For the last year, I've operated with a healthy dose of paranoia about counterparty risk. The kind of paranoia that makes you re-read OCC operating plans on a Saturday. My quietest assumption has been that the long, unglamorous work of vetting banking partners would eventually become a competitive advantage. Turns out "eventually" is now.
The collapse of Synapse in April 2024 became the case study everyone needed but nobody wanted. Millions of customers left stranded. Ledgering failures. Compliance gaps exposed in real time. As a founder watching that unfold, it felt like a horror movie you know is secretly a documentary.
Regulators didn't wait long. The OCC used its 2024 Bank Supervision Operating Plan to make the message explicit: banks are responsible for their fintech partners' actions. No dramatic new rule required. They just enforced the existing ones harder. You can't outsource risk, and now the penalties for trying are visible.
Investor behavior mirrors the shift. According to KPMG's Pulse of Fintech, 2024 funding went toward larger, concentrated bets on companies with proven models and clear profitability paths. The growth-at-all-costs checks of 2021 are gone. Money is moving into B2B payments (clear revenue models), compliance tech (direct response to regulatory pressure), and embedded finance (but only with sustainable, compliant partnerships).
For a pre-seed founder, this is actually liberating. I don't have to compete with hype. I compete on the quality of my thinking and the resilience of my model. Starting with Dentplicity as a data-first platform means we build trust and gather insights while the BaaS landscape matures, which makes the eventual launch of CLIN much more defensible.
This validates the framework in Building vs. Partnering: Mapping the Decision. Choosing a partner is mission-critical. The market is now punishing those who treated it as a checkbox.
Data sources: Cross River Bank Q4 2024 Newsletters, OCC.gov, American Banker, KPMG Pulse of Fintech H2'23.