Through partnership with Mastercard and Marqeta, Synctera adds card capabilities to its platform
- With card capabilities under its belt, Synctera CEO Peter Hazlehurst says the company has covered all the bases a fintech needs to launch.
- But competition is heating up, and other BaaS platforms have their own plans to expand their offerings.
Synctera is a banking as a service platform that offers fintechs banking and payment services from more than one partner bank through its marketplace model, including things like ledger and ACH. The company is spearheaded by former head of Uber Money, Peter Hazlehurst.
Synctera has been picking up speed pretty quickly since its launch in December last year.
The company has already solidified a handful of partnerships, including community banks Coastal and Lineage, and fintechs Ellevest and One Finance.
Last month Synctera added some new partnerships as well. Marqeta, Mastercard, and Regent Bank represent Synctera’s expansion and its dive into new waters -- mainly cards.
“These fundamental partnerships will allow our fintechs to issue cards in a cost effective way with any of Synctera's bank partners, and will allow even more community banks to get into the card sponsorship business,” said Hazlehurst. “We are able to scale to more fintechs and banks because of the collaboration / partnerships we've put in place with Marqeta and Mastercard”
Partnering with Marqeta and Mastercard
Synctera’s partnership with Mastercard will allow for faster onboarding for new partner banks, and will speed up the launch process for fintechs. Synctera is now able to access Mastercard’s Digital First Card Program, which allows the payment company’s partners to offer their customers digital payment solutions.
The partnership with Marqeta will allow more services and tools fintechs can implement into their own card programs. Synctera is white-labeling Marqeta’s tools and offering them to fintechs via bank customers as fintech-as-a-service APIs. Some perks the BaaS company can offer through this agreement include less manual processes associated with bank identifier number onboarding, card tokenization, and chargeback support.
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Onboarding a new community bank and releasing a card API
In addition to announcing its partnership with Marqeta and Mastercard, Synctera said it’s onboarded a couple of new community banks, Regent Bank, an Oklahoma-based medium sized bank with around $442 million in assets, is one of them. New York-based Community Federal Savings Bank, with around $563.33 million in assets, is another.
There’s also Synctera’ card API, which will let fintechs implement the use of cards into their offerings. And according to Hazlehurst, these recent partnerships will help the company add more card-themed capabilities in the future.
Synctera plans to formally launch its Card as a Service offering later this year, which will include tools surrounding virtual and physical debit cards, and debit transactions.
The competition heating up
Synctera is not alone in looking to expand its services. Synapse, one of Synctera’s competitors, also partnered with Mastercard in August to offer more card . Its Credit Hub offers different card related services, including card issuance, credit building tools, and cashback rewards.
Unit, another competitor, announced its new service Unit Go back in June. The service integrates with Plaid to allow users to move funds between their Unit platform accounts and their external accounts
Synctera is looking to show that its platform is the full package
According to Hazlehurst, enabling card-based services means that Synctera has ‘all the key ingredients’ to help a fintech launch.
“It's powerful because we not only have expanded the supply of banks for the entire industry, but we are making it easier than ever for fintechs to be built on our platform.”
But as the banking as a service industry heats up, Synctera may have its hands full keeping ahead of competitors.