Inside many American banks, employees still spend four or five hours a day making sure one system agrees with another. The work is repetitive and invisible to customers, yet it persists beneath an industry promising instant payments and increasingly intelligent financial tools.
“These are things that should be automated,” Miami fintech entrepreneur Randy Fernando told Forbes.
Fernando is betting $30 million that banks are ready to act. His new Miami-based company, Maximum, emerged from stealth with one of fintech’s largest seed rounds and an ambitious mission: replace the fragmented infrastructure at the heart of banking with a real-time, AI-native operating system.
CRV led the financing, joined by Pear VC, Restive Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Anthemis Group and other investors. They were backing a founder with a history of building and selling fintech companies. Fernando founded Vault Investing and sold it to Acorns in 2017. He later launched Power Finance, which Marqeta acquired in 2023 for $275 million in cash.
That track record helped make for an unusually fast raise. Fernando told Forbes that CRV returned with a term sheet “within twenty four hours,” while the entire round closed within days.
Building Maximum will take considerably longer.
The company is targeting the core systems responsible for recording a bank’s balances, payments, transactions and ledger entries. More than 70% of nearly 5,000 U.S. banks still use core technology created in the last century, according to Maximum’s press release. Those systems predate mobile banking, real-time payments and artificial intelligence.
“Banking software has kind of had one job. It’s to remember,” Fernando [pictured above] told Forbes. “Remember every transaction, every balance, every payment, every ledger entry, and it’s been great at that.”
Maximum argues that remembering is no longer enough. Its platform is being designed to interpret activity, anticipate what might happen next and automate operational work. Banks would be able to build agents that handle complex workflows, monitor customer activity and help create new financial products.
The opportunity is particularly pronounced among community and regional banks, which often depend on a few dominant core providers while connecting dozens of additional services. Fernando told Forbes that one bank he examined worked with “over 100 additional vendors.”
“The issue has been the concentration,” he said. “You’ve only got two or three providers that primarily power these institutions.”
That concentration also underscores the difficulty of Maximum’s mission. Core migrations can take years, require dedicated internal teams and introduce serious operational risk. Maximum does not plan to offer a limited “sidecar core” that runs beside an incumbent platform. It is looking for banks prepared to make a full transition.
“We’re starting with bank number one, and we’re doing a full migration end to end and then we move on to bank number two,” Fernando asserted.
He did not minimize the challenge. “I believe banking will be one of the hardest industries to rebuild around that idea,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing Maximum and the round.
Maximum will use the funding for product development, hiring and bank implementations. Although the company said it had attracted interest from larger community and regional banks, it has not publicly named a customer or demonstrated its platform operating inside an institution.
Maximum therefore enters the market well funded and deeply experienced, but still unproven. Its financing came together in days; its credibility will be earned through slow, painstaking bank conversions.
“We’re still early. There is a tremendous amount of work ahead,” Fernando wrote. “But I can’t think of a more important problem to spend the next decade solving.”
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- Space-Eyes takes aim at a $638 million public debut – August 4, 2026
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