For a while, Cale Johnston thought he was done with fintech.

After building ClickSWITCH into one of Minnesota’s better-known banking software success stories and selling the company to Austin-based Q2 Holdings in 2021, Johnston stayed on for two years before leaving the company. He didn’t expect to return to the industry that had defined much of his entrepreneurial career.

Instead, Johnston took a swing at the fast-moving world of NCAA’s Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) payment ecosystem.

He founded Roy, a platform designed to connect college sports fans with athletes through NIL. But the business quickly became difficult to navigate as the rules surrounding NIL continued shifting.

“It was really tough,” Johnston says. “We pivoted out of it because the goalpost kept moving.”

Johnston believes Roy entered the market too early, before the infrastructure and long-term economics of NIL had stabilized. Without the time or capital required to continue investing in Roy, Johnston returned to familiar territory, and investors appear eager to follow him.

His new Minneapolis-based fintech startup, Onsetto, launched in 2025 and has already completed two seed funding rounds in 2026 totaling roughly $11.5 million. The company, which also has a tech office in Columbus, Ohio, currently employs 20 people, though Johnston says he hopes to double his staff by the end of the year and grow to 100 banks under contract.

Since last year, Onsetto has signed more than 30 financial institutions, most of them community banks.

From Consumer to Business

Onsetto is tackling a problem Johnston says the banking industry has never fully solved: moving a business relationship from one financial institution to another—but doing so quickly.

“This time around, there’s a much larger addressable market,” Johnston says when asked about why he got back into the fintech industry.

At ClickSWITCH, the focus was consumer banking. When a customer opened a new account, banks used ClickSWITCH’s software to automatically switch over customers’ direct deposits and recurring payments to the new institution.

Business banking is significantly more complicated.

“When we have to migrate a business account, that one business could have $100 million in deposits,” Johnston explains. “They’ve got to move over accounts receivable systems, vendors, and relationships.”

Today, much of that process remains manual. Banks often rely on spreadsheets and internal workflows to analyze a company’s cash flow, treasury services, account receivables, and payment infrastructure before trying to transition the relationship.

“They’re trying to create a one-to-one match internally,” Johnston says.

Onsetto uses AI models to analyze a business customer’s banking relationships and help financial institutions understand what it would take to win and retain that business. Bankers can upload statements and financial information into the platform, which then forecasts how the relationship could impact the bank if acquired.

“As a consumer, you go into ChatGPT or OpenAI and give it a prompt and it responds,” Johnston says. “We want to bring that type of interface to bankers.”

The idea, he says, is to allow banks to ask questions such as: What products would incentivize this business to move? How valuable is the full relationship? What treasury services would need to transfer?

Once a business and bank agree to begin a relationship, Onsetto then automates the migration itself.

Onsetto Enters a Dynamic Banking Industry

Johnston points to acquisitions such as Old National Bancorp’s acquisition of St. Paul-based Bremer Financial Corporation as an example of where tools like Onsetto could become vital.

“When Old National buys Bremer, the business relationships are with Bremer,” Johnston says, “but they have to transition to Old National Bank. If Old National has a tool like Onsetto, you could easily migrate all those business accounts and retain them.”

That retention piece is critical, he adds.

Right now, banks often compete for businesses through lower rates or attractive lending offers. But even after a business accepts a loan, its core operating accounts (payroll, payables, and receivables) frequently remain elsewhere.

“That’s problematic for the bank because they are just lending, but the deposits are living at a different bank,” Johnston says. “So, it doesn’t work.”

Onsetto’s broader vision is to dramatically reduce the friction involved in moving business banking relationships. Today, Johnston says the process can take anywhere from 90 days to a full year. He believes Onsetto can eventually reduce that timeline to essentially Day One.

“I think we’re going to start living in a world where businesses can move freely,” he says.

What changed between ClickSWITCH’s early days and now, Johnston adds, is the rapid advancement of AI automation tools. He believes the technology has finally reached the point where banks no longer need nearly as much human intervention to onboard and transition customers.

“You can build full-service automation through AI agents and deploy those to get them moved over,” he says.