Stearns Bank joined the sponsor bank community of Synctera, a banking-as-a-service platform and provider of embedded finance solutions.

“We’re very pleased to begin working with Stearns Bank. We believe that their experience and leadership in scaling compliance-first programs will accelerate, attracting lots of amazing customers,” Peter Hazlehurst, co-founder and CEO of Synctera, said. “Increasingly, we’ve found that companies want to enable their end users to take advantage of financial services in places other than a traditional bank setting.”

To streamline how banks and companies work together, Synctera has built a process relying on institutional experience that carefully matches the two sides together with the goal of forging a long-lasting direct relationship. In addition to being able to scale programs, the benefits of the direct relationship can include better regulatory checks and balances as well as improved oversight and accountability between a bank and its partner companies.

“Synctera’s expertise is proven and its approach provides distinct benefits for banks, namely bringing us in at an early stage of the vetting process to ensure our compliance and integration standards are met and it’s a good, strong fit for our bank,” Kelly Skalicky, president and CEO of Stearns Bank, said. “Synctera fully understands the regulatory environment in which we operate and makes sure the companies we will be partnering with do too.”

The time spent and experience Stearns Bank gained by building out its banking-as-a-service business led it to select Synctera as the right partner to accelerate its vision and reach its goals with built-in direct oversight and technical expertise in risk and compliance.

“Synctera clearly doesn’t build tech just for the sake of building tech. We’ve been in the banking-as-a-service and embedded finance space for a few years now, and we know what makes a strong bank partner,” Josh Hofer, chief risk and information security officer at Stearns Bank, said. “Synctera has really solid technology, robust compliance and risk management processes, access to data and reporting, and strong processes, making it appealing and easy to partner with them to offer our banking services and sponsorship. It’s important to continue to evolve, and adjusting to today’s customers is important for the community banking space and Stearns Bank. We were looking to support broader capabilities for companies we were already having conversations with, and we needed a partner that ’gets it.’ And Synctera gets it.”