Midwest Moxie: Helping customers who hate their banks

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Cale Johnston talks through two connected problems in banking on this episode of Midwest Moxie: why switching accounts is still painful, and why he thinks the same “switching” concept is even more valuable for small businesses than for consumers.

He starts with ClickSwitch, the Minneapolis fintech he founded after hearing bank customers complain that it was hard to get people to switch banks. In his telling, opening an account had become fast, but actually moving a customer’s financial life wasn’t, especially re-pointing direct deposit and switching recurring payments away from the old account. 

A big part of ClickSwitch’s growth, he says, came from a go-to-market loop where banks marketed the product as a competitive differentiator (“easiest bank to switch to”), pushing competitors in the same market to adopt it too. He says ClickSwitch ultimately scaled to “over 600 financial institutions” in “all 50 states” by the time it was acquired by Q2 Holdings in 2021. 

The emotional whiplash afterward - expecting relief, but instead feeling a loss of identity and “founders guilt,” alongside the abrupt changes imposed on employees in an acquisition. He describes needing to “reinvent” himself after eight years of being defined by the company, and says he spent time “soul searching” before deciding he was ready for “round two.”

That “round two” is Onsetto, founded in July 2025 and based in Minneapolis. He says the company is built with pilot banks and targets “commercial account switching”: switching a small business bank relationship, which he claims can take “90 days up to a year,” and compressing that into “minutes.” He argues business switching is inherently more complex than consumer switching because more than one person is involved. 

Finally, Johnston describes what he’d do differently raising money this time: he says ClickSwitch fundraising was slow because he was a young, first-time fintech founder without the expected background. He says he now intends to be more strategic about which investors he takes and links poor investor fit to “founder fatigue” and being ready to sell. 

He also explains why he thinks Onsetto has more potential than ClickSwitch: commercial switching can drive larger deposits for banks, which he believes supports a higher SaaS revenue model and clearer ROI, and he points to heightened attention on commercial deposits as the  “right time, right place” context for the product.