EXCLUSIVE: 'Banking Without Banks': Current CTO On Motivations And Vision At Money20/20

Money20/20’s latest in-person conference was held Oct. 24-27, 2021 at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, and amidst all the recognition and networking, Benzinga had the opportunity to speak with Trevor Marshall, the chief technical officer at Current. The financial technology company's core offer is centered around payments and online banking, among other financial services.

Here’s the conversation that transpired.

Q: Tell me about your background, Trevor. How did you get involved in the space?

A: I started on Wall Street at Morgan Stanley MS where I was trading foreign exchange.

The reason I joined Morgan Stanley after college was I wanted to bring bitcoin trading to Wall Street in 2012. I was super pumped about that.

When did Current come into the picture?

Current CEO Stuart Sopp, who has been my boss my whole career, across four companies, taught me about trading and the professional environment.

I couldn’t get what I really wanted to do at Morgan Stanley so, when Stuart left in 2014, I followed him and we did a couple of things, including some bitcoin statistical arbitrage trading across different exchanges … like Ripple which has distributed order books you can run some strategies on.

We spent a year developing some prototypes and then we met Garrett Camp, co-founder of Uber Technologies Inc UBER who was running an incubator.

We wanted to build something in consumer finance and so we took some money from him and started building what ultimately became Current … where I’m focused on DeFi applications.

What does Current do?

It’s banking without banks.

We’ve built our own core banking engine. We built our own system of record that, by controlling the ledger for customer balances, that’s the integration point for any financial backend experience.

In 2017, we launched our teen banking product. In 2019, we launched our full pseudo-demand deposit accounts (DDA).

We have over three million users and we’re starting to add more products.

How did you fare during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Really good in that the digital transformation, which was already happening in banking, accelerated.

The first five years were a real slog and then last year, and now … people are more comfortable with doing payments digitally. Current is part of that trend.

What opportunities do you see in DeFi?

We’re moving away from the innovations of Web 2 — which was convenience and distribution of all types of products — of which Current is a great example.

The next phase and the way applications and businesses are built is this Web 3 concept of data transparency and fungibility between different projects.

That’s what is happening now in DeFi. Connecting users into that and being sort of a trusted interface into that is sort of the next step for us.

Thoughts on the exuberance in digital banking?

This tsunami of change that’s happening is a rising tide situation for a lot of us.

What you’re starting to see now is differentiation come out of the different banks and everyone’s taking a different approach.

I think where Current is really taking a strong approach is around the underlying core technology. It’s very differentiated from our peers and sort of the acceleration that we’re trying to enable into Web 3 technologies.

Photo: Courtesy Current