Better service makes keeping customers harder
SoFi Technology Solutions is confronting a challenge common to B2B infrastructure providers: the harder a business grows, the more attractive it becomes for that business to take control of the technology driving its own operations. The B2B infrastructure division, which evolved from the acquisitions of Galileo and Technisys, reported that technology platform revenue fell 23% year-over-year to $84.5 million in the second quarter of 2026. Enabled accounts dropped 16% from the previous year, largely due to the departure of a major client that fully transitioned off the platform before the end of 2025.
Internalizing the Stack
That specific customer had reached a scale where financial services were central to its operations and decided to bring more of the underlying technology in-house. Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore, president of SoFi Technology Solutions, said the loss “did leave a hole.” The departure illustrates a fundamental paradox in this market: an infrastructure provider sells a product that becomes more valuable to a client as that client grows.
Related: Improved Infrastructure Makes Customer Retention More Difficult
As the product becomes more integral to the client’s business, the client faces a build-versus-buy decision that is distinct from cloud infrastructure economics. While a company might rent a cloud service even if it is strategically important, a payments system or lending engine can become part of a company’s own product, customer experience, or competitive advantage. A sufficiently large client may therefore decide it wants to own more of those layers, even if it has no intention of rebuilding the entire financial stack itself.
Wider Market Shifts
Financial infrastructure providers have long chased this dynamic, but they are unlikely to recreate the market dominance of cloud providers like Amazon Web Services. The idea of renting financial infrastructure is not new. BNY has been exposing accounts, payments, and cash flow capabilities through APIs for years. Stripe has spent years turning payments and financial services into infrastructure that businesses can build on. J.P. Morgan has been commercializing blockchain infrastructure through Kinexys. What is changing is how deeply companies are building around these capabilities. Unlike cloud services that are often viewed as utilities, financial infrastructure layers like card platforms, lending engines, or account infrastructure can evolve into a company’s proprietary product, defining its economics and differentiating its customer experience.
