Finzly, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based provider of modular banking infrastructure, has joined the American Fintech Council (AFC), the US trade body representing more than 150 fintech companies and innovative banks. The membership adds Finzly to a coalition that lobbies for technology-friendly regulation and promotes responsible innovation across consumer and institutional financial services.
Finzly’s core product is BankOS, a composable banking operating system built on cloud-native, ISO 20022-native architecture. The platform allows financial institutions to deploy individual capabilities, including payment orchestration, virtual accounts, real-time ledgers, treasury tools and tokenised-asset infrastructure, without replacing the existing core system. The company describes this as a “surround and shrink” approach, in which the legacy core continues to run while modern rails are incrementally layered around it.
Phil Goldfeder, chief executive of the AFC, said Finzly’s infrastructure gave banks and fintechs the tools to integrate next-generation payment rails and scale operations without committing to a wholesale core replacement. He described responsible innovation in payment modernisation as a central AFC priority.
Booshan Rengachari, founder and chief executive of Finzly, framed the AFC membership as an opportunity to engage with industry leaders on regulatory clarity and the mechanics of incremental modernisation. “The future of banking will be built on open, composable infrastructure that gives financial institutions the flexibility to plug and launch modern banking products and innovate at their pace,” he said.
Why composable architecture is gaining ground
Core banking replacement has long been one of the most expensive and operationally risky projects a financial institution can undertake. Failures and delays at large banks have reinforced a preference for incremental migration strategies, and composable or modular architectures have emerged as the dominant framing among vendors competing for that modernisation budget.
Finzly sits in a growing field that includes established cloud-native core providers as well as specialist payment-hub vendors. The differentiating claim is ISO 20022 nativity, which positions the platform for the ongoing migration of high-value payment rails in the US and globally, including the Federal Reserve‘s FedNow service and the Clearing House‘s RTP network. ISO 20022 compliance is increasingly a procurement consideration for banks looking ahead to correspondent banking and cross-border payment modernisation requirements.
The tokenised-asset component is the most forward-looking element of the BankOS proposition. While US regulatory guidance on bank-held digital assets has been evolving, including updated OCC interpretive letters permitting national banks to hold crypto assets and offer stablecoin services, mainstream institutional adoption of tokenised asset infrastructure remains at an early stage. Finzly’s inclusion of that capability signals an intent to be positioned ahead of demand rather than behind it.
Regulatory and policy context
AFC membership carries strategic value beyond networking. The council has an active presence in Washington on issues including open banking implementation under the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Section 1033 rulemaking, earned-wage access regulation and the framework for bank-fintech partnerships. For a vendor selling to regulated institutions, association-level engagement in these policy conversations can support both commercial credibility and early visibility into regulatory direction.
The AFC’s positioning as the voice of responsible innovation also reflects the tighter post-2023 scrutiny of bank-fintech relationships following high-profile programme bank failures. Membership signals that Finzly is engaging with that regulatory sensitivity rather than ignoring it. The immediate commercial question is whether the AFC platform accelerates Finzly’s pipeline among the community and regional banks that represent its most likely near-term customers.
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