How Striga is creating an entire ecosystem for FinTechs and Neobanks: The new crypto-fintech ecosystem
How Striga is creating an entire ecosystem for FinTechs and Neobanks: The new crypto-fintech ecosystem
- Mousser R.
- 7 min read
Table of Contents
Are you a financial institution, a non-financial institution, or a start-up planning to launch a crypto-bank?
Striga provides a white-label digital asset banking solution. It expedites deployment and enables companies to tap into the digital asset market in a matter of weeks. The Fintech banking ecosystem is packed with all essential banking features —bank accounts, payments, prepaid/debit cards, trading, lending, and user onboarding— but there is still vast room for implementation of crypto features.
A Digital Banking platform enabling new propositions
Regulated Financial infrastructure
By combining crypto-banking businesses with regulated financial infrastructure*, the Striga platform enables new, specialized financial service with an enhanced time to market. This new value proposition is tailored to serve FintTechs. Its transparency and comprehensive features allows it to substitute existing solutions by aggregating the many aspects of the traditional banking value chain under one roof.
*Striga Technology OÜ is currently pursuing a Virtual Asset Service Provider License in Estonia in accordance with the recently (March 2022) introduced amendments to the Estonian law
From co-branding to tailored products
A broad variety of partners are now embedding deposits, lending, and payment features directly within their own products. However, they usually need to co-brand with many partners in order to launch a white-labeled debit cards program on top of everything else.
Striga cuts off this long chain of providers to offer FinTechs a simple integration for all the product lines under one platform.
To build, or not to build?
An outside-in approach for FinTechs to develop enhanced products
The easiest way to illustrate Striga is through a life-inspired use case.
Let’s meet Frank, founder of a FinTech. Frank’s passion for the financial industry led him to quit his day job as a lead developer and starts his own company.
Current Pain Points
- Frank was never formally taught how to run a business, let alone one in the financial world. He manages to make do (poorly) using a mix of different software products, which he has to coordinate and manage for many hours every week.
- Frank struggles to access payments flows, especially card programs schemes. The documentation of providers is both hard to find and to understand. Their commercial proposals often have dozens of different fees, and they are not always clear on how they connect to other partners.
Frank's Fintech built on a top of a BaaS platform
Frank has access to the interactive Striga Sandbox, a native testing tool: He starts to build his financial components, designing his card program and preparing a crypto-to-crypto & fiat-to-crypto environment under the hood of his app. The best part? He can build all of this before going live, so he can launch it at the press of a button once he has his project approved.
The benefit of using API-Based Banking
As a result of the streamlined and integrated process, Frank can focus on his business core, and surround it with fully functional, compliant processes developed by Striga. Much of the infrastructure he needs to build into an app is redundant: Striga already did the heavy work, why would he need to do it again? He’s learned not to expend precious resources on reinventing the wheel, and instead has chosen to rely on APIs from Striga’s platform.
Getting an edge over the competition
BaaS provides a competitive advantage for FinTech entrepreneurs
A friendly UI built on seamless infrastructure
Providing financial services to users requires a lot of backend processes. Card issuing requires the coordination of at least 3 different entities, add to that another company to create the bank accounts, an exchange to get access to crypto, and a wallet to store it. If that’s not enough, you need anti money-laundering and KYC processes in place and coordinated with all of the above.
Those processes get complex fast, and if not managed properly, create redundancies, long wait times and bad experiences for clients. If you want to add loans, investments and other financial instruments, complexity goes through the roof. That’s why your client needs a friendly UI that coordinates all of these processes seamlessly. That’s what BaaS does, it simplifies the complexity, so no one else has to deal with it.
A business accelerator for Fintech Services
The beauty of crypto-fintech is that it competes on-par with banks on core banking services, without the need to build all the side products, heavy proprietary infrastructure, or even literal brick-and-mortar infrastructure.
Most bankers still look at FinTech too comfortably, their industry is traditionally slow to change, and it is not reacting to this second wave (crypto) of BaaS. This creates a great window for FinTech entrepreneurs to build and expand. Once a critical mass of users is reached and banks start to properly pay attention, it will be too late for them to block the path to growth.
Added value from all sides
FinTechs and non-financial companies are finding new paths to add value to their customers
Payments
With BaaS, Fintechs and non-financial companies can add top-notch payments services to their tailor-made products. An entire suite of services enables companies to deliver white-label debit cards that increase brand loyalty and earnings.
These debit cards don’t have to be conventional, they can be connected to their crypto wallets, leverage the Bitcoin Lightning Network, or even be tailored to create programs such as cashbacks, rewards, and even Buy-now-pay-later, per each company’s own core business.
Identity Verification
Whether financial or non-financial companies, identity verification plays a crucial role in terms of security. BaaS allows companies across diverse industries to quickly and affordably verify their potential customers’ identities by plugging into a BaaS’s KYC process.
The Striga platform provides a module specifically designed for easy KYC, so you can focus on getting the clients, and outsource the operative part. To top it off, it also helps with AML.
Overcome the regulatory complexities
FinTechs have to deal with complex regulations and compliance, while delivering financial services to their clients. BaaS providers align with banks or licensed institutions to deal with the complexity for you. Clients of a well-built BaaS only need to think about the compliance of integrating with one partner, instead of all the separate processes that would be needed if they skipped the BaaS.
Closing Thoughts: A Smarter way to create an online banking experience
Fintech/non-fintech businesses can plug into a BaaS platform to provide an entire portfolio of financial services to their own customers, under their own brand. Thus, BaaS can offer other companies multiple ways of diversifying their value proposition, all within one platform, and without needing to carry the whole weight of regulatory burdens.
Offering debit cards, Bitcoin integrations, bank accounts, transactions, and more has never been easier. Integrating banking services into an app used to require a spiderweb of integrations. Now, it requires one single plug, and it’s on.
Striga Crypto-native Banking as a Service:
Your path to building and launching financial products
Join the financial businesses that use Striga’s cloud platform to delight their customers and launch their own products without the complexities that come when dealing with core banking solutions’ relationships, licensing, compliance and payments methods.
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