From Retail Cards To Business Banking
Peter Hazlehurst and Kris Hansen, co-founders of Synctera, on BaaS in 2023
This shift shows embedded finance moving from simple consumer cards into software that runs a business’s cash flow. Instead of launching another niche neobank, platforms are adding checking, payroll, bill pay, rent collection, and investor payouts inside existing industry software for dealers, dispensaries, sports clubs, and real estate operators. That pushes BaaS from lightweight retail onboarding toward higher stakes business workflows, where underwriting, permissions, controls, and sponsor bank oversight matter much more.
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The practical change is in what the user is doing. Early BaaS often meant a branded debit card and basic consumer account. The newer pattern is a vertical software company handling operating money, paying workers, collecting from customers, and routing funds to multiple counterparties inside one product.
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Commercial use cases are more valuable because the economics improve as transaction size and complexity rise. In prior BaaS research, commercial transactions carried higher interchange than consumer, which helps explain why platforms moved upstream from retail and SMB into heavier business banking and embedded workflows.
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The market structure also changes. Middleware platforms like Synctera match fintechs and brands with sponsor banks, while vertically integrated banks like Column and Lead increasingly win larger programs by combining charter, ledger, payments, and compliance in one stack. That is a better fit for scaled business banking programs with stricter controls and larger balances.
From here, the winning platforms will look less like consumer fintech launch kits and more like operating systems for regulated money movement inside industry software. As more vertical SaaS companies embed accounts, cards, lending, and payouts, BaaS providers and API banks that can support deeper commercial controls will capture the next wave of fintech volume.