What to expect when you’re onboarding with your bank partner

Launching embedded finance: your complete guide 

When you work with a bank partner to make banking and lending products (e.g., charge cards, high-yield accounts) available to your customers—that’s embedded finance.

Launching it is a big decision. On one hand, you can realize powerful new revenue streams while delivering better money experiences for your customers. In fact, embedded finance has the potential to increase revenue per user by 2–5x.

On the other hand, we’ve all heard stories of product launches that went over budget and took longer than expected. In today’s macroeconomic environment, it’s crucial to get to market quickly, with a minimum of engineering resources.

If you’re a tech leader who’s wondering what to expect during your Unit onboarding, this guide is for you.

Given what’s at stake, it’s important to think through what it takes to go live, what’s involved in the process, and what success looks like after launch.

Unit is a financial infrastructure platform for software companies that want to store, move, spend, and lend money inside their products. To date, we’ve helped nearly 200 leading tech companies partner with banks to make embedded financial products available to their customers. It’s our sole focus, and we’ve gotten onboarding down to a science. 

If you’re a tech leader who’s wondering what to expect while onboarding with your bank partner via Unit's platform, this guide is for you. In it, we'll answer questions like:

• What does it take to launch?
• What resources will be available to me?
• What sets Unit apart?
• What does success after launch look like?

What does it take to launch?

Before companies like Unit, launching embedded financial products typically required years, millions of dollars, and significant engineering resources.

Today, you can go live in 2–3 months. That’s because Unit provides the infrastructure you need to quickly make banking and lending services available to your customers. 

A key decision you'll have to make—the one that will most impact your time to market and the resources you'll need to invest—involves how you build on Unit. We offer implementation options comprising a spectrum of ownership; the choice is how much of the build and operating model you want to own.

• Managed solutions. If your goal is to get-to-market fast, we recommend our fully managed option - a pre-configured build that Unit runs for you. You can embed it in one line of code, and with Banking, Capital, and Bill Pay modules you can stand up a real financial product fast, without building a compliance and operations function first.

• Configure your build. Get direct access to every rail and financial primitive on a single ledger, along with tooling to run your product and the option to delegate operations to Unit. In this implementation option, you have flexibility to turn on the elements that are needed and run the program in-house. Compared to a managed solution, you'll need to plan for a longer launch timeline.

We often hear this question: “What if we’re planning to own more of program responsibilities, but we still want to get to market quickly and see how customers are engaging?”

To accomplish both goals, many companies choose to launch with a managed solution to validate customer demand, then shift ownership over time. As every build sits on the same underlying platform, you can take on more control as you scale, without re-platforming and disrupting their customers.

What does onboarding involve?

Once you've chosen an approach to your front end, you'll be assigned a team dedicated to helping you launch your embedded financial products. 

Over the next 2–3 months, it will be their job to guide you along the path to go-live. Broadly speaking, the work falls into several buckets:

• Bank partner. To launch embedded finance, you’ll need a bank partner. Unit works with multiple banks, so we’ll introduce you to a few that might be a good fit. After you and your bank partner have decided to work together, you’ll start to build, test, and approve your embedded financial products.

• Compliance. Banking and lending are subject to dozens of regulatory requirements and compliance obligations. The good news is that we’ll be there at every step to help you navigate the process and provide tools that you can leverage. During onboarding, your main task will be to gather the information you’ll need to present to your bank partner. 

• Cards. Debit, credit, and charge cards are a great way to help your customers spend money while generating interchange revenue for your platform. Setting them up is simple; it generally takes about five weeks. Just send us your logo, and we’ll take care of the rest. 

• Support. Money is an important topic, and your customers are likely to have questions about your embedded financial products. To address them, you’ll need to set up a support platform (e.g., ZenDesk) and a process for handling these requests. We’ve helped our customers build strong support programs in the past, and we’re happy to provide guidance.

What support will be available to us?

Unit is your partner at every step of the journey, from our kickoff call through launch and beyond. 

Here are some of the resources we provide during onboarding:

1. Premium support. During onboarding, you’ll have access to a customer success manager, a compliance leader, and our solutions engineers. They’ll be available to address or escalate any questions that may arise.

2. Build in our sandbox. Want to try out a new product or feature? We make it easy to build a functioning prototype in minutes. Start building in our Sandbox today.

3. Docs and guides. Our documentation walks you through requirements and instructions for launching embedded financial products. Meanwhile, our technical guides take a broader view into how our platform works.

4. API status. Encountering technical difficulties? Check out our API status to determine whether the problem is on our end or yours. For context, Unit handles more than 10 million API calls every day while maintaining 99.997% historical uptime. 

What sets Unit apart from competitors?

Your choice of a financial infrastructure partner can make or break your program’s success—so it’s critical to get it right. 

Unit is a financial infrastructure platform for software companies that want to store, move, spend, and lend money inside their products. Today, we support over 2 million end customers, process more than $100 billion in annualized transactions, and handle more than 10 million API calls every day.

Unlike most of our competitors, our focus is solely on building the infrastructure that allows technology companies to build, launch and scale financial products inside their product. It’s our bread and butter, not a side hustle. That’s important, because banking and lending are tough to get right, and mistakes are costly.

Onboarding case study: Baselane

Baselane is a software company that helps landlords manage their business finances. 

For many landlords, managing rental-property finances can be daunting. It’s common for landlords to stitch together at least four or five different tools just to manage their finances. As a result, it can be difficult to understand their cash flow or even know how they’re doing.

Unit provides all of the necessary technology to launch and scale embedded finance—accelerating time to market.

To streamline financial management for landlords, Baselane needed to ground their platform in a system of well-organized business bank accounts. At the same time, they wanted to go to market quickly while understanding and meeting their compliance needs.

That’s why they chose Unit. Unit provides all of the necessary technology to launch and scale their financial products—accelerating their time to market without requiring a heavy investment of engineering resources.

“We spoke to five different financial infrastrcuture providers,” recalls Korder. “Unit was the only one that could build what we needed and launch on our timeline.”

What does success after launch look like?

Launching financial products is a big milestone—but the journey doesn’t end there.

In coming weeks and months, you’ll need to ensure that customers are using the products as intended. You may also want to make changes or explore launching additional products.

Here are some things we’ll prioritize to ensure your success after launch:

• Go-to-market strategy. We’ve helped many leading tech companies scale their financial products. As you craft your go-to-market strategy, we’re here to share best practices and insights.

• Integrations. Which software tools do your customers use to manage their money? Chances are, we already offer an integration. With Unit, you can quickly and easily integrate with platforms like QuickBooks, Plaid, Intuit, Astra, AllPoint, and AWS Data—just to name a few.

• Ongoing compliance support. After go-live, we’ll work closely with you and your bank partner to ensure industry-leading compliance. We’ll help with things like KYB/KYC, manual account reviews, and disputes. In addition, we’ll work with you to provide assistance and guidance on crafting compliant marketing messaging and customer communications. 
• ‍Adoption tooling. A financial product your users never adopt doesn't grow your revenue, and it doesn't grow ours either. Unit invests in tooling, including marketing banners, onboarding flows, post-approval checklists, lifecycle communications, and more, designed to help improve end-user adoption.

• Explore new products. Software companies typically go live with a foundational set of financial products. From there, they iterate and add new products. We’re excited to guide you through the process when that day comes.

Ready to onboard with Unit? We’d love to talk and help you create your launch plan. You can also check out our sandbox and build in minutes.