Narmi: Solving the Digital Banking Puzzle

By John San Filippo

Creating a credit union’s digital member experience can seem like building a jigsaw puzzle. The base digital banking platform represents the edge pieces but then comes the hard part: completing the picture with components like digital onboarding, payments and fraud management. Nikhil Lakhanpal, co-founder of digital banking provider Narmi, believes that this piecemeal approach introduces significant integration pain for financial institutions. Narmi addresses this challenge by providing a single, comprehensive platform that orchestrates a member’s entire digital life cycle.

A Vision Born from Frustration

Nikhil Lakhanpal

The inspiration for Narmi originated from Lakhanpal’s experience managing a credit union utilizing, by necessity, this same approach.

“We were just so confused more than anything else, like why the state of digital banking was what it was, why we couldn’t be extraordinarily proud and confident that what we offered to our accountholders was competitive,” Lakhanpal said.

In 2016, Lakhanpal partnered with the credit union’s CTO to build a solution from scratch. Rather than creating another “also-ran” digital banking platform using the traditional model, the Narmi team focused entirely on developing a comprehensive digital experience layer.

“Our vision was how to build a true single platform from scratch,” Lakhanpal explained. “Account opening, in-branch opening, mobile banking, online banking for businesses, for consumers, fraud, real-time payments.”

The Breadth of a Single Platform

Today, the company delivers on that original blueprint through its unified platform, Narmi One. In a typical deployment, he noted, the platform replaces multiple siloed software applications, consolidating digital banking, online account onboarding, and branch-based account opening into one system. Additionally, Narmi One embeds a dedicated fraud technology layer across both the onboarding and digital banking environments, while serving as a direct payments hub for instant networks like FedNow.

“The fact that all our products are so tightly integrated that you’re gaining—we don’t call it integration, we call it intragration,” Lakhanpal said. He uses that term to characterize the tight connectivity between the various Narmi One components.

While the platform is engineered for full enterprise transformation, Lakhanpal added that credit unions are not required to deploy the entire suite simultaneously.

“You can start with smaller flavors of Narmi One,” Lakhanpal said. “Maybe they don’t have the implementation resources for all of that. Maybe they don’t have the budget. Maybe honestly, some things we do are not problems for them right now. And they want to focus on a certain part of it.”

This modular flexibility, he further explained, also means credit unions can retain their existing, preferred third-party applications – such as a favored digital onboarding system – in lieu of a corresponding Narmi module, with the platform relying on a library of over 125 third-party integrations to keep systems running smoothly together.

Expanding into Business Banking

Consolidation is equally critical for Narmi’s small and medium-sized business (SMB) offering, which the company has developed since launching its first business client in 2018. Recently, Narmi introduced receipt-matching features designed to automatically pair uploaded receipts with corresponding transaction data directly within the credit union interface.

“Sometimes you need to submit receipts and you want to be able to easily upload them and have them automatically assigned to a transaction,” Lakhanpal said. “That’s been a feature reserved for the Ramps and Brexes of the world,” he added, referring to the popular corporate spend management platforms. “We think it’s crazy. We’re going to give up that primacy to a Ramp? Let’s bring it to our credit unions. We already have the operating account. Let’s own the relationship.”

Targeted AI and Governance

The architectural modernness of the platform has also accelerated Narmi’s deployments in artificial intelligence. Rather than pursuing a generalized approach, the company restricts its AI development to highly specific applications. One such deployment involves connecting financial institution accounts to large language models via the Anthropic Claude Model Context Protocol (MCP) to automate manual accounting workflows for business members.

On the operational side, Narmi utilizes an AI Decision Assist tool to streamline the manual review process for new member applications. By parsing fraud data and delivering automated recommendations, the tool reduces human processing time by 50% to 60%, while eliminating unconscious human biases in the underwriting cycle.

Regardless of the technology used, Lakhanpal emphasized that data governance remains the critical starting point for any financial institution evaluating AI.

“That’s the number one thing our credit union clients are focused on before they even start touching AI is governance,” Lakhanpal said. “Where’s my dataset? Who owns the relationship? Who owns the liability? Is my data being trained? We’ve spent a ton of time on the governance aspect.”