Bank of America is gearing up to invest $1.5 million in a Charlotte, North Carolina, initiative to build a FinTech hub in the city.
According to a report, Bank of America said it will commit the $1.5 million over the course of three years to help formalize and launch the city’s efforts to create a FinTech hub. The investment is viewed as a new growth opportunity for Charlotte, which is home to a lot of banking and financial services.
“FinTech is a significant, new opportunity for Charlotte that connects our strong finance and technology infrastructure with innovatively minded people, creating tech jobs and new paths to economic mobility,” Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer for Bank of America in the report.
Roughly twenty groups are working on the initiative in Charlotte, with an announcement about the launch expected in the coming months. The move to launch a FinTech hub does come at a time when the state of North Carolina has taken a hit among technology companies and other businesses after putting a law on the books that bans transgender people from using the bathroom of the gender with which they identify. Under the law, people have to use the bathroom based on their gender listed on their birth certificate.
When the law was put in place, PayPal opted to withdraw plans to create a new global operations center in Charlotte that would have resulted in 400 new jobs. Deutsche Bank also halted plans to create more than 200 new jobs at a tech location in the town of Cary, North Carolina, noted the report.
It’s not surprising that BoA would want to invest in a FinTech hub, since FinTechs are doing better than a lot of the traditional financial services companies. A survey by early-stage venture capital firm Blumberg Capital conducted in October found that three in five Americans believe banks aren’t doing a good enough job of keeping up with their needs.
Blumberg, which has invested in Able Lending, Addepar, Lendio, Fundbox, FeeX, EarnUp and CoverHound, found 57 percent of Americans think traditional financial services companies won’t remain as they are today within their lifetimes.