In US society, 66% of everyday consumers live paycheck to paycheck, with 35% stating that they would need to make US$50,000 a year to feel financially secure and 44% citing US$100,000.
Among those considering themselves living paycheck to paycheck, financial pressures include inflation (69%), lack of savings (59%), rising interest rates (28%), credit card debt (33%), and medical bills (28%).
Varo Bank’s strategic objective is to dismantle these systemic barriers, including traditional legacy bank fees and punitive overdraft models, by engineering product loops, deposit, spend, borrow, build and save, that aligns the bank's ultimate success with its customers' personal upward mobility.
“For us, compliance and programs like the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) are not bureaucratic 'check-the-box' requirements; they are a direct extension of our core corporate DNA,” says Riva Bobrowsky, Chief Procurement Officer at Varo Bank.
Responsible for overseeing Varo Bank’s end-to-end procurement lifecycle and vendor governance, Riva’s primary objective is to ensure that as America's first all-digital, nationally chartered bank, our external vendor ecosystem operates with the same velocity, security and innovation as our internal technology stacks.
But of course, this is something that Riva doesn’t do alone. “Procurement at Varo is fundamentally a team sport, “ says Riva, “My team works in lockstep with our Legal, Compliance, Privacy, Technology and the various business requestors, and we collaborate very closely with our Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) team to ensure that procurement fully supports and champions Varo’s risk program requirements.”
Procurement as a first line of defence
When Riva joined Varo Bank in 2019, the organisation was operating under a radically different paradigm.
“We were essentially a fast-moving fintech startup operating without an independent banking charter. Procurement at that stage matched the organisational infancy; it was fully manual, highly decentralised and dependent on static spreadsheets, paper-pushing and ad-hoc email tracking,” explains Riva.
The true watershed moment happened in August 2020, when Varo officially received its national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
“We transitioned overnight from a fintech startup to a nationally regulated financial institution. This evolution fundamentally redefined my role and the entire procurement footprint,” says Riva.
As the bank scaled, its procurement had to transform into a high-functioning first line of defence. “Working hand-in-hand with our specialised internal partners, we digitised our core operations, established rigorous baselines and automated contract workflows through our partnership with Leah.”
The collaborative partnership behind Leah
A vital technology partner of Varo Bank is ContactPodAI for its AI platform Leah.
“We utilise Leah as part of our broader toolkit to execute the heavy lifting of contract management. Specifically automated redlining, extracting key contract provisions, running comprehensive portfolio reporting and validating agreement end dates,” says Riva.
She continues: “A critical way we partner with Leah is at the absolute infancy of our third-party relationships, long before any definitive commercial agreements are signed. Our digital perimeter relies heavily on getting NDAs successfully negotiated, approved and queried through Leah's repository chatbots before we launch into formal proofs of concept. This ensures that baseline parameters are locked down immediately.”
In a digital-first banking environment, partnerships are essential. As a chartered digital institution, delivering an entire financial ecosystem requires an interconnected network of third-party capabilities. “Selecting the right partners, negotiating balanced agreements based on risk and incentivising the right behaviour is how we deliver value without sacrificing our regulatory integrity,” says Riva.
Securing its data and financial assets entirely in the cloud, Varo Bank’s perimeter is only as secure as our weakest third-party link. Therefore, procurement, contract management and vendor management cannot be a back-office administrative checkpoint.
“We are fundamentally the gatekeeper and the first line of defense, which is why everything starts with getting NDAs successfully negotiated and approved at the absolute infancy of any relationship,” explains Riva.
She adds: “Our digital perimeter allows us to operate with extreme efficiency.”
With a centralised repository, Varo can easily search for existing, active NDAs across the organisation, eliminating the time-wasting administrative burden of re-signing an agreement if an active one already exists.
Additionally, before initiating a Proof of Concept (POC) or exchanging a single byte of exploratory data, Varo Bank can query the active document directly in the repository using the natural-language AI chatbot in Leah.
“This gives us immediate validation that we have the exact legal coverage required for the specific types of data to be shared, ensuring our data security guardrails are active and aligned with Varo's risk posture before any formal engagement takes place,” says Riva.
“We reject the old stereotype of procurement acting as a bureaucratic 'black hole' where contracts go to slow down,” she adds.
Instead, Varo Bank views itself as a business enabler and a proactive first line of defence, aligning with Varo Bank’s mission of financial inclusion by ensuring its external ecosystem is just as efficient and fair as its customer-facing products.
“By maintaining a lean, automated procurement function powered by AI, we help drive massive operational cost efficiencies. Those structural savings allow Varo to offer fee-free checking accounts, high-yield savings and credit-building tools like Varo Believe to everyday Americans,” Riva explains.
“Every time we negotiate a fairer agreement, complete a live monthly training with a new business line or streamline an integration timeline, we are directly supporting our customers' upward financial mobility.”
The need for speed vs. risk management
“This is the ultimate balancing act of modern financial technology,” says Riva, “If procurement takes six months to clear a vendor, we lose our fintech edge and speed-to-market. But if we bypass guardrails to move fast, we compromise our national bank charter and violate strict regulatory mandates.”
Varo Bank balances this tension through intelligent tiering and automated parallel workflows. Instead of treating a low-risk marketing tool the same way we treat a critical core-banking API, Varo Bank's system dynamically tiers vendors based on their data access and operational criticality.
“For our critical partners, we achieve speed through concurrency. While our AI tools are helping us redline agreements and extract key provisions, our internal partner teams, such as Privacy and InfoSec, are simultaneously vetting financial health and information security controls,” explains Riva.
Varo Bank also collaborates very closely with the Third-Party Risk Management team, aligning its front-end contracting velocity to flawlessly support the broader interagency risk compliance program.
“By compressing the time it takes to review documents, validate end dates, and generate reports, we remove the administrative drag. This allows our human experts to spend their time on high-value tasks: creative contracting, balancing risk and building fair, long-term partnerships,” says Riva.
Transforming its procurement into a 'modern, tech-enabled' function required a complete architectural shift from its manual past.
Today, Varo Bank’s operational core is powered by an advanced ecosystem of automated and intelligent software.
“While we maintain a strategic partnership with the developers of Leah, it is important to note that Leah is not the only AI tool I use to understand macro changes in our industry or to review complex contracts. We purposefully leverage a broader array of AI technologies to synthesise market shifts and break down multi-layered agreements,” explains Riva.
“However, we are very clear that AI is just a tool; human oversight is always required to guide, prompt and validate its direction,” notes Riva.
By utilising these AI capabilities to automate baseline legal and operational workflows, Varo Bank has successfully shifted its human capital away from administrative tracking.
“This has laid the digital foundation for our next major milestone: exploring how Agentic AI can eventually help us connect disparate data loops, while ensuring our human specialists remain the strategic orchestrators of the system.”
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Riva Bobrowsky
Chief Procurement Officer at Varo Bank