Fintech partner deposits fuel interest

This is what makes Lead Bank look more like a real bank than a software vendor. When a fintech partner brings in customer balances, Lead gets low cost funding that it can place into loans or securities, and the gap between what those assets earn and what it pays on deposits becomes revenue. That matters because interest already made up about 68% of Lead Bank's 2024 revenue, so deposit gathering through partners is the economic engine under the API layer.

• The deposits do not come from Lead branches or direct consumer marketing. They come from apps like Revolut and other fintech programs where the end user sees the fintech brand, but the account sits at Lead Bank and the funds land on Lead's balance sheet.
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• Lead monetizes the same deposit twice. First through net interest spread, by investing or lending against those balances. Then through payments and card activity, with fees on ACH and wires and a share of interchange when those deposited funds move through cards.
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• Compared with Column, Lead is more interest heavy. Column's 2024 revenue was close to evenly split between interest and fees, while Lead's revenue mix was much more weighted to interest, especially from BNPL and working capital programs tied to partners like Affirm.
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The next phase is bigger partner balances and more lending products layered on top of them. If Lead keeps adding programs like BNPL, merchant lending, and stablecoin linked cards, every new deposit base can feed both fee revenue and spread revenue, pushing the model toward a larger and more diversified infrastructure bank.