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Do you see marketplaces like Synctera coexisting with vertical banks such as Cross River in the future?
Peter Hazlehurst
Co-founder & CEO at Synctera
Yeah, and I see a future state where we at Synctera would say, "We'd love to work with you, Cross River. We have a bunch of lending programs that don't land naturally at some of our community banks. Would you like to have access to those deals?" They've got really great expertise over there in that category.
For example, we have one bank region that does cannabis banking, and if you're a fintech and you want to do cannabis, there's actually a very finite number of places you can go, find a banking partner.
We are very lucky to have one. Same sort of thing where there's specialization of the bank's capabilities like there are some banks that will be comfortable with taking eSports, gambling, and other use cases. With a marketplace of banking in general, as an end consumer, you say, "Which is the right bank for me?" Whether I want B of A, Chase, Chime, or whatever.
The same thing, then, applies to the companies. Who do you want your business checking account with? Traditionally, if you're a small mom-and-pop store in Main Street Iowa, you're going to go to the local branch in town. That's where you go, because you know B of A, but you'd rather bank with the person who puts the uniforms on the kids that go to school and play on the football team.
Our job is to take that hometown community experience, bring it out onto the internet, like everything else that's gone there. If you think about it, banking is still relatively retrograde compared to social media and other sorts of things in its approach to internet aggregation of consumers. If we can get it right, then, the marketplace is really healthy, because it allows us, based on the profile of the consumer segment, to find you the right home on the backend.