The infrastructure paradox: The better you become, the harder customers are to keep
- Financial infrastructure is becoming part of the business itself, changing what customers are willing to outsource.
- Providers now have to grow with their customers and keep expanding their value as those customers begin to question how much of the stack they should continue to outsource.
The “Letter from the Editor” is a biweekly series of exclusive insight and opinion-driven analysis from Tearsheet’s Managing Editor Sara Khairi, connecting ideas, questioning assumptions, and tracking shifts across both mature and emerging trends in financial services.
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Issue # 13
SoFi is facing a problem that gets at the hardest part of selling financial infrastructure. What happens when one of your biggest customers decides it wants to own more of its stack?
For SoFi Technology Solutions, the B2B infrastructure business that evolved from the acquisition of Galileo and Technisys, the decision had a measurable impact. Technology Platform revenue fell 23% year-over-year to $84.5 million in the second quarter of 2026. Enabled accounts were down 16% from a year earlier. The decline reflected in part the departure of a large customer that had fully transitioned off the platform before the end of 2025.
The customer had reached a point where financial services had become central to its business and decided to bring more of the underlying technology in-house, rather than continue outsourcing as much of the stack. Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore, president of SoFi Technology Solutions, said the loss “did leave a hole.”
That gets at a paradox sitting underneath the financial infrastructure business. The infrastructure provider is selling something that becomes more valuable as the customer grows and therefore more tempting for the customer to own.
Financial infrastructure does not have the same build-versus-buy economics as cloud infrastructure. Though financial infrastructure providers are chasing a similar dynamic, they are unlikely to recreate AWS simply because cloud has become strategically important. But a payments system, lending engine, card platform, or account infrastructure can become part of a company’s own product, economics, customer experience, or competitive advantage. A sufficiently large client may therefore decide it wants to own more of those layers, even if it has no intention of rebuilding the entire financial stack itself.
The idea of renting financial infrastructure is not new. BNY has been exposing accounts, payments, and cash flow capabilities through APIs. Stripe has spent years turning payments and financial services into infrastructure that businesses can build on. J.P. Morgan has been commercializing blockchain infrastructure through Kinexys. What is changing is how deeply companies are building around these capabilities.
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