Jack Henry Connect 2026: Wade Arnold Is on the Moov
By John San Filippo
When Wade Arnold sold digital banking provider Banno to Jack Henry and eventually left the company in 2016, he never imagined he would be back at Jack Henry Connect a decade later taking home a prestigious Cobalt Award (one of two such awards in the Integrator category presented to exceptional technology partners). Yet at Jack Henry Connect 2026, held Oct. 18-21 in Kansas City, Mo., Arnold was front and center as the co-founder and CEO of payments fintech Cedar Falls, Iowa-based Moov.
During the conference, Finopotamus sat down with Arnold to discuss how a long-standing friendship with his former Banno CTO – and current Jack Henry CTO/CDO – Ben Metz evolved into a deep collaboration that is reshaping small business payments, peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions, and expense management for credit unions.
A Different Kind of Partnership
The catalyst for Moov’s return to the Jack Henry ecosystem began three years ago with a simple question between Arnold and Metz: How do we help financial institutions grow deposits?
At the time, Arnold was building out low-level payment processing infrastructure at Moov, while Jack Henry had the modern Banno digital banking platform and the user experience layer. Rather than engaging in a traditional vendor-reseller arrangement, the two companies joined forces to co-develop Tap2Local, a cloud-based contactless merchant payment acceptance tool embedded directly into digital banking.
“I think this is one of the first times that two different companies, two different org structures, built a product together with Tap2Local,” Arnold said. “Most credit unions aren’t buying an L2 kernel for Android for contactless payments. They don’t even know what I just said, right? Yeah, so, but we have one and it’s really good, I promise. But that’s what allows you to touch a card to the NFC reader and connect it to Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discover.”
Jack Henry took Moov’s low-level software development kit (SDK) and built the user experience, entitlements, rights, and permissions inside Banno. Announced a year ago, the product has seen rapid adoption.
“We have over 918 financial institutions on it today,” Arnold noted. “Really from May of 2026 to end of September, we added over 35,000 small businesses, which is pretty exciting. And the rate’s accelerating too. I don’t think, if we came back here next year, it wouldn’t be shocking if we were over 100,000 small businesses on the platform.”
Even more compelling for credit unions is the business model. Moov prices the merchant processing competitively against market leaders like Square, Stripe, and Intuit, assumes the underwriting liability and chargeback risk, and shares the revenue back with the credit union.
“The beauty about this product is we pay the financial institution,” Arnold said. “There are very few products that start with that pricing model. So, it’s in essence a free product to them, and if they market it, they can make money off of it. They’re already doing the KYC and CIP process to onboard the member, so why wouldn’t they participate in some of the upside?”
While Tap2Local launched exclusively within Banno, Arnold confirmed that the solution is expanding to other digital banking providers, with integrations into Q2, Alkami, and Lumin slated to launch in early 2027.
Reinventing P2P on Debit Rails
Building on the momentum of Tap2Local, Moov and Jack Henry used Connect 2026 to spotlight their latest joint endeavor: Moov Money, a P2P payment solution branded inside digital banking as “Pay Anyone.”
Traditional P2P networks often trap users in walled gardens – requiring both parties, for example, to use Venmo, Cash App, or a Zelle-participating institution,. Moov Money bypasses that friction by riding directly on the debit rails in collaboration with Visa and Mastercard.
“The Pay Anyone product syncs with your contact list, uses the trusted channel that people already use, whether that’s iMessage or SMS or WhatsApp,” Arnold explained. “You send a link over that channel.”
When a recipient clicks the link for the first time, they complete a one-time SMS verification, set up a passkey, and can immediately claim the funds via Apple Pay, Google Pay, the Visa Alias Directory, the Mastercard Credential Services Directory, or by manually typing in their debit card number. Because the link is sent directly from the sender’s phone via their native messaging app – and carries the credit union’s branding alongside a Visa or Mastercard trust logo – recipients know the message is legitimate.
“Do you have a debit card?” Arnold asked. “You’re in-network. It’s that simple.”
He pointed out that this model also solves a massive financial inclusion gap. Because reloadable prepaid cards issued by Visa and Mastercard are KYC-verified debit credentials, they work seamlessly on the network.
“There’s over 19 million Americans without a bank account, but they’re being serviced by Visa and Mastercard, typically in reloadable prepaids, which is a KYC card,” Arnold said. “If you serve a community, 19 million is a real number of people without an account and routing number, which means they can’t get an RTP, they can’t get FedNow, they can’t get Zelle, period. So, we’re excited about bringing those citizens kind of into the network and being able to get them funds electronically rather than other means, which is typically cash checkers and things like that.”
For credit unions, the economics of Moov Money also contrast sharply with Zelle. Working closely with design partner Tustin, Calif.-based SchoolsFirst Federal Credit Union ($37 billion in assets; 1.6 million members), Moov discovered that a significant portion of credit union P2P volume stays within the same institution.
“Just raw cost, apples to apples, it’s 15 to 30% less,” Arnold said. “Over 20% of their Zelle transactions were member-to-member. And so, you have a send fee and a receive fee on Zelle. Their member-to-member transactions were their most expensive. They’re getting double-dipped. And our difference is there’s no receive cost on our network.”
Furthermore, Moov embeds fraud protection and payment hub fees into its base cost, and discounts “on-us” member-to-member transactions by 15 cents since the credit union has already verified both parties.
Capturing the Sole Proprietor Wave
Looking ahead, Arnold’s primary passion is helping credit unions capture the exploding market of sole proprietors – a demographic, he said, that has grown by roughly two million new businesses annually since the COVID-19 pandemic and is poised to accelerate further as artificial intelligence disrupts traditional employment.
Too often, these micro-businesses operate out of retail checking accounts because traditional commercial treasury management accounts are too expensive and complex for a one-person operation. To bridge that gap, Moov and Jack Henry announced a new commercial expense management solution at the conference.
“The third thing that we just announced yesterday is expense management on behalf of the credit union,” Arnold said. “So that’s a commercial secured card tied to their account, and they can mint a one-time card for accounts payable, they can mint a different card if they have recurring payments on file. Think of it as positive pay for checks, but using cards.”
Equipped with spend controls, merchant and time restrictions, and receipt ingestion, the expense management tool follows the same risk-free revenue-share model as Tap2Local.
“And that’s, I think, where Jack Henry and Moov are thinking differently, is we’re showing up with products that aren’t yet another cost for a deposit account,” Arnold said. “We’re showing up with revenue opportunities that grow deposits, and then if they invest into them, they can make more money off of them.”
“The best way to help a community isn’t cheap retail accounts; it’s helping businesses thrive in that community,” Arnold concluded. “I think their mandate has to be: How do I grow the economy of the market I serve, not just subsidize the deposits of an industry? I think that’s a big change in credit unions.”
