The Sponsor Bank Problem

Every fintech that touches money needs a sponsor bank. Most can't find one that works. Most reporting on sponsor banks comes from individual interviews and narrow case studies — but Cassandra Labs is a collective intelligence research institute, and our work is built around the premise that distributed practitioners, asked the same questions in parallel, produce a sharper picture of a market than any single expert account can. Between February and April 2026, we surveyed founders and operators across the TWIF and Cambrian VC communities about what they need from a sponsor bank, what they can't get from the ones they've tried, and where the gap sits. The results point less to a service problem than to a structural one — and to a clear set of design constraints for whatever comes next.