Banking as a Service, Explained: What it is, Why it’s Important and How to Play

Banking as a Service (BaaS) is reconfiguring the banking value chain, opening the door to disintermediation and enabling new sources of growth. Our latest report, "Banking as a Service, Explained," can help you understand what BaaS is, why it’s important, and how to play.

BaaS is the provision of banking products and services through third-party
distributors. Through integrating non-banking businesses with regulated financial infrastructure, BaaS offerings are enabling new, specialized propositions and bringing them to market faster.

As customer dissatisfaction with existing offerings grows, BaaS offerings are
rapidly gaining ground—here are a few key stats on the state of the market:

• 30% of customers are considering switching banks
• 42% of customers have used a Buy Now, Pay Later service
• 2x ROAA for banks focused on BaaS offerings

The emerging BaaS configurations

As opposed to traditional banks who owned the entire value chain, BaaS players are largely focusing on only one to two stages of the value chain. Today, successful BaaS players align to one of four configurations:

• Providers provide their banking license, and products, operations and/or technology for use by aggregators, other banks, and non-financial companies (NFCs).
• Providers-Aggregators act like Providers, but also couple their own capabilities with other vendors to compose a complete “out-of-the- box” solution.
• Distributors leverage end-customer relationships to offer unique financial services propositions
• Distributor-Aggregators enhance the propositions they distribute by adding new products or technology from multiple providers

To see examples of these configurations, the value they create, and how to launch a net new BaaS proposition, download our full report.