SaaS Standout Finix Is Coming After Stripe

Two years ago, software-as-a-service company Finix was enjoying modest success selling its payments technology to other companies. It had attracted considerable attention for the quality of its software, with Sequoia Capital leading a $35 million Series B fundraise . . . only for Sequoia to abruptly reverse course, claiming that the company couldn’t get financially involved with a potential competitor to their other major holding, Stripe.

Evidently, Finix saw that as a challenge, and at the end of May it announced that it is not only entering the payments game itself, it has developed the architecture to allow any other software firm to bypass mainstream financial middlemen.

“What we’ve done now is become the payments facilitator ourselves,” said Finix Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Richie Serna. With this new development, Serna explained, Finix “can not only provide the payments, but also all the back office requirements and compliance certifications, so that our customers can get up and running in a matter of days, rather than months.”

Though positioning itself as a true rival to Stripe is an extremely lofty goal for Finix, the company’s move couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. With Stripe and Plaid locked in their own drama and the threat of recession continuing to loom, Finix’s novel modular open architecture might just give it a competitive edge.