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What factors drive Square and other companies to use third-party solutions like Marqeta rather than building their own finance infrastructure?

Justin Howell

Co-founder & CEO at Rize

Yeah, you look at all these infrastructure businesses -- internet and cloud with AWS, ecommerce with Shopify, and our space -- the infrastructure is critical to all of those businesses. You literally cannot run the business without the infrastructure. But the infrastructure is not the business, either. There's a reason why companies like SynapseFi were able to prove there's a huge market here. If you give somebody the choice of, “Do I build it all myself, versus do I have a set of APIs to build against?” -- pretty much all day, every day, I'm going the easier route. But the service had to be good enough that it actually solves the problems. I think you're seeing more and more situations across financial services where, if it does its job, and you don't have to build that whole thing yourself, that works. As long as you've got it compliant and as long as you've got a set of economics that allow everything to be healthy up and down that stack, that's where things are going to move towards. As you pointed out, that’s true even for a company as accomplished as Square.

Find this answer in Justin Howell, co-founder and CEO of Rize, on the horizontal infrastructure missing from fintech today
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