How does Sila differentiate itself from other companies in the banking-as-a-service industry, such as Unit, Treasury Prime, and Bond?

I think the granddaddy of that space is Synapse. They've been around for five plus years now. The banking as a service providers typically end up bundling a bunch of services, like KYC, KYB, ACH, card issuing, bill payments, sometimes photo check deposit, wires, and potentially a few more other things as well. I think the experience of a lot of customer of  Synapse, at least, was that it seems like a very compelling proposition when you start. You're like, "Hey, everything that I could possibly imagine is built into this platform. It's just one API call away." And then a lot of customers realize that it's really hard to be good at everything. You might be a really good ACH processor and be terrible at card issuing. I might be a really great card issuer and be awful at ACH or wires or bill payment or something else.

So a lot of people, as they started scaling on Synapse -- as probably the oldest one -- realized that it just didn't work for them, because at scale you need an amazing card issuing platform, an amazing ACH, an amazing KYC, and an amazing everything. You need best of breed in every single thing, because every single thing is massively complex. There are a bunch of failures and edge cases.

I think a lot of the early customers of Synapse ended up scaling on them, and then rolled off them and either built their own in-house bespoke platforms, like Chime and Simple did back in the day, or went to a model where they were using five to six different processors. That's how all the large banks operate. Most of the large banks are not built all on FIS or Fiserv. They have their own code, with some Fiserv tech in there, some TSYS, and twenty others.

I'm fundamentally skeptical of the fact that anybody can build all of that and be good at all of it at scale. So we always took the approach of focusing on the core money movement. We do KYC, KYB, ACH, ledgers, crypto payments, and we're adding in wires and more capabilities around that. But for most other things, we just partner with people. We partner with Lithic for card issuance. We partner with Arcus for bill payment. We partner with Plaid for account aggregation. We try to find the best of breed in each capability and build a seamless network.

As you build your infrastructure honestly, it is more work. It's more work to integrate Lithic and Sila than it is to just integrate one API. But you'll probably end up finding out that, as you scale, it ends up being a much better solution, because Lithic is probably the best card issuer -- or one of the best at least -- and Sila is probably the best at ACH in the US now. It depends on approach and strategy. I much prefer to build less and be better at it than try to do everything and suck at five things at the same time.