Groundbreaking Solution Giving Banks Rapid Fintech Integration: Introducing FIS Embedded Finance

Digital demands on banks have never been greater. Consumer and business financial services needs are evolving at breakneck speed and increasing in complexity. This makes it extremely difficult for a bank, particularly community banks, to serve everyone. The key to adapting in today’s dynamic landscape is to partner with fintechs to bring in new revenue streams, and now a groundbreaking partnership breaks down the barriers and makes it easier than ever before.

Rapidly integrate with fintech and embedded finance

Financial technology company FIS has partnered with banking as a service (BaaS) leader Treasury Prime to offer the first embedded finance offering as part of the FIS Baas Hub. It’s hard to overstate how central a role FIS plays in the success of its banking partners. The Fortune 500 company is one of the largest financial institutions in the banking core providers space. Core providers are essentially the bank vaults of the modern financial system. Everything a bank does runs on top of or starts with their core — that includes the basics like how much money is in your checking account to the interest earned on your savings to the slightly more complex tracing loan payments, recording overdrafts and holds, fraud monitoring and more. 

Treasury Prime builds modern, industry-leading API software that fully integrates with those bank core systems and allows fintechs and enterprise companies to plug into those APIs on the other end. The new partnership between the two companies gives hundreds of FIS-partner banks the ability to launch fintech and embedded finance partnerships at unprecedented speed. That also means faster time to market for fintechs and embedded finance apps. 

Here’s everything banks and fintechs need to know about how to take advantage of this new opportunity. 

To learn more about how to offer embedded banking products, download our white paper.

Why is Treasury Prime partnering with FIS?

The old saying, “If you try to be everything to everyone, you are nothing to anyone,” rings very true here. While banking products tend to stay fairly consistent across core offerings, the big differentiators are how the data is consumed and interacted with by the end-users. This is something that fintechs excel at, and they can quickly create new products to serve customers. Rather than trying to compete with fintechs, Banks need to focus on their strengths — the ability to offer bank accounts, payment rails, and compliance — and look at each fintech or embedded finance partnership as a new business line, the same way community banks have for ages added lenders or business banking teams to target specific segments. Treasury Prime is giving banks the ability to add these new business lines at a rapid pace.

By partnering with top core provider FIS, we are able to fast-track the technical integration of FIS bank partners. Those that opt into FIS embedded finance will plug into a rapidly growing network of fintechs and other innovative partners that can help banks grow deposits and reach new markets. 

A deeper and more cohesive core BaaS integration leads to better end-user experiences for a fintech’s customers. When a banking API is not well-integrated with a bank’s core, the result can be a broken end-user experience. With both FIS and Treasury Prime at the table working hand-in-hand for our banks and fintechs, innovation and product enhancements can develop at a pace unseen before in the BaaS market. 

What does this partnership mean for FIS partner banks?

As a bank that runs its core on FIS, you will now be able to rapidly integrate with Treasury Prime’s banking API at a lower cost. We work with around 70 fintech clients including employee financial wellness app Wagestream, business formation service and embedded finance app ZenBusiness, couples’ shared bank account app Zeta, and many more.

While the bank won’t be the face or brand for these business lines — it will be the fintech or embedded finance company — the deposits and balance sheet will all look the same, with one major difference — the overhead and operational costs. These programs show a significantly lower cost of funds than traditional business lines within a bank.

​​Grasshopper Bank is the first financial institution to utilize FIS embedded finance. The digital bank, which offers banking solutions to fintechs, venture capital companies, and small and medium-sized businesses, saw a big opportunity in the growing field of embedded finance. With that in mind, they switched to FIS as their core provider to capitalize on the FIS integration with Treasury Prime and gain banking as a service capabilities, which allows them to easily work with fintech companies.

“Banks are increasingly realizing that they need to have an API strategy. As FIS and Treasury Prime demonstrated with Grasshopper Bank, this doesn’t need to be a lengthy process or a heavy lift,” said Chris Dean, CEO at Treasury Prime. “The banks that lean in now have the opportunity to become the foundation for a new generation of embedded finance companies. They will play an outsized role in the transformation of banking and will reap tremendous benefits.”

“We chose FIS because they are a trusted innovator and industry leader, and their core solution combined with Treasury Prime is enabling us to be in production faster than any other option,” says Chris Tremont, Chief Digital Officer at Grasshopper.

Are you an FIS partner bank interested in integrating with Treasury Prime? Contact the Treasury Prime bank team to discuss integration. 

What fintechs need to know about FIS BaaS Hub

To launch a fintech or embedded finance product, somewhere along the line you will need to have an integration with a bank’s core, and a lot of banks run their core on FIS. This new embedded finance offering means that hundreds of banks will now have the ability to integrate faster and at a lower cost with Treasury Prime’s banking API. For you, that means more potential bank partners to choose from when you work with Treasury Prime, easier integration with them, and greater ease to scale your business and cross banking services without concern for outgrowing your bank partner. With the Treasury Prime network, you can add bank partners for scale reasons without a change in your technology stack, meaning you can focus on your growth without concern for concentration, capacity, or other bank-specific dependencies. 

HUMBL, a Web 3 blockchain company with both consumer and commercial divisions, has partnered with Grasshopper through FIS embedded finance. Through Treasury Prime’s APIs, the fintech leverages Grasshopper’s bank services across its user base. 

"Our user experience is often heavily influenced by the evolving quality of our partner plugins. We are thrilled to partner with FIS, Grasshopper, and Treasury Prime on delivering this next stage of mobile wallet experiences for customers in the months ahead," said HUMBL CEO Brian Foote.

How can you take advantage of this partnership? FIS partner banks interested in integrating with Treasury Prime should reach out to their FIS account manager or the Treasury Prime bank team to discuss integration. 

Fintechs interested in taking advantage of FIS embedded finance or other embedded finance programs at Treasury Prime can contact our sales team with questions. Developers can also experiment at their own pace with Treasury Prime’s API in our Sandbox.