Aven cofounder and CEO Sadi Khan says credit unions are structurally set up to lower people’s borrowing costs.
Cody Pickens for Forbes
In an apparently unprecedented move, Sadi Khan, the 40-year-old CEO and cofounder of fintech startup Aven, says he and the company are donating “a few million dollars” to launch a new federal credit union. While the not-for-profit credit union will be independent, Khan hopes it will offer Aven products to its members and will advance his stated goal of lowering borrowing costs, particularly for homeowners.
Aven, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, offers credit cards grafted onto home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) of up to $400,000. The new financial institution it’s sponsoring, Haven FCU, will be based in Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara. Khan expects Haven to start offering digital banking products this year and to open a physical location over the next 18 months. He says the credit union’s management team will decide how many branches it opens.
Founded in 2019, Aven reached a $2 billion valuation last year. It has issued $4 billion in loans and has more than 75,000 customers. Aven targets consumers with prime and super prime FICO scores that are usually above 700.
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Credit unions are a unique type of financial institution because they’re not-for-profit and are owned by their customers (members). Their interest rates on loans–especially auto loans–and fees on credit cards are often among the lowest in the U.S. since credit unions are not incentivized to maximize profits and don’t have to pay federal income taxes. “The credit union is a very Americana object,” Khan says. “It really represents a by-the-people, for-the-people institution, which has always resonated with me.”
Khan was born in Bangladesh and raised in Toronto, and after he graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2008, his first bank account was at First Tech Credit Union. First Tech accepts as members employees of many tech companies, including Microsoft, where Khan worked for a few years after college. While most traditional banks “were unable to underwrite me as a young immigrant without any credit history in the United States,” First Tech used Khan’s Microsoft employment letter to open his account.
Khan first started working on Haven’s application for a de novo (new) federal credit union banking charter back in 2023. After a rigorous process that included Haven providing its business plans, marketing plans and financial projections and undergoing stress-testing in areas like interest rate risk, liquidity and credit risk, it finally got approved in December 2025. It was one of only three credit union charters granted last year. The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), a federal government agency, grants charters and insures credit union members’ deposits for up to $250,000, just like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) does with for-profit banks.
Haven will have its own CEO and management team separate from Aven. Khan and another Aven employee will sit on Haven’s five-person board of directors. Chris Tissue, who is chief operating officer at credit union consulting firm CUCollaborate, will be the board’s chairperson.
Legally, every credit union must define a niche or “common bond” that unites the consumers it accepts as members. Those common bonds are often based on someone’s employer, profession, church or place of residence.
Haven’s field of membership includes four groups. One is a geographic area of 300,000 “underserved” people it has chosen in California’s Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, where 71% of residents are considered low-income by the Census Bureau. Forty-one percent of the residents in this region are Hispanic, 28% are Asian and 84% rent their homes.
The second and third groups are members and employees of a California-based homeowners association and the Community Impact Fund, which provides charitable, 0% interest loans to employees facing emergencies. Both organizations have national memberships, so if someone in Ohio wants to join Haven to buy its financial products, which will be sold online and in person at its Santa Clara branch, she can become a member of either of those two organizations to gain eligibility. Aven’s 80 employees can join Haven too.
The new credit union will only sell Aven’s products like its credit cards or personal loans if Haven’s management determines they’re “best-in-class,” Khan insists. How can consumers be sure that Haven will put its own members’ interests first, instead of prioritizing Aven’s business? Haven board chair Chris Tissue points to a few factors. He says the rigorous charter-approval process helps weed out people who aren’t dedicated to the credit union business model and that credit unions have conflict-of-interest policies and procedures that regulators periodically examine them on. He adds that usually after a year, a credit union’s board seats start going up for election, and every member of a credit union, regardless of bank account size, has an equal vote. That means Haven’s customers could vote out a board member if they wanted to.
Khan says his top priority is that “the credit union makes the best decisions for serving homeowners in America. And if that happens to be product A versus product B, the credit union should make that decision independently and without bias.”
For Aven, beyond potentially finding a new place to sell its products, another way the startup could benefit from a partnership with Haven and other credit unions is that the institutions could eventually help Aven lower its costs for funding consumer loans. Since Aven doesn’t have its own bank charter, it partners with Washington state-based Coastal Community Bank to issue consumer loans and funds them by paying banks and private credit firms for access to investment capital. Fintech lender Upgrade, led by LendingClub founder Renaud Laplanche, has for years sold its loans to credit unions, a strategy that Laplanche says helps reduce costs because credit unions have lower investment-return thresholds than banks. Last year, Upgrade issued $10 billion in loans, Laplanche says, about 20% of which were bought by credit unions.
Khan thinks Upgrade has done “a great job with developing a strategy of relationships with credit unions.” He says he hopes to work with credit unions “in a similar vein” and that the investment in Haven will be one of many that Aven makes in credit unions. “We think credit unions are really powerful pieces of infrastructure for helping Americans get to a lower cost of capital.”
Yet the CEO says the goal of starting a credit union isn’t to lower Aven’s funding costs or to find an alternative to a bank charter. The company “already has a robust capital markets strategy” that includes a “AAA-rated securitization program that does not depend or rely on Haven FCU,” says Aven spokesperson Rick Chen. Khan adds that, while Aven may try to get its own bank charter in the future, it has no interest currently. “The private credit markets have grown to a point where the cost of capital is actually quite efficient.”