BaaS served three ways: A closer look at a rapidly evolving market

The BaaS market is evolving rapidly and so are the options for companies who wish to quickly spin up new financial services by leveraging these bank-in-a-box APIs.

We recently took a look at who the ideal customers and partners are for banking-as-a-service startups … And today we’re going to dig deeper into the different flavors of BaaS offerings and how they stack up.

Some of the BaaS players in the market have partnered with bank partners to offer API access to their services, others offer software and are running a marketplace model to match up community banks and fintechs, and at least one startup has bought a bank to build its own banking API customers can access.

If you’re looking to spin up a new fintech app or want to add banking, debit cards or other financial services to your existing business, knowing how each of these competitors is positioned to work with customers and bank partners is key.

Turnkey banking as a service

The simplest — and most common — BaaS offering is one that brings together everything a company might need to roll out financial services and made it available via API. Companies providing these types of services include Synapse, Unit and Bond, among others.

Typically, these BaaS providers make their money by charging a platform fee to customers and/or share in revenues from interchange or other fees generated by the customer’s end product or service.

For fintech companies just getting started or vertical SaaS players looking to launch financial services without building out a whole new fintech team, hooking into their API or set of APIs can be a low-cost way to build, test and deploy with little hassle.