Payments Infrastructure Twenty Years Behind
Shamir Karkal, co-founder and CEO of Sila, on the modern payments stack
Payments infrastructure lagged because fintech builders were not just missing clean APIs, they were inheriting bank compliance, bank ops, and bank software built for branch era workflows. Even by 2021, launching a money movement product still often meant 12 to 18 months of bank approvals and operational setup, versus days or weeks for communications APIs. That gap created room for companies like Sila to package KYC, ACH, ledgering, and sponsor bank access into something developers could actually ship with.
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The bottleneck was never only code. A fintech could wire up a sandbox quickly, but still get stuck for months in risk, legal, and compliance with sponsor banks. That is why modern payments products had to bundle operational hand holding, not just endpoints and docs.
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The market split into all in one platforms and specialist tools because each rail has ugly edge cases at scale. Sila focused on ACH, KYC, KYB, ledgering, and crypto payments, while partnering for cards and bill pay. Lithic described the same future as modular, interoperable APIs rather than one stack doing everything well.
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The comparison point was Twilio and SendGrid. In communications, developers plug in messaging as a feature. In money, the equivalent job still required sponsor bank relationships, compliance operations, and old processors like FIS, TSYS, and Jack Henry. BaaS emerged to compress that work from years and $500,000 plus into weeks or months.
The next phase is less about proving that money can be programmable, and more about hiding the remaining banking complexity behind cleaner building blocks. As embedded finance spreads beyond fintech into software, commerce, and vertical apps, the winners will be the providers that turn regulated money movement into a fast, reliable developer workflow instead of a bank integration project.