Compliance Bottleneck for BBVA Open Platform
Diving deeper into
Shamir Karkal, co-founder and CEO of Sila, on the modern payments stack
The BBVA Open Platform never really got traction because it never solved the compliance problems for customers.
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Reviewing context
The real bottleneck in banking APIs was never code, it was getting a startup through bank compliance fast enough to ship a product. BBVA Open Platform could give developers a sandbox quickly, but the live launch still depended on months of bank risk, legal, and policy review. That made it usable for very large partners, but a poor fit for the typical fintech that needed onboarding, controls, and approvals packaged into the product itself.
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This is what later BaaS platforms were built to fix. The winning model was not just exposing ACH or card APIs, but handling KYC, KYB, bank coordination, and operational review so most customers never had to deal directly with the sponsor bank.
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The market split into two layers. Some platforms sold an all in one stack for speed, while others focused on one hard workflow like card issuing or ACH and let customers assemble the rest. Both models worked better than a bank run platform that left compliance as the customer’s problem.
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That helps explain why BBVA could land names like Google and still fail to scale broadly. Large enterprises can absorb a year of review. Early stage fintechs cannot, because every extra month burns cash, delays user launch, and often kills the company before revenue starts.
The next phase of payments infrastructure keeps pushing compliance deeper into software. The platforms that win will be the ones that make regulated money movement feel as fast to launch as email or SMS, while still satisfying partner banks and regulators behind the scenes.