Buyer's Guide for Fintechs
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A buyer's guide to wallet infrastructure for fintechs: wallet-as-a-service, custody model, compliance, licensing, chains and pricing, with criteria and FAQ.
How to Choose Wallet Infrastructure for Stablecoin Products
Adding stablecoin balances, cross-border payouts or stablecoin-funded cards to your fintech product means deciding what to build, which custody model to use and whether to operate under your own licenses or a licensed partner’s coverage. These choices determine how quickly you can launch and what your team will need to manage afterward.
We’ve seen how much time those decisions can cost. SquareFi spent a year building its own MPC stack before switching to Utila. Obtaining licenses directly can take 12 to 24 months, which is why our Licensed Partner Network launch. provides a partner-led route to launch.
Meanwhile, these products are already serving customers: card-linked payments among companies tracked in Artemis’s stablecoin payments study reached an $18 billion annualized run rate in August 2025.
This guide is for CEOs, CTOs, heads of product and compliance leads at fintechs, neobanks, wallet apps and embedded finance platforms. It covers the criteria that decide a wallet-as-a-service evaluation, compares Utila with embedded wallet SDKs, legacy custodians and in-house builds, and shows how fintechs run on Utila. It does not compare consumer self-custody wallet apps, which serve a different buyer.
Building Digital Asset Products as a Fintech
A fintech’s advantage is distribution and product experience, not key management. The infrastructure choice should protect that advantage: the team ships features in its own app while the wallet layer handles signing, policy, gas and compliance underneath. Three concerns decide most fintech evaluations:
Time to Market without Replatforming. The platform has to support launch now and scale later, across chains and entities, without a rebuild at the first growth step or the first license.
Custody Model and Product Experience. Enterprise treasury wallets and embedded consumer wallets solve different problems. Fintechs need to know who holds key shares, whether approvals can run entirely from their own interface, and how many wallets the plan allows as users grow.
Compliance Perimeter. Screening, travel rule and audit trails must work from the first user, and the fintech must know whether it operates under its own license or a partner’s while its own is pending.
The next section shows how Utila handles each concern.
Utila for Fintechs
Utila’s fintech offering lets product teams build digital asset features on governed infrastructure rather than building custody themselves. More than 400 companies run on the platform across 100+ blockchains.
Platform Capabilities
Wallet-as-a-Service APIs. REST APIs create wallets and addresses, initiate transactions, query balances and enforce policies, while rich webhooks report deposits, confirmations and approval requests. You build your own interface on top.
Governance behind the Product. Multi-entity vaults, role-based access and restricted members let staff create transactions without signing rights, and the API co-signer signs automatically within policy so user-facing flows never wait on a person.
Licensed Partner Network. Launch under a partner’s coverage while your own license is pending: Fipto, CoinGate, Balance and Surus cover the EU, the US and Canada, and you can move to your own license later without replatforming.
Embedded Compliance. Chainalysis, Elliptic and TRM Labs screening, Sumsub, Notabene for travel rule and Corsa for combined compliance workflows, all listed in the integrations catalog.
Yield and Ecosystem Access. Institutional stablecoin yield through Morpho vaults curated by Gauntlet, staking providers such as Figment and Kiln, and counterparties on Utila Link.
Fintech Use Cases
Stablecoin Balances and Dollar Accounts. Hold, send and receive USDC and USDT for users and businesses, with per-user or per-business wallets.
Stablecoin-Funded Cards. The wallet, gas, ramp and compliance layer under a card program; Utila is a launch partner in the Mastercard Crypto Partner Program.
Cross-Border Payouts and Remittance. Multi-country payouts on Stablecoin Payments, the model Afriex scaled from 5 to 23 African payout countries.
Embedded Yield. Yield on idle stablecoin balances under the same policies, roles and audit trail; see the embedded on-chain yield webinar.
Digital Asset Buy, Sell and Hold. Exchange connectivity to Kraken, Binance, Bybit and OKX through Trading Operations, as used by 1Konto.
Those capabilities set up the evaluation criteria below.
Decision Framework for Fintech Wallet Infrastructure
Fintech evaluations often stall on questions raised late by compliance or finance: who holds keys, what happens at 50,000 wallets, and whose license covers the product. Settling them early shortens the path to launch.
Category | What to Evaluate | Why It Matters for Fintechs | Evidence to Request |
|---|---|---|---|
Custody model | Who holds key shares; enterprise MPC vs end-user-key embedded wallets | Determines your regulatory role and your users’ recovery experience | Key-share diagram, recovery flow |
Product control | API coverage for wallets, transactions, approvals and policies; build-your-own UI | Your app, not the vendor’s console, is the product | API reference, sandbox access |
Scaling economics | Pricing by wallet count, volume or transaction; limits on active wallets | B2C growth can multiply wallet counts faster than revenue | Written plan limits and overage terms (pricing) |
Time to production | Onboarding time, integration effort, support model | A slow launch costs the market window | Onboarding plan, reference customers |
Licensing path | Partner license coverage by region; switching to your own license | Licenses take 12 to 24 months to obtain directly | Partner list, regions, migration terms |
Compliance | KYT vendors, travel rule, audit trail, screening rules in workflow | Required from the first user, not at scale | Integration list, sample audit export |
Chain and asset coverage | Chains your users and partners use; adding chains on demand | Tron USDT, Solana and EVM L2s dominate different corridors | Chain list, BYO EVM docs |
Gas handling | Gas wallets and sponsored transfers | Users holding only stablecoins cannot pay network fees | Live sponsored-transfer demo |
Yield and extensions | Yield, staking, exchange and card connectivity under the same policies | New products should not need a new vendor | Integration catalog, policy coverage of DeFi actions |
The comparison below applies the same lens to the four routes fintechs usually weigh.
How Utila Compares for Fintechs
Fintechs usually choose between enterprise wallet infrastructure such as Utila, embedded wallet SDKs built around end-user keys, legacy custodians, and an in-house build. Columns other than Utila describe common patterns, not named vendors.
Capability | Utila | Embedded Wallet SDK | Legacy Custodian | In-House Build |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Primary design | Enterprise wallets governed by your policies | Consumer wallets with social login and end-user keys | Safekeeping of institutional assets | Whatever you design |
Policy and approvals | Quorums, limits, whitelists, restricted members, API co-signer | Usually light, per-user | Strong but manual, ticket-driven | Built from scratch |
Treasury and operations | Vaults, sweeping, batch payouts, reporting | Usually out of scope | Custody-focused | Separate builds |
Licensing support | Licensed Partner Network in the EU, US and Canada | Rarely | Custodian’s own license | Your license only |
Compliance tooling | Chainalysis, Elliptic, TRM Labs, Sumsub, Notabene, Corsa | Varies | Custodian’s controls | Integrated one by one |
Chain coverage | 100+ blockchains plus BYO EVM | Often EVM- and Solana-focused | Slower to add chains | One chain at a time |
Yield and ecosystem | Morpho and Gauntlet vaults, staking, exchanges, Utila Link | Varies | Limited | Bilateral |
Branding | Your UI via API; Utila’s mobile app for internal approvals | Your UI | Custodian portal | Your UI |
Pricing | Subscription; Starter at $799/month with 1,000 active wallets, custom above | Often per wallet or per user | Often basis points on assets | Engineering headcount |
Customer experience shows how these differences play out once real users arrive.
Fintechs Running on Utila
The fintechs below replaced in-house custody, exchange wallets or third-party custodians with Utila, and each case maps to one of the concerns above.
SquareFi provides accounts, cards, digital asset processing and payouts to other fintechs from New York, Singapore and Dubai. In-house custody had become costly and cryptography engineers were hard to hire, so it replaced its own MPC stack with Utila’s Wallet-as-a-Service, Stablecoin Payments and Business Continuity, which also gave it custody credibility with its banking partners.
1Konto offers digital asset, stablecoin and FX access from the US. Exchange wallets and third-party custodians had meant slow processing and a fragmented user experience; it now runs Wallet-as-a-Service, Stablecoin Payments and Treasury Management with Kraken and Binance connectivity on flat-fee pricing.
Afriex began as a consumer remittance app and now runs a B2B portal for hundreds of businesses. Consolidating its stablecoin operations on Utila took it from 5 to 23 African payout countries, with a commercial ramp-up of two to three months.
Vield, an Australian provider of OTC services and AUD loans backed by digital assets, moved off hardware wallets and per-customer wallet workarounds to Utila’s policy and quorum controls, and completed integration in two weeks.
Their rollouts followed a similar sequence, outlined next.
From Evaluation to Launch
Fintechs that launch fastest make the licensing and custody decisions before writing integration code, since both shape the wallet structure.
Choose the Regulatory Route. Operate under your own license, or launch through the Licensed Partner Network while yours is pending.
Design the Wallet Structure. Decide vaults per entity or product line, wallets per user or business, and the policies, roles and limits for each.
Integrate the API. Build wallet creation, transfers and balance views into your app, subscribe to webhooks and deploy the API co-signer on your own cloud.
Connect Compliance and Liquidity. Add KYT, travel rule and ramp partners, plus yield or exchange connectivity if the product needs it.
Launch and Scale. Start on the Starter plan or a custom plan, and add chains through BYO EVM as new corridors open.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Wallet-as-a-Service?
Wallet-as-a-service is infrastructure that lets a company create and operate digital asset wallets through APIs without building key management itself. The provider handles signing, policy enforcement, gas, chain connectivity and compliance integrations, while the company builds the user experience on top.
What Is the Difference between Embedded Wallets and Enterprise Wallet Infrastructure?
Embedded wallets give each end user a wallet, often with social login and user-held keys, inside a consumer app. Enterprise wallet infrastructure, such as Utila, gives the business governed wallets with approval policies, vaults, treasury tools and audit trails. Some fintechs use both: embedded wallets for users and enterprise wallets for treasury and settlement.
Can We Launch before Our Own License Is Approved?
Yes, in supported regions. Utila’s Licensed Partner Network lets fintechs operate under partners’ MiCA, money transmission or equivalent coverage in the EU, the US and Canada while their own license is pending, then switch without replatforming.
Can We White-Label the Experience?
Your customers use your own interface, built on Utila’s APIs and webhooks. Internal approvals can run through Utila’s web console and mobile app, which carry Utila branding, or through your own systems via the API co-signer.
How Does Utila Pricing Scale with Wallets?
The Starter plan costs $799 per month for 12 months, billed quarterly, and includes 1,000 active wallets, one vault, three users and up to $3M in outbound volume per quarter. Custom Growth, Pro, Scale and Enterprise plans set wallet, vault, user and volume limits to match your product. Utila does not charge per transaction.
Can Idle User Balances Earn Yield?
Yes, where your product and regulatory position allow it. Utila offers institutional stablecoin yield through Morpho vaults curated by Gauntlet, plus staking integrations, all governed by the same policies, approvals and audit trail as other transactions.
Scope Your Product Build
A session with Utila’s team maps your product, regions and license status onto a wallet structure, a regulatory route and a plan size, which is what most fintech teams need before committing engineering time.
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