How to launch new financial products without rebuilding everything
From our CEO's conversation with Greg Myers on Leaders in Payments
Payments companies and ISOs are being asked right now to deliver something the legacy stack was never designed for: owned payment experiences that feel consistent and built in. In Episode 1 of our series on the Leaders in Payments Podcast with Greg Myers, our Founder & CEO Chris Aristides shares why Jaris started with lending and why the bigger opportunity is the infrastructure that makes multi-product embedded finance possible.
Chris originally set out to build “Square Capital for everyone else,” focused on closing the small business funding gap with a bank-backed approach on a modern tech stack rather than the typical MCA model. The reasoning was simple: banking is a bundled business. Lending, deposits, and money movement are connected, and if you want to scale into new products over time, you need a foundation that can scale with you.
We also talk about the trade-off between vertical SaaS and the legacy ISO/processor world. Conversions can be dramatically higher in vertical SaaS, but most of the dollars still flow through the legacy model. And single-product strategies hit a ceiling: even if you do a spectacular job in lending, you’re often only serving a small portion of the merchant base.
The bigger question becomes: how do you adopt solutions that can work for the full customer base and drive retention?
That foundation becomes even more important when you step into the processor market. The opportunity is massive, but it’s also fragmented by decades of legacy tech and acquisitions. As Chris puts it, for many processors there’s “no outlet to plug into” - especially in multi-processor environments where you’re dealing with multiple CRMs, dashboards, contracts, and ways of doing the same core workflows.
So, we asked a different question: what if we could abstract the hardest parts - instruction, settlement, and money movement - from the underlying processor? That led us to build processor-agnostic instructional funding and settlement capabilities built to work across platforms. Partners can keep processing where it is and still introduce capabilities like split settlement while leaving risk at the processor.
It also meant investing in the plumbing: standing up our own core, building around RTNs, and designing for a multi-bank future so you aren’t beholden to a single partner’s roadmap.
Another theme we unpack is engagement. In legacy payments, you don’t just “download an app.” The engagement layer is often the ISO, the agent, and the relationships they’ve built over years. Our job is to support “super ISOs” by providing tools, data paths, onboarding, and white-labeled experiences that let the ISO’s brand show up.
Most importantly, Chris is clear about what we are (and aren’t) trying to do. Jaris is complementary to existing infrastructure and business models. We’re here to preserve what already works, and do the hard work others avoid so payments organizations can modernize without ripping out everything they’ve built.
If you’re thinking beyond a single product, this episode is for you. Episode 2 goes deeper on where we’re headed next as we shift from lending into the foundation that enables embedded finance at scale.