What

Zeta is a San Francisco-based banking tech company that provides embeddable banking as well as BaaS products for fintechs and distributors. It considers itself the only natively built Banking-as-a-Service Platform in the industry, having unified the whole stack that distributors need to effectively provide BaaS solutions.

Founded in 2015, Zeta has raised over $340M, including a $250M Series C from SoftBank in 2021.

Why

Gary Singh, Zeta’s President, said that banks have been slow to move toward modern banking solutions or providing BaaS to their clients because of siloed and outdated tech stacks that are expensive to move away from. By offering a unified tech stack, Zeta can help banking partners rapidly modernize and scale their products while minimizing operational costs.

But, on a more philosophical level, Singh said banks “have decisions to make.” They can either invest capital to incrementally extend the shelf life of their legacy systems and play a game of catch-up, or they can convert to architecture that is “fundamentally disrupting the status quo.”

“These are both risky decisions,” Singh said. “One is futuristic, and one is like you're looking in the rearview mirror.”

How

Zeta has built out its solution so as to mitigate operational friction from the client bank’s end. Zeta’s decision to unify the whole stack—assets and liabilities, credit card solutions, debit card solutions, BNPL, and other offerings—lets banks avoid the lengthy process of locking down point-solution vendors for individual components of the larger BaaS ecosystem they seek to provide their own clients. This also gives banks the flexibility to launch new products when they see fit, without having to onboard new vendors, which would extend go-to-market runways.

“The operating cost is very low, as the setup cost is low, the integration cost is low; all of it has been streamlined with this BaaS offering in the marketplace,” Singh said. “You can quickly and agilely launch products, launch new services—and fail fast, even, by trying a product in the market with 100 users and tweaking it in a different direction.”

“From an operation perspective, the efficiencies are built into it,” Singh continued. “There's a lot of self-service in the architecture—you can pretty much do anything you want to do on the digital interface.”

That self-service model applies both to client banks, which can configure Zeta as they deem best for them, as well as for client banks’ own clients. This includes helping BaaS clients navigate customer support and avoid time on hold through digital support modules they can navigate themselves.

While most of these BaaS operations are directly provided by Zeta through its architecture, Zeta does also team up with partners where needed. It has partners dedicated to card printing, stationary, customer service (Genpact), and collections.

Zeta anticipates significant growth in the coming year, with at least two new clients carrying a total of 6 million consumers that will have their banking experiences powered by Zeta.

“Right now we're busy—let me put it that way,” Singh concluded.