First Fidelity Bank has entered the highly competitive Banking as a Service market with Episode Six as its platform partner
First Fidelity Bank (FFB) a 100-year-old community bank headquartered in Oklahoma City, announced the launch of its next-gen Banking as a Service (BaaS) solution. The solution was developed with Episode Six (E6), a leading global payments and banking infrastructure provider that provides a simple, flexible platform that meets a critical need for any company looking to offer next-generation payments.
“Open banking is as much if not more of an opportunity for community banks than a threat”
FFB and E6’s BaaS solution is now live with its first customer, Unifimoney, a multi-asset digital wealth management platform that enables community banks and credit unions to offer investment services to their customers through online banking.
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As a market that proves to be in demand, there are an estimated 100 or so sponsor banks offering BaaS-type solutions and a large number of intermediary platforms that sit between the bank and the client companies. The market has struggled with undifferentiated offerings, poor payments infrastructure and often legacy and conflicting approaches to compliance, especially around blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
The FFB and E6 solution is designed to support the next generation of embedded finance with a low-cost, quick-to-deploy architecture; real-time payments including RTP and OCT; card issuing and processing; and modern, sophisticated digital KYC/AML/IDV and fraud detection, and controls including Astra Finance, Sardine and Prove. E6 has great experience in this market with more than three million user accounts live on its platform already.
“Open banking is as much if not more of an opportunity for community banks than a threat,” said John Symcox, Chief Innovation Officer, First Fidelity Bank. “It allows us to bring best-in-market solutions to clients and customers at high speed and low cost. The future of money is, we believe, going to be banking+ other services offered as a bundle. We want to be a part of enabling this and core to this ecosystem of new money services. To this end, we needed a trusted partner with extensive payments experience in this market, and we’ve found that with Episode Six.”
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John Mitchell, CEO and Co-Founder of E6 said, “FFB has some of the most sophisticated payments infrastructure in the market and can enable compelling customer experiences with real time, secure money movement. Our platform provides the virtual ledger that has been tested at scale with some of the world’s leading financial institutions. We’ve heard first-hand that this combination creates an incredibly compelling platform for fintechs.”
“There are many BaaS solutions in the market now,” said Ben Soppitt, CEO of Unifimoney. “They promise the world, but actually launching can be painful, slow and expensive. FFB and E6 have solved this with a platform and process built for the future, not the past. And they’ve done it in a way that makes launching a BaaS solution much easier, allowing us to get to market quickly.”
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