Evolve Bank & Trust

Evolve Bank & Trust

Evolve Bank & Trust began in 1925 as a local Tennessee community bank. Over the past decade under CEO Scott Stafford, it transformed into a leading bank-as-a-service (BaaS) provider — one of a small number of FDIC-insured institutions that rent their charter and core banking infrastructure to FinTech companies. The bank's wealth and family-office origins are not publicly disclosed; it operates as a publicly reportable financial institution with no single-family-office wealth anchor on record. The bank's BaaS strategy centers on deposit-taking, debit card issuance, and lending-as-a-service for partners including Stripe (via Stripe Issuing), Aspiration, and Betterment. Evolve also originates commercial real estate and consumer loans on its own balance sheet. Its geographic footprint is U.S.-only, with headquarters in Memphis and a tech-oriented office in Menlo Park, CA. As of September 2023, Evolve reported roughly $2.2 billion in total assets and $1.8 billion in total deposits (per FDIC data, June 2023). The bank employs approximately 300 people. There is no disclosed adjacent philanthropic or operating-company vehicle. In May 2023, the bank entered into a consent order with the Federal Reserve over risk management deficiencies related to its FinTech partnerships (per the Fed, May 2023). Evolve's structural differentiator is its role as a regulated industrial bank (a Tennessee-chartered institution) that provides the actual compliance, deposit insurance, and settlement infrastructure for dozens of consumer-facing FinTech products. This places it in a small cohort — alongside Sutton Bank and The Bancorp Bank — that effectively power the banking layer of the modern digital economy. Unlike many family offices that invest in FinTech, Evolve is the operational infrastructure itself.