Vram Ismailyan spent nearly fourteen years at Wells Fargo, where he sold payment infrastructure strategies to Fortune 500 companies. Although he was a top performer in the payments division, he constantly felt hindered by the bank’s outdated technology. He reported spending five to ten hours preparing for customer meetings, requiring him to navigate ten or fifteen different systems to gather information, analyze it, and then compile it into a presentation.
His colleague, Kevin Miyamoto, faced similar struggles with the technology at Wells Fargo. Despite managing nine hundred billion dollars in annual client payments, he was forced to manage his entire portfolio of accounts using Excel spreadsheets instead of a proper customer relationship management system.
Frustrated by the inefficient tools at their disposal, Ismailyan and Miyamoto teamed up in 2021 to build Identifee. This software platform was designed specifically for commercial bankers, incorporating all the capabilities they felt were missing. The company is now a Top 20 finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
Having personally experienced the challenges of outdated technology at one of the nation’s largest banks, the founders recognized that these inefficiencies are even more severe at smaller financial institutions. Miyamoto explained that to pull customer information, a banker might have to log into ten separate systems, download disparate data into Excel, and then begin analysis, a process that takes an immense amount of time.
Identifee is designed to boost banker productivity by combining the functionality of multiple, fragmented internal systems into a single, unified platform. The startup’s platform is built on several modular systems that clients can purchase individually or as a complete suite. These systems include a customer relationship management tool, a business intelligence tool for tracking customer data, and a sales enablement module for generating reports and presentations.
Miyamoto noted that for a community bank to replicate what Identifee offers, they would need to acquire Salesforce, Seismic, Power BI, and Tableau. Instead, they can use Identifee, which integrates all those functionalities into one easy-to-use platform.
Some of Identifee’s modules are powered by artificial intelligence. For example, the startup’s AI agent can assist in filling out request for proposal forms in accordance with each bank’s specific compliance and risk policies.
The founders state that Identifee is the only platform built specifically for commercial banks and credit unions. This combined United States market segment is estimated to include over eighty-eight hundred institutions. Identifee has already gained the trust of the banking sector, signing up over one hundred seventy clients, including major names like Silicon Valley Bank, First Fidelity Bank, and Comerica.
The company has raised approximately five million dollars in seed funding from investors, including Ocean Azul Partners, 10X Capital, and Gaingels.
When asked why other startups are not tackling the technology inefficiencies in commercial banking, Miyamoto responded that while many people are familiar with the problem, those individuals do not often start companies as he and Ismailyan did.