Fintech Talks:"One Throat to Choke": How NXTMOVES Is Fixing the Sponsor Bank Bottleneck

Yeah, so we went at it a little bit different to get there.

I mean, we're three years old as Next Moves Advisors, and then coming this September, we incorporated to what Next Moves is today, and it still gets iterated all the time, so as we keep up with the marketplace.

But Walt and I went around to almost 100 banks during our first year journey and really wanted to understand Where the problem was with the Bass implosion or whatever you want to call what happened to Bass pre-COVID and then after COVID and with the SVB, the lineages of the world that evolved, everything that happened with Synapse and all that stuff.

How could we make it better on the issuing side? And what were the problems on the issuing side and what the banks really suffered with? to get more sponsor banks.

And so that's really what we went out to seek.

That was the problem that came out in the industry is there wasn't enough sponsor banks out there.

There wasn't enough transparency for the sponsor banks to understand whether I'm looking at program one or program 10, what's the delineation in those programs, where are the users, what's going on with those users, all the things that the regulators would come in and beat the sponsor banks up about.

They had no platform out there that would give them the visibility into And so that's what we went to solve.

And then I'll let Walt tell you what Next Moves is today and how we solved that.

Yeah, I mean, today, like to Steve's point, the journey has been very interesting, obviously, as we dynamically grow and try to add new things to our platform.

But really, if you think about it today, we're a unified orchestration management platform.

And why I want to make sure that people understand what that is is because in the marketplace, it's a myth, right? In the ethos of issuing card programs and building up these types of programs, whether you're a big box retailer or a big merchant that's out there, like you want to say you're a Macy's, or hey, you're an next-door fintech that is disrupting X vertical of the marketplace.

The reality is that when you think about their individual journeys, one, they're organizations that were not built around building card programs.

They're built around solving another problem.

And so they're not card program experts, not payment experts.

And you can learn it, but you're still not an expert in hand, right? You're not going to get your multiple necessarily off of being a payments provider or learning all that stuff, as well as then obviously trying to disrupt an industry, so to speak.

The other thing you have to do is, if you think about the ecosystem itself, you have to build out these relationships with about 10 different types of vendors, right? So starting off at the very top, you have to have yourself a sponsor bank.

And As we know, not all sponsor banks are the same, right? Some are very specialized in acquiring only or issuance only.

Some will do both.

Some will just do payroll programs.

So finding the right sponsor bank for you, I think, is vitally important.

You have that processor stack then that comes into it, right? So is it a processor that is built around the idea of a credit card and you want to launch a credit card program? Do they build all the things out that make credit cards really, really easy for you to do? Or are they just kind of dabble in both debit and credit? And those are big deals, right? Do they manage the U.S.

market or are they global, right? Because everything's a little bit different across the globe.

There's this listing, a checklist of all these other vendors, compliance.

There's three or four in that stack within itself, right? You've got...