Azlo

» see azlo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

PNC agreed in November 2020 to buy BBVA's United States business for just over eleven billion dollars. That sentence is the whole cause of death, and it has nothing to do with Azlo, which was working. Two months after the deal was announced, the Spanish parent said it would close both of the American digital banks it had been funding. Simple went, and Azlo went with it.

Azlo was founded in 2017 by Brian Hamilton and Cameron Peake inside BBVA's New Digital Businesses division, the unit the bank used to incubate financial startups at arm's length. It tested with a small set of customers for a few months and opened properly in February 2018. It held a banking license it did not own, which is to say it ran on BBVA USA's charter and payment rails while operating as its own company, and that arrangement is exactly why a corporate sale upstairs could end it.

~ the case file ~

~ who it was for ~

The pitch was narrow and well aimed. If your business is you, a traditional bank treats you as a nuisance: minimum balances, monthly maintenance fees, a branch visit to open the account, and paperwork scaled for a company with staff. Azlo opened a business checking account from a phone with no monthly fee and no minimum, then connected it to the software a one-person business actually runs on, so invoicing and payments and the accounting package all talked to each other.

The customer base was freelancers, contractors and the sort of sole proprietor who had been running business income through a personal account because the alternatives were insulting. For that customer the product was not a marginal improvement, it was the first business account anyone had bothered to design for a company of one. Cameron Peake made Fortune's 40 Under 40 in 2020 on the strength of it, the year before the thing closed.

~ the sale upstairs ~

The closure notice went up on 7 January 2021 and gave customers until the end of March. On 31 March 2021 every Azlo account was closed. Anyone left holding a balance above zero had a check mailed to whatever address was on file that day. A bank built to get paper out of a freelancer's life ended by printing some and putting a stamp on it. The app came off the App Store on 15 April, two weeks after support had already stopped.

~ what is left to read ~

BBVA put up a page at bbvausa.com explaining the closure, with a phone number and answers to the questions people were obviously going to ask. Where did my money go, how do I get my statements, how do I serve a subpoena on an account that no longer exists.

That page is gone now, and not because anyone took it down. The domain bbvausa.com does not resolve at all today, because the entity it belonged to was absorbed into PNC and the name was retired along with it. The only way to read BBVA's explanation of why Azlo closed is through the Internet Archive. The bank that closed the bank got closed, and the notice outlived both of them by sitting in a library neither of them owned.

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