Vram Ismaliyan spent nearly 14 years at Wells Fargo, selling payment infrastructure strategies to Fortune 500 companies. Despite being a top performer in the payments division, he felt constantly bogged down by the bank’s antiquated technology.
“I spent at least five to 10 hours preparing for customer meetings,” he told TechCrunch. “I had to work through 10 or 15 different systems to gather information, make sense of it, and then put it into a PowerPoint.”
Like his colleague, Kevin Miyamoto also struggled with Wells Fargo’s tech. Despite managing $900 billion in annual client payments, he managed his entire portfolio of accounts with Excel spreadsheets instead of a proper CRM.
Frustrated by the inefficient tech tools at Wells Fargo, Ismaliyan and Miyamoto teamed up in 2021 to build Identifee, a software platform designed specifically for commercial bankers with all the capabilities they wished they had. The company is a Top 20 finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
Because they had personally grappled with outdated tech at one of the nation’s largest banks, Ismaliyan and Miyamoto recognized that the tech inefficiencies are even more severe at smaller financial institutions.
“If you want to pull any information on your customer, you might have to log in to 10 separate systems, download the data that’s all different into Excel, to then start to do analysis,” Miyamoto said. “It takes forever.”
Identifee is designed to boost banker productivity by combining the functionality of multiple, fragmented internal systems into a single platform.
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The startup’s platform is built on several modular systems that clients 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 generating reports and presentations.
“If you’re a community bank, you could do what 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 those things, but in one easy platform.”
Some of Identifee’s modules are also powered by AI. For instance, the startup’s AI agent can help fill out request for proposals (RFPs) forms in accordance with each bank’s compliance and risk policies.
Ismaliyan and Miyamoto claim Identifee is the only platform built specifically for commercial banks and credit unions, a combined U.S. market segment estimated to exceed 8,800 institutions.
Identifee has already won the trust of the banking sector, signing up over 170 clients, including major 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 aren’t tackling commercial banking tech inefficiencies, Miyamoto responded: “There are tons of people familiar with [this problem], but those people don’t start companies like Vram and I did.”
If you want to learn more about Identifee from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of others, hearing their pitches, and listening to guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27 to 29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.
