Fifth Third’s Newline to Expand Stripe’s Built-in Financial Services

Financial infrastructure giant Stripe cooperates with Embedded payments company Newline, part of Fifth Third Bank, will expand its embedded financial services offering, the companies announced on Monday.

Starting next month, Newline will support Stripe Treasury, which enables software platforms on Stripe to offer customers built-in financial accounts. Newline enables businesses to launch and scale payment, card and deposit products directly from Fifth Third Bank.

“Modern businesses want easy-to-use, accessible financial services in the software they use every day,” wrote Neetika Bansal, Stripe’s chief business officer for financial services LinkedIn“Stripe and Fifth Third make this possible by simplifying money flow for our users.”

As Bansal writes, the cooperation began almost a year ago.

Newline was partly born from Rize, Fifth Third’s embedded payment platform acquired last year, in partnership with the traditional embedded payments team that Fifth Third formed in 2021.

But its roots go back even further, to Fifth Third Processing Solutions, a payments network created by the bank in 1971 that eventually merged with Worldpay, the country’s largest payment processor.

“Our vision (in 2021) was to enter the embedded payments market with the experience, scale, depth and breadth that Fifth Third has historically had, but (we) wanted to add a modern technology platform to that group,” said Tom Bianco, CEO of Newline.

“If you think about the Rize technology stack, it was a fully modern, fully cloud-native, API-centric, embedded banking platform. And with (Newline), our sole focus was to deliver payment capabilities directly at the point of need for customers building software platforms,” he said.

Some of Newline’s partners have had decades-long relationships with Fifth Third’s payments arm. But what’s unique about the Stripe partnership, Bianco said, is how much it expands the distribution of Fifth Third’s core payments capabilities on a massive scale: Stripe more than a trillion dollars in trade payments processed last year, which represents a 25% increase over the previous year.

“For Newline, a partnership at such a prestigious level as Stripe kind of reinforces our leadership position in the market and reminds the market that we are a real force and have been for a long time,” Bianco said.

“Maybe we’re just too modest for the Midwest, but Newline is not a newcomer to this industry, and we need to do a better job of making sure the market understands our leadership position, the investments we’re making, and quite frankly, the innovations we’re bringing in a very short time since we acquired Rize,” he said.

Fifth Third’s commercial payments business processes $17 trillion in payments annually and serves 25% of the Fortune 100, according to Monday’s announcement.