Bankful Looks to Help Unbanked SMBs After Rebrand

Payment service provider Pinwheel is rebranding as Bankful as it shifts from serving smaller businesses to financial institutions of all sizes.

According to a Wednesday (Nov. 16) news release, banks can now offer their clients integrations into website builders and eCommerce platforms like Wix.

“This rebrand ushers in a fundamentally new era for the company,” Bankful Co-founder Blair Thomas said in the announcement. “There is tremendous growth potential around the globe, where millions of small businesses still remain unbanked or underbanked.”

PYMNTS looked at this phenomenon earlier this year in our coverage of Alif, a Tajik FinTech that was moving into the Pakistani market to help unbanked small businesses.

Alif began life in 2014 as a microcredit organization and is one of roughly 20 that applied for a license after the State Bank of Pakistan began its digital banking framework. Alif said this would make for “interesting times” as legacy banks have been changing their operations, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

Meanwhile, FinTechs have been making innovations with payment methods and other ways to conduct banking. Alif’s position is that Pakistan’s unbanked population and its small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been overlooked, with 17 trillion to 18 trillion transactions still undocumented

Bankful has been using its new name since at least last week, when it announced a partnership with buy now, pay later (BNPL) provider Sezzle to let Bankful’s merchants offer their customers the option of paying in monthly installments.

“There is tremendous growth potential around the globe, where millions of small businesses need fast and easy payment processing functionalities,” Bankful Co-founder David Silverton said at the time.

“Our strategic partnerships have allowed us to give merchants a wide selection of payment gateways, POS [point of sale] solutions, business funding and check processing solutions.”