Most people experience fintech through polished apps, sleek cards, and instant payments. But beneath every smooth interaction sits an invisible machinery of rails: ledgers, payments networks, KYC engines, card processors, and fraud systems that coordinate billions of dollars across millions of users. It’s this hidden infrastructure layer that’s becoming an arena for competition in modern finance.

Globally, this shift is turning into a massive economic story. The Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) market, where platforms embed financial products through third-party infrastructure, is projected to grow from $15.9B in 2023 to $64.7B by 2032. This rapid expansion mirrors a broader re-architecture of financial services globally, where BaaS has shifted from a niche enabler to a structural layer in digital finance. We’ve unpacked this transformation in-depth in our Brankas × WhiteSight Banking-as-a-Service report.

In the US, more than 150 banks have plugged themselves into this opportunity over the past few years, offering BaaS partnerships to fintechs and large brands. But fast growth has now collided with intense regulatory scrutiny. Throughout 2024, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve issued multiple consent orders against BaaS sponsor banks, flagging issues such as weak third-party oversight, anti-money laundering gaps, and insufficient risk controls. New supervisory expectations have made one thing clear: outsourced infrastructure must now be as safe and compliant as a bank’s own internal stack. The industry has been in the middle of a major reckoning, where BaaS models are being re-evaluated under sharper regulatory lenses. We break down this ‘great unbundling under scrutiny’ in our analysis of the BaaS Backlash and what it means for banks and fintechs.

And that pressure has exposed a structural tension: most fintechs rent their critical infrastructure from third parties, but are increasingly held accountable for risks they don’t fully control. This tension defined much of the embedded-finance narrative in early 2025, as digital brands accelerated into infrastructure partnerships even while regulators tightened the screws. We explore these shifts across banks, fintechs, and platforms in our Embedded Finance (Q1 2025) Roundup.

This is where SoFi made a very different bet. Instead of renting the technology that powers its financial products, SoFi bought the infrastructure themselves. It acquired Galileo Financial Technologies, a full suite of open APIs enabling companies to build modern consumer and B2B fintech services – from account setup and payments to card issuing and real-time transaction controls. Then came Technisys, a cloud-native, multi-product core banking platform. Through its Cyberbank system, it provides institutions the ability to design, configure, and manage innovative financial products across deposits, lending, and digital banking. Together, they gave SoFi ownership of the payments layer, the core ledger, and the digital experience engine underneath its products. Today, this same stack not only powers SoFi’s own bank but also serves dozens of fintechs, enterprises, and global financial institutions.

To understand how SoFi is positioning itself as a long-term infrastructure provider, and how its technology platform keeps delivering growth, we need to unpack how Galileo and Technisys work together.

But to become a top-10 financial institution, a goal CEO Anthony Noto articulated, SoFi couldn’t solely rely on just consumer products. Noto emphasized the following pillars: capital strength, regulatory alignment, consumer trust, and most importantly, control over its own infrastructure. That realization became the catalyst for a major strategic pivot.