‘How to build a credit card product like a Lego rocketship’: Railsbank’s Dov Marmor

Embedded Finance is becoming more competitive. New platforms are launching and existing platforms are expanding into new products and geographies. My guest today has seen it all. Dov Marmor has helped build some of the leaders in banking as a service, including Currencycloud, Green Dot, and now Railsbank.

Railsbank’s chief operating officer for North America, Dov Marmor joins me on the podcast to talk about the embedded finance field — where the market is headed and who’s best positioned to take more marketshare. Railsbank is launching in the U.S. with its credit cards as a service solution to both fintech and brand customers. 

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The following excerpts were edited for clarity.

Credit cards as a service

The big problem we’ve identified is everyone who’s launched a debit card has credit next in their sights — it has different economics, it helps them reach a broader swath of the population. It just has a bunch of features that you can’t do with debit on its own.

But most of those companies have also been blocked because of the incredible complexity of actually building a credit card program. Because on top of the processing, and the cards and all the things you do with debit, you also have to learn to manage credit and raise funds and manage risk, different elements of banking, sponsorship, different regulations. And it’s an alphabet soup of things that one needs to do to go from debit to credit.

SPONSORED

We saw a big opportunity of automating all of that. So putting together all of the different infrastructure pieces that you need to launch a credit card program, building in the bank sponsorship and the credit line. And then working with our GC and Chief Compliance Officer who is a former FDIC regulator over banking and credit cards to actually build a compliant program that teaches someone how to create their own products from soup to nuts.

I kind of equate it to my son’s Lego set. I get a box with a bunch of little pieces in it and an instruction manual. And it takes me step by step on how to build a rocket ship. We bring that same flavor to building your first credit card product.

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