Sila bets on modular payments stack
Shamir Karkal, co-founder and CEO of Sila, on the modern payments stack
This reveals that Sila is betting the winning fintech stack will look less like one giant bank in a box and more like a tightly connected set of specialist tools. The practical tradeoff is extra integration work up front, in exchange for better performance once volumes rise and edge cases matter, like card declines, return processing, bill pay exceptions, and bank connection failures.
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Sila’s own scope stays close to core money movement, including KYC, KYB, ACH, ledgers, crypto payments, and planned wires, while cards, bill pay, and aggregation are handed to partners like Lithic, Arcus, and Plaid. That is a deliberate line around what it believes it can control and do well.
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This mirrors how larger financial institutions and scaled fintechs actually operate. The bundled pitch is attractive at launch, but as products mature, many teams replace weak modules with specialists or build internal orchestration so each function, like ACH, issuing, or compliance, can be tuned separately.
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The contrast is clearest at the enterprise end. Brex argues that smaller and mid market customers still prefer all in one bundles, but large enterprises buy point solutions for distinct workflows, like travel, procurement, card issuance, and spend management, because different teams own each purchase and global scale raises the cost of weak links.
The market is heading toward a split structure. Bundled platforms will keep winning first launches and smaller customers, while scaled fintechs and enterprises will keep unbundling into specialist rails connected by their own orchestration layer. That favors companies like Sila if they can stay the default core for money movement while partners handle the surrounding workflows.