Banking on the Future: How Old Glory Bank Is Building the Bank America Needs
Client Snapshot:
Old Glory Bank: oldglorybank.com
Bank size: $265M
Headquarters: Elmore City, Oklahoma
Old Glory Bank Mission
We believe in the fundamental freedoms that our Constitution and its amendments bestow. We believe that every American deserves the right to Privacy, Security, and Liberty in banking, and that nothing is more un-American than cancel-culture.
About Old Glory Bank
Old Glory Bank is the premier full-service bank serving the Freedom Economy and DeFi Economy, offering the best mobile banking solutions for consumers and businesses, from sea to shining sea. Old Glory Bank is committed to protecting the Privacy, Security, and Liberty of all Americans. For press inquiries, contact media@oldglorybank.com. We Stand with You. Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender.
How one fast-growing digital bank turned data into their greatest competitive advantage and what signal-driven banking looks like at scale
There's a version of banking that most Americans know too well — the one where you feel like a number, where products are pushed at you rather than designed for you, and where your financial institution knows your account balance but not your actual life.
John Kingma, Chief Product, Technology, and Information Security Officer at Old Glory Bank, has spent his career trying to change that.
"Customers don't want to feel watched," he says. "They want to feel heard, listened to, understood, and then have that understanding used to remove barriers in their life."
That philosophy isn't a tagline. It's the operating principle behind every decision Old Glory Bank is making as it builds something rare: a bank with a national footprint that still feels like it knows you. And getting there required a fundamental rethinking of how the bank listens to its own data.
A Century-Old Bank, Reimagined for the Digital Age
As the first state-chartered bank in Oklahoma, Old Glory Bank has roots that go back over a century. But the institution that exists today is something quite different. In 2022, the bank was reimagined from the ground up, and in April 2023, it launched a digital-first banking platform with the ambition to serve customers in all 50 states. Within two weeks, it had accounts in every one of them.
The growth since has been remarkable. Deposits have grown more than 2,000%, from $10 million to over $245 million. The bank now serves more than 80,000 personal and business accounts nationwide. In January 2026 alone, it added over 435 new small and medium business accounts, a 10% increase in a single month.
That kind of growth doesn't happen by accident. It happens when a leadership team has the vision to see an opportunity and the courage to push through barriers. But vision alone isn't enough. The banks that scale successfully are those with a plan to match their growth with maturity. Old Glory Bank had that plan from the start, and it began with how they thought about data.
The Challenge Every Growing Bank Faces
The faster a bank scales, the faster data accumulates. Without the right foundation, that data becomes noise rather than a signal. Teams end up pulling from different systems, cobbling together reports that don't quite match, and making decisions based on an incomplete picture. Everyone is working hard, but no one has the full view.
Old Glory Bank made a deliberate choice early on to avoid that trap. They invested in a data warehouse before they had 80,000 accounts or a quarter billion in deposits, creating a single source of truth where everything is connected, consistent, and accessible. Instead of chasing data across systems, every team would have the same reliable foundation to build on.
That early investment was the foundation. But having data in one place is only the beginning. The real question was what to do with it — and that's where Old Glory Bank's vision for what banking could look like started to take shape.
What It Means to Become a Signal-Driven Bank
John calls it "signal-driven banking" — and it's one of the clearest articulations of what truly data-driven banking looks like in practice.
Most banks operate by looking backward. Historical transactions, past balances, prior behavior — these tell you what happened, but they don't tell you where a customer is right now, or where they're heading. It's useful information, but it keeps a bank perpetually one step behind.
Signal-driven banking flips the model entirely. Rather than waiting for something to happen and responding after the fact, you're reading real-time signals that reveal what's happening now and what's likely to happen next. A customer whose patterns suggest they're launching a business. A small business owner whose cash flow signals they're ready to grow. A new account holder showing early signs of friction that, left unaddressed, will quietly turn into churn.
The difference between these two modes isn't just operational. It's philosophical. One treats customers as accounts to be managed. The other treats them as people on a journey — and asks how the bank can show up for them at exactly the right moment.
"Banks are working backwards, looking at historical transactional information," John says. "It doesn't tell you what the customer is really needing at their current time in their financial journey, where they are today."
Having the data unified in one place gave Old Glory Bank the raw material. The next step was making sure every team could actually hear what it was saying.
Making Data Work Across the Whole Organization
A unified data foundation changes what's possible, but only if the right people can access it, understand it, and act on it. That meant taking the single source of truth Old Glory Bank had built and making it visible across every department — in real time, in a format each team could put to immediate use.
The results touched every corner of the organization. Marketing could identify and reach the right customers with a precision that simply wasn't possible before. The Fraud team gained the ability to spot patterns as they formed rather than after damage was done. Customer Service could show up to every interaction fully informed. And Leadership could make decisions based on what was happening now, not what happened last quarter.
"That data only matters if it leads you to some sort of action," John says. "Otherwise it's just sitting in a data dumpster."
Equally important was what it freed the internal team to do. When every department has what it needs, the people responsible for managing data can stop running reports and start innovating — focusing on what the bank needs next rather than keeping up with what it needed yesterday.
"It's given us more bandwidth internally, more insight, more visibility across all the departments," John says. "And building it in our own ecosystem allows us to keep that level of security over the data."
The Trust Dimension: Why Signal-Driven Banking Has to Be Customer-First
Here's the tension at the heart of modern banking: the same capabilities that allow a bank to personalize your experience are the ones that can make customers feel surveilled. Getting signal-driven banking right isn't just a technical challenge. It's a value challenge.
People are more aware of their digital footprint than any previous generation. They've watched data be bought, sold, and used in ways that don't serve them. The idea of a bank that "knows" them can feel as unsettling as it does reassuring. The banks that navigate that tension thoughtfully will have a genuine, lasting competitive advantage over the ones that don't.
Old Glory Bank is building around a clear principle: use customer data to serve the customer, not the bank. That means surfacing the right product at the right moment in someone's financial journey, not flooding them with irrelevant offers. It means reducing friction rather than manufacturing engagement. It means what John calls personalization without surveillance.
"I don't want to use the data to serve the bank," he says. "I want it to serve the customer and remove friction, remove complexity from their life."
A customer should feel known. Not watched.
What This Looks Like for Real Customers
The clearest expression of where all this leads — when the infrastructure is right and the culture is aligned — is how Old Glory Bank thinks about the people they most want to serve.
"I'm a small business owner or an entrepreneur," John says, painting a picture. "I want to own a coffee shop. Maybe I want to own four coffee shops, but I'm just side hustling right now. Understanding where that person is and helping them walk into their dreams — that's how we win."
It's a vision of banking that's less transactional and more relational. The bank isn't waiting for that customer to walk in and ask for a business loan. It's reading the signals that suggest they're getting ready, and showing up with the right tools before the customer even knows to ask.
When data stops being a reporting function and starts being a way of listening, the entire organization can orient itself around one question: what does this customer need right now, and how do we help them get there?
Why It Matters for the Industry
Old Glory Bank's journey is worth paying attention to not just because of its growth numbers, but because of what it signals about where banking is heading.
Consolidation in the financial industry continues to narrow the options available to everyday Americans and small businesses. John estimates there are 50% fewer banks today than when he entered the industry, with another 50% of these likely to disappear in the next decade. Fewer banks mean fewer choices, and fewer choices mean fewer institutions that are willing to think differently about who they serve and how.
In that environment, the banks that survive and thrive won't necessarily be the ones with the most branches or the biggest balance sheets. They'll be the ones who know their customers best — and use that knowledge responsibly.
John sees data as the defining differentiator of the next decade. Not data as a commodity to be monetized, but data as a tool for building trust. "The banks that become a differentiator are the ones that are cognizant of how they're using the customer's data and how much trust they build with their customer base on what their data is used for," he says.
Part of that means cutting through the noise that has come to define so much of modern banking. Customers today are overwhelmed by products and offers that have nothing to do with where they actually are in their financial lives. The bank that can rise above that — that can read where a customer is and respond with something genuinely relevant — earns something far more valuable than a transaction. It earns loyalty.
"If we can use the data as a good steward and position the right things to the right customers at the right time, and build that trust by driving privacy and security," John says, "that's where the deeper differentiator is going to be."
Signal-driven banking, built on a foundation of unified data and a customer-first philosophy, is how Old Glory Bank is positioning itself for that future. Not by waiting to see what the industry does next, but by building the infrastructure and the culture today that will define what great banking looks like tomorrow.
"We're building a bank that doesn't just store money," John says. "It understands where its customers are going, and walks with them to get there."
That's not a small ambition. But for the gig worker dreaming of owning a coffee shop, the small business owner ready to expand, and the everyday American who just wants a bank that actually gets them — it might be exactly what they've been waiting for.
Old Glory Bank partnered with iDENTIFY to unify their data and build the banking business intelligence infrastructure powering their growth. To learn how iDENTIFY can help your institution become a truly data-driven bank, get in touch.
