 2022, the industry was heading into what Jared Robinson calls the dark times of BaaS. Regulators were cracking down, consent orders were piling up, and nobody knew whether the whole model would survive. So how do you build a brand new line of business in the middle of all that? In this episode of The Propagate Fintech Podcast, Roland Howard sits down with Jared Robinson, SVP and Director of Fintech at Legend Bank, a community bank based in Bowie, Texas. Jared shares how his team turned uncertainty into a roadmap by treating every consent order as a lesson. They read each one, circulated it to leadership, and used it to map out their next steps. The tradeoff? Going a little slower than everyone else. And Jared is completely fine with that. Legend Bank isn’t chasing overnight growth. It’s protecting a 140-year legacy while building something that lasts. In this conversation: What it was like launching BaaS during the industry’s toughest stretch How consent orders became Legend Bank’s playbook Why slow and steady beats going supernova Balancing innovation with a century-plus of community banking trust If you’re a bank leader weighing a fintech partnership strategy, or a fintech founder trying to understand what your bank partner is thinking, this one’s for you. 🎧 Subscribe to The Propagate Fintech Podcast for more conversations with the people shaping fintech and banking. #banking #BaaS #fintech #communitybanking #strategy #entrepreneurship #bankingasaservice

In a BaaS model, the fintech partner often owns the technology and the customer experience. But the bank holds the charter. So when a partner's model makes a decision and nobody can explain how it got there, examiners don't go knocking on the fintech's door. They go to the bank. That's a big deal for a community bank in Bowie, Texas. And it should be a big deal for every fintech that wants a sponsor bank to say yes.

Hot take: stablecoin is a silly quest for most banks and credit unions right now. We just had Jared Robinson, SVP Director of Fintech at Legend Bank, on Propagate Fintech podcast, and he shared the three questions he asks when a bank comes to him asking, "Should we get into stablecoins?" Uno - How much money do you move internationally today? Dos - Who's your largest commercial treasury customer? Tres - Do you onboard people with ITINs or without a full social? His point? If the answer is "one customer who sends an international wire once a quarter"… that's probably not where you start. None of this means you can't grow into it. But chasing the shiny thing before you've got the real-deal use case probably doesn't make sense. Jared breaks it down in full the episode. Link in comments. Now, I'll be honest… I could be missing something here 🙃 If you're at an FI that jumped into stablecoins for different reasons and it paid off, or you just see it differently, we'd love to hear the other side. 🫡