MRV Banks Selects Kobalt Labs to Scale Compliance Across Its Growing Fintech Partnership Portfolio

Missouri community bank will run fintech partner due diligence, monitoring, and marketing compliance through Kobalt as its lending and deposit portfolio grows.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, October 5, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Kobalt Labs, the AI native risk and compliance platform for financial institutions, today announced that MRV Banks has selected Kobalt to power compliance operations across its fintech partnership program.

MRV Banks, a roughly $860 million bank with 5 Missouri branches, manages multiple fintech partnerships and is adding new deposit partners through Treasury Prime. Its growing program was stretching processes built around manual reviews: partner documents and approvals lived in separate systems, contract deadlines were tracked in spreadsheets without automated reminders, and individual fintech risk assessments had yet to be fully developed.

Compliance staff spent hours reviewing 10–30 page policies and procedures for gaps, while lending compliance checks, including adverse action notices and periodic statements, were also performed by hand. With more partners and higher marketing review volumes ahead, MRV needed to expand its capacity without adding staff at the same rate.

“We built this compliance program from scratch and reached a point where the manual work was limiting how fast we could grow,” said Robert Lawrence, President of MRV Connect. “The compliance talent we need is hard to find, and hiring another person every time we add a partner is not a scalable answer. Kobalt changes that equation.”

In its evaluation, MRV found that Kobalt could enable nearly 3x the throughput per compliance staff member, allowing the bank to support more fintech partners with its existing team.

From Onboarding to Ongoing Monitoring

Kobalt will provide MRV Banks with a single platform to manage fintech partner compliance across the full lifecycle, from initial due diligence and risk assessment to ongoing monitoring and marketing review. Instead of moving between separate systems for document intake, contract tracking, and assessments, MRV’s team will work from one environment where evidence is extracted, documentation gaps are surfaced, and reviews are already substantively underway.

MRV Banks’ decision reflects a broader challenge facing community banks as fintech partnership programs become larger and more complex. Each new relationship brings additional oversight responsibilities, while the specialized compliance expertise required to manage them remains difficult to scale. By investing in technology to expand the capacity of its existing team, MRV is building the compliance infrastructure to support the next stage of its fintech business.

MRV Banks joins financial institutions including MVB Bank, Republic Bank of Chicago, Emprise Bank, and Stearns Bank that have selected Kobalt to bring greater structure, consistency, and efficiency to their risk and compliance operations.

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About MRV Banks

MRV Banks is a community bank headquartered in Sainte Genevieve, Missouri, with approximately $860 million in assets. Founded in 2007, MRV Banks has grown to five branches across Missouri and has been recognized as one of the top performing community banks in the nation by CB Resource, ranking third among banks in its asset tier. Through its fintech partnership program, MRV Banks works with fintech companies to deliver credit, lending, and deposit products to customers nationwide. Learn more at mrvbanks.com.

About Kobalt Labs

Kobalt Labs is the AI native risk and compliance platform built for financial institutions. Kobalt automates the manual work in third-party risk management and fintech partner compliance by extracting critical evidence from documentation, identifying control gaps, and generating risk assessments within minutes. Kobalt delivers the consistency, speed, and audit-ready documentation that manual processes cannot match. Learn more at kobaltlabs.com.

Ashi Agrawal
Kobalt Labs
ashi@kobaltlabs.com