By John San Filippo
Each year since the publication’s inception in 2020, Finopotamus has attended Money20/20 USA, the fintech mega conference, in Las Vegas. Since 2021, it has become a tradition to kick off the event by interviewing someone from Zeta, creators of what it calls a “modern” card processing platform. On October 27, 2024 – the first day of this year’s event – Finopotamus sat down with Zeta’s Vice President of U.S. marketing Chris Harris.
What Makes Zeta Different?
“We offer a technology platform for banks and credit unions that want to launch credit cards, small business cards or cards in general, but focused on credit cards,” Harris told Finopotamus. “The pain that most credit unions feel is they have an inability to direct their own card programs. They're at the mercy of their technology provider, their processor, to tell them what benefits they can offer, what features they can offer. We’re providing modern technology that allows credit unions to launch new products very quickly and to serve their members more effectively, build better relationships with them.”
Harris posed the example of a credit union that decides to offer a student card. “That's something you can do on the Zeta platform very, very quickly,” he said, “but that's not necessarily something that you could do very easily on a legacy platform.” He added that Zeta also makes it easy for a credit union to see its relationship with each cardholder. In the case of a student card, it allows the credit union to develop that relationship with the student directly over time.
The Competitive Advantage
Speaking on why having a modern cards platform creates a competitive advantage for a credit union, Harris said, “I feel like a lot of credit unions have very commoditized credit cards. It's an afterthought. I've got a rewards card and I've got a platinum card, maybe I have a student card or something like that. But there’s not a lot of differentiation from other institutions’ card products.” He explained that this sort of strategy attracts a different type of cardholder.
“You tend to attract a certain type of card holder that's not as interested in a really competitive product,” he said. “Your high-end member are going off to Chase and co-brands and things like that. You're left with a low performing portfolio.” He added that this inability to quickly innovate results in post opportunities for the credit union.
Breaking into the Credit Union Market
Harris told Finopotamus that Zeta has put more of an emphasis on credit unions over the past year and hopes to sign its first credit union customer soon. In terms of card portfolio size, the company’s target market is approximately the top 300 credit unions.
“If you’re a credit union with tens of thousands of cardholders, we should have a conversation,” he noted. “One of the things we're working on right now very actively is building out a fuller suite of end-to-end solutions for community financial institutions. To this point, a lot of our clients have been larger because they like the ability to build it themselves and do what they want. But we're finding that most of the community financial institutions want a little bit more end-to-end solution, card in a box type of thing. We've been working very actively to continue to build that out.”
Under the Hood
Finopotamus asked whether the Zeta platform is easily integrated with a credit union’s digital banking platform.
“The nice thing about our platform is that you can do it either way,” Harris responded. “If you decide you need a specific card experience, we can give you a specific card experience. But if you want to put it in your banking app, you can use it any way you want. You can consume our APIs (application programming interfaces), consume our SDKs (software development kits), you can script it yourself. We give you access to all the stuff that we do to develop things internally if you want.”
Harris also told Finopotamus that this week at Money20/20, Zeta is introducing an artificial intelligence (AI) component to its platform called Merlin AI. He was scarce with details, pending the official announcement.