Green Dot Names Marqeta Vet Renata Caine as BaaS Lead

Green Dot has named payments industry veteran Renata Caine as its new Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) general manager.

Caine previously worked at Marqeta and at the commercial payments division of WEX, the digital bank/Fintech firm said in a Monday (April 15) news release.

“Renata is an impressive leader whose deep experience driving strategy and growth for global businesses will support our evolution as a market-leading single-source embedded finance platform,” Green Dot CEO George Gresham said in the announcement.

“We are thrilled to welcome Renata to the team as we continue serving and growing our current partners, building our pipeline and establishing a strong foundation that enables scalable growth for our embedded finance business.”

In addition to her time at WEX and Marqeta, Caine has also served most recently as a consulting advisor for venture capital firm Point72 Ventures, as well as chief commercial officer at Tel Aviv-based chargebacks startup Justt.

“Green Dot is uniquely positioned to make its mark as a leading BaaS and embedded finance provider given its unique assets and powerful platform and tools designed to help current and future partners achieve scale and innovation,” said Caine.

“I look forward to helping Green Dot navigate the ever-evolving fintech landscape and to establishing the company as the market-leading single-source platform businesses rely on for embedded finance tools and services.”

PYMNTS looked at the evolution of Banking-as-a-Service last month in an interview with Drew Edwards, chief executive of Ingo Payments.

“BaaS 1.0 was, in some ways, tech companies focused on enabling tech companies,” Edwards told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

“They would build a cloud core and bring together all kinds of third-party vendors to manage what we would call money mobility. The use cases were varied, and the source of the funds created a lot of risk and exposure as they ramped up fast with many startups, many different industries, all with small banks.”

The BaaS-focused collaborations between FinTechs and smaller banks did not come without consequences, as regulators are now examining the risks associated with know your customer (KYC), compliance and risk management, fraud and the financial safety of FinTechs and their partners. This increased scrutiny has led to regulatory crackdowns, creating service delivery issues and interruptions for customers.

It’s why, as Edwards explained, the time has come for BaaS 2.0, which means moving away from API-enabling numerous third-party providers toward sender-centric ecosystems that embed digital banking into their payout workflows.

“I don’t think for a minute that banking-as-a-service is going away, or that this concept of embedded banking is going away,” Edwards said.