SynapseFI, a San Francisco-based startup that provides things like payment and lending products to fintech firms via APIs, has raised just over $17 million in a Series A funding round led by Trinity Ventures and Core Innovation Capital.
Founded in 2014, SynapseFI is working to build an operating system for banking that is fit for the digital age - both less expensive to maintain and more easy to innovate on top of.
Then, says CEO Sankaet Pathak in a blog, the firm thinks it can help to "change banking from a lending or transactions business to a SaaS business".
It wants to do this through back office automation, slashing the cost of offering financial products, making them available to more people. Then, with an automated back office, the goal is vertical integration - enabling companies building on top of Synapse to be able to offer all the products and services that large banks provide.
Finally, the startup is putting much of its efforts into behavioural economic research, building up a team to automate advice and help make financial products "fun, intuitive, and transparent".
So far, more than 100 fintech firms have used SynapseFI's infrastructure - payment, deposit, lending and investment products accessed via APIs - as the basis on which to build their own products and services. The firm has processed over $10 billion in transactions and banks over 1.5 million end users.