Justin Howell is the co-founder and CEO of banking-as-a-service platform Rize. We talked to Justin to learn more about the complex back-end infrastructure of fintech and how banking-as-a-service platforms look to stitch together functionalities like ledger, checking, and card issuing.

Questions

1. Let’s start with how Rize came about.

2. You mentioned that finance on the back end is separated into these silos that customers don’t see and that they don't really talk to one another or interoperate, which manifests in these building blocks of fintech that companies find difficult to put together into a unified view. Is that an accurate summary? What are some of the common building blocks, and why is it so hard to make them talk to one another?

3. It sounds like partnering with point solutions that can do individual tasks is important for you in providing that connective tissue.

4. Could you dive into a little more detail on what it looks like for these tools not to play nice? What does it look like when you're stitching together a bunch of point solutions, and it just sucks, and what is Rize doing to correct that?

5. You mentioned earlier the idea of building backwards from the customer point of view, focusing on customer needs versus building an abstraction layer over the banking core. Is that the main way you view your positioning as different from the new generation of banking-as-a-service companies—like Bond, Unit, Treasury Prime—and is there other stuff as well?

6. Your vision hinges on the idea that companies today might want to add just banking or a credit card to their app, but that in the future an increasing number will want to add brokerage and other products. What other kinds of products are you envisioning, and what's the narrative you see driving this trend of ever more horizontal products being bolted on?

7. What’s your take on the different dynamics between serving embedded finance companies versus a company focused on fintech, like a neobank comparable to Chime?

8. I feel like that helps explain a little bit why, for example, Square uses Marqeta with Cash App. They’ve gotten the economics to work out to where it makes sense to use Marqeta versus spending a ton of time building their own version.

9. You’ve mentioned this comparison between the cloud and banking and finance. Is the way that banking and brokerage work on the back end so disconnected and so siloed that it’s an even bigger mistake to build your own, versus in the cloud where maybe you can build everything except you outsource one aspect easily to AWS?