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How does Finix position itself in relation to payment processing tools like Worldpay from FIS?
Jareau Wadé
Founder at Batch Processing
This is where I would bring up the payments layer cake.
Here is the issuing side of the stack. You guys have done a great job of detailing a lot of this. It's not just cards but there's a blurry line right now between banking-as-a-service and some of the other money movement mechanisms, things like push-to-card and card issuing. We don't really play here; we're more on the acquiring side.
Everything that sits on top of the card networks on this side of the stack would be the processors: the acquiring processor, the sponsor bank and then -- what's been developed over the last decade or so -- this layer of payment facilitators. Balanced was one of the pioneers of this model back in 2011, 2012. In the US, it's very much the case that almost all fintech -- not just payments but lending insurance, etc. -- usually sits on top of some legacy provider to make their product happen and to bring it to market. It’s no different in this case. You have folks like Stripe and Square, who were the best-known models of the payment facilitator movement a decade ago. They would sit on top of folks like First Data (now Fiserv) with Wells Fargo as the sponsor bank and Worldpay (now part of FIS) with Fifth Third bank as the sponsor bank.
Today at Finix, we, in part, do this model, where we sit behind our customers, who can be payment facilitators, and we provide the software infrastructure for them to access the underlying infrastructure. We make the bank and the processor technology available to them through our set of RESTful APIs, and they are the ones who are sponsored as the payment facilitator. Customers like Lightspeed and Clubessential very much fit the mold of vertically focused software companies -- Lightspeed for retail, Clubessential for fitness studios. They are sponsored by the underlying providers. We work with the underlying legacy providers to bring this new model to market and to create the more modern technology on top of it.
