Sunrise Banks is empowering financial wellness through fintech partnerships

Could you describe Sunrise Banks for me?

Sunrise Banks is a community bank that has been serving the urban core of Minneapolis and St. Paul since 1986. Sunrise offers core banking services to clients while also maintaining a commitment to underbanked consumers.

Sunrise is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), certified B Corporation and a public benefit corporation. Aside from offering traditional financial services, Sunrise also partners with financial technology companies (fintechs) to provide credit-building products and small-dollar alternatives to payday loans.

What does your customer base look like?

Sunrise Banks provides financial services to personal and business clients. The majority of our customer base is local to the Twin Cities, but we also work with national and global clients through our fintech partnerships.

How do you empower financial wellness?

Sunrise empowers financial wellness by providing products and services that aim to improve the economic wellbeing of our clients.

Our credit-builder program, for example, lets a client take out a small loan -- $500 to $1,500 – to be placed in a certificate of deposit and pay principal and interest on the borrowed money for the life of the loan. Then, once the loan payments have been completed, the client has saved up the funds from the certificate of deposit and has also built his or her credit by making regular monthly payments.

Another example of empowering financial wellness is Sunrise Banks' offering of Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) home loans. This way, immigrants to the United States can still receive mortgage funding without a social security number.

At the end of the day, “empowering financial wellness” means providing access to products or services that make it easier for people to gain control of their finances.

We talk a lot about bank+fintech partnerships. Which fintechs are your working with? And what do these collaborations allow you to do?

Currently, Sunrise is partnering with Self, TrueConnect and Gusto.  TrueConnect and Gusto offer small-dollar loans for employees. Self helps clients save and build credit at the same time.

The beauty of fintechs is that they provide convenience for clients at a fair price. Sunrise handles the back end – lending, payment solutions and efficient funds movement – while fintechs provide the customer experience today’s consumers want. We partner with fintechs that have similar values to Sunrise, and those that want to help people attain financial health.

These collaborations allow Sunrise to expand its reach globally and provide accessible and affordable products to those who are underserved or haven’t been comfortable working directly with banks in the past.

What's coming next for Sunrise Banks?

Sunrise will continue to focus on providing services to our local clients and being a responsible member of the Twin Cities community. We look forward to partnering with new, mission-driven fintechs and keeping up with the ever-changing regulatory and technological landscape of finance.

We will also continue moving forward with our Carbon Footprint initiative, which looks to keep global temperature increases in this century below 2 degrees Celsius.

We’re happy with the progress we’ve made thus far and look forward to a bright future.

What is your vision of banking in 2030?

Banking in 2030 will look very different – the customer experience will be almost completely digitized. Our desire for real-time transactions and personalized services will be fully realized. Technology, especially artificial intelligence, will be a game-changer in every industry, not just finance.

However, that doesn’t mean that the human touch will disappear completely. Banking will still require excellent and informative customer service from its employees. The processes might change, but the needs won’t. Humans, after all, are responsible for training artificial intelligence to perform its desired outcomes.