You've decided to embed financial products into your platform. You're evaluating infrastructure partners. Most of that evaluation focuses on APIs, pricing, and feature coverage. But there's a question that will shape your team, your timeline, and your ongoing costs more than any of those: what are you actually responsible for when you operate a fintech program?
Program management is the day-to-day: who handles fraud disputes at 2AM? Who files tax forms with the IRS? Who runs AML monitoring and responds when the bank asks questions? Who reconciles transactions across payment networks and settlement systems like the Federal Reserve?
Most financial infrastructure gives you APIs and leaves the rest to you: a separate KYC vendor, AML software, a disputes case management tool, a ledger, a reconciliation system, statement and tax form generation, bank reporting pipelines. Ten or more tools, ten or more policies, before your first customer. A lean compliance and operations team to run them: 3 to 4 people, $500,000 to $800,000 a year. Twelve to eighteen months from contract to live.
Unit’s Platform is configurable: it can support the operational complexity, or you can own all of this from day one. How much you take on and when is your decision, not a constraint imposed by the platform.
Who owns program management depends on how you work with Unit. When you build directly on the Platform, you act as the program manager. If you embed a Managed Solution, Unit acts as the program manager. The sections below describe the responsibilities typically associated with program management.
What you always own
Regardless of the partner you work with, there are certain responsibilities you'll typically have to your customer. Think of them as “last mile” obligations, because you own your relationship with your customers.
|
What it is |
How Unit helps |
| Product and data security |
You're building the product your customers interact with. Securing it (authentication, access controls, the basics of protecting your own application) is your responsibility. |
Unit handles the storage and processing of sensitive financial data (e.g., card numbers and account numbers) in compliance with PCI/SOC2 standards. More on that below. |
| Marketing compliance |
Marketing financial services under your brand carries with it a set of regulatory compliance expectations. |
Unit and your bank partner can help guide you on what makes compliant marketing. |
| Customer support |
Your customers need to be able to ask questions about their money. As the program manager, you operate customer support, either with your own team or through a delegated provider. |
Unit provides the underlying tools, including a Dashboard view of customer activity and account state, so support can be integrated into the product your customers already use. |
What you can own or delegate
Everything below is what most platforms expect they'll need to build, buy, staff, and maintain when they launch financial products. Without Unit, each row is a separate vendor, a separate integration, and a separate set of procedures you maintain for your bank. With Unit, they're one platform that you and your bank both operate from. The same system your team uses to run the program is the system your bank uses to oversee it.
|
What it is |
How Unit helps |
| Identity verification (KYC/KYB) |
Confirming that a person (KYC) or business (KYB) opening an account is who they claim to be. Banks require it before any account opens, and it has to run against multiple data sources with auditable results. |
When you create an Application through Unit's API, it triggers built-in identity verification workflows. You don't buy a separate KYC tool, staff a manual review team, or build integrations with identity data providers. The verification runs, and you get a result. This replaces the need to buy and implement a separate KYC/KYB tool, build integrations, staff a team for manual reviews of identity documents, addresses, and phone numbers. |
| Anti-money laundering (AML) monitoring |
Ongoing surveillance of customer activity to detect money laundering, fraud, and sanctions evasion. Includes transaction monitoring, watchlist screening, periodic re-screening, and case investigation when activity gets flagged. |
Unit’s platform integrates with your partner bank’s AML monitoring system, so flagged activity can be reviewed and acted on by the bank. You don't need to buy AML software, staff analysts to review cases or run AML case management. |
| Dispute handling |
Dispute handling is what happens when a customer claims a transaction was unauthorized, incorrect, or never delivered. It runs from intake through investigation, provisional credits, and final resolution on regulatory timelines (Regulation E for consumer accounts). It requires case management tooling, trained analysts, and an auditable process. |
Unit provides dispute management workflows and managed support capabilities, including 24/7 escalation support. You don't need to buy a case management tool, train a disputes team, or build a process for Regulation E compliance, when applicable. Most infrastructure providers leave disputes to the partner from day one, which means standing up the tooling, staffing, and procedures before you have customers to serve. |
| Reconciliation |
Reconciliation matches transactions across payment networks, the bank's settlement system, and your ledger to confirm every movement of money happened correctly. It requires direct connectivity to the Federal Reserve, card networks, and the bank's settlement infrastructure. Invisible when it works, catastrophic when it doesn't. |
Unit's system integrates with payment networks (e.g., Federal Reserve and card networks) and the settlement system to reconcile transactions at the system level, so you don't invest engineering effort in reconciliation or carry the risk of discrepancies. |
| Payments and transaction decisioning |
Every payment and transaction needs a decision: approve, decline, hold, route. That decisioning runs against account policies (limits, terms, velocity rules), risk signals, and program logic, in real time, on every money movement. |
Payments and transactions are native objects in Unit. You create them through the API, and Unit enforces the account policies you set. You can layer in your own logic to enhance Unit's default behavior, or take over decisioning entirely. |
| Statements, tax forms, and the ledger |
A real-time ledger tracking every credit, debit, and balance change across accounts, plus the monthly statements and IRS tax forms (like 1099-INT) that come out of it. All three need to be accurate, auditable, and produced on regulatory timelines. |
Unit generates compliant account statements and tax forms automatically, and files 1099-INT forms directly with the IRS for customers who earned more than $10 in interest. All forms are accessible through the API and Dashboard. Most infrastructure alternatives leave you to generate and file these forms yourself, which means buying another tool or building an internal process. Unit’s infrastructure maintains an account-level ledger of program activity (e.g., money movements) across deposit, wallet, and credit accounts. You assign policies (limits, terms) and Unit enforces them. You don't build a ledger, and you don't maintain one. |
| Card issuing and processing |
Creating and managing payment cards (virtual and physical, debit, credit, charge, prepaid) and authorizing every transaction in real time. Requires direct integration with Visa and Mastercard, a processor stack, and fraud controls tied back to the underlying account and ledger. |
Unit's issuing stack is built in-house, integrated directly with Visa and Mastercard. It supports virtual and physical debit, credit, charge, and prepaid cards across all account types. You get real-time programmatic authorization control, full transaction-level data, flexible funding accounts, and interchange revenue flowing into your revenue account with detailed reporting. This is part of the same system that handles your accounts, ledger, and money movement. |
| Bank reporting and oversight |
The visibility partner banks need into program activity, compliance performance, and adherence to the program agreement, usually delivered through reports, data exports and auditable procedures. The more program functions sit outside the bank's view, the more reporting infrastructure the program manager has to build. |
Because Unit enforces program elements and gives the bank direct visibility into activity on the system, you typically don't need to build separate reporting pipelines or manually export data that already exists in Unit. Other setups require you to own program elements and then report on how you're performing them: procedures, data, and reports from systems the bank can't access directly. |
| Sensitive data storage |
Storing card numbers, account numbers, and other regulated financial data in PCI DSS and SOC 2 compliant environments, with the certifications, audits, and access controls that go with them. |
Unit stores card numbers, account numbers, and other sensitive financial data. It's PCI and SOC 2 compliant. You get permissioned access through the API or Dashboard. You don't store this data on your own systems, which means you don't take on the certifications, procedures, and bank reporting that come with it. |
Taking on more control as a Program Manager
Unit's Platform covers all of the above by default. But defaults aren't constraints and some partners have good reasons to own specific functions, immediately or over time.
Unit's Roles & Responsibilities framework formalizes which program management functions you own, which Unit handles, and which are shared, across every capability in the table above. You can adjust which functions you own and which you delegate. This works at launch or years later. As your program matures, the framework matures with it.
Relay is one example. As a sophisticated fintech program managing over $1B of deposits on Unit, they took ownership of onboarding reviews and transaction monitoring of different payment types, including fraud decisioning. This lets them run core operational workflows while relying on Unit’s infrastructure for compliance, tooling and bank connectivity.
The point isn't that you should own more. It's that you can, on your timeline.
Get started
Explore the docs - See how responsibilities map to specific workflows and controls across both models.
Talk to the team - We can help you think through the operational picture.
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