Optus Bank
Optus Bank is South Carolina's only Black-owned bank and a Treasury-certified CDFI. It grew from $65 million in assets in 2018 to $764 million in mid-2026, and in July 2026 agreed to merge with M&F Bancorp of Durham, NC, creating a $1.27 billion bank with 10 branches across both Carolinas. Its public lending experience is call-or-visit: mortgage, construction, HELOC, auto, personal, commercial and SBA loans all end at a phone number or a contact form. The solar loan portal now returns an error, and the site no longer links to its Upstart personal loan portal. New accounts start with a form and a callback within 24 to 48 hours. The merger is the moment to decide what a combined, two-state CDFI's front door looks like.
Optus Bank grew from $65M in assets at year-end 2018 to $764M at June 30, 2026, with two branches in Columbia, SC and 46 employees. It is a commercial lender: nonfarm nonresidential CRE ($198M) and C&I ($147M) dominate a $456M loan book, and one-to-four family residential is just $14M. In July 2026 it agreed to merge with M&F Bancorp of Durham, NC, creating a $1.27B CDFI with 10 branches across both Carolinas, expected to close in Q4 2026.
The borrower journey today
How a prospective borrower actually moves through Optus Bank’s digital properties right now, line by line.
What we’d upgrade
Eight loan types, no online application
Optus markets mortgage, construction, auto, HELOC, personal, commercial and SBA/USDA lending, and none of them can be started online from optus.bank. The solar portal is gone and the Upstart portal is no longer linked. A borrower who arrives at 9 p.m. with intent to buy a home or start a business has no way to raise their hand.
The M&F merger sets the front door for a two-state bank
The combined bank will run 10 branches across both Carolinas, eight of them in North Carolina, with headquarters in Columbia. System and brand decisions made during the conversion will set the borrower experience for years. A bank-branded, verify-as-you-go intake lets borrowers in Durham and Columbia start the same application the same way.
CDFI borrowers are the hardest files to document
Optus's borrowers often have non-traditional income: small business revenue that varies month to month, self-employment alongside a part-time W-2 job, thin credit files. A verify-as-you-go intake that layers bank-account cash flow and payroll data alongside traditional bureau pulls closes files that a call-and-document workflow loses to delay.
46 employees, $764M in assets, commercial-heavy growth
Optus grew twelvefold since 2018, mostly in commercial real estate and C&I lending, with 46 full-time-equivalent staff. Every commercial inquiry starts as an unstructured phone call. Capturing business name, EIN, purpose and financial verification at intake gives the relationship manager a structured file from day one.
What it could look like
Below is a live, interactive white-label demo in Optus Bank’s own branding: one front door, every product, with identity, income, and property verified automatically. Try it, or open it full-screen.
Before & after
What your loan officer receives
The instant a borrower finishes that flow, a fully verified application lands in the RAVEN dashboard. No rekeying, no document chase, full audit trail.
Jordan Carter
Where the time goes today
Roughly 665 files a year need borrower verification at Optus: identity, income, employment, assets, and property, collected today through document requests and follow-up calls.[3]
That is 0 staff hours a year in the expected case, recovered as origination capacity rather than headcount reduction.[1]
Value by lending line
Different files carry different verification loads. Commercial files (beneficial ownership, guarantors, business financials) take the longest; consumer files the least. Expected-case annual labor value:[1][2]
The full math
| Line | Conservative | Expected | Optimistic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staff time savings[1][2] | $82K | $159K | $260K |
| Pull-through revenue (0–1 added closings)[4] | $0K | $0K | $1K |
| New-resident lead pipeline (1,600 new households/yr)[6] | $4K | $34K | $165K |
| Total estimated annual value | $86K | $193K | $425K |
Why this matters for Optus
Verification Friction Is the Bottleneck for LMI Borrowers
Optus Bank's core borrowers, low-to-moderate income and minority households in the Columbia metro, are exactly the population most likely to have non-traditional income documentation: gig work, cash wages, multiple part-time jobs, or SSI. Manual document collection for these borrowers is slower, more error-prone, and more likely to cause application abandonment than for conventional wage earners. RAVEN's permissioned open-banking income and employment verification pulls payroll and bank-transaction data directly from the source, eliminating the back-and-forth phone calls and fax requests that drive up loan officer hours on files that are already complex. For a two-branch bank with 46 employees and a commercial-heavy book, shaving even two hours of manual verification per file translates directly into capacity for more loans and better service to the underserved borrowers Optus was built to help.
$764M in Assets, Two Branches, Two States Next: RAVEN Extends the Reach
Optus has grown from $65M to $764M in assets with only two physical locations in Columbia, meaning its loan officers already serve borrowers across the state through CDFI network relationships, referrals, and online inquiries. Without a digital verification workflow, every out-of-branch loan still requires borrowers to drive in, fax documents, or email sensitive files in uncontrolled formats. RAVEN enables a fully remote borrower experience where income, employment, and asset verification happens in minutes through a mobile-first consent flow, not a trip to Gervais Street. This matters more after the M&F merger takes the bank past $1.2B and into North Carolina: it needs operational leverage, not just more headcount, to hold its efficiency ratio (55.8% in 1H 2026) across 10 branches in two states.
Mission-Aligned Data: CDFI Reporting Needs Richer Loan-File Inputs
As a Treasury-certified CDFI and MDI, Optus Bank must demonstrate community impact in its grant reporting, ECIP compliance disclosures, and CRA exam documentation. Richer verified data at origination (income levels, employment sectors, asset levels of underserved borrowers) feeds directly into that impact narrative and makes regulatory exams smoother. RAVEN's verification reports produce structured, auditable outputs that document borrower financial profiles at the time of application, exactly the kind of granular evidence CDFI funders and bank examiners want to see. For a bank whose entire funding model depends on maintaining credible impact metrics for PayPal, Citi, and Treasury, clean borrower-level data is not just an operational convenience but a strategic asset.
Want this with Optus Bank’s real products and rates?
We’ll wire your actual product lineup, your rate card, into a private demo, then pressure-test every number above against your real volumes.
We also published an independent analysis of Optus's performance and market:
Read: Optus Bank Grew From $65 Million to $764 Million. Now Comes M&FSee how Optus Bank's vendors compare with 31 other Southeast banks and credit unions:
Bank Tech Stack TrackerMethodology & footnotes
Hours saved per file. Published verification-automation case studies (Blend Labs, 2025) report 15-16+ staff hours saved per mortgage file across loan officers, processors, underwriters, and compliance. We model mortgages at 6-14 hours, commercial files (which add beneficial ownership, guarantor identity, and business financials) at 8-16 hours, and simpler consumer or HELOC files at 2-6 hours. The expected case sits well below published benchmarks on purpose.
Loaded staff cost. The $38-48/hour range blends Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS rates for South Carolina loan officers (~$30/hr), processors (~$28/hr), underwriters (~$55/hr), and compliance staff (~$50/hr), including benefits. Most verification labor falls on processors and loan officers, which is why the blend sits closer to the lower rates.
Verification volume. Mortgage counts come from HMDA Modified LAR filings via FFIEC, which report actual originations. Commercial, HELOC, and consumer volumes are estimates derived from FDIC call report loan mix and branch footprint; they are not reported figures and could vary materially. The 60-day pilot exists to replace these estimates with the bank’s own measured numbers.
Pull-through improvement. The MBA reports roughly 68% industry-wide mortgage application abandonment. We model a 1-5 percentage-point improvement applied to originations (not the larger application pool, which would produce a roughly 3x bigger figure), at the MBA-reported $785 average profit per closed loan. Published case studies report 10-15 point gains; our optimistic case is one-half to one-third of that.
What this is not. These figures are directional estimates built from public data and industry benchmarks. They are not a quote, a guarantee, or an analysis of the bank’s internal workflows, and recovered hours are modeled as redeployed origination capacity rather than headcount reduction. Banks already running highly automated verification will see less; banks running fully manual document collection will see more.
New-resident lead generation. TD Bank research reports roughly 30% of consumers open an account with a new bank after moving (and movers 55+ switch at a higher rate than millennials), while 91% of consumers say digital capability matters in choosing where to bank (MX, 2025) and more than half of online banking applications are abandoned mid-flow (The Financial Brand; Innovatrics). We model a bank with a white-label, fintech-grade intake flow capturing 1.5-9% of new-to-market households as started applications, converting 12-50% of those to funded loans (expected case: ~55% completion times the MBA-reported ~55% depository pull-through). Value per funded loan combines the $785 MBA average profit with $500-1,500 of avoided lead-acquisition spend, the going rate per funded loan from purchased shared and exclusive lead channels. New-household counts are derived from Census county population estimates and are not bank-reported figures. This line is included in the headline total.
Digital audit sources: optus.bank (homepage, /consumer-loans, /lending-options, /sign-up, /renewable-energy-lending), solar.optus.bank (404), optusbank.upstart.com (login only), secure.optus.stiapp.com (digital banking login), FDIC BankFind and API cert #35241 (year-end 2018 to Q2 2026), American Banker and The Charlotte Post on the M&F Bancorp merger (July 2026). Founded 1921 as Victory Savings Bank. Two branches, both Columbia SC. Reviewed October 2026.
ROI data sources: FDIC Institutions and Financials APIs (CERT 35241; year-end 2018 to Q2 2026); FFIEC HMDA filer lists 2024 and 2025 (no Optus filing); optus.bank (consumer-loans, lending-options, sign-up), reviewed October 2026; American Banker and The Charlotte Post on the Optus Financial and M&F Bancorp merger (July 2026); Post and Courier and Columbia Business Report on the PayPal deposit (August 2020) and 2021 investments; World Population Review (Richland County 2026); Optus Bank Impact Report 2023
How Optus Bank compares with banks its size: Bank Peer Snapshot