How does Rize differentiate from other BaaS platforms by prioritizing customer needs over abstractly layering over the banking core?

When we think about differentiation, we start with what we call the synthetic core. The problem that we wanted to solve with the synthetic core was originally for ourselves, back when we were on the B2C side of things: how do you build a product when you need to be able to, say, combine capabilities across banking and brokerage?

The fundamental building block of financial services has always been the underlying regulated account. Traditionally you’ve had two different sources of truth, because you’ve had accounts on both sides. Again, you look at some of these guys with 15 million plus accounts who are trying to add some of those additional capabilities, and they have an immense amount of difficulty doing so because the source of truth has always been these underlying accounts. You have to build a whole bank stack, you have to build the whole brokerage stack -- those two things were never designed to be able to talk to each other. Because we approached this problem from the other direction, we always said, "this needs to ultimately roll up to an individual customer." We need to create a world where, regardless of where money sits or where things are operating across a variety of different financial verticals, it's always got to be able to roll up to a single customer. 

It feels like a normal account and it has the same kind of characteristics as a normal account that you as the builder think about, but instead of having the underlying source of truth be the bank account or the brokerage account, you can do it at what we call a synthetic core layer that can reach down, handle and utilize all the different capabilities of the different verticals that you plug into it, allowing you to build the experience around an end customer’s wants

What that means for our customers is you can start with a very simple use case, just an account and a card, but as you want to add more capabilities nothing has to change about your build in order to access that. We effectively just gave you a new set of switches that you can turn. You get a lot more future proofing by building against Rize, because as we add more capabilities, you don’t have to find ways to connect a banking-as-a-service platform to a brokerage-as-a-service platform and then have to create the connective tissue over those kinds of pieces. We've created a world where that abstract layer is already there.

A variety of other differentiators flow from that. We're not only the cheapest out in the market by quite a bit, but we have much more flexibility to really price appropriately to each client’s end use case as opposed to "here's one size that fits all."

Compliance is also at the absolute core of what we do. We're really able to provide compliance as a service to our customers, saying, "Look, here's everything that you need to get yourself off the ground, templated out for you already. And then all the different pieces that you're going to need to be able to maintain compliance and have visibility up and down the stack are already built into the platform for you." We've taken away that trade off -- it used to be in the early days that either you're going fast or you're going compliant, but you can't really do both. You can go fast, you can get to market fast, you can start to scale quickly, and you've got the tools that you need around that to have compliance as well.

Our synthetic core, pricing, and compliance management system are a bunch of the big areas where we really differentiate ourselves from our competitors.