What are the origins of Rize as a company?

My co-founder, Kirk Voltz, and I originally got together because we shared a vision for a much more customer-centric and intuitive approach to financial services. The problem that we really wanted to solve was: How do you take this complicated financial services world that is regulated into different silos -- like banking, brokerage, lending, crypto, and insurance-- and map them to how people think about and use money out in the real world? End customers really don't see the distinctions amongst those silos, despite the fact that, within the industry, not only do those silos never talk to each other, they literally may not know how each other operates. That's the gap that we wanted to bridge there.

In many ways, what is now known as embedded finance -- being able to take existing capabilities and combine them into existing user experiences -- is how we thought things should work, but when we started five years ago, that wasn't a concept yet. What we really understood were the consumer pain points, which is why Rize actually started as a consumer fintech. We built automated saving technology and then we brought investing and banking into that. Again, we were interested in starting to knock down some of the silo distinctions, because for an end customer at the end of the day, it’s all just money. You really don't care how the engine works: you just want the car to go from point A to point B.

What we discovered in the process of building all that for ourselves is what we had originally thought was merely a complicated UI/UX matching problem, was actually an infrastructure problem. You can’t build the right user-centric, financial user experiences if you don’t build out the missing horizontal connective tissue. As we talked to other fintech builders, we discovered that pretty much everybody was running into the same infrastructure problems and having to recreate the wheel -- and usually doing it badly. 

It turned out that what we had originally built for ourselves was a much more flexible and elegant solution to those infrastructure problems than anybody else had done to date. Thinking from the customer's perspective led us to build a very different set of architecture; our flexible, synthetic account core. 

So we ultimately pivoted the business from being a B2C builder ourselves to becoming an API-based B2B platform that serves other fintech builders around these core infrastructure elements. We're the only player in this space that's been on both sides of the table, which gives us a very unique perspective and allows us to very legitimately say, "We've been in your shoes.”