He Sold MoneyLion for $1B, Now He’s Building His Own Bank
55 min
Banks have spent decades layering new technology onto infrastructure built in the 1970s. The result is a patchwork of systems that struggle to keep pace with modern financial markets. Dee Choubey, founder of MoneyLion, spent over a decade building on top of this infrastructure. Now, at Openreserve, he is rebuilding the bank at its core, on a single unified ledger that brings payments, compliance, credit and treasury together. In this episode: 1. Banking 101: deposits, capital ratios, the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC, and how fintechs used sponsor banks and private credit. 2. Why money moves slowly: multi-hop payments, out-of-sync ledgers and trapped capital. 3. The rebuild: how OpenReserve plans to run on a unified ledger, underwrite continuously, share risk with outside lenders (an open bank), and offer a stablecoin plus FDIC-insured tokenized deposits. Timestamps (00:00) Trailer (01:06) Introduction (01:58) The MoneyLion story (10:00) The business model of a bank (17:28) Why build another bank now (20:46) Trapped capital and the $500 billion problem (26:56) Building the bank core like an L1 (30:21) What happens to the shape of US banking (39:14) Issuing their own stablecoin (45:26) What's next for Openreserve (48:21) Takeaways from the conversation Connect with the Hosts & Guest Chuk Okpalugo: LinkedIn | X | chuk.xyz Raj Parekh: LinkedIn | X Dee Choubey: LinkedIn | X | OpenReserve About Money Machines Money Machines explores how finance is becoming programmable and always on. Hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh speak with founders and operators working on stablecoins, tokenized assets and artificial intelligence. Through their experiences, we examine how these systems work, what it takes to build them and what they mean for businesses and investors. About Rain Rain is the global stablecoin payments platform that makes it simple to launch and scale payment programs around the world. Learn more at rain.xyz.
