Vram Ismailyan spent nearly 14 years at Wells Fargo, selling payments infrastructure strategies to Fortune 500 companies. Despite leading the payments department, he constantly felt bogged down by the bank’s antiquated technology.
“I spent at least five to 10 hours preparing for client meetings,” he told TechCrunch. “I had to work in 10 or 15 different systems to gather information, understand it and then put it into a PowerPoint.”
Like his colleague, Kevin Miyamoto also struggled with Wells Fargo’s technology. Despite managing $900 billion in annual customer payments, it managed its entire portfolio of accounts with Excel spreadsheets instead of a proper CRM.
Frustrated by ineffective technology tools at Wells Fargo, Ismailyan and Miyamoto teamed up in 2021 to create Identifee, a software platform designed specifically for commercial bankers with all the features they wish they had. The company is a Top 20 finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
Because they had personally encountered outdated technology at one of the nation’s largest banks, Ismailyan and Miyamoto recognized that technological inadequacies are even more severe at smaller financial institutions.
“If you want to pull any information about your customer, you might have to log into 10 separate systems, download the data that’s all different into Excel, and then start doing analysis,” Miyamoto said. “It takes forever.”
Identifee is designed to enhance banker productivity by combining the functionality of multiple, fragmented internal systems into a single platform.
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The startup’s platform is based on several modular systems that customers can purchase individually or as a complete suite. These systems include a CRM, a business intelligence tool for tracking customer data, and a sales enablement module for creating reports and presentations.
“If you’re a community bank, you could do everything Identifee does, but you’d have to get Salesforce, Seismic, Power BI and Tableau,” Miyamoto said. “Or you could use our tool, which has all these things, but in an easy platform.”
Some of Identifee’s modules are also powered by AI. For example, the startup’s AI representative can help complete request-for-proposal (RFP) forms according to each bank’s compliance and risk policies.
Ismailyan and Miyamoto claim that Identifee is the only platform built specifically for commercial banks and credit unionsa combined US market segment estimated to exceed 8,800 institutions.
Identifee has already won the trust of the banking industry, signing up over 170 customers, including big names like Silicon Valley Bank, First Fidelity Bank and Comerica.
The company has raised about $5 million in seed funding from investors including Ocean Azul Partners, 10X Capital and Gaingels.
When asked why other startups don’t address the technological inadequacies of merchant banking, Miyamoto replied: “There are a lot of people who know [this problem]but these people don’t start companies like Vram and I do.”
If you want to learn more about Identifee from the company itself — while checking out dozens of others, hearing their pitches, and listening to guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27-29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.
