Citizens Bank of Edmond CEO Jill Castilla’s latest venture combines two key elements of her professional life: financial services and the military.

For the past several years, the bank executive and military veteran has been building a national digital bank that aims to address some of the banking pain points that Castilla herself encountered when she enlisted in the Army at 19. 

“There's still this deficiency in the market where there's not a focus on that new servicemember coming in,” Castilla said. “They're very targeted from a predatory lending standpoint.”

Through Roger, a digital bank which officially launched on Tuesday, Castilla is hoping to reach entry-level recruits who all too often start basic training without bank accounts.

“They are coming to basic training, 50% or more across every service, without having a banking relationship,” she said. 

The lack of early access to a bank account can delay a new recruit’s first paycheck, or even push back their training start date, Castilla said.

Castilla said Roger aims to work with military recruiters to provide new servicemembers with an instantly available direct deposit form that is compliant with the Department of Defense regulations. The form populates all of the prospective service member’s information, as well as a signature by Castilla as the bank’s CEO.

“All they have to do is either text that, email, or print it out and provide it to either the recruiter or to reception at basic training,” she said.

Roger also allows 17-year-olds that have signed enlistment papers to be able to open an account without a cosigner.

“That’s another big hurdle that we're excited to be able to remove for young people that are serving but may not be 18,” Castilla said.

‘Cracks in the system’

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, U.S. servicemembers are increasingly becoming targets of predatory lending and falling victim to payments app scams. 

The Department of Defense has identified predatory lending and poor financial literacy as serious threats to military readiness, Castilla said.

“It’s recognized, from a mental health standpoint, as well as deployment readiness by the Department of Defense, that financial stability and financial literacy is critical to ensure both the servicemembers and their families are well educated and protected when it comes to their finances,” she said. “We have laws in place to protect service members from exposure to potentially predatory lenders, unfortunately, cracks still exist in the system, that don't fully allow that barrier from someone taking advantage of a service member being deployed.”

One of Roger’s fraud protection features includes “deployment mode” where a servicemember can lock down some of the access to their debit card or enable increased fraud monitoring during a tour.

A common cause

Castilla said a couple hundred users, made up of both military veterans and National Guard members, have been testing the platform ahead of its official launch.

Existing staff at Edmond, Oklahoma-based Citizens Bank of Edmond have been tapped to work on Roger, Castilla said. The firm also added retired Brigadier General Andy Preston as Roger’s director of military banking.

Castilla said “several $100,000 of hard expenses” as well as the equivalent of $1 million in staff time has gone into the launch of Roger.

Roger has a standalone core powered by banking technology firm Nymbus.

Castilla said Nymbus has offered to work with Citizens to make its technology more accessible “all for this common cause to help the servicemembers that typically have been underserved.”