We’re currently planning and shipping our latest Banking as a Service (BaaS) products to help FinTech builders get ready for 2023. Visit our roadmap in our Learning Center to see what we're working on right now.

After talking with our growing community of developers and integrators building their ideas in our guided workspace, we’ve uncovered some interesting insights.

For example, check out our latest poll of over 100+ FinTech influencers and stakeholders, where nearly half of the respondents believe successful FinTechs in 2023 (and beyond) are the ones who will focus on their “customer experiences and brand.”

So - how does that materialize in a Banking as a Service product to help builders?

‍Intuitive and delightful apps for customers: apps that match your brand’s tone, vision, and mission, and help people solve their problems you’re trying to fix. That’s why I’m excited to introduce…

Synctera’s Starter Apps for Banking: Helping developers quickly build and launch intuitive and branded experiences

If you’re building a FinTech app or an embedded banking product today, you are likely aiming to meet a banking or payments-related need for your well-defined market segment– people whose wants, needs, and requirements you understand deeply. 

And with many FinTech influencers in the space now heavily focusing on building their own brands, user experiences, and intuitive designs, there’s a high likelihood you’re planning on delivering your FinTech product or service through a mobile app that is beautiful and easy to use.

How to build such an app? If you’re a startup, you might not yet have a tech team. If your company is larger and more established, internal technical resources can be hard to come by or require months of advance notice. But even if you do have an engineering team that is able to help you, should they be spending time building a banking app?

At Synctera, our opinion is that no, you should not build a banking app in house. Why not? Because Synctera already built it!

Earlier this month, we announced the first Synctera Starter App, which you can use to build an end-to-end mobile banking experience for your retail customers. 

The app works with iOS, Android, mobile web, and is pre-wired out of the box with the Synctera platform, so your customers can engage in a full set of banking activities, all powered by Synctera’s APIs. With our Start App, customers can:

• Onboard quickly, undergoing standard and advanced Know Your Customer (KYC) checks
• Open checking and savings accounts, issue virtual and/or physical debit cards
• Create Lines of Credit
• Link external accounts
• Move money via ACH, wire, card transfers, and internal transfers
• And a lot more

The best part? We provide this app for free to people building with Synctera.

Why we built the first Synctera Starter App

Synctera launched our Banking as a Service (BaaS) platform in 2020, offering one set of easy to use APIs for all the tech services startups and larger companies need to build banking. 

We also have relationships with the largest number of sponsor bank partners in the market, giving our clients the best chance of finding a compatible bank partner faster than they would on their own.

Since we launched, we’ve continually sought to make our BaaS platform more approachable while remaining flexible enough to support complex use cases.

We’ve introduced amazing new tools for developers, a robust Console UI where FinTechs can manage their bank partnerships and much more, and comprehensive compliance and operational support. 

Our clients still wanted one thing, however: help with building their actual app. 

They were often light on technical resources, and their engineering teams were not excited to rebuild the standard functionality that underlies most banking apps. They instead wanted to focus time and resources on product differentiators that would help them win customers, whether that be a customization layered on top of a standard functionality (e.g. putting QR codes on top of standard bank account functionality to create a closed loop QR code-based payment option) or a much-needed product integration (e.g. a wealth management startup wanted to focus their resources on integrating with a stock trading app, not on building basic banking functionality). 

Over time, we witnessed many customers build mobile banking apps from scratch: 

• Designing the same flows, identifying the same corner cases
• Reducing the same friction during KYC and customer onboarding
• Mitigating the usual pitfalls around KYC

I’m not going to sugarcoat it -  It was pretty excruciating to watch. So after this year, we were giving builders tips from having seen it done many times over, and we decided to do one better!

Synctera’s mission is to be the fastest and easiest way to build FinTech apps and embedded banking products, and we saw that building a white label banking app would help us further that mission. 

So we worked with Intelliware, a leading software developer, to create this app, with guidance from a range of our clients on best practices learned along the way. By giving our clients a solid starting point that’s secure, compliant, efficient and customizable, we aim to allow them to focus on quickly bringing value to their customers and executing a killer marketing plan for growth.

How Synctera Starter Apps can help you

Our Starter Apps are purpose-built to cover three core areas for developers:

1. Pre-wired connections to our Banking as a Service platform
2. Common features and functions you can personal customize and build on
3. Getting you MVP ready for a sponsor bank partner match

Synctera Starter Apps are delivered as React Native codebases that come with a free, perpetual use license for our clients. 

You can customize the app’s UI to match your branding, logos, product flows, and more. And if you need more help creating a great brand and experience for the people you’re trying to help, our professional services team can modify it any way you want and help you make it production ready. 

As you approach launch, you will need to get your app certified by your sponsor bank partner, but this is usually a smooth process because our bank partners have already vetted Synctera Starter Apps. That means the only thing you need to do is match with a bank from our marketplace. 

At launch, you host the app and deploy the code on your infrastructure. Synctera will continually be enhancing the source code, so you can merge in the latest version to your code.

Interested in learning more?

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. 

Have more questions? Feel free to get in touch with us as well.

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