VersaBank is a Canadian Schedule I chartered bank that has successfully leveraged its commitment to innovation to develop an efficient and effective technology-driven business-to-business banking business model that has facilitated VersaBank’s becoming one of the world’s first fully digital financial institutions. In our digital banking operations, we conduct our deposit gathering and loan origination activities predominantly through technology-enabled electronic deposit and lending solutions for financial intermediaries that we believe enable these intermediaries to excel in their core businesses. We seek to profitably and prudently address underserved segments of the Canadian and U.S. financial service markets by developing and providing innovative, technology-based deposit taking and lending solutions that enable lower-cost funding and lower-risk lending than we could otherwise achieve, in the pursuit of attractive risk-adjusted returns.
Our lending business has a particular focus on point-of-sale financing. We have grown our point-of-sale loan and lease portfolio in Canada to U.S.$918 million as of July 31, 2021 by addressing an unmet market need and believe the opportunity exists to address a similar unmet need in the United States, in which the market is estimated to grow to U.S.$1.8 trillion.1 Through our wholly owned subsidiary, Washington, D.C.-based DRT Cyber, Inc, we are leveraging our internally-developed IT security software and capabilities to diversify our sources of revenue and pursue what we believe are significant opportunities to offer innovative cybersecurity products and solutions designed to address the rapidly growing volume of cyber threats constantly challenging financial institutions, multi-national corporations and government entities. We believe that this combination of innovative, technology-enabled, specialty banking products and services positions VersaBank as a market-leading fully-digital bank serving clients holding or otherwise transacting in digital assets.
Our History and Growth through Innovation
We have been pursuing our strategy of becoming a model for digital banking for nearly three decades. In 1993, our founder and CEO, David Taylor, together with a syndicate of investors, purchased Pacific & Western Trust in furtherance of their vision of a fully-digital financial institution. In 2002, Pacific & Western Trust was granted a Canadian Schedule I banking license, which, at the time, was the first Canadian Schedule I banking license granted in the preceding 18 years.
By 2010, we launched our point-of-sale financing business in Canada, which provided the opportunity for us to make available more efficient financing solutions to consumers, via our origination partners in what we believed was a rapidly expanding market. We continued to seek and identify opportunities to expand our lending platform, and in 2012 we launched our insolvency professional deposit business. Following this offering, we intend to continue pursuing other opportunities to expand our lending platform, including potentially expanding our point-of-sale financing business into the U.S.
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VersaBank is a Canadian Schedule I chartered bank that has successfully leveraged its commitment to innovation to develop an efficient and effective technology-driven business-to-business banking business model that has facilitated VersaBank’s becoming one of the world’s first fully digital financial institutions. In our digital banking operations, we conduct our deposit gathering and loan origination activities predominantly through technology-enabled electronic deposit More
