Banks rely on third-party software from FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry, which control 80% of the market. Because they don't own their tech stack, they can't expose APIs. So customers become the API, manually downloading and uploading statements and files.
banks are inherently not technology companies. What banks are really good at is the relationships, bringing deposits from, you know, small businesses, consumers like you and I, and then lending out those deposits in the form of mortgages, SBA loans, auto loans, home finance, construction, all of that. And the spread that they're making between the interest that they're earning on these loans versus the interest they pay on deposits, that's like the core business model for most banks. And so when it comes to technology, what banks actually do is they're buying third-party technology from FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry. And these three companies control 80% plus of the banking software market. And every bank, whether it's Chase or Wells or your local regional or community bank, they're basically running on these existing softwares. And so when it comes to things like APIs, like they don't have control over their underlying technology, and so they can't offer that. And so what happens is when you try to get information out of a bank, the human, or you and I, we're essentially the API. We're downloading bank statements, we're downloading NACHA files, uploading to the bank, we're downloading CSV statements, or maybe BAI-2 files or something like that.
