Scale Demands Best-of-Breed Payments
Shamir Karkal, co-founder and CEO of Sila, on the modern payments stack
This is really a point about specialization becoming more valuable as transaction volume rises. A startup can live with one vendor that does many jobs well enough, but a large fintech cannot. Once a company is handling huge ACH volume, card volume, returns, disputes, and reconciliation, each workflow turns into its own operations machine, and a weak vendor can force dozens of internal people to patch gaps by hand.
-
In the interview, the core example is Synapse. Early customers liked one API for KYC, ACH, cards, and bill pay, then outgrew it and either built their own stack or split across multiple processors. The break point came when small edge cases, like returns and chargebacks, became large recurring workloads.
-
Sila positioned itself around that exact tradeoff. It focused on money movement, ledgers, KYC, and ACH, then partnered for adjacent functions like card issuing with Lithic and bill pay with Arcus. The logic was simple, do fewer things, but make each one strong enough for scaled operators.
-
The same buying pattern shows up in adjacent enterprise fintech. Brex argues large companies buy the best card and spend product, then connect it into travel and procurement tools like Navan and Coupa, instead of replacing every workflow with one suite. That is how big organizations buy when different teams own different budgets and processes.
This pushes the market toward modular stacks with tighter integrations. The winners will be the providers that own one painful, high volume workflow deeply enough to remove headcount and errors, then plug cleanly into the rest of the customer’s system. Over time, large fintechs and enterprises will look less like all in one apps and more like carefully assembled payments infrastructure.