Synctera’s journey to date

When you climb a mountain, you focus on the path ahead. But it’s just as important to look back and appreciate how far you’ve come.

In the tech and software sector this year, we’ve all navigated uncharted trails, steep climbs, and even stared down some double black diamond runs that look pretty intimidating. 

But with any challenge, it’s always easier when you have a group of brave, smart, and excited people ready to help you explore new frontiers together.

For us at Synctera, the team spent 2022 charting a ton of new territory in the FinTech space. As I type this, we’re adding a host of new products, features, and developer experiences to our innovative Banking as a Service (BaaS) platform. 

The exciting part of today versus a year ago is watching the next wave of mission-driven FinTechs building with us that will brighten financial futures for people worldwide.

The best part? We, the team, and our FinTech partners just barely started the climb.

Read on to get our 2022 highlights.

Key highlights from our ongoing climb

Reflecting over the past year, we’ve had many positive signals that show how our fast and easy developer experience is helping builders. 

We spent the year helping establish resilient partnerships between FinTechs and sponsor banks in a dynamic regulatory environment for FinTechs, and are proud to support a wide range of product use cases that now include new ventures into lending and credit. 

Here are highlights from our journey:

• We built a new platform to help banks manage compliance and reconciliation for new and existing FinTechs that today powers over 2.3 million consumers cards and accounts, with information stored safely in our PCI certified data vault and ledger.

• We’ve processed over 30+ million transactions to date. And all of that money and transaction velocity is increasing (it will probably be more by the time this blog hits our site).

• On our own company’s revenue specifically: Our revenue increased over 20x from Q4 2021 through Q4 2022. 2,082% YoY growth, to be precise.

• Our FinTech customers and sponsor bank partners have run over 55+ million API calls in our platform to open bank accounts, issue debit cards, and more.

• More than 100 innovative FinTech ideas  are currently being built, tested, and launched with our platform, including fast-growing scale-ups like Players Health, Float, and others. This includes both signed partners and early integrators testing their ideas with t-minus10 (more in the next section about what that is).

• Developers can now create and test with live debit cards in under 5 minutes - faster than any of our BaaS competitors.

• We’ve saved “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in compliance and fraud costs for our FinTech customers with our operational and compliance support program called Ground Control.‍

• Our Product and Engineering team shipped over 100 new BaaS products and features, giving companies the banking building blocks they need to make their unique FinTech or embedded banking idea a reality.* 

• New sponsor bank partners continue to join the Synctera platform, and we are proud to have 10 banks available to partner with FinTechs - the most diverse set of BaaS players operating in the market today. Our partners enable us to support even more diverse FinTech ideas and products.** 

Navigating the ascent

Our “peak” in BaaS is to: 

• Be the fastest, easiest, and safest way for companies to build a FinTech app or embedded banking product
• Help FinTechs form a resilient partnership with a sponsor bank partner
• Empower FinTechs to launch their products into the hands of the people they’re trying to help 

In order to reach that peak, we anchored 2022 on building products that will help innovators navigate common FinTech obstacles they’ll face when they start their own climbs: 

1. Building and testing with banking and ledger technology
2. Standing up compliance protocols and banking operational support
3. Creating a unique UX that reflects their brand and delivers a fantastic customer experience
4. Expanding financial products beyond the basic building blocks like accounts and debit cards

In 2022 we put a lot of work into streamlining the FinTech journey. Here’s a selection of things we're really proud of:

• Building and testing banking technology: Early in the year, we launched t-minus10, as in, 10 steps to countdown before you can launch your FinTech idea. t-minus10 is a live testing environment where developers test cards and money movement, with real money and a real bank, and get access to all of the core FinTech items they’ll need on their build journey.

• Fast connections to sponsor banks: We rolled out a bank matching process with hands-on support to help FinTechs connect with a sponsor bank and launch in as little as six weeks from contract signing. The benefit? FinTechs can get direct feedback from potential sponsor banks as they build, establishing strong relationships that will scale.

• Compliance and banking operational support: In the summer, we launched our banking operations and compliance support with Ground Control. Ground Control is a program that provides free end-to-end banking and compliance operational support for the first six months of a FinTechs' journey.

• Fostering direct connections between banks <> FinTechs with intelligent tech: One of our clear differentiators from other BaaS providers is Synctera Cases - case management platform technology that helps streamline communications and establish better direct connections and communications between bank and FinTech partners. We’re adding more to this feature set to speed up and simplify the experience of our ecosystem. But it’s clear that having a structured dialog and plan is helping folks build faster and safer - whether you're an early startup building something super new or an established company looking to build financial services at a non-financial company. 

• Front-end code that’s easy to customize: In the fall, we unlocked access to our free, white label app codebase called Synctera Starter Apps. Developers can now save up to 300+ hours building end-to-end mobile banking experiences and apps for customers that are full-featured and work out-of-the-box with the Synctera platform. Check out $pace, the demo version of the Synctera Starter App for retail banking (it’s designed to be viewed on mobile), then sign up for a Synctera account to start exploring our APIs. 

• Need help on where your FinTech journey will begin? Start with our new Use Case Explorer - the innovative new blueprint that helps builders discover their FinTech use case and make it reality in a few minutes. With the Synctera Use Case Explorer, watch Synctera's APIs come alive and connect with the Synctera Starter App for retail banking (Editor’s note: we have yet to see anyone else do this in BaaS).

• Expanding into credit: In the last few months, we’ve expanded our banking, debit card, and payments solutions to include Credit products, allowing builders to leverage Lines of Credit and Smart Charge Cards. Now, we can help you build a card product that can be customized to provide more rewards to customers funded by significantly higher earned interchange than a debit card.

Looking up at the mountain

We founded Synctera so FinTechs could unlock better access to financial services for people and ultimately, increase human potential and happiness. 

But there’s still work to be done.

Today, over 42% of adult Americans can’t get access to reasonable interest rates due to no credit or low credit. Underbanked people are forced to turn to payday loans, high-fee check cashing services, and other financial strainers that impact financial stability and well-being.

Even looking at the macro level, many of these financial issues reach increasing levels of severity, where in many places it’s super difficult to even get a bank or checking account.

There are so many amazing FinTech ideas and solutions out there waiting to get built that will help underserved and under-resourced communities in the world. And our job at Synctera is to not only help builders find answers to these complex financial problems, but quickly create solutions to fix them.

Less than two years ago that was the vision. Every day, that reality only becomes more and more real. 

All of this progress is made possible by our community set of people and partners that have believed in us and committed their time, mindpower, energy, and money to help us:

• Our supportive investors and board: Diagram Ventures, Fin Capital, Gaingels, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mastercard, SciFi Ventures, Scribble Ventures, and many other folks. 
• Our sponsor bank partners: Lineage, Thread, Veritex, Regent, MSB, Emigrant, Coastal, BankProv, Pacific West Bank, and Liberty Bank. 
• Our fabulous banking, technology and services partners: Arroweye, CheckAlt, Feedzai, Finicity, Marqeta, Mastercard, Middesk, MX, Plaid, Socure, Praxent, Intelliware, Moven among a growing list of others ready to help Fintechs.
• Our FinTech customers (too many to count here).
• And most importantly, our 100+ fantastic Synctera team members.

We’re helping more and more people, and we couldn’t do it without all of you. 

We’re working hard on our 2023 plans. You can check them out on the roadmap here, and there’s still some other really exciting stuff in the works we can’t share quite yet. 

That’s further up the mountain.

But if you’re ready to build, test, and launch your FinTech idea, there’s never been a better time than now.

Tx,

P (on behalf of the whole Synctera team)

<div class="rt-btn-wrap"><a href="https://synctera.com/contact-us" class="button yellow w-button">Schedule time with me</a></div>

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_{*You can read all about our new products via the Monthly Changelog on the Synctera Blog or explore Synctera Developer Site} 

_{**More exciting news on that front coming soon ;)}