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In this conversation, we chat with Ashwin Kumar, Stripe’s Head of Startups for Banking-as-a-Service. Ashwin is the former CEO and co-founder of Y Combinator-backed Sway Finance, and now helps Stripe’s customers to use their BaaS APIs to embed financial products.
Ashwin’s startup roots help him guide fintech founders as they work with Stripe to solve complex financial problems. He’s designed products from scratch, taught himself to code, won several hackathons to support his entrepreneurial endeavors, and was part of Y Combinator’s S16 cohort. Prior to joining Stripe in 2021, Ashwin was a data scientist for YC Startup School, a product manager/machine learning engineer at Mythic and a software engineer at Autopilot.
1’18”: Understanding Stripe: Deciphering the core bet, its mission, and defining the concept of a digital company
3’18”: Defining the landscape of fintech: The role of stripe in niche user group services, embedding financial services in SaaS companies, and the evolution towards becoming a financial services arm
6’43”: Exploring Stripe's unique position in the industry: The exponential reach through platform integrations, a comparative study with Amazon's strategy, and the unfolding of Stripe's architectural framework for third party utilization
12’14”: Distribution to the long tail and solving the last mile problem: Differentiating between embedded finance and Banking-as-a-Service, and understanding the relationship with underlying regulated financial entities
17’15”: Expanding the role of Banks in embedded finance: Regulatory perspectives, compliance work, and the impact of the shrinking U.S. banking sector
18’17”: Stripe's vision for Bank partnerships: Diversifying distribution and empowering financial institutions in the era of centralizing forces
21’04”: Observing the evolution of fintech: Changes in quality, screening, and focus of emerging tech companies seeking cutting-edge fintech solutions
22’08”: Strategies for fintech startups: Considering distribution, value addition and comprehensive business models for sustainable growth and success in the financial technology landscape
Sneak Peek:
Ashwin Kumar: …It's not easy to launch those products. Stripe Issuing, launching a card, launching an account, it's a lot easier than it used to be, but there's a lot of compliance that has to happen. There's a lot of disputes you have to think about. There are card operations, and so it's not just a turn the switch and write some code kind of thing. That actually surprises a lot of startup founders for sure. They think it's that easy. It's not there yet. They do need to have some scale; they need to have a reason for why they would launch this product.
We've seen some platforms try and it doesn't really catch. They'll launch a card or an account product on top of their whatever SaaS platform is, and their customers don't necessarily want to switch their bank account to this, or maybe they don't trust the platform or there's not enough of a value add, and so it doesn't always work. And so of course the first thing is figure out what their users want, which is their role. And then once they do that, the way we've architected Stripe is that the product that these platforms are built on is called Stripe Connect and our banking and card products are built on top of…
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