Community banking app provider Malauzai announced today it has been tapped by Florida’s second-largest community bank.

Under the agreement, the Austin-based company will design and deploy a mobile app for Axiom Bank’s AxiomGo, a platform that serves the underbanked community. The digital, checkless checking account provides a bilingual alternative to prepaid cards and traditional checking. AxiomGo is a low-fee way for users to pay bills, pay a friend, deposit checks, and transfer funds on a mobile-first user interface.

The bank’s goal is to give users an app to manage all banking activity from their mobile phone. As Ron Strand-Sorrell, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Axiom Bank explained, “essentially we wanted to give them the bank in the palm of their hand.” He added, “For many of our customers, this is their first experience with the U.S. banking system and we wanted to ensure the app was intuitive and brought value to their daily lives.”

Upon launching the app, Axiom expanded the capacity of its call center to accommodate an increase in call center activity. However, while users of AxiomGo have increased 300% since launching last December, the number of calls to the call center have significantly decreased because of the robust in-app help capabilities.

“It’s important that underserved markets gain access to traditional banking services, said Robb Gaynor, chief product officer for Malauzai. “The bank designed the app to eliminate many of the barriers that often make it more difficult for this market to take advantage of banking services, and in turn has enabled Axiom to better serve its current customers, while also reaching a new audience and expanding its footprint.”

Founded in 2009, Malauzai last demoed at FinovateSpring 2016, where it debuted MOX Pay powered by Visual App Builder. In May of last year, the company teamed with Vantiv to leverage the company’s Ondot CardControl tool.

With more than $2 billion in total assets, North Carolina’s Southern Bank will leverage its deployment of Malauzai’s Picture Pay to provide its customers with a new digital payment option: Photo Billpay.

“Providing our customers with modern, digital payment tools is a priority for the bank,” Sondra McCorquodale, SVP and alternative delivery channel manager at Southern Bank said. McCorquodale highlighted the importance of giving customers “easy to use” self-service channels, and offering a variety of payment options as “key to providing a superior customer experience and in turn … a significant competitive advantage.”

Southern Bank, which has been a Malauzai partner for years, said that it has seen a 20 percent gain in customer usage of all digital payments and an increase of 38 percent in the average value of money movement transactions. Southern Bank has deployed a variety of additional money management features including remote deposit capture (RDC) and P2P transfer.

“Mobile-based money movement features like PicturePay, RDC, A2A, and P2P are growing in demand and popularity,” Malauzai CPO Robb Gaynor said, “whatever we can do to help our customers like Southern Bank have access to the latest innovations and stay competitive, we fully support.”

Malauzai’s PicturePay technology was developed in collaboration with Allied Payment. The technology was designed to serve as a stand-alone mobile billpay solution that is mobile banking provider agnostic. PictuePay is compatible with any core banking system or mobile platform and requires no technology integration.

“The simplicity of Picture Pay makes it ideal as a stand-alone application that runs separately from a bank or credit union’s current mobile banking app,” Allied Payment Network president Ralph Marcuccilli said. “We have received a tremendous response to the Picture Pay product offering and wanted to accommodate these institutions quickly without waiting for other mobile vendors to develop their own product.”

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Malauzai Software demonstrated its Conversational Banking for Businesses solution at FinovateFall 2017. Also this fall, the company announced that Somerset Trust would extend its deployment of the MalauzaiOne digital banking platform to retail customers. Colorado’s Public Service Credit Union (PSCU), with more than $2.3 billion in assets, completed its rollout of MalauzaiOne in August. And earlier this year, the company collaborated with payment processing giant Vantiv to introduce a youth spending solution called Family Manager: SmartKid Control.

With more than $24 million in funding, Malauzai includes Wellington Management and Live Oak Banking Company among its investors. The company was founded by Danny Piangerelli (CTO) and Tom Shen (CEO and Chairman of the Board).

Courtesy of its partnership with Malauzai, Somerset Trust Company is extending its digital banking service to its business customers. The West Pennsylvania-based community bank will use the same MalauzaiOne digital banking platform it rolled out to retail customers last year, giving business users digital access to their accounts and easier ways to manage payments and receivables.

“The response to our digital banking offerings from our retail customers has been tremendous,” Somerset Bank COO John Gill said. He credited the alliance with Malauzai for giving the bank the ability to “design a cutting-edge banking solution that both our retail and business customers can use interchangeably and seamlessly.” Somerset Bank’s deployment of Malauzai’s technology for retail users was recognized by the inaugural Best of FinXTech Awards, sponsored by Bank Director.

In his statement, Malauzai Chief Product Officer Robb Gaynor highlighted this same advantage of using a single platform for both retail and business banking. “It is great to see banks like Somerset benefit from what Malauzai’s single platform delivers: better engagement with customers, less complexity in their back office and ultimately much lower costs to support the digital channels.”

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Malauzai demonstrated its Conversational Banking for Businesses at FinovateFall 2017 (demo video available soon). The company has more than 425 customers using its technology and more than 800,000 active end users. In August, Malauzai added the Public Service Credit Union (PSCU) with more than $2.3 billion in assets and 219,000 members to the list of FIs using MalauzaiOne Digital Banking. Back in May, Malauzai’s partnership with fellow Finovate alums OnDot and Vantiv enabled Vantiv to launch a youth spending solution called Family Manager: SmartKid Control.

Malauzai has raised more than $25 million in funding and includes Live Oak Banking Company and Wellington Management among its investors. Tom Shen is CEO.