Summary
Fintech touches nearly every part of an ecommerce operation, from buy now pay later at checkout to bill pay on the back end, and most brands evaluate these tools on features and price alone. Understanding ecommerce fintech risks matters far more than comparing feature lists, and the collapse of Parker made that clear. The ecommerce credit card startup filed Chapter 7 with almost no warning to customers, leaving merchants scrambling to figure out what they owed and to whom.
Stephen Brown and Stacy Walker break down a four-part framework for evaluating any fintech vendor: vendor risk, financial risk, operational risk, and strategic risk. The conversation covers why most fintechs are venture-backed and unprofitable, how they sit on top of partner banks like Thread Bank, and what a Silicon Valley Bank style failure could mean if it hit the fintech layer instead of traditional banking.
Takeaways
- What Happens to Your Money When a Fintech Company Goes Out of Business
- The Four Risk Categories Every Ecommerce Brand Should Evaluate Before Choosing a Fintech App
- Why Free Bill Pay Is Just a Price Increase Waiting to Happen
- How to Vet Whether a Fintech Startup Will Still Exist in Three Years
- Why Percentage of Sale Pricing Punishes You for Growing
- What FDIC Protection Actually Covers and How Long It Takes to Get Your Money Back
- The Case for Keeping One Account at a Too Big to Fail Bank
- Why Fintech Accounting Integrations Wreck Your Books
- Who Is Actually Responsible for PCI Compliance in Your Payment Stack
- The One Question That Matters Most When Evaluating a Fintech Vendor
What We Cover:
- 00:00 Understanding FinTech and Its Risks
- 02:53 Vendor Risks in FinTech
- 09:33 Financial Risks and Fee Structures
- 16:01 Operational Risks in FinTech Applications
- 19:56 Strategic Risks and Compliance
- 23:27 The Future of FinTech and AI
- 26:00 Key Questions for Evaluating FinTech Vendors
Guest Information
Stacy Walker is the Director of Growth at LedgerGurus, where she leads the sales and growth strategy for one of the ecommerce industry’s most specialized accounting firms. With a background that spans business development, sales, and marketing, Stacy brings a front-line perspective on what ecommerce brands are actually dealing with, having spent years talking directly with seven and eight-figure sellers navigating everything from scaling challenges to profitability gaps.
Work with LedgerGurus
Building your own tools versus sticking with SaaS is a tough call, and this episode gives you a framework to decide with confidence. If you need help with ecommerce accounting, LedgerGurus can help.
Transcript
Stephen Brown (00:00)
FinTech is everywhere in e commerce, from BNPL to paying bills to receiving payments. And most teams evaluate fintech on features, user experience, and costs, but there’s more to consider and you need to make sure you understand the risks of fintech apps before using them.
Welcome to the Ecommerce Finance Podcast. I’m Stephen Brown with LedgerGurus and I have Stacy Walker, LedgerGurus Head of Growth, here to discuss ecommerce fintech app risks. Stacy, we’ve got a bit of a series going on here talking about tech. We talked about AI costs and where we think they’re going. We talked about is it cheaper to vibe code or buy SaaS? And there’s something that’s been on my mind for a little while now, which is fintech app risks.
Stacy Walker (00:26)
Hi, Stephen.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, let’s do it. Let’s start off defining fintech. Why don’t you go ahead and define fintech for people who aren’t 100 % sure what that is.
Stephen Brown (00:54)
I want to talk about fintech specifically as apps that are involved with the movement or storage of money. So as I said in the the beginning, that could be things like buy now pay later, that could be receiving payments, you know, your PayPal’s, your stripes, that could be paying bills, that could be these neobanks where you’re storing your money. That could be the fancy credit cards out there.
all of those that are involved the movement of money is what I would categorize as fintech. Now there’s a close category that we work with which I call accounting tech, which is tracking money. But for this conversation I want to specifically talk about the things that are involved with moving money around.
Stacy Walker (01:33)
Yeah.
Okay, yeah, let’s do it. So let’s start off. Do you have any examples of FinTech app problems? I can think of one right off the top of my head. I wonder if it’s the same one you’ll tell us about.
Stephen Brown (01:50)
Yes, I have one and I’m I don’t usually like to throw companies under the bus, but this one failed so poorly that I feel like it merits calling them out. And that’s Parker.
So Parker wa started as this ecommerce specific credit card that gave terms where you could have rolling terms on your purchases. You could actually increase those terms for a fee. So it gave some cash flow facilities, they expanded into bank accounts and some other areas. And then
A few months ago they just went out of business. In fact, I want to read the tweet of their CEO. I won’t call out his name, but you can find it. Well, that was a crazy turn of events. Three weeks ago I thought Parker was going to be acquired in a deal worth nearly ninety million dollars. Yesterday we filed for Chapter Seven. I spent most of my twenties building Parker. We went from an idea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the hardest part is the impact on the people involved, customers dealing with disruption.
Employees losing jobs, they worked hard for investors who believed in us losing money.
That was basically how Parker went out of business. And and that tweet wasn’t actually when they went out of business. There was actually reports in TechCrunch and other news outlets. We were testing Parker with our little brand. I hadn’t pushed them on our customers. We had some customers using Parker. You went into the website, there was nothing. You know, I remember going to support us like you guys going out of business? Nothing.
I think this tweet came a couple of days later and it was a a rude awakening that fintech has some risks and when they fail, they can fail in glorious fashion. In fact, I’m still trying to settle my account from Parker because it just went out of business and I don’t know what the balance is. I’m getting these weird let letters from the banks that were underwriting their credit cards and their
Stacy Walker (03:28)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (03:51)
their bank accounts and I’m trying to figure out what the heck is going on. How much do I owe? Who do I pay to? It’s just it’s a complete mess. And it really makes me mad.
Stacy Walker (03:54)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (04:00)
So I wanna talk about things that people should be thinking about when they’re using fintech, specifically e commerce fintech.
Stacy Walker (04:00)
Yeah. Yeah.
So what do you think the key risks are with these FinTech apps?
Stephen Brown (04:08)
I think there’s four risks that you should be thinking about. One is your vendor risk, financial risk, operational risk, and strategic risk. So I wanna talk about it in the framework.
Stacy Walker (04:19)
Okay, tell us more. Let’s start with vendor risk.
Stephen Brown (04:22)
So vendor risk. I mean, Parker is a good example of vendor risk. And let’s be honest, there’s a ton of these fintechs that are startup phase. Meaning they are operating off of venture capital money. They’re usually losing money profits. There’s no they’re unprofitable. They’re burning through cash. They’re using those investments to stay alive with the hope of going public or getting acquired someday.
Stacy Walker (04:39)
Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Brown (04:48)
I mean, I’ll give you the big example. Stripe is still a private company.
Stacy Walker (04:52)
yeah, that is a good example.
Stephen Brown (04:54)
I haven’t read recently what their financials are. I’m assuming that they’re probably pretty viable. They’re huge, but Stripe is not a public, well known going concern. And so a lot of people are using Stripe. the the reality about the vendor risk is these these fintechs.
They’re usually riding on top of banks. I mentioned the example of Parker. So these FinTech credit card companies are usually working with partner banks for the credit cards, sometimes a different bank for cash accounts, credit checking and savings accounts, because they don’t it’s really hard to get a bank license. And so they’re sitting on top of these. You know, Stripe did a lot, I think, to build on top of the most basic rails. It’s very hard to build.
Stacy Walker (05:37)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (05:50)
on top of the banking system. I mean you worked in banking, right? It’s in it’s crazy, right? I mean all the re I mean, what was your experience, the the regulations and whatnot?
Stacy Walker (05:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is hard. Yeah, it’s insane.
The regulations are off the charts. I can see why FinTech has come around because it’s virtually impossible for a small brand, like a small FinTech, to be able to get any kind of banking license.
Stephen Brown (06:15)
And banking, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, their tech is horrible. I don’t know why. I mean, do you know why? You worked in a bank. Why why why are their software so garbage?
Stacy Walker (06:20)
terrible. It’s terrible. No, I don’t know why we, I don’t,
yeah, I don’t know why for like we were on DOS for years. Think about that. Like years we’re still using DOS. I don’t know why they’re so slow to adopt new tech. I really don’t know why. the bank I was at, I know had the financial stability to do something about it. That’s just not where they chose to put their
Stephen Brown (06:30)
Mm.
Stacy Walker (06:49)
but their efforts, I guess, I don’t know. But we’ve talked about also that like lending through for an ecommerce brand to get traditional lending is virtually impossible. I do see, I see a reason that these FinTech apps can be successful.
Stephen Brown (06:51)
Yeah.
Correct. And that what’s emerged is this interesting industry where there’s certain banks, Threadbank is is one that’s well known that is the underpinning of a lot of fintechs, where they will they’ll be the the banking, the compliance, all the regulatory part of the of the solution, and then they enable these fintechs to connect to their their systems to do all the cool software things.
Stacy Walker (07:34)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (07:35)
And and so you have this interesting combination of banks where there’s some stability, but like I worry like thread seems to be the underpinning of a ton of fintechs. I’m like, what happens if one of those fintechs goes bad in a big way and it like took down thread and then all the fintechs that were on top of thread were to go down? I mean, I don’t ever hear anybody talking about that, but it’s something that’s gone through my head as we’ve seen some bank failures in recent years like Silicon Valley Bank. Who would have thought
Stacy Walker (08:03)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (08:05)
ten years ago that Silicon Valley Bank would go out of business.
Stacy Walker (08:08)
I know, that was so surprising.
Stephen Brown (08:10)
You know, and so there’s layers of risk here. You have the the fintech themselves and what we’ve seen with Parker is they can fail. Your money’s gonna be in some other bank, but unwinding it’s a pain. And you know, like the problem is, you know, how much of your financial operations are built on top of that fintech? It can take a while to switch things around. But underneath that I think is even greater risk is is
Stacy Walker (08:34)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (08:39)
What are the underlying banks and what is their risk profile? And I feel like we think that banks are fairly stable. Hey, OA, we fixed all those problems. But I I feel like bank failures just go in cycles. And, you know, we had we had a couple of banks around the Silicon Valley. That was really based off of bond yields and some calls for capital.
Stacy Walker (08:48)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (09:06)
So for people who aren’t familiar with Silicon Valley Bank, they got a bunch of bonds, interest rates rates went up, those bonds went underwater. A lot of times banks will they’ll they’ll get these bonds and then sometimes they need to liquidate them. But if they’re like way underwater, they don’t want to, and then they have l liquidity crises. Like banks don’t actually keep cash. They they turn around and they they put it to work and they have all these fancy
Stacy Walker (09:28)
They don’t.
Stephen Brown (09:33)
Formulas and sometimes the the regulators have expectations for how much you can deploy. And that’s all great until there’s a run on the banks. And with Silicon Valley Bank, what happened is all the VCs were like, they’re unstable, go pull your your money out, which further stabilized unsta destabilized them, resulting in a bank run, good old fashioned bank run, and the failure of the bank. and the the feds had to come in and bail them out. So
Stacy Walker (09:52)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (10:01)
That could happen again. And I I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a fintech if there was a fintech bank failure that has widespread issues someday.
Stacy Walker (10:12)
Yeah, yeah, there’s so many of them on top of that. That’s a really good point. Well, Stephen then how do you think our customers and other ecommerce sellers can vet whether a FinTech company will still be around in three years?
Stephen Brown (10:24)
I think we’ve gotten a little bit sloppy the last few years with the growth of of SaaS. But I think you’ve really got to look beyond, hey, does it solve this problem? Do they have a good reputation? You know, I think about things like how much have they raised? What’s the last time they raised? What’s the word on the the street around them? The problem is with with private companies.
There’s not always a lot of details a w around their financial performance. But they love to brag about how much they raised.
Stacy Walker (10:55)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (10:58)
And so I want to see how much they’ve raised, how long has it been, you know, what are you hearing? What what’s the the word around layoffs? Like when a fintech has layoffs, it spooks me because I’m like, ooh, they’re not super stable. And I feel like fintechs have to operate a little bit differently than traditional startups because they’re handling people’s money. So I would look at all those things and I would just be like, buyer beware for, you know, a startup fintech.
Once they go public, you have much better visibility. Let’s take one that we’ve used for years, bill dot com. Bill.com went public. You can see exactly how they’re doing. You can see how they’re performing, if they’re profitable, you know, what what’s going on. And there’s something to say there.
Stacy Walker (11:38)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it’s so true. What about financial risks?
Stephen Brown (11:52)
So I think one of the things you gotta think about, particularly with startups, is is fees and fee creep. I’ve seen it over and over again where fintechs will come in with incredible pricing. One of the areas we saw this in was bill pay. There was this like rush of bill pay apps for many years and a lot of them have been acquired or they’ve gone public, but they’d come in with super cheap pricing.
And I got to a point where it’s like free bill pay is just a price increase waiting to happen.
Stacy Walker (12:24)
Yep, I totally agree.
Stephen Brown (12:25)
So I’d be really cautious about pricing that feels too good to be true.
I would also just pay attention to price increases. Again, as a company goes public or is acquired into either a large public or you know, there’s a lot of private equity and that’s that’s even worse because you don’t know what’s going on. But I’ll tell you one thing about private equity. They don’t like to lose money, so for the most part it’s good, but they also like to harvest profits. But there there’s gonna be
Stacy Walker (12:54)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (12:59)
Instability when they’re small. I would also look at what are their pricing economics. Are they atta attached to a percentage of sale? And how does that affect your growth? Like I feel like a lot of these apps in e commerce wanted to take a piece of sale, which means you can’t really dilute that cost. It just grows with you.
Stacy Walker (13:20)
Yep. Yep.
Stephen Brown (13:21)
I would also look at who actually holds or controls the funds and how long it r takes to receive funds. you know, these are things that you don’t usually dig into but are worth considering.
Stacy Walker (13:36)
Yeah.
Yeah. So if a provider, so if I’m using one of the Fintech apps and they suddenly freeze my accounts and my money, like what recourse do I have to like protect myself ahead of time?
Stephen Brown (13:53)
That is a really good question. And I my guess is it’s buried in the terms of service. Right? You’re probably gonna have to get a lawyer and you know like how how much do you understand bank failures having worked in banking and when FDIC takes over?
Stacy Walker (13:59)
Yeah.
I’m decent at it, I think.
Stephen Brown (14:14)
I mean you’re protected what, like two hundred fifty thousand dollars on an account and there’s all these little exceptions video.
Stacy Walker (14:17)
Yeah, depending on the structure. Yeah, depending
on how it’s structured, you can be protected for more, but it takes FDIC time to get you your money. And if you’re an e-com brand, we already know that cashflow is a challenge for e-com brands. What if this happens during Q4? I mean, then what are they doing?
Stephen Brown (14:26)
Yeah. Yeah that
Silicon Valley Bank spooked me. Like I diversified banks after that. I was like, I don’t trust any of my banks. I’m just gonna have multiple banks so I I can redirect money if I need to. I’ve tried not to create balances too big. And we’re talking about traditional banks, not even fintechs, but you know, FDIC, when there’s failures, from what I’ve learned, which I haven’t gone super deep. FDIC comes in and they take over and they have to unwind all the assets. But like you said, it’s it’s not like you’re gonna get
Stacy Walker (14:42)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Stephen Brown (15:04)
A check cut immediately. They’ve got to do an orderly wind down of those assets. And yeah. In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, it was big enough where, like, I was super spooked that weekend. I was like, we’re gonna have a freaking recession starting on Monday. And the government went and bailed out the entire bank, not just the FDIC limit. So they created solvency, which they didn’t have.
Stacy Walker (15:08)
Yeah, yeah, it can take months.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (15:33)
have to do, but that bank was wrapped around so much of tech that it could have frozen up the high entire tech ecosystem, which could have frozen up the entire economy. So I would argue that we dodged a huge or not a huge, but a a good recession because of that bailout. And the average person probably didn’t even think about it.
Stacy Walker (15:45)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
didn’t even realize. I think the average person doesn’t think about it or realize, right?
Stephen Brown (16:01)
But these key institutions can cause systemic failures. As we learned in 08. For those of you who weren’t around in 08, you know, you had a domino effect with mortgages and it is just a catastrophe. Well, I think you could have something similar with fintech. But to your your question though, I don’t know. Like I think you’d have to get into terms of service and really and my guess is
If your funds get frozen, who knows? So how much is locked up in these fintechs and what’s your confidence in in your accessibility of those funds?
Stacy Walker (16:41)
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I love the diversification strategy. I think that’s smart regardless of where you’re banking or anything else. So let’s talk about…
Stephen Brown (16:52)
Yeah, and I
well let me tell t pull on that thread just a little bit. I have this thesis of even though they’re a pain in the butt, always work with a too big to fail bank. So that’s like your Chase, your Wells, your Bank of America’s. there’s like s you know, seven really big banks in the country. I think P and C’s up there.
And they kinda suck to work with. But my thesis is those banks are not gonna go under, like ’cause it’d take down the whole country. So it it’s not a bad idea to have a foot in one of those big banks just in case.
Stacy Walker (17:18)
Yeah.
Yeah, they will. Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, I like that. Let’s talk about operational risk.
Stephen Brown (17:35)
So operational risk I think about is like if these are a critical part of your your workflow. So like a payment process or a BNPL or you know, maybe you’re using something to receive payments, what’s the impact if they were to go down? Or let’s say you’re using a bill pay app. If your bill pay app were to have a hiccup, how would you pay bills? Could you, you know, redirect to something else?
And you know, what would be the impact? What if w or what if a different case? What if like they’re just they slow down? Now I d I haven’t heard a lot of cases of like where they there’s outages amongst fintech apps, but I’m sure it happens. and I think you have to just consider and I I again I would focus really heavily on the startups. Like Stripe has an incredible reputation. But
Like something new and and this happens all the time. It’s like the latest and greatest thing. What’s their reputation? Have they had outages? And w and just kind of think through if this app were to go down, how does this impact my business? Could I adjust or could I wait for it to to get back online?
Stacy Walker (18:48)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so from the bookkeeping side, where do you see fintech tools break down the most, like specifically maybe around reconciliation?
Stephen Brown (18:59)
Fintechs are terrible when it comes to accounting integrations. Like even the biggest ones, like PayPal, you know, Shopify, they just barf all their data into like QuickBooks or Xero And in general, we don’t like to connect them directly. So there are other apps out there. We’ve had A2X on the podcast, you know, that do intermediation between the
Stacy Walker (19:07)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (19:27)
you know, the sales order systems. But in general, I don’t like pushing the transactional transaction level data from these fintechs. We either like to do like summary data or you know, we’ll we’ll do bank feed level data into the accounting software. The fintechs, while better than some systems, oftentimes
Stacy Walker (19:29)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (19:56)
They err on the side of just sending too much over. And so that’s not as much an operational risk, but that’s an operational impact. And I think you have to understand, you know, we’ve seen this all the time. You see this, people go out and they’ll say, Well, I’ve got, you know, two credit cards, three bank accounts, and one payment processor, and then we’ll dig in and the team’s like, I actually got like five, right?
Stacy Walker (19:59)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Stephen Brown (20:26)
And you
hooked you hooked one of up to your your general ledger and they’re making a mess. So that’s something to consider. Most people don’t use these apps for their accounting prowess, but it is definitely something to think about as well.
Stacy Walker (20:31)
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about strategic risk next.
Stephen Brown (20:44)
So strategic risk I would think about in terms of like regulatory and compliance spillover. Like
At the end of the day, there is a level of ownership around
Payment data and understanding what to protect. So how how well are they compliant and what are the risks there? who owns the transaction data? The other thing I think about strategically is getting too locked in. Like let’s say you become super dependent on a vendor, they get acquired, and all of a sudden they double their prices.
Stacy Walker (21:02)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (21:25)
Could you switch? Yeah, like software I think about like supply chain. It’s like for a lot of industries. We you hear about supply chain diversification e commerce, you think about do I have one manufacturer? Software in some ways is the same thing. if something were to go sideways with a vendor, how would you adapt? And some are harder. Like moving off of a Shopify would be very painful.
Stacy Walker (21:26)
Yeah.
nightmare yeah
yeah
Stephen Brown (21:55)
but you know, moving from one BNPL to another, not so bad. Or is it? I don’t know. Something you have to think about. And the market changes quickly. So you gotta think about how painful it is to roll this out, how locked in am I? Could I unwind it? is there, you know, compliance risk with this partner? Or, you know.
Stacy Walker (22:02)
Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Brown (22:20)
So they have everything buttoned up.
Stacy Walker (22:21)
So how much of the compliance burden do you think operators assume the fintech provider is handling for them?
Stephen Brown (22:29)
I mean, I think they assume one hundred percent. But the reality when you’re using payment processors is you often will have to do a PCI compliance survey every year. I’ve had to do those. And they’ll ask you, Are you storing any customer credit cards, anything sensitive? Which usually the answer is no. But
Stacy Walker (22:54)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (22:57)
You know, one of the things you want to look is are they compliant with, you know, financial laws? those are things that we forget to ask a lot of times. And the kind of the big ones are PCI compliance, that’s a really big thing around credit card information.
Stacy Walker (23:12)
Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Brown (23:14)
There’s other things around but that’s probably the one that you’re that’s most likely to fall back on a business of are you PCI compliant? Are you in and hopefully there’s no spillover to you?
Stacy Walker (23:27)
Yeah. Okay, so we talked about AI not too long ago. So, and we know like everybody’s saying that it is talking about how AI is the death of SaaS, right? So does this change any of the FinTech risks?
Stephen Brown (23:45)
Well the last episode that you and I talked about was a buy versus build. And I will emphasize one of the points. Like I wouldn’t touch building your own fintech with a million foot pole. Like that’s really dumb. I mean, I think the way it’s gonna change it is accelerate how quickly things are developing. I would be really surprised to see like OpenAI.
Stacy Walker (23:54)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (24:06)
I would be really surprised to see open AI or Anthropic building fintech solutions. I think per our previous conversation, we’ll see a new wave of technology companies that are AI first. and so the key is just going to be checking all the boxes I said. Like, you know, how so how solvent are they? What’s their compliance? But don’t
Go build your own FinTech, that’s a really bad idea. And as there’s new waves of technology companies emerging, you know, you’re just gonna want to vet them the same way that I mentioned earlier.
Stacy Walker (24:45)
Yeah. Okay. So let’s take it a step further. What if I have an AI agent that’s moving money on my behalf? Who’s accountable when it makes a mistake?
Stephen Brown (24:54)
I have no idea. Like, these are the kind of things that people
Stacy Walker (24:56)
Hahaha!
Stephen Brown (25:00)
Like I I would just be really careful about how you’re moving money. And the idea of letting an AI agent like setting up OpenClaw and connecting it to your bank account, like to me that just sounds like the dumbest idea ever. But I’m sure somebody’s already done it and they’ve probably found it to be really useful. But I don’t know, that’s probably in some legal gray area that’s gonna have to get solved in the courts.
Stacy Walker (25:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I’m sure that’s true. Okay, so let’s talk about like the practical operator framework. What could that look like?
Stephen Brown (25:34)
So I’m just gonna give you a couple key questions from the vendor. What happens if this company fails? Financially, what happens if pricing changes as they scale or as you scale? Operationally, what happens if that system goes down? Strategically, does this limit your future flexibility? And who’s responsible for compliance? So just kind of walk through those questions.
Stacy Walker (25:36)
Okay.
Stephen Brown (25:58)
As you’re evaluating fintech vendors.
Stacy Walker (26:00)
So if you had to pick just one of those questions, and you would say this one is the most important, which would it be and why?
Stephen Brown (26:06)
that is so hard.
I mean they’re all so important.
Stacy Walker (26:09)
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (26:10)
I I I think
I think you gotta think about all. I really do. But if I were to put a little weight, I think viability, like what happens if they were to if this thing were to fail tomorrow, which kind of checks a couple of boxes. The operational risk, the vendor risk. If this were to fail tomorrow, what would be the impact? That’s probably like an overriding question that encompasses all a lot of the others. And if you’re comfortable with the answer
Stacy Walker (26:14)
Okay.
Yeah.
Stephen Brown (26:38)
Proceed. If you’re not, you know, think through it.
Stacy Walker (26:41)
Yeah, exactly.
Stephen Brown (26:42)
All right, let’s wrap this up. I’m gonna put this out there. FinTech isn’t just software, it’s infrastructure. And every infrastructure decision is a risk decision. So choose wisely. All right, let’s call that a wrap. Thanks, Stacy.
Stacy Walker (26:56)
Okay,
thanks Stephen.