We can help you:
You may need a number of building blocks and moving parts to achieve your goals because the ecosystem of Embedded Finance and FinTech is quite rich and complex: see below the many categories of operational partners we had to work with when helping other clients.
Traditional business banks offer only a poor choice of international options for sending or receiving money across borders.
Meanwhile there are now a number of global platforms making use of stablecoins rails like Bridge, BVNK, Zerohash, FlexOne...
You are not sure what to do about:
See our explainer documents below about licensing and open banking in EU.
You have the budget but not the resources to become your own Program Manager for a payment card issuance service. Yet, you want to deploy quickly.
The market used to have many Bank-as-a-Service ("BaaS") vendors offering turnkey solutions, but BaaS is no longer an acceptable deployment method for many banks.
We can assist you in deploying the best solution for your situation by validating what you can best do "in house" versus buy from specialized vendors, since we have already helped with many card program management situations.
We will:
You have become aware that you need to identify high-value features, to improve customer experiences, expand into adjacent markets, and adapt business models to changing conditions.
However, your existing revenue streams, organizational complexity, legacy technology, and internal processes may slow the identification and development of new opportunities.
We provide an external perspective to evaluate market dynamics, analyze competitive landscapes, identify emerging customer needs, assess technology trends, and uncover opportunities that may not be visible from within your organization.
We deliver:
Decades of experience in open-loop payment systems. Regulations-friendly: we ask for permission, not for forgiveness. We innovate fast and iterate often. Get in touch ›
Your customers are your customers: we prefer if you come with your own designers and User eXperience specialists but we can also provide them upon request.
Build services that can scale easily
Avoid security and regulatory risks
Help achieve consumer financial wellness
We seek innovations with scale which leverage existing networks.
We prefer to serve clients with large consumer audiences.
We audit the data security of your service, including its A.I. components, and give guidance about compliance with main banking regulations.
We follow guidance from advisory groups like Financial Health Network to ensure that products and services do the right thing.
We have joined ConexAmericas, a group of seasoned executives with expertise in international deployments of financial services.
ConexAmericas' mission is to help fintech founders and VC-backed teams enter the US, LATAM and EU markets with less risk, faster timelines and the right partners in place.
If the FinTech company you run or have invested in is considering a geographical expansion into or out of the US, the ConexAmericas team can help you validate and de-risk your growth project.
Financial Strides recommends DataArt if you need reliable software engineering resources with Fintech expertise to complement your own team. DataArt can also provide specialized IT help like DevSecOps services.
Financial Strides has partnered with DataArt for over 20 years to develop Fintech services and perform security audits.
DataArt is a global software engineering firm that delivers breakthrough data, analytics, and AI platforms for the world’s most demanding organizations. As the partner for progress in the digital age, our world-class teams artfully design and engineer data-driven, cloud-native solutions that generate immediate and enduring business value. We combine global scale, deep technical expertise, and progressive vision with advanced R&D Labs, frameworks, and accelerators to solve our clients’ toughest challenges.
Since our founding in New York City in 1997, DataArt has grown to bring together 6,000+ experts across 40+ locations in the US, Europe, Latin America, India, and the Middle East, with clients including major global brands like Priceline, Ocado Technology, Legal & General, and Flutter Entertainment. Recognized as a 2023 Newsweek Most Loved Global Workplace and 13 times as an Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Company, we are proud of our reputation as a great place to work and partner with.
We will be happy to provide you an introduction to DataArt's management upon request.
We recommend DuploCloud if you don’t have a DevOps or DevSecOps team and need to achieve security and compliance quickly. DuploCloud also makes sense for DevOps teams that want to amplify their impact, reduce manual work, or scale without adding headcount.
DuploCloud’s AI DevOps Engineer automates the full DevOps lifecycle. It handles infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, troubleshooting, and compliance while accelerating time-to-market up to 10× faster through our intelligent, rules-based automation engine.
Developers and DevOps teams can focus on higher-value engineering work instead of managing pipelines, policies, and manual configurations.
You also gain access to fractional DevOps experts who support cloud operations, migrations, and modernization efforts to ensure secure and efficient growth.
We will be happy to provide you an introduction to the management of DuploCloud upon request.
We recommend Johanson Group if you need an independent auditor to complete your SOC, ISO, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST, or PCI compliance.
As a licensed CPA firm, Johanson can provide readiness assessments, examinations, and audits for your organization to achieve compliance.
Their team of experts will ensure your company meets all your necessary compliance framework controls, protecting both your business and your customers from data breaches and cyber threats and achieve compliance excellence.
Audit/Examination Services:
We will be happy to provide you an introduction to the management of Johanson upon request.
We recommend PayKademy if you or your team needs a quick and convenient way to learn about Fintech related topics through remote courses.
PayKademy can also provide its learning platform and its team as a private instance for small and large teams who want to have their own learning center.
Get 10% discount on all quarterly or yearly PayKademy memberships with the discount code "finstrides". We will also be happy to provide you an introduction to the management of PayKademy upon request.
Financial Strides recommends Plaid if you need to let your customers link to their existing bank accounts for purposes like:
Plaid makes it easy for people to securely connect their financial accounts to the fintech services they choose. Plaid's developer-friendly platform supports over 12,000 financial institutions so the over 8,000 digital financial services built on Plaid can be accessible to everyone.
If you intend to use Plaid services that are billed on an API‑usage basis (not the Pay-as-you-Go Plan), then we can help you get a 10% discount on your usage bills (not applicable to implementation, support, or other non‑API/one‑time fees).
We recommend Scale Consulting Group if you need help in establishing a banking compliance service that will withstand bank and regulator scrutiny. Its principal, Rick Bachman holds several compliance certifications and has helped more than 100 FinTechs get into compliance. While Financial Strides can provide general regulatory guidance, Scale Consulting will provide detailed compliance services to precede or complement the work of your own Chief Compliance Officer.
We will be happy to provide you an introduction to Scale Group's management upon request.
We recommend SecureFrame if you need to achieve SOC-2 or ISO 27001 compliance.
Secureframe is a platform that can be used for automating all your security compliance requirements. The Secureframe platform enables organizations of all sizes to obtain and maintain SOC2 or ISO 27001 compliance with minimal time and effort through product integrations with 100+ core services such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Github, JAMF, and Okta. The Secureframe platform continuously collects audit evidence, runs security awareness training, and monitors infrastructure — all automatically.
This is done through automation built into the Secureframe platform that reduces manual work and they support this with their own in-house experts who are former auditors.
We will be happy to provide you an introduction to SecureFrame upon request.
(issuing incentives)
Nope, we don't do
snailmail anymore...
