Banking-as-a-Service

BaaS is designed to give companies access to the exact financial services they need, without having to build the service themselves. It’s a different model to accessing financial services: Unlike traditional banking products, BaaS services are accessed by API and are integrated directly into a company’s user-facing portal or back-end systems.

Every BaaS service relies on API calls, to send and receive messages between a business’s internal systems and the BaaS platform. This 2-way infrastructure allows businesses to build more complex digital products, services and data flows, by integrating financial services.

BaaS has a number of benefits: It lets businesses solve some of the most painful operational challenges they face, especially around issues like payment reconciliation. Fixing these processes in turn delivers a better, smoother user experience. It also lets businesses build deeper, stickier relationships with their customers – using financial services as a new set of touchpoints to keep users within their product ecosystem.

This is a common question we get. At OpenPayd, we think about “Embedded Finance” as the user-facing service that a business delivers – the account that’s issued in an end user’s name, or the pay-in information that’s unique to them. BaaS is the business model that makes this possible. It’s the technology, the licensing and the product development, all delivered via an API, that lets companies embed financial services.