How to get the most out of your accounting tech stack

The First Heading

The advent of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) tools has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for founders to build new fintech companies or for businesses to embed financial services into their existing offerings. This allows companies to integrate financial services into their product experience, drastically reducing the development effort, product complexity, and regulatory burdens to offer loans, financial accounts, and card products.

With technology making it easier than ever to build a fintech company, there has been a surge of new companies and products entering the market, all aiming to offer financial services tailored to different users’ needs. However, while BaaS has reduced the overhead and complexity of building a fintech, software development and engineering is only one piece of building a new fintech business. Founders also need to think about product-market fit, monetization strategies, customer acquisition, and more.

This guide outlines some of the steps and best practices for businesses looking to build a successful fintech, focusing on fintechs that offer financial accounts and cards. We paired our internal knowledge with insights from fintech startups to help you design, build, and grow your business.

Fintech basics

A fintech is a business that offers any financial service—such as financial accounts, cards, or loans—and makes them accessible to their customers via software. It can refer to a “pure play” fintech business, where the core product offering is a financial service (e.g., a fintech whose primary offering is loans to small businesses). It can also refer to a business that embeds financial services into their platform to supplement their core offering (e.g., an appointment software tool for salons that also allows salon owners to process payments and spend on an expense card).

With the proliferation of companies building and offering financial services, determining whether a company is a fintech isn’t straightforward anymore. Because financial services play a larger role in the product and business strategy for many companies, more and more businesses today can be defined as a fintech.

Examples of a fintech

There are a variety of ways you can offer financial services, including:

Becoming the primary banking relationship with users: The goal of these fintechs is to be the primary banking relationship for their customers, supplanting their existing banking relationships (if any). These businesses generally need to offer a wide range of financial offerings that meet all or most of a user’s financial needs, including checking and savings accounts, credit and debit cards, loans, and more.
Building a fintech point solution: Point-solution fintechs are focused on solving a targeted problem or need in financial services, differentiating their offering against existing offerings in some particular manner. Examples of this include making it easier to send money via remittances, increasing accessibility to capital via loans, enabling corporate expense management via cards, and more.
Developing financial infrastructure: These businesses improve and solve pain points with existing financial services infrastructure for other fintech businesses, which can range from providing compliance and security capabilities, payments and financial services infrastructure, and more. (Stripe is an example of a financial infrastructure business.)

Businesses building an expense card or spend management solution, such as Ramp, Emburse, and Brex, are examples of fintechs (specifically, fintech point solutions). These companies have built products that enable their business customers to easily facilitate, manage, and track corporate expenses made by their employees.

Traditionally, corporate expense management is a highly manual, resource-intensive, and error-prone process. Employees need to pay out of pocket for corporate expenses and then wait for reimbursements after filing their expense reports. Additionally, finance and accounting teams need to spend significant amounts of time managing expense report submissions, validating receipts, and managing expense reimbursements.

Modern expense management solutions provide businesses and their employees with virtual or physical cards that have specific spend controls in place, all while streamlining and automating the expense management and reimbursement process.

Expense management solutions are just one type of fintech business. The fintech landscape is vast and constantly evolving, and there are many other types of fintech businesses in the market, including neobanks and challenger banks, benefit disbursement cards, business-to-business (B2B) lending providers, remittance companies, bill payment tools, wealth management platforms, and many more. With all of these businesses, customers can access financial services directly within the fintech’s platform or product rather than needing to visit or interact with a traditional financial institution.

Key things to consider when building a fintech

We interviewed several fintech startups to learn how they identified their product offering and monetized it, how they built their technology infrastructure, and how they acquired their first customers. Here, we highlight their insights and anecdotes and share the key questions for your business to consider based on their learnings.