Unit’s banking-as-a-service platform is getting into the charge card game

It will be ubiquitous among businesses if the banking-as-a-service fintech Unit does its job right. Unit is breaking into the charge card game after giving companies a way to integrate financial services into their products.

The startup can now be used by unit customers to make their own charge cards. Unit's bank partners offer a wide range of credit products for customers to choose from. Card printing, compliance, and transaction tracking will be handled by Unit on the back end.

Unit's fourth pillar as a venture-backed company is cards, according to co- founder and CEO Itai Damti.

Just six months ago, Unit announced that it raised a $100 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, making its total equity raised nearly $170 million.

Unit can use charge cards, which are more popular than credit cards for small businesses, to allow customers to build and offer lending products, even though the startup is not a lender itself. Damti said that once you can store money for people, you can move money for people and you can give people money, it's the full spectrum of banking that all these software products can use to launch within their environments.

The image is of a unit.

If Unit's new card line sounds competitive with the likes of Brex and Ramp, it's a little more complicated. Unit is selling customers on a way to create personalized cards for their own end users instead of selling a card to a startup. The classic B2BC model is going to be used.

Damti said that if you sell to construction companies, you can just add lending into your software. We don't compete with Brex and Ramp, but we allow companies to offer an equivalent product and do it in a way that is embedded."

During a particularly tough economic run for fintech companies such as Chime and Stripe, Unit's expansion is different. The new product could help the company's customers introduce an entire new line of revenue through interchange fees, according to the unit VP of lending David Sinsky.

Sinsky said that they are working with companies that have built differentiated software. I see Unit as an opportunity to improve their economics. When using a credit card instead of a debit card, the unit claims that the interchange revenue will be higher.

There is less of a red ocean in vertical finance, because they have data, they have a distribution, and they can be very effective underwriters who are very effective in their vertical.