Thredd and Cross River Team to Help FinTechs Get Sponsor Bank Access

Thredd is working with Cross River Bank to help international FinTechs enter the U.S.

The collaboration makes Thredd one of Cross River’s strategic processing partners outside of the bank’s own stack, the companies said in a Wednesday (March 11) news release.

“The arrangement enables Thredd to introduce a curated pipeline of high-potential fintech clients from various geographic regions,” per the release.

“In turn, Thredd’s clients benefit from Cross River’s proven ability to deliver compliant, scalable banking infrastructure and principal network sponsorship, ensuring a smooth, fast, and credible market entry.”

The release offers an example of the partnership in action: work by the two companies to help B4B Payments, a FinTech specializing in card issuing, embedded payments and expense management, and the first customer to go live under the collaboration.

In this case, Thredd facilitated the introduction and offered the issuing processing technology, while Cross River provided “comprehensive issuing bank services, including BIN sponsorship, ACH capabilities, compliance oversight, and end-to-end support for prepaid program enablement,” the release added.

PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about the growing intersection between the FinTech space and the traditional banking world.

This came after a string of announcements from FinTech firms seeking or planning to seek banking charters from U.S. regulators. These include Revolut, PayPal, Checkout.com and Affirm and — as of this week — lending platform Upstart.

“Taken together, these moves point to a structural change in how nonbanks seek permanence inside the regulated financial system, with government approval becoming viewed as an asset, not an obstacle,” PYMNTS wrote in January.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that 62% of Generation Z consumers would consider turning to a neobank for their primary banking services, “a striking level of openness that outpaces all other generations,” as covered here in October.

Meanwhile, Thredd this week announced that it had named Marilyn McDonald as its new chief technology officer.

She joins the company following senior positions that offered “global transformation experience” at companies including Mastercard, Citigroup, Expedia and StubHub, the company said in a news release.

McDonald succeeds Edwin Poot, who helped lead the push to modernize Thredd’s architecture and technology stack, allowing “for cloud-native and agentic growth,” Thredd said in the release.