What kind of customers benefit most from point solutions compared to all-in-one BaaS for spinning up financial services?

I think the most fruitful framing exercise we conduct at Lithic is thinking about the JTBD for each prospect that comes in through the door.

Card issuing solves a payments need, and the need for secure, seamless payments is ubiquitous, but that doesn’t mean that one size fits all. And so the Growth team at Lithic spends a disproportionate amount of time understanding the actual card issuing use case for each client in order to serve them best. You might find for instance that one client has a very straightforward disbursement use case. They want to create virtual gift cards with pre-set spending limits and distribute them out to survey respondents as a thank you. You might have another client that’s building a corporate card solution for DAOs and wants to help these end users generate double or even triple-digit DeFi yields on their treasury assets. 

For that former use case, we think that Lithic’s out-of-the-box Starter solution could work great – folks could start issuing cards straight away without signing contracts or even talking to the Sales team. For that latter use case however, we think that the client is probably best served by working with an API-first, crypto wallet and compliance provider such as Wyre who can handle the real-time liquidity between fiat and crypto.

No single BaaS solution is going to provide the best crypto on-ramp as well as the best Identity and fraud decisioning as well as the best issuer-processing. That’s why, at Lithic, we're building developer-first, composable, card issuing primitives. So that startups can mix and match the best fintech infrastructure available in the market to build unique, differentiated products. 

Each of these point solutions is singularly focused on building the most powerful tools to solve a precise pain point; as a result, these best of breed solutions stand to benefit from compounding loops. Working with point solutions also affords greater flexibility as a company’s product roadmap evolves over time. Instead of being beholden to an all-in-one platform that has different priorities on its own product roadmap, companies can easily plug in a modular solution to solve for specific functionality as needed. With so many great API-first solutions out there, we’re quickly converging upon a request/response world.