How a Data-First Strategy Helped Focus Bank Enter the Fintech Space Smoothly
Client Snapshot:
Focus Bank: https://www.focusbank.com/
Bank size: 861,562,000
Headquarters: Charleston, Missouri
Branches: 9
Fintech ecosystem: Sponsor bank for 2 fintechs, and scaling in 2026
Focus Bank Mission
To deliver exceptional financial services by seeking insight from our clients, exceeding shareholder expectations, empowering our staff to achieve personal and professional goals, and making a difference in our communities.
Focus Bank Vision
Built on a 94-year foundation of successful community banking, FOCUS Bank is moving forward with an innovative mix of old-fashioned, first-name basis customer service combined with state-of-the-art banking products and services. This commitment to customer service, along with a sharply focused vision for the future, is proving to be a winning combination in communities throughout Southeast Missouri and Northeast Arkansas.
Challenge: Reactive v. Proactive
Most banks are trying to modernize their data stack at the same time they’re expected to monitor a program that’s already generating customers. Internal teams are learning new responsibilities, but regulators expect precision before the bank has the tools to achieve it.
The result is that feeling building the bike while you ride it. Someone bolts on the handlebars, adjusts the chain, rewires the brakes, and swaps the tires for something sturdier, but everyone is moving, whether the bike is “ready” or not.
Focus Bank’s advantage and success in fintech partnerships is their deliberate, proactive strategy that prioritized building a solid data foundation and a clear operational focus before bringing its first partner online.
Kayla Jones, Chief Fintech Banking Officer for Focus Bank, said that by building a framework first, Focus Bank avoided the reactive scramble that leads to manual workarounds and regulatory blind spots.
In a recent conversation, Jones walked through the process that gave Focus Bank early success in fintech partnerships.
Planning for Risk and Regulation
Leveraging their prior experience with high-risk verticals (specifically cannabis banking since 2020), the executive team and board were already accustomed to complex oversight, so their primary concern was determining exactly what examiners would require.
Jones noted, "one of the things we knew was going to be important is our examiners expect us to be able to very clearly identify KPIs, ROI, how we're monitoring... and how they impact the bank”
The team explicitly discussed the inadequacy of manual processes, acknowledging that "the days of and everything in an Excel spreadsheet” are gone simply because of the volume of data available in fintech.
Solution: Planning Data Infrastructure
Initially, the conversation involved the potential to migrate to a "data lake type of solution on the core side of the bank." However, this evolved into exploring how iDENTIFY could "pull that out and translate it into the fintech side," allowing the bank to standardize and analyze data efficiently for both leadership.
APIs get talked about like they’re the universal answer, but they don’t magically scale. Once a fintech is moving millions of transactions a day, relying on APIs as the primary data movement channel starts to show strain.
A big part of this is mapping and reconciliation. One fintech might call something “available_limit,” another “open_to_buy,” and a third might bury the same concept under nested JSON. iDENTIFY builds and maintains the mapping layer that connects those fields to the bank’s definitions and reporting structures. That’s where a lot of “semantic confusion” disappears.
The more sustainable answer is shared cloud environments, like Snowflake or Databricks. When both sides operate on compatible cloud infrastructure, you don’t have to endlessly ship files or push API payloads across the fence.
This is also how you kill the spreadsheet monster. Without a normalization layer, teams fall back on CSV dumps, Excel tinkering, and late-night reconciliation fire drills every month or quarter.
Outcome: Solving Semantic Disconnects
Once they began engaging with their first partner, the conversations shifted to resolving communication gaps.
Jones described a process of "trial and error" where the bank would request a report, receive data that didn't match their expectations, and have to ask, "what is this? this is not what we were talking about".
This forced them to sit down and "work through the disconnect in really semantics," ensuring that both the fintech and the bank defined critical data points in the same
Without standardized data intake, partnerships can quickly become mired in manual, time-consuming processes. Jasper Sneff Nanni, a managing principal at FS Vector, said the strain also impacts the fintech partners who could end up spending "half their time just sort of cobbling together requests." This constant back-and-forth for ad-hoc data pulls creates significant friction and ultimately undermines the efficiency and scalability of the partnership.
Key Takeaway: Avoiding the temptation of "more"
The first instinct for banks entering the fintech space might be to hoard data under the assumption that volume equals safety.
Focus Bank learned that this just leads to information overload.
Jones said that the approach early on was, “Well, just give us everything and we'll sort through what we need and what we don't need."
But they quickly realized, "we don't need half of this."
They adjusted from collecting everything to collecting the right things, and learned that a target prevents the kind of overwhelm that could lead to overlooking areas with the highest risk.
Instead of monitoring hundreds of data points, Focus bank and its consultants (like FS Vector) found that effective oversight often boils down to a tighter set of "15 or 20 things" that need to make it into board decks and management committees.
Key Takeaway: Investing in One Area of Expertise
The leadership team decided "we need to focus it in. We want to be really good at one thing first.”
They agreed to start with consumer credit because the leadership and lending departments were already familiar with the regulations and parameters of that asset class, making it the "best foray into the fintech space"
In a market that often rewards rapid, unfocused expansion, Focus Bank’s most strategic decision was deliberate restraint.
Jones said, "We want to be really good at one thing first and then when we know we're doing that and we're excelling at it then we can look at expanding."
iDENTIFY Helps Banks Understand Their Data
Before any building begins, we take a close look at your current data landscape in our discovery phase.
That means understanding where your data lives today, how your systems communicate with one another, and which integrations already hold your environment together.
From there, we trace the legacy workflows that support your program, like the handoffs, the manual steps, the places where risk or inefficiency can hide.
This gives us the clarity needed to document a realistic plan and timeline, along with a preview of the infrastructure that will replace or strengthen what you have now.
