Fintech Banking: How to Protect Your Business and Cash

For a solopreneur, putting banking, payments, payroll, taxes and cash management in one app can make running a business dramatically easier. It can also concentrate the consequences of an outage, frozen account, fraud incident or platform failure in a single place.

Members of the Senior Executive FinTech Think Tank share their expertise across fintech, payments, banking technology and financial infrastructure to answer a question that goes beyond whether an app looks secure: What is actually underneath it, and can the business keep operating if something goes wrong?

The answer is not necessarily to choose a traditional bank over fintech, or fintech over a bank. Instead, solopreneurs should evaluate the infrastructure behind the product, understand how their money and data are handled and build enough redundancy to keep one technology failure from becoming a business crisis.

“A fintech platform can absolutely run your entire business, but convenience should never come at the cost of creating a single point of failure for accessing your own cash.”

– Anshuman Yadav, Founder and CEO of NeuraCraft

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Start With the Financial Infrastructure

Anshuman Yadav, Founder and CEO of NeuraCraft, says solopreneurs should begin their evaluation beneath the user interface. The convenience of an app tells them very little about where their money is actually held or how the platform would perform during a disruption.

“For solopreneurs, the real question isn’t fintech versus traditional bank; it’s whether the underlying financial infrastructure is secure, transparent and resilient,” Yadav says.

That starts with understanding the relationship between the fintech and any bank behind the product. The FDIC notes that nonbank fintech companies themselves are not FDIC-insured, even when they partner with FDIC-insured banks. Depending on how funds are held and recorded, deposits placed through a fintech may qualify for pass-through FDIC insurance, but the arrangement has specific requirements.

Yadav says solopreneurs should ask directly “where funds are actually held” and whether deposits carry FDIC insurance through a “named partner bank.” They should also look for security controls such as “SOC 2 reporting, multifactor authentication and fraud monitoring.”

SOC 2 is particularly useful as a due-diligence signal because it addresses controls relevant to areas including security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. It should not be treated as a blanket guarantee that a platform is risk-free, but it can give a business owner more information about the controls a service organization has in place.

Security is only half of the evaluation. Reliability matters just as much when the platform becomes the operating center of a business.

“Reliability deserves equal weight,” Yadav says, pointing to uptime history, transaction limits, support responsiveness and dependencies on third-party vendors. “A fintech platform can absolutely run your entire business, but convenience should never come at the cost of creating a single point of failure for accessing your own cash.”

That last point changes the question a solopreneur should ask. Instead of simply asking whether a platform works under normal conditions, the business owner should ask what happens when it does not.

“A platform may offer attractive features, but the right question is whether those features and underlying policies actually support the solopreneur’s specific operating needs.”

– Banu Raghuraman, AI Lead Product Manager at Perficient

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Read the Fine Print Before Trusting the Platform

Banu Raghuraman, AI Lead Product Manager at Perficient, approaches the decision from the perspective of someone who has spent more than 15 years building products and customer experiences in fintech, payments and healthcare. Her experience includes leading product MVPs for mobile banking, real-time payments and conversational intelligence solutions.

For Raghuraman, the evaluation should start with the business itself. A platform may offer attractive features, but the right question is whether those features and underlying policies actually support the solopreneur’s specific operating needs.

“Apart from the foundational non-functional questions of FDIC insurance, compliance, transparency, availability and more, this is a great research opportunity to deep dive into the specific needs that they will need the bank or fintech to support,” she says.

That means turning the platform’s marketing claims into a checklist. Does the account support the transaction volume the business expects? Are there limits on transfers? Can the owner make the types of payments required by vendors, tax authorities or contractors? What happens when a transaction is flagged?

Raghuraman also recommends spending time with the terms and conditions rather than treating them as boilerplate.

“In addition, run through and review the terms and conditions for nuanced edge cases to ensure they cover all their needs,” she says.

Those edge cases can matter most when something goes wrong. A solopreneur should understand the rules governing account restrictions, dispute resolution, data sharing, termination and access to funds before moving the business’s entire cash position onto a platform.

The data question deserves particular attention. A banking or fintech platform may have access to transaction histories, customer information, business relationships and other commercially valuable information. Raghuraman says solopreneurs should understand “handling of data and how it can be used, ownership, exposure and more.

Her advice is especially relevant as more financial platforms connect with third-party services. A platform can become part of a larger ecosystem of vendors, integrations and data flows, making it important to understand not just what the fintech does with information but where information can travel.

The FTC recommends that businesses evaluate the security of third-party apps that store, access or transmit sensitive information and use safeguards such as multifactor authentication. For a solopreneur, that same mindset can be applied before granting a financial platform access to the business’s most sensitive information.

Raghuraman ultimately brings the evaluation back to fit. Security is essential, but a secure platform that cannot handle the actual needs of the business is not reliable enough to serve as its financial backbone.

“Avoid putting everything in one place.”

– Allen Kopelman, CEO of Nationwide Payment Systems Inc.

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Build Redundancy Before You Need It

Allen Kopelman, CEO of Nationwide Payment Systems Inc., brings a payments-focused perspective to the decision-making process. Nationwide Payment Systems serves businesses across the United States with payment technology designed to improve cash flow and reduce operational friction. Kopelman has spent decades working at the intersection of payments and business operations and also hosts the B2B Vault podcast.

His advice starts with the same infrastructure question Yadav raises: Do not mistake the app for the financial institution behind it.

“Solopreneurs should look past the slick app and ask what sits underneath it,” Kopelman says. “Is the company actually a bank, or does it partner with one?”

The answer is essential because it determines how the business should think about deposit insurance and where its money ultimately resides. Kopelman says owners should ask how funds are held, whether deposits are FDIC-insured and “through whom.”

The next test is what happens when the platform itself has a problem.

“What happens if the fintech freezes the account, suffers an outage, changes banking partners, or shuts down?” he asks.

Those are not hypothetical questions to ignore simply because a platform has worked reliably so far. A solopreneur who depends on one account for incoming revenue, payroll, vendor payments and taxes has created a concentrated operational risk.

That is why Kopelman puts unusual emphasis on customer support.

“If your payroll, vendor payments, taxes and receivables all depend on one platform, being able to reach a real person matters,” he says.

Security controls remain part of the equation. Kopelman recommends strong two-factor authentication, transaction alerts, user controls, fraud monitoring and clear procedures for unauthorized activity.

Federal cybersecurity guidance supports that emphasis. NIST’s guidance specifically tailored to non-employer firms identifies multifactor authentication as one of the most important steps a very small business can take to reduce cybersecurity risk. CISA likewise recommends MFA because passwords alone are no longer sufficient to protect sensitive business accounts.

The risk is not theoretical. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded more than $3 billion in reported losses from business email compromise, illustrating the scale of financial harm that can result when attackers gain access to business communications or financial processes.

For Kopelman, however, the strongest protection is not a security feature. It’s redundancy.

“I’d also avoid putting everything in one place,” he says. “A fintech platform can be excellent for automation and convenience, but maintaining a traditional bank account as a backup gives a business another layer of protection.”

That backup does not necessarily mean abandoning fintech. It means separating convenience from dependency.

“Convenience is great. Redundancy is better,” Kopelman says. “And if you ever need a loan, banks are easier to work with!”

For a solopreneur, that may be the most practical test of all. If one platform becomes unavailable tomorrow, can the business still collect money, pay critical obligations and access enough cash to keep operating?

The Solopreneur’s Fintech Safety Checklist

• Verify where your money is held. Confirm whether the platform is a bank, identify any partner bank and understand exactly how FDIC insurance applies to your deposits.
• Evaluate the platform’s security controls. Look for multifactor authentication, fraud monitoring, transaction alerts, user controls and credible evidence of security practices.
• Test the platform against your actual business needs. Check transaction limits, payment capabilities, payroll and tax functionality, integrations and other requirements before making it your primary account.
• Read the terms before you need them. Pay particular attention to account restrictions, dispute procedures, data use, ownership, third-party sharing and what happens if the relationship ends.
• Investigate reliability and support. Review uptime, service history and support options, and determine whether you can reach a real person when access to your money is at stake.
• Ask what happens when a vendor fails. Identify third parties that sit behind critical services such as payments, payroll or data processing and understand how a disruption could affect the business.
• Keep a backup financial relationship. A secondary traditional bank account can provide another path to cash and critical payments if a fintech platform becomes unavailable.
• Test the failure plan. Do not wait for an outage to discover that all of your cash, payments and financial records depend on one platform.

Make Convenience Earn The Right To Be Critical

A fintech platform can be a powerful operating tool for a solopreneur, but the decision should not come down to how polished the app looks or how many features it offers. The strongest choice is the platform whose underlying financial relationships, security controls, data practices, reliability and support hold up under scrutiny.

The goal is not to choose fintech simply because it is newer or a traditional bank simply because it is familiar. It is to build a financial setup that can keep the business moving when something goes wrong. For solopreneurs, that means understanding the infrastructure behind the platform, reading the terms before committing and keeping enough redundancy to ensure convenience never becomes dependency.