Full-stack banking as a service | David Jarvis, Griffin

Lloyd Wahed met with David Jarvis, Founder and CEO of Griffin on the latest Searching for Mana podcast where they discussed the challenges of being the fintech’s OS for embedded finance.

Griffin is building a Banking as a Service (BaaS) platform to support the fintech ecosystem, and as a new player it can look forward rather than having to be slowed by legacy. The best supplier is one that enables you to do what you do best, and that will support you with an expertise that you don’t have and don’t need to have. Businesses rely on complex services that they cannot possibly always be experts in. Finance, Technology, Recruitment, Law and so many other fields of specialist knowledge can be bought as a service that is leading-edge, compliant, cost-effective and user friendly. That is what Griffin is bringing to the rapidly expanding and entrepreneurial world of fintech. They enable fintech’s through operating solutions for embedded finance. They build the tech stack and create the products and services their clients will need. For every solution, they create there is a product to be defined and marketed externally.

David shares with us that Griffin can look forward in order to build what clients will need, not what they have needed, so new operators hit the ground running with Griffin solutions. Driving this is a team of experts, constantly building their intellectual property and domain expertise, tech nerds and professionals with authorisation experience. 

From there, the conversation dives into David’s background and how he grew up partly in Japan, UK and US, and how he learnt about finance from his father and how that world works in those different cultures. We learn about the family’s strong work ethic and entrepreneurial streak that David reflects on. He became an analyst, who learnt coding and became a software engineer in Silicon Valley with the likes of Airbnb or CircleCI. He has added to this background the ability to define a vision based on his view of how the middleware market can be better and he has the energy and intellect to drive a solutions business, build a team and attract the funding they need. David has taken full advantage of a favourable environment in the UK to build a banking business and looks set to change the world of Banking as a service.

David’s book on ClojureScript language: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-clojurescript/9781785887635/