How to build a partnership that can survive market disruptions, power growth, and serve millions of customers ft. Cross River and Best Egg

Some partnerships in financial services begin with a handshake and end with a contract dispute. Others start with a Sunday morning LinkedIn message and evolve into something that transcends the typical vendor-client relationship. The collaboration between Cross River Bank and Best Egg falls firmly into the latter category.

“When we first got into the business, we met several new companies, and some of them were like three guys in a garage,” recalls Adam Goller, EVP and Head of Fintech Banking at Cross River. 

An impromptu conversation in 2013 between Best Egg’s founder and Cross River’s CEO would eventually grow into a partnership that has facilitated nearly $35 billion in loans and 2.5 million customers – reshaping the lives of people and communities who were previously underserved by traditional FIS and had limited access to credit.

What began as basic loan origination has evolved into sophisticated closed-loop capital market solutions, including the development of Best Egg’s “BEAST” securitization platform, which uses Cross River’s CRB Securities to package assets for sale to institutional investors.

The progression reflects Cross River’s willingness and ability to help fintechs climb the rungs of product expansion as they grow: “We have so many use cases where a partner came to us for lending, and that ultimately expanded to a deposit product, a payment service, and a card product,” Goller notes.

Although partners that offer point solutions can help fintechs get started, they don’t set them up for the future. The Cross River – Best Egg partnership shows how the right BaaS and bank partner helps fintechs move beyond the start up mindset with more sophisticated financial support as they mature. 

Listen to this conversation to learn about the blueprint fintechs should use to identify the right banking partners at the start and how Cross River can help fintechs look beyond isolated business cases and build long term product road maps, with the support of a large financial institution and the agility of a fintech. 

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Mission alignment is a good partnership’s secret sauce

The partnership between Cross River and Best Egg succeeded because both organizations shared a common vision of serving customers rather than simply maximizing transaction volume. Best Egg’s target customer base — consumers with limited savings but strong credit profiles — represented an underserved market that traditional banks had largely abandoned.

“Our target customers are consumers with limited savings. So we define that by folks who have less than two months of their expenditures in savings,” explains Bobby Ritterbeck, President of Best Egg. “Our average user has a over 700 FICO score. They have $130,000 in individual income on average. So this is just a group which leverages credit in their life.”

Best Egg’s team calls this customer profile “HENRY” customers — High Earners, Not Yet Rich — aligned with Cross River’s broader mission. “Our mission is to empower people to have better lives,” notes Goller.

The alignment extends beyond customer demographics to operational philosophy. Both companies prioritize steady, sustainable growth over aggressive expansion. “They’re conservative people. They weren’t the first ones post-COVID out of the gate loosening standards just trying to increase volume and take market share,” Goller observes about Best Egg’s approach.

Trust may be tested through market disruptions

The true strength of the partnership revealed itself during moments of market stress, according to Goller and Ritterbeck. COVID-19 presented the most significant test, as funding sources dried up across the industry and uncertainty dominated decision-making.

“When there’s fear, funding dries up very, very quickly,” Ritterbeck recalls. “I can’t say for sure that there was a day where Cross River was the only one that was continuing to buy loans. But if that wasn’t true, it was very, very close.” 

Goller frames these challenging periods as relationship tests. “It’s like a marriage where you don’t know how good your marriage is until something goes wrong,” he explains. “When things like this come up, that’s where I think you really see strength in partnership.”

The Cross River-Best Egg partnership has weathered three major market disruptions: the Madden decision affecting marketplace lending, COVID-19’s impact on credit markets, and the interest rate shock of 2022-2023. And each crisis reinforced the value of the partnership, helping it evolve beyond a transactional relationship. 

How to balance compliance with innovation

Rather than viewing compliance as an obstacle to innovation, both organizations treat regulatory requirements as a framework within which to build creative solutions. Cross River’s approach involves building robust compliance infrastructure that enables rather than inhibits growth.

“As a bank, you don’t look to eliminate risk, you look to mitigate risk,” Goller explains. “We look to have the strongest compliance program that mitigates any risk, but facilitates growth.” 

Best Egg’s continued investment in the Cross River partnership is driven in part by the fintech’s recognition of Cross River’s regulatory expertise. “Cross River is not shy about working directly with the regulators to make sure they’re coloring within the lines, but they are also being thoughtful and innovative about the future,” said Ritterbeck.

How to think strategically about build-versus-buy decisions

Both organizations share a view that the decision to build or partner emerges from whether an emergent need is or is not part of a fintech’s core competency. This framework allows fintechs like Best Egg to focus on long-term strategic objectives rather than producing near-term single point solutions. 

“Whatever you have to build to support your core competency, you should build,” Goller explains. “If it faces the customer and it’s to help improve their experience, the application flow, the acquisition of the customer, the servicing of the customer, absolutely think about building it versus buying it or partnering on it.”

For capabilities outside core competencies, partnering becomes the preferred approach. “When it comes to the things that maybe aren’t your core competency, it just makes perfect sense to work with a bank who has a competency in regulatory compliance [for example] … why would you go ahead and try to build something that’s not part of your core competency?”

Ritterbeck echoes this philosophy: “We probably gravitate toward not reinventing the wheel, whenever possible. If you’re going to build something, from my standpoint, you better be bringing something new to the market.”

Choosing partners that help you evolve is a differentiable skill

Over the years, the collaboration between Cross River and Best Egg has moved from simple lending services into comprehensive capital market offerings, like the $160 million BEAST securitization platform with levered residual certificates. The BEAST platform marks a new phase in the Cross River – Best Egg partnership and demonstrates how Cross River can help fintechs mature financially alongside their long-term strategic vision. 

“When you have a company like Cross River which has technology that enables every product, and you can scale from lending to payments to cards to deposit accounts, that’s really important,” Goller said.

The Beast securitization platform represents the partnership’s most sophisticated collaboration to date. “It was the two teams sitting together and saying funding is one of the biggest challenges that we have in the space,” Goller explains. “The ability to do so in a repeatable, lower cost way is what BEAST provides.”

The Cross River-Best Egg partnership demonstrates that successful bank-fintech relationships require more than compatible technology platforms or favorable economics. They demand shared mission alignment, trust, and willingness to come to the table to brainstorm strategy. 

The evolution on the horizon: From niche offerings to full-service

Fintechs aren’t an experiment any more. Many have grown beyond point solutions and into ecosystems of financial products. This shift is likely to accelerate in the future, as fintechs start to match the sophistication of traditional FIs. 

“Right now, there’s still a lot of mono-line companies in the industry. You have folks who just do one specific payment niche.. [like] offer one loan product, but we’re seeing a change,”shared Cross River’s Goller.

Leading this shift are partners like Cross River who are moving partnership models towards shared infrastructure as they support fintechs in all stages of their growth journey. 

Historically, the path to move fintechs beyond balance sheet lending and credit facilities has remained murky. However, offerings like CRB Securities help these firms move into fully closed-loop models, helping fintechs get commercially-viable more quickly as they build momentum long term. 

The change is possible because of the fundamentally different role Cross River plays in the industry: “We are truly a tech company, not just a bank,” said Goller. Cross River uses its experience and expertise to move beyond just providing financial infrastructure. And it informs everything, from whom they partner with, to how they create and use their capabilities to help their fintech clients grow. 

To learn more about how to find partners that can grow with you, get this playbook.