What are the use cases and customer needs that Synctera addresses in the market?

Because we're a two-sided marketplace, we have two types of customers. Technically, our buyer is a community bank who wants to get into the fintech business and wants to take their precious asset -- which is their license -- and find a way to work with fintechs to create more value.

As a retail bank, you've got a retail part of the bank with consumers walking over to the branch, and you most likely have a commercial part or a small business part of the bank where you're taking those deposits the consumers dropped off and turning them into loans for the local pizza shop, things like that. If you're a growing bank, you might even have a wealth team for consumers that have some sort of investing needs.

We are proposing and have started to see a bunch of banks thinking about having a fintech division or group. While the customers themselves technically and legally belong to the bank, for all intents and purposes the end users belong to the fintech. Those fintechs are the classic neobanks that are popping up in every vector of society, whether they are neobanks for people that love pets or small business neobanks, like people that are helping stylists manage their money better and being distributed through hairstyle salon software. There's also a number of fintechs looking at the remittances business, both sending money to Africa and LatAm and stuff like that, but also reverse remittances -- we've got three separate fintechs that we're working with right now that are Indian-based and are solving money flow to folks in the US. And that doesn’t even include the tens of thousands of new immigrants coming to America every year who quickly find a problem: they can't get a bank account because they don't have previous banking records and/or they want to send money overseas. The banking use-cases are endless.

Going back into micro level-detail of the large US banking economy: you’re a small, local community bank, you basically don't know anything about any of this stuff. You’ve heard about it, and said, "that would be a cool market we could help if we could get it," but you don't know how to do it. You don't know what you have to do from a compliance perspective. You generally don't have any tech resources at all.

Our solution to the banks is, effectively, fintech-as-a-service in a box that they can acquire from Synctera at no cost. We don't charge them anything for it, and we give them a set of APIs that they in turn can offer to the fintechs that allows the fintechs to build whatever they want to build. Technically, the fintech is on the other side of the marketplace. It's all sitting on our platform, and they code to our APIs, which are sold to them by the bank. That's the true marketplace dynamic.

Here’s an analogy: think of the fintechs like riders on Uber and the banks like drivers. Our job is to help the drivers -- in this case, the banks -- have a viable platform: How do they do compliance? How do they do billing? How do they track users for KYC? All of those things, so that they keep the banks safe with the least amount of friction or integration. We don't do any connect at all to their core banking system, which means they don't have to talk to the Fiservs and the FISs to get to launch.

On the other side of the marketplace, it's all the APIs needed by the neobanks, crypto wallets and remittance companies to build their service, whether it's doing KYC, sending a transaction over ACH or push-to-card, a ledger, printing a debit card or, in the future, lending products like overdraft, line of credit, credit card and so forth.

So, a long answer to say two types of customers, broadly. A platform for banks to become entrants in the marketplace -- we've already signed seven in the six months we've been in the market. On the fintech side, we're up to twenty fintech that have signed on and are in various stages of implementation. The first of them is live now. We've built, over time, the full stack of consumer bank functionality and all the bank operations capabilities.