Press Release

A new way to get paid

This “press release” was written as a product development artifact. But it’s all true!

BOULDER, June 27, 2024 -- Straddle, a fintech startup building the next generation of account-to-account (A2A) payments, today announced the launch of Pay by Bank, a unified API flow that enables businesses to build faster, easier, and more secure payment experiences.

Pay by Bank addresses the complexities - and limitations - of modern A2A payments by bringing identity, fraud detection, open banking, and money movement into a single API. Businesses and developers build on Straddle to accelerate time to market, reduce operational overhead, and keep more of the value they create. With Straddle there’s no fraud, fast settlement, and none of the usual fees.

"Today's businesses and software applications need more than just a payment processor. They need a comprehensive payment strategy — available as an API — that's both powerful and easy to implement," said Keith Raphael, CEO of Straddle. "Pay by Bank is purpose-built for this, with a unified API that brings parity to bank payments and sanity to a fragmented ecosystem. We want our customers to focus on growing their business, not piecing together costly point solutions while navigating an ever-shifting maze of regulations and fraud."

Key features of Pay by Bank include:

Identity First: Onboard and verify individual or business customers in less than a second using Straddle ID, a graph-defined identity engine. Real-time identity verification without requiring a low-conversion “selfie.”

Powered by Open Banking: Connect customer identity to open banking data via Bridge, Straddle's “no-code” widget. Or, bring your own token from names you know like Mastercard (Finicity), Plaid, and MX.

Secure Payments: All payments are protected with built-in balance confirmation and real-time fraud detection through Watchtower, Straddle's transaction monitoring risk engine.

Move Money Faster: Built-in balance and risk scores enable 24-hr direct debits, with payouts via dynamic multi-rail orchestration across ACH, RTP, and FedNow (coming soon).

Compliant by Default: Integrated KYC, watchlist screening, and transaction monitoring ensure robust compliance without the engineering overhead.

Developer-Friendly: A single, secure API stack that turns complex infrastructure into easy-to-implement code.

"Almost no companies should be building in-house bank payment flows now that Straddle exists." - Walt Cox, Valley National Bank

Pay by Bank is powered by two key technologies:

Bridge: A comprehensive suite of account connectivity endpoints that facilitates secure connections between users and their financial accounts. Bridge offers:

A drop-in open banking widget that connects to 90% of US bank accounts with a simple code snippet.

Support for existing third-party tokens from providers like Plaid, MX, Flinks, and Finicity (Mastercard).

API-based bank account verification for "out of network" banks, eliminating the need for onerous micro-deposits.

Paykeys: An evolution of traditional payment tokenization, Paykeys create a secure link between a user's verified identity and their chosen payment method. Paykeys offer:

The first identity-linked payment method since the debit card

Built-in compliance and fraud detection, by connecting verified customer identities to open banking data via LSTM machine learning models

Reusability for subscriptions, recurring invoice payments, and — one day — portability

"We've built Pay by Bank to be the solution we wished existed while deep in the trenches of ACH over the last 15 years. We don’t wish that pain on anyone," added Keith. "Straddle is built by payments experts, for developers, to make integrating advanced payment capabilities as simple as possible.”

Straddle is also introducing Embed, a purpose-build API stack that enables software providers, marketplaces, and payment facilitators to easily integrate Straddle's open banking payment capabilities into their own offerings.

"Straddle Embed allows any platform to extend and monetize our payments infrastructure with all the benefits of a 'PayFac' program, but without the regulatory headaches or liabilities," Keith explained. "Embed integrators carry no payment liability or flow of funds exposure - they focus on building compelling software while we manage payments, compliance, and risk."

Straddle's Pay by Bank is now available for early access, with general availability planned for Q3 2024. Developers and businesses interested in the early access program can find more information at

www.straddle.io⁠

⁠

About Straddle: Founded in 2023, Straddle is focused on modernizing account-to-account payments. The company's Pay by Bank platform combines identity verification, open banking, and multi-rail payment routing to enable faster, more secure bank transactions.

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