.jpg)
Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Keith Raphael, Co-founder & CEO of Straddle | Episode 458
What if account-to-account payments felt as dependable as swiping a card? We sit down with Keith Raphael, Co-founder and CEO of Straddle, to explore how a trust-first approach can transform ACH, RTP, and FedNow into fast, reliable options that product teams and finance leaders can actually count on. Keith’s journey from hardcore compliance to building a unified API offers a rare, inside look at what it takes to replace “file uploads and hope” with identity-led orchestration and clear, real-time visibility.
We unpack the core idea that money moves at the speed of trust and how the lack of a strong identity layer has kept A2A stuck in 1970s-era uncertainty. Keith explains how Straddle combines KYC, fraud detection, open banking connectivity, tokenization, and multi-rail routing to solve the “where is my money” gap for subscriptions, stored-value wallets, remittances, marketplaces, and B2B flows. We also dig into US-specific headwinds: no regulatory mandate for open banking or instant payments, incumbent pricing strategies that protect debit economics, and the resulting friction for adopters.
From the rise of platforms and embedded finance to direct-to-rail integrations and the cautious reality of stablecoins, Keith lays out a pragmatic roadmap for scaling bank payments without sacrificing compliance or customer trust. The lesson from Stripe and Square still stands (simplicity wins) but it now applies to ACH, RTP, and FedNow.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the topic.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers. And today's special guest is Keith Raphael, the co-founder and CEO of Straddle. So, Keith, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02:Hey, Greg. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to chat today.
SPEAKER_01:Great. So before we dive into your career and the company, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. You're gonna ask anyone who knows me, I love to say that I'm a New Yorker, right? I spent, I think, most of my all of my childhood and most of my 20s in in New York, on and around Long Island, a little bit in Queens and Brooklyn. I don't know, about three years in Tampa in my early 30s, and I've since been out in the Greater Denver metro area here in Colorado, which is where we founded the company in 2023, uh, just outside of Boulder.
SPEAKER_01:Well, if you don't mind, can you walk us through your professional journey and then maybe how and why you started the company?
SPEAKER_02:Oh man, yeah, absolutely. So it's one of those things you never think. I, you know, I just turned 41. And so I've I've probably been in the payment space, you know, since I was 25 or so. I think I just took, I think my uncle was a VP at you know, some some big public company and I got a job. And next thing I know, I'm I'm running a payment reconciliation for like every radio station um in the country somehow at this SATCOM company. So, you know, I think it was kind of an accidental uh career, but I've never left. You know, I really got my start on hardcore compliance. And so throughout my career, I've held designations from NACHA and ACAMS, you know, accredited ACH professional, accredited payments risk professional, and uh ACAMS AML. So I was really kind of hardcore in compliance. Went and worked for a large public bank for a bit and was running uh kind of scale acquiring compliance. And and that was through about like 2015 or so. And I kind of uh, you know, maybe it's a little bit of hubris, I kind of was like, man, you know, I think I'm a pretty smart guy and I don't want to be locked in the basement doing like kind of compliance troll work all the time, right? And so I took a bit of break from the payment space and and went and worked at a startup doing unstructured data modeling, which is, you know, again, 10 years too early for AI, or probably would have been out of out of payments for good. And um, you know, I think I took a lot of the kind of rules-based flows that I kind of learned in the payment space and applied them more holistically, uh, like at the product and strategy level. And so that was a nice little break. And I got drawn back in from a friend of mine who had acquired a kind of legacy ACH processor about 2019 or so. And we came and we turned that firm around. You know, the as folks in payments know, sometimes these old processors don't quite have the guts there, the core infrastructure with the acquisitions and things of that nature to really kind of meet the needs of a modern digital economy. And so that's when we left to found Stradle in 2023. And and really the reason for that is spending you know 10,000, 12,000 hours talking to folks from you know, chief compliance officers to startup founders of, you know, why is this so hard? Or why do I need to know these rules? Or, you know, why does there keep being fraud? And so I think a lot of folks follow that old like VC cliche, you know, don't fall in love with the problem, fall in love with the solution. You know, personally, you know, I hate the problem. I hate that you have to integrate with six different point solutions to do compliance payments. Or I hate the fact that folks are are losing money or have a lack of visibility in their flow of funds. And so we we like to think that we have some pretty good answers to these fundamental problems for uh account-to-account money movement. It's almost like one of those things like, you know, fine, we'll we'll just do it ourselves.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, go ahead and tell us all about Straddle. Tell us, tell the audience kind of what all Straddle does today.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, sure. Straddle is uh financial API infrastructure that brings the trust of card networks to account to account payments, making them, and when I say account to account, you know, ACH, slow but risky, instant payments, uh RTP and FedNow, fast, but risky, right? And so what is the common thread there? So our goal is to make account-to-account payments cheaper than a wire, but as reliable as a debit card. And we do that by not just being a payment processor. We like to think of ourselves as a trust layer. We bring everything from identity and fraud detection to open banking to multi-rail payment orchestration into a single API platform. I think throughout our career, my career I've learned that money actually moves at the speed of trust. And in the account-to-account space where you're uploading a file or even an ISO message, there's not that intrinsic identity piece that the car network solved long ago. And so we're bringing that to a platform level that everyone from a you know two-person startup to an enterprise SaaS or publicly traded company can build on.
SPEAKER_01:What would you say is the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers right now?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, you know, rather than going to something like mitigating risk or fraud, I think we like to think as we're solving that where is my money problem, right? If you know anything about how ACH worked, you know,$86 trillion last year and you know, not even on direct deposit, right? Consumer internet payments last year were something like six and a half trillion dollars, more than Visa, right, in the US, right? And so uh it seems strange to us that you can track a pizza to the minute on DoorDash, but you know, folks are like, well, you know, what was it a weekend or a holiday? Where's my money? Is it gonna clear or is it gonna settle? So from a first principle standpoint, we we solved that question of where is my money for our clients.
SPEAKER_01:And what would you say differentiates Straddle from your competitors out there?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I I think the problem kind of started with the advent of fintech, right? So you're like fintech unbundled the bank, right? Great, you know, I mean, banks are good at being banks. They're they're not super great at innovation, and that's that's fine. But what that led to was what I could call merchants of complexity, point solutions for every little step of the process. And so at Straddle, we don't think of ourselves as a payment processor where our job only kicks in once we receive that API request to move money from Bob's account to Sally's. We actually start from an identity perspective. My team hates me, but you know, I'd say people make payments, right? And and corporations are people too, at least, at least here in the US. So why not care about that counterparty a little bit more? And what we found is that uh again, in you know, uh high volume, e-commerce, subscriptions, what have you, a lot of these folks out here are trying to piece this thing together. They're trying to get their head around what's the difference between KYC versus identity fraud, right? And and what are all these things and what how does open banking work? And so by building this unified architecture, we can move money at the speed of the internet, as we like to say, reliably. And our the the folks building on top of Shraddle have an opinionated but compliant by default payment stack that they can rely on and thus focus on building better product experiences there. So we see, again, most in the payment space is worried about the money movement. We're we're kind of worried about that whole trust ecosystem.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, what are your thoughts on the account account? I mean, you you mentioned some use cases, right? Subscriptions, utility bills, you know, things like that that people are pretty used to paying, you know, via ACH or business-to-business type payments. Do you see this getting to where I walk into a retail store and am able to pay with my sort sort of like they have in other countries, right? I mean, that they they're able to do that, but in the US, we're we're kind of behind there. What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, that that's the uh the trillion dollar question, isn't it? Right. You know, I I think today we look at how can we solve these fundamental problems from this 1970s architecture on ACH across a variety of industries. So our clients include everything from consumer stored value wallets to remittance apps to enterprise uh SaaS on an embedded ISV type model, all in those industries that rely on ACH. But I think that's just the start. As you alluded to, you know, in the US, we've been blessed and in certain ways kind of cursed from any lack of central bank or regulatory mandate as it pertains to instant payments or open banking, which I think are the two key constructs of truly ubiquitous account-to-account payments. And so I think we're facing a little bit of inertia from the entities that already have, let's say, a nest egg to protect. So what we see here in open banking is you may have seen the recent uh the CFPB situation notwithstanding, you know, you've seen Chase come out and put say onerous pricing on certain aspects of open banking connectivity. And you know, don't want to speak too out of turn here, but you know, I think that the company line there is hey, like these APIs they cost a lot to maintain and we have to protect consumer data, right? Which is is is logical on its on the surface. But if you look at their pricing model, they're not charging 10, 100x for the consistent scraping of consumer data via like PFMs, they're charging to get the routing an account number, right? So there's this inherent kind of circling the wagons about that debit card issuance, which is, I think, a good thing. It's like first they fight you, right? And so we we see that the current dominant forces in the market are kind of worried about account-to-account payments being ubiquitous. Because with the right identity layer, with the right open banking connectivity, what's the difference between uh an RFP request for payment pushing and a debit card? Not much, right? And so I think there's a future there, and certainly what we're working towards diligently. I've recently co-authored a uh a paper, a white paper with the FASTR Payments Council about the need for instant recurring payments, that persistent mandate that a user can view and see. And so, you know, we're excited about the inevitable widespread adoption of account-to-account payments, but we're fighting these uh kind of powerful market forces a little bit as the rollout is is kind of industry driven as opposed to bank or government mandated, as you've seen in in Brazil or in India with UPI and obviously PSD2 and instant payments in the EU and UK.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. I think it's a good segue into the next question where we're talking a little bit about the future. So, where do you see the biggest growth opportunity for your company within your segment of payments?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I think that we look at the big long-term picture, right? And so we have these really powerful tailwinds here in the states of unfortunately rising fraud, right? And so the better we can build product and tools to help combat that, coupled with an increasing demand for faster, more reliable payments. And so we have open banking-ish, right? Like, you know, but we have we have the big data aggregators, and we have, you know, I seen really exciting growth across RTP and Fed now, even at a very limited stage, even with banks being terrified of SEND or RFP, right? Because of fraud, which is true, but also because, you know, again, very much like debit card issuance. So we're happy to ride those tailwinds and actually push the industry forward as it pertains to instant payment adoption at the bank level. And you know, on that note, we're excited to share a sneak peek towards the second half of this year is you know, we're in the process of integrating directly with the Fed and PCA, just like alongside FISERV and Jack Henry, to get that direct-to-rail connectivity to power not only our clients' money movement, but also I could potentially work with some bank cores. And so the technology is there. I think the product has to be built on top of it, right? As opposed to just having this, hey, there's a rail here, try to use it or not. For us, we're happy to solve huge problems in in ACH and help businesses relying on this seven 1970s architecture get their money on time with visibility. But we're really building for that future in which money moves, like I said, at the speed of the internet and not just between bank accounts, right? What's the difference between an Ethereum wallet and your local credit union, right? With the right technology, money should just move. And I think for us, card networks have solved e-commerce long, long ago. But there's these trillions and trillions of dollars being, there's like a spoke in the wheel of the US economy based off of this fraud versus visibility and kind of hold times on the account-to-account side.
SPEAKER_01:Well, what does success look like for your company, say over the next three to five years? What are those things that you, when you look at that far, you say, hey, you know, we're successful because we did this or that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we're building a product that should be the default account-to-account infrastructure in in the United States, right? We've been, I hate to use the word operating in stealth, but you know, I've never even posted on LinkedIn that our company um exists. And, you know, just last month, I think we originated something like$180 million in payment origination. There's a clear demand and need for faster, more reliable bank payments. And we're building that trust layer that allows money to move freely between accounts without sacrificing on compliance or risk.
SPEAKER_01:You've been in the industry a while. When you kind of step back, what are the biggest trends that you think are reshaping the payments industry right now?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think we've seen a move from the traditional ISO reseller gateway model into SaaS platforms, marketplaces, wallet type platforms become not just distribution layers for payments, but actually key drivers of adoption. Folks today, you know, they want to go and log in and pay their kids tuition or their yoga subscription right from that software. They don't want to be routed to some weird gateway, right? And so um we think that increasing financialization of software serves as an exciting ability to reach those SMB and Main Street businesses that are running running their company off of CRM, right? Or selling goods in an online marketplace. And so we really obsess over building tools that other companies can can build on top of without having to worry about that messy plumbing underneath. And is the ACH operator here the Fed or the Clearinghouse or which rail is it or anything like that? They just get to deliver an exciting experience to their clients. And so that is, I think, buoyed by, you know, I think Stripe success, but we see it across account-to-account payments too, not just the card network, or sorry, the card acquiring. And then I think, you know, elephant in the room is, you know, stable coins, right? The all the hype around that. Let's just say that, you know, I've been a big believer in distributed ledger technology, I mean, for years. I run my own Ethereum validator, but I I think we track this. I think we've been asked once or twice this year for stablecoin money movement. I think it's it's uh it's an exciting thing for corporate liquidity and and you know, maybe cross-border transactions. But I think the consumer or the end user use case isn't quite there yet. We're hoping that there is that killer app one day to help help that. But if you look at the power of like an ISO message uh done right, it's not all that different from a stablecoin, except you have money instead of uh a token.
SPEAKER_01:So a couple final questions. So if you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would that be?
SPEAKER_02:Run away. No, um just kidding. Yeah, I I would say listen to your customers and listen to your users. I we actually we have a one of our values is you know, see people, not users. So I forgive me for saying that. But I think that's what's most important when you're talking with a merchant or a technology provider or a marketplace, what have you, and they're feeling frustrated and friction or they're confused because of you know, these we all have a few copies of the NATS rule book somewhere in our office, right? They're they're not quite sure on you know why that if they're charging their customer, the the customer is a receiver. I think listen to them, right? And and and and see how you can build your product or company with the intent to solve those problems. You know, it was very easy, especially when I was kind of more compliance focused, to be like, oh, well, you know, there's you know, this is not a proper authorization or there's not a proper logging here. When it's really like, you know, come on, guys, this is all pretty absurd uh if you're you know just a well-to-do business owner. And so I I would I wish I had a little bit more of that uh empathy um early on. But but I think again, after thousands of hours of hearing it, you realize that something is broken. And and you know, we wake up every day and try to you know help solve our customers' problems in a way that work for their business, and hopefully we can make a few bucks too.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so final question what's the one thing that you would want someone who's listening to this episode to take away about Straddle?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, you know, I I think the message that we want to convey is that it doesn't have to be difficult or confusing or scary to stand up a payments product. For too long, the onus has been on the merchant or the originator or again, the business owner to kind of figure it out. We think that building an opinionated, intentional, compliant by default stack that basically abstracts uh both the direct-to-rail complexity and and the you know half a dozen integrations on the top is the way that things are moving in this industry. And so when you're faced with difficult decisions around compliance versus open banking, kind of think about like why doesn't this stuff just work? Right? What are what are we really doing here? That should not be just for account to account payments, right? That should be for most things, right? When you when you're being kind of nickel and dime across the entire life cycle of uh again running a business, you just think that you know something seems wrong here. And uh it's probably a great idea for for a new company. You know, I think that you know, folks who are brilliant at building accounting software or running yoga studios or whatever should do that and then let folks who are are passionate, a little obsessed about these dirty problems with compliance and money movement, you know, help. And so I think I think that's a real way to help both scale the economy in terms of kind of money movement, but also just have better outcomes as a you know, client, customer, partners.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we you you say that, and I think of like Square, the that many years ago, I don't know how many it's been, really simplified pricing, right? They had the the one rate, you know, the what are two seven, thirty cents or whatever it was that everybody blew everyone's mind that anyone would do that, right? And Stripe comes along and says, hey, whatever it was, you know, one line of code and you can accept payments, right? They took complexity and made it simple and built big businesses around that. And it sounds like kind of your mentality and your your thought process around what you're doing is is somewhat similar. I don't do I have that kind of right.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. You know, it's a funny anecdote is I think I was at a NACA conference maybe 10 years ago. I think it was in Austin. But I was talking with some folks uh, you know, on the kind of ISO acquiring side, and I was like, man, what are you guys, you know, Stripe was probably worth a few billion dollars there, but they weren't Stripe yet, right? So I was like, what are you guys gonna, what are you guys gonna do about Stripe? Are you seeing this? Yeah, you can onboard and register for production access, but you can be approved for a merchant account in in minutes. And they kind of laughed at me and they're like, they're like Stripe, Stripe is a pay fact. They could never compete with us on price. That was their thing, is that we'll we'll always go uh, you know, interchange plus three basis points plus two plus one, and they kind of commoditize themselves out of a job in a business, right? Whereas Stripe, on the other hand, really was customer obsessed and problem obsessed, right? And they're like, you know, screw it, no interchange plus unless you're an enterprise, you know, 295 and 30 cents. We don't care if it's uh if it's a debit card. And people lined up to pay them, right? Because they helped solve these problems that folks were having running their business. I think there's a lesson there, right? Where if your big moat or whatever is is being cheaper, then it's probably a reason why you're cheaper. There's been uh you know a lot of consolidation in the payment space, especially on the card side. And I think you'll see a rebundling of sorts more broadly out of kind of these, you know, very I hate to say merchants complexity, but let's just say point solutions into a little bit more intentional and sometimes opinionated product. For us, it's interesting. It's like, oh, account to account payments. Like, what does that cost? Three cents, right? You know? But but actually not really. There's a lot of elasticity there if you can provide, you know, this kind of first principle of like I'm a business that relies on bank payments, ACH, maybe one day RFP, to run my business. I I want to be paid fast and reliably. And I'll kind of pay for that. Right. And so I think an interesting learning that we've had is you know we've built really outstanding, highly complex but abstracted technical products. Instant like machine learning name matching, payment tokenization, open banking connectivity. And we like to be proud of that. Then we show um potential client or partner our dashboard and we have like a little pizza tracker of money's left the uh straddle, money's at the you know the operator, money's been debited from your customer account. And then then that that whole process and like this is amazing. This is the best thing every not that cool. But but but really that's that's the thing is like those little moments of like hey I don't have to think that well what time did I originate this payment on Friday? Was it a holiday weekend it's not open that kind of unlocks excitement and and like a trust in they're going to get paid. They can they can ship the good or or you know release a deposit on the on a rental or something like that. Right. And so if all you're doing is replicating a notcha file or an ISO message upload to a bank, it is worth three cents. But if you're if you're solving problems about reliability and consistency and finality in money movement, then I think it's a much different conversation. I think a lot of the payments industries can can can learn from those early stripe and square lessons and and you know focus more on first principles rather than being a bank with an API.
SPEAKER_01:Totally agree. I think Keith this has been a great conversation I really appreciate you being on the show today. I know your time's incredibly valuable. So again thank you so much for being here and I really appreciate getting to know you and learn more about Straddle. So again thanks for your time.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely Greg it's been a pleasure talking to you. I got a whole bunch of backlog of your your episodes to catch up on now and wishing you all the best and hopefully we'll talk soon.
SPEAKER_01:Okay thank you and to all you listeners out there I thank you for your time as well and until the next story.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersandpayments.com where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening please share on your social channels as well