OppFi Moves Deeper Into Banking With $130 Million BNC Purchase

Online lending platform OppFi is set to acquire BNC Bank for $130 million.

The deal, announced Wednesday (April 29), is designed to capitalize on both OppFI’s digital finance capabilities with BNC’s national banking charter.

“Combining our operations under unified regulatory supervision by the OCC and Federal Reserve simplifies and strengthens our compliance and risk management,” Todd Schwartz, OppFi’s CEO and executive chairman, said in a news release.

“This will position OppFi/BNC for long term scalability and sustainable growth. We are excited to get to work with BNC’s team to maximize the strengths of our businesses and continue to find ways to better serve customers who have been traditionally underserved by banks.”

Headquartered in Arizona, BNC had approximately $1.1 billion in total assets and approximately $1 billion in total deposits as of the end of last year. OppFi’s platform is designed to connect consumers with community bank partners and consumer loans.

The company said the acquisition will allow it to deliver more services, such as Small Business Administration (SBA) lending, secured consumer lending and wealth management.

OppFi’s acquisition plan comes as many other FinTechs are working to land banking charters, as PYMNTS wrote last month.

In fact, that report said, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has gotten so many applications for banking charters from FinTech, payment and crypto firms to lobbying group the Bank Policy Institute (BPI) is considering suing the regulator over its wave of approvals.

In 2025 alone, the OCC received 14 de novo charter applications, a number nearly equaling the total applications received by the agency in the prior four years put together. By the middle of March, the OCC had approved four new applications and received more than seven.

Earlier FinTech-to-bank conversions depended heavily on acquisitions. Buying a bank provided speed and regulatory certainty, while also importing “legacy systems, cultural mismatches and balance sheet constraints designed for a different era,” PYMNTS wrote.

A bank charter “is not a trophy, and it certainly isn’t a product label, but it’s a public trust,” Rodney E. Hood, former acting comptroller of the currency, told PYMNTS affiliate Competition Policy International in a January interview.

“A federal charter should never be construed as an end run around supervision, and it should certainly never be a pathway to scale without accountability,” he added.