What is Banking as a Service and how can it scale your fintech

In the beginning, almost every fintech has the same ambition: to solve a specific pain point with a better experience than traditional banks. But sooner or later, a question emerges: is it worth building the banking infrastructure behind all of this?

This is where Banking as a Service (BaaS) comes in — not as a shortcut, but as a real leveraging platform.

Understanding BaaS in Practice

Banking as a Service is the offering of banking infrastructure via APIs, which enables other companies to provide financial services (such as accounts, transfers, cards, TED, Pix, etc.) without needing to become a financial institution.

In practice, you don’t build the bank, but build on top of the bank — using regulated and auditable components to assemble your own solution.

By using an infrastructure like Azify's, for example, your fintech can:

• Open accounts with built-in compliance

• Operate with Pix directly with Bacen

• Integrate cards, billing, and financial movement

• Delegate the dirty work of reconciliation, ledger, AML

You take care of the product, Azify takes care of what is invisible (and essential).

Why Do Fintechs Get Stuck Along the Way?

The MVP works. But when the product scales, the cost of internal infrastructure explodes — not only in time and money but also in regulatory responsibility, legal risk, and operational complexity.

• You need to become an expert in Bacen, SLC, STR

• Implement compliance, reconcile accounts, maintain segregated balance

• Deal with audits, fraud, and the learning curve of banking

All of this takes focus away from the core — and creates technical debt that incurs high interest.

BaaS is not outsourcing, it is intelligent abstraction of infrastructure. You maintain control over the product and the experience but operate on a solid foundation that has already gone through the pains you don’t need to experience.

Scaling Efficiently: Where BaaS Really Helps

• Time to Market: go from zero to a functional banking product in weeks, not months.

• Focus: direct the team toward experience, differentiation, and acquisition — not to understanding the SPB.

• Compliance and Regulation: operate with standards required by Bacen and CVM, without bearing the burden alone.

• Modularity: use only what you need — accounts, payments, cards, investments — without inflating your stack.

At Azify, each financial component (account, investment, payment) is pluggable via API, with its own banking engine, real testing environment, and integration with automated compliance. You don’t need to deploy a monolithic tower. You fit what makes sense.

The Future is Infrastructure, but Without Friction

Every fintech, sooner or later, needs to scale. The question is: do you want to scale a product or a regulatory structure?

Banking as a Service exists so that innovation is not held hostage by bureaucracy, and so that you can build something great without carrying the weight of a bank on your back.

Build what matters. The rest, we handle with infrastructure.