The Story of Orum: Building the Future of Money Movement

Sometimes the biggest innovations start with the smallest observations. For Orum founder Stephany Kirkpatrick, it began with a pattern she noticed as a financial planner: even the best financial advice often went unheeded because people feared losing access to their money in emergencies.

This insight touched on a fundamental disconnect in modern finance. As Stephany explains, “You’re in San Francisco, I’m in New York right now. We could get a massage on demand in our houses in under an hour. If we want to get our money from point A to point B, we’re talking about five to seven days without a product like what Orum has.”

The journey from observation to innovation wasn’t straightforward. Stephany’s background as a financial planner led her to explore how technology could scale financial advice. At LearnVest, an early fintech startup, she saw the potential of technology to reach more households. After selling to Northwestern Mutual, she helped scale the technology to reach 6.5 million households.

But even that wasn’t enough. As Stephany recalls, “I said, that’s still not enough. So I want to be at the intersection of innovating around the actual infrastructure that can touch 250,000,000 American households and wallets.”

This ambition led to a crucial insight: many financial products we take for granted today exist primarily because of infrastructure limitations. As Stephany notes, “if what we’re building at Orum had existed a decade ago, you would have never built Venmo, which is probably one of the most ubiquitous financial services products we all consume.”

Orum emerged as the solution: a single API integration for instant payouts. Through their platform, companies can deliver payouts across multiple payment rails – RTP, ACH, Same-day ACH, and more. As Stephany explains, “We’re super excited to be launched partners with Fed now, which is going to be yet another real time growth settlement framework.”

The impact goes beyond just moving money faster. It’s about enabling entirely new categories of financial services. This is particularly evident in how Orum’s customers are using the platform. They span from “some of the largest financial services providers. Think like Fidelity, e Money, the biggest bank in the world is a partner of ours, all the way down to some of the most innovative gaming, crypto, new services platforms that are popping up.”

Looking to the future, Stephany’s vision extends far beyond instant payments. “Our vision is to power a better financial system where everyone has the freedom to build to their potential,” she explains. “We think that we’re building the scaffolding required to rethink today’s existing constraints and empower real change in the way that financial system works.”

This isn’t just about technology – it’s about enabling economic empowerment. As the daughter of an immigrant who grew up with very little, Stephany has always been driven by “closing the wealth gap and really helping people who have less figure out how they can apply dollars to have more.”

The future Orum envisions is one where financial access isn’t constrained by socioeconomic status. As Stephany puts it, “We want to be always that first phone call that you make when you’re thinking about building a company and you know you’re going to do payouts or you’re going to do money movement because everything else that you’re building should go faster as a result of working with a partner like Orum.”

In a world where we can summon nearly anything on demand, the ability to move money shouldn’t be the limiting factor in financial innovation. That’s the future Orum is building – one API at a time.