Banks Building End-to-End Fintech Stacks
Anthony Peculic, Head of Cards at Cross River Bank, on building a fintech one-stop shop
The real moat in fintech infrastructure is not the charter, it is the operating system behind it. Cross River is describing the hard part of vertical integration, building the core ledger, payments rails, card issuing, compliance workflows, and API layer in one stack so a fintech can launch faster without stitching together multiple vendors. That is why only a small number of banks like Cross River, Column, and Lead have pulled it off at meaningful scale.
-
Cross River built its own bank core and framed that as the reason it can add products quickly and avoid depending on large third party processors. In practice, that means one partner can combine accounts, cards, payments, lending, and compliance instead of coordinating separate providers for each layer.
-
Synctera describes the same problem from the other side. Banks need full visibility into customer level activity inside FBO accounts, plus case management and risk tooling. Building that shared ledger and oversight layer is fixed cost heavy, which is why being both a bank and a software company is unusual.
-
The market has since validated this model. Column won Brex and Mercury by replacing a multi vendor stack with a bank, ledger, payments rails, and compliance system under one roof. Lead Bank followed a similar path with lending heavy programs like Affirm and Revolut. Cross River remains the largest of this group by revenue.
The next phase of fintech infrastructure belongs to banks that can look like software platforms while still acting like regulated institutions. As compliance gets tighter and larger fintechs want fewer dependencies, more volume should consolidate onto vertically integrated banks that already paid the cost to build the stack.