Making Moov
First of all, hi, we’re Moov. We’re a new company with a mission to bring joy to developers tasked with building on top of the United States banking and payments infrastructure. We have world-class investors that believe in our mission, and we’re building a team of people who are passionate about creating a better future.
The beginning
Moov’s story begins with founder and CEO Wade Arnold, who founded Banno, a white-label digital banking platform for community banks and credit unions, in 2008. Jack Henry acquired Banno in 2014, and the platform has become their premier digital banking offering. After leaving Jack Henry in 2016, Wade joined BILLGO, a leading bill payment company, as EVP of Technology and interim CTO. Wade’s experience in the digital banking, core banking, and payments space led to a deep understanding of the challenges in building modern banking software in the United States.
Wade’s a programmer first, so in 2017 he started building a “protocol to API” for ACH, the primary method of electronic money movement in the US, which moved $55.8 trillion last year.
The goal of this project was to take something that all of us in fintech need, that isn’t a strategic differentiator in any business, and make it open source.
To get technical for a minute, the Moov ACH library was written in Go, a modern and cloud-native programming language growing in popularity. It can be used as a library in a Go project or as a RESTful HTTP API. The library makes it easy for developers to generate Nacha formatted files.
Not surprisingly, the ACH library was immediately useful to developers frantically searching GitHub to find an easy way to implement something to meet their business’s needs. A developer community was born. “Is this real?” “Does it work?” “Who else uses this?” are all reasonable questions to ask of critical financial infrastructure available as an Apache 2.0 open source software on the public internet.
A Slack group was born to support the developer community—a place to provide answers, get feedback, fix bugs, and increasingly, allow members building products to make connections with other builders. Today the Slack community has over 500 members. Well-known fintechs and financial institutions, and companies serving different verticals joined the group and contributed to our open source projects.
Starting a moovment
The community created more libraries for low-level protocols like Fedwire, OFAC sanctions lists, Image Cash Letter for Check 21, Metro 2 consumer credit reports, ISO 8583 for card payments, and more. These are things that are hard to build on your own, at least without studying the specifications. Still, with a community contributing their expertise, these implementations become more stable and feature-rich.
Moov’s purpose is to be the modular building blocks on which companies needing to move money and store value can be built, backed by an open and inclusive community.
Moov, the company
Enter Moov Financial, Inc.
At the heart of Moov is an open source community committed to delivering high-quality, industry-standard financial service protocols for any business looking to receive, send or, store money. We use these libraries ourselves and care about how they work for others.
For too long, developers have been scouring the internet, attempting to quickly become experts and deploy high-quality, working financial service protocols like ACH. Too many organizations have been forced to build half-baked ACH libraries, only to have significant technical debt to resolve years later.
By delivering the right tools, documentation, and services, Moov empowers developers to focus on delivering high-quality code without wasting precious time reinventing the wheel.
Now backed by seven institutional investors and 27 influential individuals in our $5.5 million seed round, Moov is building a platform for platforms.
The brand
Our brand image aligns with our values. We think software should be beautiful. Not just in how it looks, but in how it works, even under the hood. We designed a logo and identity that could grow and evolve with us.
Eye think you'll like @moov_io's new press resources page 👀 https://t.co/pYZLjGEqlU
— Josh Sadler (@joshsadler) July 24, 2020
Excited to share the story of our brand more soon!
The logo is simple enough on its own but stands out among the crowd of other emerging fintechs and financial infrastructure companies. Moov takes on the characteristics of what we want to communicate and what we stand behind. We’re a community and want that community seen within our logo.
What’s next?
We’re just getting started. We’re hiring to accelerate our product roadmap, foster the community, and enable developers to be heroes.
If our mission resonates with you, follow us on Twitter, star us on GitHub, join us on Slack, or get involved in the way that works best for you.
