Fintech's Missing Horizontal Infrastructure
Justin Howell, co-founder and CEO of Rize, on the horizontal infrastructure missing from fintech today
The key insight is that good fintech feels simple on the surface only when someone has already solved the ugly plumbing underneath. Rize started by trying to make banking and investing feel like one product for consumers, then discovered the hard part was not screen design, it was stitching together separate bank accounts, brokerage accounts, processors, compliance systems, and sponsor bank relationships into one system that could act on behalf of a single customer.
-
The underlying problem was that money lived in separate regulated silos that were never built to talk to each other. A user may think they have one balance, but the product team is really coordinating multiple ledgers, vendors, and rules. That makes simple features like automatic saving, card spend, or investing triggers an infrastructure job, not just an app design job.
-
Rize positioned its synthetic core as a new source of truth above those siloed accounts. Instead of rebuilding the product every time a customer wants to add brokerage, credit, or other features, the developer can keep the same customer level account model and switch on new capabilities through the platform.
-
This is where Rize differs from point providers and from more standard BaaS stacks. Many providers help launch accounts and cards, but the broader market was still organized as separate specialists for KYC, ACH, card issuing, custodial banking, and brokerage. The missing value was the horizontal layer that made those pieces behave like one product and shortened launch time from many months to weeks.
The market has kept moving toward that connective layer. As embedded finance spread from fintechs to software and commerce companies, the winning platforms became the ones that let builders start with one use case and expand into multi product finance without rewriting their stack. That shifts advantage toward infrastructure that is customer centric at the data model level, not just developer friendly at the API layer.