MoneyLion's Founder on Chartering a National Bank With Blockchain in the Core

From MoneyLion to a charter

Dee Choubey says he ran MoneyLion as a public company CEO for four and a half years before selling it to Gen Digital, a deal that closed in 2025. He says the logic was that Gen Digital had 100,000,000 consumers in the US who could benefit from MoneyLion's features. He says the app was the number one finance app for many weeks and passed 25,000,000 downloads.

After some time off, Choubey says, he and his co-founders filed a national bank charter application for OpenReserve on April 14.

Why not a partner bank

Dee Choubey says that as a fintech, MoneyLion was beholden to two or three layers of governance, with the partner bank's roadmap deciding which lending, savings or credit card products it could offer. He puts MoneyLion in the same group as SoFi and Chime and says that model makes certain things hard. With blockchain now usable in the banking technology spine, he sees an opportunity to modernize that three or four layered stack.

What OpenReserve is building

Dee Choubey says OpenReserve will serve both direct-to-consumer and B2B use cases, and that clients use its 600 endpoints and APIs. He describes a forward deployed banking model, with client teams made up of engineers along with tax and legal staff. The company is also seeking a broker-dealer license, which he calls an important regulatory perimeter for what he calls continuous banking.

He also says US consumers are getting used to agentic tools such as ChatGPT, Anthropic and Perplexity as the first way they manage their lives.

Timeline and advice

Dee Choubey expects legal and regulatory work to be done by the end of 2026, with early 2027 as the target for OpenReserve to be in market. His advice to neobank founders: be properly capitalized and avoid cutting corners, keeping at least parity with the median bank.