COVID-19 has ushered in rapid changes for banking as a service, vaulting contactless banking to new heights. As an engine that powers financial services for consumers, Synapse is right at the heart of this transformation, and we’re experiencing unprecedented demand for our services. 

As the company’s first Chief Financial Officer, I am thrilled to be helping further Synapse’s goal of democratizing access to best-in-class financial services and enabling our customers to offer a rich array of offerings to end users ranging from instant loans, high-yield savings, and same-day pay for gig workers. Indeed, there is amazing potential to change how and where people bank and ensure that people of all backgrounds have more equitable access to the financial services they need.

In 2021, we’ll be rolling out several new offerings that will position Synapse to become an even more comprehensive one-stop-shop for our customers. As our CEO Sankaet noted in a recent post, we’ll be introducing broker-dealer services—a strategic new offering that provides even more exciting possibilities for our customers. We’re also continuing to build out our banking relationships, including expanded lending offerings and augmenting our KYC services. 

Our robust suite of services is highly valued by our customers as they can work with just us to accomplish many objectives rather than having to find separate partners for each one. With our robust new suite of offerings, we’re making it easier for our customers and have shortened the time it takes our customers to build products and get them to market - in a matter of weeks, rather than years.

As a CFO with a history of helping start-ups scale, I’m looking forward to helping Synapse enter this new phase of growth and will ensure we are intentional in how we define and reach our goals. Since joining, I have been laser-focused on building out our processes and overseeing our end-to-end finance and risk functions to create better, safer products for our customers. 

Here are three strategies all companies at our stage of growth ought to focus on and how we're working to achieve them at Synapse.

Build the right team

As companies mature, building the right team is critical. Synapse has been actively growing its leadership bench in recent months and has added new hires in areas including marketing, compliance and finance. Ensuring we have the right players is critical to positioning ourselves for a series of impactful product roll-outs and continued customer acquisition in 2021. We’re putting in place the infrastructure needed to address pain points while putting the right people in the right roles with the goal of building an even stronger organization. 

Keep it simple

A typical challenge for start-ups and young companies is trying to do too many things at once. Rather, companies at this stage ought to determine what are the top two or three areas to focus on and keep focused on those priorities. As CFO, I am helping set those priorities at Synapse and keeping the company focused on them by setting clear milestones for success throughout the year. 

Be transparent

It’s not enough for the CEO and the CFO to know the big plan—it’s on us to communicate it clearly to the entire team to ensure we’re in the best position possible to activate it and achieve success. Being honest and transparent helps build credibility within the team and empowers the entire organization to support our shared goals. we’ve made great progress in how we’re communicating our goals internally to ensure teams are aligned.

By working closely with our CEO on all three of these areas, I’m proud to help our organization mature in our internal processes as well as in our customer relationships. By doing this hard work now, we’ll be in an even better position to support the expansion of our suite of offerings even as we welcome even more customers who are eager to partner with us to bring products to market quickly.