Tom Bell, CEO of Maast | Episode 205

What do ISVs have to do with banking in the near future of fintech? According to Maast CEO Tom Bell, just about everything! For those of you who may not know, Maast (which actually stands for Money as A Service +) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Synovus bank with a mission to create a true embedded finance platform for ISV and SaaS providers. When asked to expand on what their platform is capable of, Tom says “imagine everything you know about embedded payments and extend that into other banking products. Our goal is to take the bank itself and embed it into the software providers platform.”As far as the Synovus relationship impacting their competitive advantage in the marketplace, it actually serves to create one of their biggest value ads. Not only do they take a lot of friction out of the embedded model by enabling Synovus to take their product and distribute it nationwide in a much more efficient manner, they also provide a tremendous benefit to their ISVs and SaaS customers in that they already have all the regulatory, risk, and compliance mandates covered comprehensively on their end due to their relationship with the bank. It really offers much more of a plug-and-play model, allowing the ISV/SaaS to be 100% confident that the Maast platform is in line with regulatory compliance and requiring them to do nothing more than code to their API.Tune in to hear Tom talking about the true definition of embedded finance as it relates to the comprehensive offering, not just embedded payments, as well as where the embedded finance industry is headed in the next 2 to 3 years. Spoiler alert: in this new world, small businesses may not even know who their bank is because they have no need to.