Ep. 76: The Evolving Reality of Banking-as-a-Service and Embedded Finance

Trent Sorbe, CEO of Central Payments and co-founder of Falls Fintech, joined the podcast to share his experience working with small businesses and fintechs to build future financial relationships.

Central Payments was founded by a community bank, but through Trent’s work has grown into a larger Banking-as-a-Service company. He says, “We’re leveraging those fintech relationships, not just to support what they want to do in the market, but effectively reselling them through the marketplace.”

Within the financial ecosystem, Trent works to find different opportunities to bring businesses to the market. Working with larger fintech companies allows his team to connect fintechs and their products to the broader system of banking. He expands, “In the end, we’ve got to connect a very complicated set of rails, some of which are pretty archaic, to cutting-edge acquisition models and cutting-edge devices.”

In the future, Trent is excited to see what the next payment device will look like. Whether it’s a new phone application or a new form of a physical card, the fintech world is rapidly changing and Trent is waiting to see where it heads next.

To learn more about the ever-evolving BaaS and embedded finance world, listen to this podcast episode with Hunter and Trent.

More about Trent

Trent Sorbe is the Founder and CEO of Central Payments, which provides payments technology and issuing capabilities for fintechs and embedded finance businesses. He was an architect of Central Payments’ Open CP Fintech API Marketplace, one of the only ‘REAL’ Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) payment platforms and the technology responsible for the rise to the fastest growing prepaid card issuer since 2015.

With more than 30 years of debit, credit, and prepaid payments experience, Trent is responsible for products garnering nine Paybefore Awards, three of which garnered Best in Class or Category. He is also the inventor on 14 patents related to consumer financial services. Trent previously held senior positions at three nationwide payment card issuers and the FDIC.

In 2016, Trent was named to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Community Bank Advisory Council and chaired the agency’s Cards, Payments, and Deposit Markets Committee. He is a co-founder of Falls Fintech, a startup accelerator program committed to bridging the bank-fintech partnership gap and is a host of the Fintech Brews & News podcast. He also sits on the Board of Directors for the Central Bank of Kansas City.