Cross River's Modular Fintech Expansion
Anthony Peculic, Head of Cards at Cross River Bank, on building a fintech one-stop shop
This shows Cross River winning large fintech accounts by slipping into one part of the stack first, not by forcing a full rip and replace. A mature fintech may already have a processor, ledger workflow, or payments setup that works, so Cross River sells the regulated piece that is missing or easier to outsource, like card sponsorship, lending, or account infrastructure, and then expands as more volume moves onto its rails.
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Cross River is built for this modular sale. Its in house operating system supports accounts, ACH, RTP, push to card, debit, credit, and lending APIs, and the bank can keep just 10 to 30% of interchange while sharing the rest with fintech partners. That lets a client plug in one service without changing everything else.
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This is the practical difference between Cross River and players like Marqeta or Cardless. Those companies solve narrower pieces, like processor tooling or co brand card programs, while Cross River provides the charter, compliance, ledger, and banking rails underneath, and can work alongside whichever partners a client already uses.
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The market has moved toward this model. Newer infrastructure banks like Column are winning by replacing multi vendor stacks with one integrated bank core, while middleware platforms like Synctera exist because many fintechs still assemble several providers and need a way to coordinate them. Cross River sits between those worlds, integrated where it can be, modular where it must be.
Going forward, the winners in fintech infrastructure are likely to be the banks that can start as a single component and still grow into the system of record. Cross River's path is to use cards, lending, and compliance as entry points, then pull more money movement and account activity onto its own stack as clients consolidate vendors.