Spidr + Moola: From 12 Tabs to One Platform

A 45-year-old nurse believed that the 401(k) account she had left behind three employers ago was gone for good. Moola’s team helped her locate the account and move approximately $30,000 into an IRA.

“For her, it was $30,000 of lost money that was found,” Moola founder Jason Schappert said. “When you’re on a call with someone and they’re crying over the whole thing, it is rewarding when you can impact people’s lives.”

That customer represents the audience Moola was created to serve: everyday Americans who know they should invest but keep waiting for the right time to begin.

“They say, ‘I’ll invest when the kids are a little older, when I get that raise,’” Schappert said. “And when just never comes. There’s always another when.”

Moola helps its members begin through something they already do: spend. When members use the Moola debit card, they earn stock rather than conventional points or cash back. Those small investments are intended to help individuals and families put one foot in front of the other and gradually build wealth.

Behind that simple customer experience, however, is a complicated collection of financial infrastructure.

When the Founder Becomes the Vendor Manager

Schappert initially tried to assemble Moola’s infrastructure directly. The company selected a know-your-customer provider, but its broker-dealer partners also needed adverse-media screening. That meant adding another provider, another contract and another system requiring oversight.

“Before you knew it, I had a spider web of all these different vendors,” Schappert said. “I wasn’t a CEO anymore. I was the vendor management guy. I was just chasing down everyone’s SOC 2 reports instead of running my business.”

At one point, members of the Moola team needed approximately 12 browser tabs open to operate the different systems supporting the product.

It was precisely the type of problem Spidr co-founders Ramy Serageldin and Joyce Mehlman created their company to solve.

Through their previous work helping more than 50 FinTechs reach the market, they had seen companies struggle to identify providers, negotiate multiple contracts, build integrations and establish the compliance programs required to operate financial products responsibly.

According to Serageldin, a company following the direct model may need seven or eight different partners. Building and connecting that infrastructure can require six to 10 months or more.

“Do I want to become a FinTech infrastructure expert, or do I want to spend my time building the service that’s going to benefit my clients or my customers?” Serageldin said. “I think all of them would say, ‘I want to spend the time where there’s value.’”

Bringing the Ecosystem Together

Spidr gives companies access to an integrated ecosystem of processing, identity, fraud and compliance providers. Its workflow engine allows the company to configure those services around the needs of each program and its bank partner.

For Moola, that meant bringing its existing product and several thousand customers into a more unified operating environment. Instead of moving among a dozen different systems, the team can primarily work through Spidr and its customer-support platform.

“Now we can just have Spidr open and our support ticket software and let that really run the entire ecosystem,” Schappert said.

Moola also receives one invoice and benefits from Spidr’s relationships with providers, rather than independently negotiating and managing every relationship.

The difference is not simply convenience. Spidr embeds compliance checks into each workflow. If a transaction fails a velocity-limit or anti-money laundering check, for example, it does not progress to the processing stage. The bank retains control over its requirements while the FinTech maintains the flexibility to create an experience suited to its customers.

A Trusted Processing Foundation

SoFi Tech is one of Spidr’s anchor processing partners. Its platform provides the ledger, issuer processing and related capabilities supporting the programs Spidr brings to market.

“Our bank partners know it and trust it,” Serageldin said. “The capabilities are really far-reaching, and we haven’t yet come across a case where we had to tell a client, ‘Sorry, we or our partner SoFi can’t do that.’”

Spidr’s understanding of the platform and its relationships within SoFi Tech also give smaller and earlier-stage companies a more accessible way to use those capabilities.

Serageldin said Spidr evaluated other providers, but SoFi Tech’s combination of processing functionality, ledger capabilities and experience made it the strongest fit.

“The platform SoFi Tech offered was the best,” he said. “The tried-and-true nature of the platform made it an easy choice.”

Infrastructure That Feels Like Autopilot

For Schappert, good infrastructure should not demand attention every day. Drawing from his background as a pilot and aviation entrepreneur, he compares the relationship to flying with a well-configured autopilot.

“I’ve got my checklist, autopilot’s on, and we’re just kind of running,” he said. “We have the systems, checks and balances, and procedures in place.”

That allows Moola to concentrate on the people it was created to serve. The company has expanded its experience to include custodial investment accounts for children, enabling parents to add their spouses and children to the platform.

“We’ve been saying internally, Moola is for families,” Schappert said. “When our members win, we win as well.”

That connection between infrastructure and customer impact is also how Spidr measures its work. Its fastest client implementation has gone from start to finish in slightly more than three months, although each launch depends on the bank and other program partners involved.

For Serageldin, the most meaningful moments arrive when a client sees its first successful transaction—or when a new bank requirement can be activated in minutes because the capability is already available.

“We get excited when our clients get excited,” he said. “If they’re successful, if they’re helping their customers, then that’s why we started this.”

By connecting Spidr’s orchestration and compliance capabilities with SoFi Tech’s processing foundation, companies like Moola can spend less time managing financial infrastructure and more time building the products—and customer outcomes—that made them enter financial services in the first place.