Financial infrastructure giant Stripe is partnering with Fifth Third Bank’s embedded payments arm Newline to expand its embedded financial services offerings, the firms announced Monday.
Beginning next month, Newline will power Stripe Treasury, which enables software platforms on Stripe to offer embedded financial accounts to customers. Newline allows businesses to launch and scale payment, card and deposit products directly with Fifth Third Bank.
“Modern businesses want easy-to-use and accessible financial services within the software they use daily,” Neetika Bansal, Stripe business lead for money-as-a-service, wrote on LinkedIn. “Stripe and Fifth Third are making it possible by simplifying money movement for our users.”
The collaborative effort began almost a year ago, Bansal wrote.
Newline was in part born out of Rize, the embedded payments platform Fifth Third acquired last year, in combination with the legacy embedded payments team that Fifth Third spun up in 2021.
But its roots go further back, to Fifth Third Processing Solutions, a payments network the bank created in 1971 that eventually merged into Worldpay, the nation’s largest payment processor.
“Our vision [in 2021] was to go after the embedded payments space with the experience, the scale, the depth and the breadth Fifth Third historically had, but [we] wanted to add a modern technological platform to that group,” said Newline General Manager Tom Bianco.
“If you think about the Rize technology stack, that was a fully modern, fully cloud-based, API-oriented, embedded banking platform. And with [Newline], our singular focus has been to deliver payment capabilities directly at the point-of-need for clients building software platforms,” he said.
Some of Newline’s partners have had relationships with Fifth Third’s payments arm for decades. But what’s unique about the partnership with Stripe, Bianco said, is how much it increases the distribution of Fifth Third’s core payment capability on a massive scale: Stripe processed over a trillion dollars in merchant payments last year, up 25% from the previous year.
“For Newline, having a partnership as high profile as Stripe kind of reinforces our market leadership position, and it reminds the marketplace that we're a real force and have been for quite some time,” Bianco said.
“Maybe we're just a little too Midwest humble about it, but Newline isn't new to this space, and we have to do a better job of making sure the market understands the leadership position we have, the investments we're making, and frankly, the innovation that we're doing in a very short amount of time post-Rize acquisition,” 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.
