Fintechs Own the Customer Relationship
Peter Hazlehurst, co-founder and CEO of Synctera, on matchmaking fintechs and sponsor banks
The fintech owns the relationship that actually matters, which is the daily habit loop of acquisition, product use, support, and trust, while the bank mainly owns the regulated shell. In practice, the user downloads the fintech app, responds to its onboarding flow, gets its card design, contacts its support team, and often never even learns the sponsor bank name. That makes the fintech the real distribution layer, even though deposits and compliance obligations sit with the bank.
-
In the common FBO model, the bank often sees one pooled account on its core, not a clean retail style view of each end user. Synctera built shared ledger and case tools precisely because banks otherwise lack direct visibility into the customer level activity happening inside fintech programs.
-
The money flow follows the same split. The fintech usually gets most of the interchange economics, often around 70/30 and sometimes higher, because it drives user growth and card spend. Synctera then takes half of the bank share for supplying compliance, ledger, and operational tooling.
-
This is why fintech brands like Mercury and Brex became more important than their bank partners, and why newer infrastructure players are competing to serve those brands. Recent market structure has moved toward direct, tech forward bank relationships such as Column and Lead for scaled fintechs, with middleware platforms acting more as connectors and control layers.
The next phase pushes more power toward the fintech brand and the infrastructure layer that best helps it launch safely and switch bank partners with minimal customer friction. Banks will keep the license and balance sheet, but the durable asset will be the interface that wins the user’s paycheck, spend, and support interactions every week.