Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. While we use the term challenger bank to refer to many of today’s top competitors in digital banking, the truth is very few are actually chartered banks. They are a user experience layer on top of an incumbent bank’s infrastructure. Not Piermont Bank.

Started in 2019, Piermont is a fully chartered commercial bank. It uses a combination of technology and human interaction to serve businesses founder and CEO Wendy Cai-Lee says still aren’t serviced. These are businesses with more complexity with accounts receivables and payables, with employees, looking for loans of $750,000 to $10 million -- not the solopreneurs and microbusinesses supported by other challenger banks.

Wendy Cai-Lee joins me on the podcast to talk about how Piermont uses its hybrid delivery model to serve this market. We also discuss Piermont’s strategy around providing direct to business commercial banking as well as a banking as a service platform targeting fintechs that want to bank a similar customer.

Wendy Cai-Lee is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.