3 Questions for Erin Allard, who leads our Bank Building and Scaling practice
1. Looking back across your experience building and scaling businesses at The Bancorp, Green Dot, Bloom, and Prism, what lessons have most shaped how you approach building the Bank Build & Scale practice at Klaros today?
I’m a builder at heart, and each of those experiences reinforced the same lesson: a good strategy matters, but execution is where businesses succeed or fail.
Building a financial business requires connecting people, technology, operations, risk, and governance so they work together in the real world. The hardest problems often live in the gaps between those disciplines.
I’ve also learned to be both rigorous and pragmatic. You need to know what good looks like, but also what must be right today, what can mature over time, and which early decisions will be difficult to unwind later.
That shapes how we are building the practice at Klaros. We are not simply producing policies or lists of requirements. We help clients turn a business plan and regulatory approval into an institution that can operate, withstand scrutiny, grow, and scale.
2. As you look ahead over the next two to three years, where do you see the biggest opportunities for Klaros’ Bank Build & Scale practice, and what do you think will differentiate Klaros as the market evolves?
We are already seeing significant opportunity as more sophisticated fintechs undertake the difficult journey of becoming banks themselves. Conditional approval is a major achievement, but it is also when the implementation challenge begins. The company still has to build a functioning bank, often while continuing to operate and grow its existing business.
Klaros is unusually well-positioned because we work across the full lifecycle, from bank strategy and design to licensing and all the way through implementation and operationalization. We bring practical experience from people who have built, operated, and examined banks.
Today, most of our clients are de novo applicants, but I believe we are at the beginning of a significant M&A wave. Many of the same requirements will apply, but the work will take a different shape. Assessing what already exists in an acquisition target and making it fit with a fintech may be even harder than building from the ground up. That is where our on-the-ground experience will be especially valuable.
3. As the practice grows, what capabilities do you think the team will need to develop to successfully support increasingly complex bank builds, and where do you see opportunities for people on the team to take on greater ownership?
The capabilities a client needs change as a bank moves from licensing to the actual build. Once conditional approval is received, disciplines such as technology, information security, deposit strategy, balance-sheet funding, and operations become increasingly important. At that stage, clients need people who have not just studied these issues, but have built and operated these functions in practice.
Deep subject-matter expertise is essential, but so is the ability to see the whole institution. The hardest questions cut across disciplines, and we need people who can recognize those connections, exercise judgment, and turn regulatory expectations into practical decisions.
That creates tremendous opportunities across Klaros. Someone may start by owning a deliverable, then grow into leading a workstream, a client relationship, or a new capability for the practice. If you are curious, comfortable solving unfamiliar problems, and eager for real ownership, this is an extraordinary place to build.
