Vram Ismailian spent nearly 14 years at Wells Fargo selling payments infrastructure strategies to Fortune 500 companies. Despite being a top performer in the payments division, he constantly felt hampered by the bank’s outdated technology.
“I spent at least five to 10 hours a day preparing for client meetings,” he told TechCrunch. “I had to work through 10 or 15 different systems to gather information, understand it and then put it into PowerPoint.”
Like his colleague, Kevin Miyamoto struggled with Wells Fargo’s technology. Despite managing $900 billion in annual customer payments, they managed their entire portfolio of accounts with Excel spreadsheets instead of a proper CRM.
Frustrated with the inefficient technology tools at Wells Fargo, Ismailian and Miyamoto teamed up in 2021 to create Identify, a software platform designed specifically for commercial bankers that had all the capabilities they wanted. The company is a top 20 finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
Because they had personally struggled with outdated technology at one of the country’s largest banks, Ismailian and Miyamoto recognized that technological inefficiencies were even more severe at smaller financial institutions.
“If you want to get any information about your customer, you have to log into 10 different systems, download all the different data into Excel, then start analyzing,” Miyamoto said. “It takes forever.”
Identify is designed to boost banker productivity by combining the functionality of multiple, fragmented internal systems into a single platform.
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The startup’s platform is built on several modular systems that customers can purchase individually or as an entire suite. These systems include a CRM, a business intelligence tool for tracking customer data, and a sales enablement module for generating reports and presentations.
“If you’re a community bank, you can do the same thing Identify does, but you have to get Salesforce, Seismic, Power BI and Tableau,” Miyamoto said. “Or you can use our tool, which has all those things, but in one easy-to-use platform.”
Some of Identify’s modules are also powered by AI. For example, the startup’s AI agent can help fill out request for proposals (RFP) forms as per each bank’s compliance and risk policies.
Ismailian and Miyamoto claim that Identifi is the only platform built specifically for commercial bank And credit UnionA combined US market segment is estimated at more than 8,800 institutions.
Identify has already won the trust of the banking sector with over 170 clients signed on, including major names like Silicon Valley Bank, First Fidelity Bank and Comerica.
The company has raised approximately $5 million in seed funding from investors including Ocean Azul Partners, 10X Capital and Gangels.
When asked why other startups weren’t tackling commercial banking technical inefficiencies, Miyamoto responded: “A lot of people are familiar with (this problem), but they’re not the people who started companies like Vram and I.”
If you want to learn more about Identifi from the company itself – as well as check out dozens of others, hear their pitches, and hear from guest speakers on four different stages – join us at Disrupt October 27 to 29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.
