On August 4, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) approved a deposit insurance application for Augustus National Bank NA, a newly chartered national bank to be headquartered in Dallas. The organizers of the bank applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a national bank charter and received preliminary conditional approval on May 8. Augustus National Bank is touting itself as “the world’s first clearing bank for the AI era, built on a stablecoin and AI-native core—a bank that’s always open, made for machines, at the speed of compute.”
Augustus National Bank’s business model will focus on providing deposit and lending products to digital asset companies, high-net-worth individuals, artificial intelligence companies, technology companies and international financial institutions, as well as virtual currency, payment and treasury services. It also plans to issue a stablecoin through a subsidiary, if approved as a permitted payment stablecoin issuer under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act and provide stablecoin-related services (e.g., issuance and redemption of partner stablecoins, custody, conversion and payment functionality). Funding will consist of demand deposit accounts, for-benefit-of accounts and correspondent accounts.
Co-founder Ferdinand Dabitz will serve as Augustus Bank’s CEO and will become the youngest CEO of a federally chartered bank in modern American history (140 years). Greg Quarles will serve as president. Quarles is the former CEO of Green Dot Bank, United Texas Bank and H&R Block Bank. Prior to that, he spent 18 years at the OCC, where he served as a commissioned national bank examiner and assistant deputy comptroller. The pair is joined by additional industry veterans. Joe Schenone, who will serve as the bank’s chief financial officer, brings extensive regulatory experience through his tenure at JPMorgan Chase and MUFG. He is regarded as one of the few finance leaders in America who has successfully transformed two technology companies into banks—both LendingClub and Smartbiz. Andy Riggs, who will serve as chief credit officer, was on the founding team of Brex’s Asset Management business, among other active lending institutions. Kyle Steed, who will serve as chief risk officer, is a seasoned financial services executive and former bank regulator who was most recently interim chief risk officer at United Texas Bank. Bruce Wallace, who will serve on the bank’s board, brings previous advisory and board director experience from Brex and Revolut.
“My main insight from 30 years in banking—including 18 years at the OCC, chartering H&R Block Bank and serving as CEO at Green Dot and United Texas Bank—is that it is incredibly hard to rethink banking from the inside,” Quarles says. “To redesign banking from first principles, you have to build from scratch. This is why I’m proud to be part of Augustus. I’m grateful to the OCC for its leadership—they have recognized that a lot has changed since the great financial crisis essentially paused American new bank creation. It’s time to build new banks again.”
Augustus National Bank’s proprietary core banking system is built from scratch around AI and programmable money, which, according to the company, is “rethinking the bank core as a system of action. Legacy cores were built in a pre-AI era and architected for stateless, short-lived, human-initiated requests. Augustus’ core banking infrastructure is made for machines: designed from the ground up for durable, non-deterministic, agent-initiated workflows—unlocking near-autonomous operations at scale.”
The FDIC approval order expires if Augustus National Bank is not established within 12 months, unless extended by the FDIC.
