CSI, a core banking software provider based in Paducah, Kentucky, acquired Qolo, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, company that provides treasury and payments infrastructure to banks and fintechs. CSI announced the deal on 14 July 2026.
Terms were not disclosed, and a company representative declined to comment on them to American Banker. Qolo's website described the acquisition as completed.
CSI will connect Qolo's technology to its core banking platform, its digital banking products and its APIs. Qolo will continue to support its existing customers, which include large regional banks such as Huntington Bank and KeyBank, a company representative told American Banker.
What Qolo built
Qolo was founded in 2018 by Patricia Montesi, its chief executive, together with Darren Beyer, Robert Pincus and Steven Bishop, according to Refresh Miami. The four had worked together about two decades earlier at WildCard Systems, a Broward County payments company.
Its platform combines three pieces that CSI highlighted. The first is a real-time account ledger that shows balances, transactions and authorisations as they happen. The second is a single engine for routing domestic and international payments across multiple payment rails. The third is card issuing and processing for debit, prepaid, virtual and secured corporate credit card programmes. Qolo also sells virtual account management and embedded ledgers to fintechs and business payments companies.
One example of its work is KeyVAM, a virtual account product that KeyBank built on Qolo's technology. By June 2025 KeyVAM had processed nearly $9 billion in transactions, KeyBank said.
“By joining CSI, we can invest more deeply in the infrastructure that powers modern financial experiences”
Why CSI is buying
CSI sells core banking, digital banking, lending, payments, compliance and managed IT services, mainly to community and regional financial institutions in the United States. Its chief executive, Nancy Langer, said community banks are built on local relationships and market knowledge, and that Qolo would help them bring commercial banking tools to market that have mostly been associated with larger banks and fintech platforms.
CSI cited research by Datos Insights finding that 85% of small and midsized businesses would choose their primary financial institution over a fintech or a larger bank when the capabilities on offer were comparable. It also said the deal supports a vertical banking strategy, in which community banks offer packaged commercial services for industries with particular needs for deposits, payments, reporting and workflow.
Langer said the acquisition also expands CSI's ability to support fintechs and business-to-business payments providers directly. Montesi said the line between traditional banking and embedded finance was becoming increasingly blurred, and that joining CSI would let Qolo invest more in its infrastructure while drawing on CSI's compliance expertise, scale and resources. The Paypers reported that Qolo's technology is meant to act as an orchestration layer across payments, accounts and workflows.
The founders and the funding
Qolo had raised about $27 million by May 2022, including a $16 million Series A, Refresh Miami reported. At that point it had more than 100 employees and was raising a $50 million Series B; whether that round closed was not reported. In June 2025 KeyBank made a minority equity investment in the company, without disclosing the amount.
D.A. Davidson & Co. was Qolo's exclusive strategic and financial adviser on the sale, and Cooley was its legal counsel.
A private equity-backed buyer
CSI was a public company until 2022, when Centerbridge Partners and Bridgeport Partners took it private in an all-cash deal valued at about $1.6 billion. TA Associates later made a strategic investment, announced in January 2024, with Centerbridge remaining the majority investor.
Qolo follows CSI's purchase of the retail digital banking provider Apiture about a year earlier, American Banker noted. Paul Schaus, managing partner at the consultancy CCG Catalyst, told the publication that businesses now compare their bank's treasury tools with the other software they use, and that the near-term benefit would go mainly to commercially focused banks with a few billion dollars in assets.
