Banking on the Future with Synctera
Announcing Lightspeed’s $12.4m investment in Synctera
Ask any company that has sought to launch a banking or payments product in the last year: it’s terrible.
A company must partner with a traditional bank on the back-end — a process that is extremely manual and burdensome. While the process is excruciatingly slow, partnering with a startup can be an attractive value proposition for a bank. It provides immense opportunity by creating new streams of revenue and deposits for banks that are typically less equipped to compete in the digital economy without a physical footprint.
With over 5,000 community and regional banks in the US, the interest to participate in this new wave is immense, but launching and managing such a program takes significant resources and compliance oversight, limiting the number of companies a bank can take on (if any at all). So where does that leave us? Banks want to partner with FinTechs and startups, but are unable to — and startups need to partner with banks, but the process is long and arduous.
Enter Synctera. Synctera solves for both sides of the ecosystems and is creating a marketplace for banks and FinTechs to work together. Synctera builds software tools to make it easier for community and regional banks to efficiently onboard, monitor, and manage their partner companies. And for startups, Synctera makes it easy to integrate and build products on top of existing bank infrastructure through a modern, API-driven platform, allowing them to launch quickly, test out their MVP, and iterate on new financial products.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a continued explosion of FinTech companies as new digital platforms are changing the way consumers and businesses interact with money. The need for digital financial products is not only limited to ‘mainstay’ FinTechs, but also to a variety of other technology companies like vertical SaaS products, marketplaces, and e-commerce brands. These tectonic shifts seem indisputable, but the path to providing these services remains fraught with friction.
Synctera’s vision is to build towards a platform upon which any company could launch a banking product on the same day. Today, the proverbial startup founders in a garage could never quickly launch and iterate on a banking product. It would require venture funding, banking relationships, and even then it would take several months to launch.
Beyond the company’s approach, Synctera has assembled a team uniquely suited to tackle the market opportunity. Peter Hazlehurst, the CEO of Synctera, was most recently the Head of Uber Money where he led and managed payment and risk functions across the company. Prior to Uber, Peter has a long history in the FinTech and payments sector as a Chief Product Officer at Yodlee and a senior product leader at Google Wallet. Kris Hansen, CTO at Synctera, came to the company from his most recent role as CTO of Koho, one of Canada’s leading neobanks, where he built and managed their banking partnership and infrastructure. Synctera’s Head of Product, Dominik Weissert, comes from the Axxiome Group where he led digital transformations for some of the largest financial services and payment companies.
With this all-star team, a unique approach, and a massive market opportunity, we are thrilled to announce Synctera’s $12.4m financing round led by Lightspeed.
As part of the round, the company has also attracted a great set of FinTech CEOs from within our Lightspeed portfolio including Max Levchin (CEO of Affirm*/General Partner at SciFi) and Henry Ward (CEO of Carta*) as well as other industry leaders such as Zach Perrett (CEO of Plaid), Alexa Von Tobel (former CEO of LearnVest/Partner at Inspired Capital), Anil Arora (former CEO of Yodlee), Manik Gupta (former CPO at Uber), and others who will also be investing in the round.
We are still in the early innings of the FinTech revolution, and we couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with Synctera at this critical inflection point in the ecosystem.
— Ansaf Kareem, Partner at Lightspeed
*Affirm and Carta are Lightspeed portfolio companies.
