Designing the Core: How Current’s Proprietary Platform Shapes Modern Banking

The report Foregoing BaaS: How Owning the Core Fuels Current’s Success examines how Current, a U.S.-based fintech, built its own proprietary cloud-native core banking platform. This unconventional choice, made in 2015, has since become a defining strength, enabling multi-bank flexibility and diverse product offerings.

“ Current’s Advantage In 2015, Current designed a proprietary, cloud-native core banking platform, setting it apart from almost every other traditional financial institution (FI) and fintech in the U.S. and abroad. Although the decision to develop its core platform was (and still is) unconventional, it was necessary given the market’s lack of modern Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions when it launched. However, while not known then, the choice to build and not buy the core banking platform proved to be a defining factor in the company’s success." (Shipper, 2025).

Multi-Bank Product Flexibility

Current’s core banking platform enables a unique multi-bank product flexibility that allows Current to maintain user profiles at the corporate level while associating individual f inancial products with multiple external institutions. This helps allow the company to add or change banking and technology solutions with minimal disruption to the customer experience. This significantly limits the risks of a partner or sponsor change, which can devastate early-stage fintechs. Furthermore, this multi-bank approach enables Current to offer diverse products, from traditional financial services to innovative offerings like no-fee crypto buy/sell and Paycheck Advance (an earned wage access product), all seamlessly integrated within the Current ecosystem and presented for the end user.” (Shipper, 2025).

What I find most compelling about Current’s strategy is how it redefines the relationship between design and banking infrastructure. Instead of relying on external providers, Current built its own system, which gave it the flexibility to design products and user experiences without being bound by product limitations. This design-first approach isn’t about the interface alone, it’s embedded in the very architecture of the bank. From a capstone perspective, this underscores the idea that design decisions often happen behind the scenes, choosing to own the “core” enables more intuitive and adaptable services on the customer-facing side. Current’s ability to integrate offerings like crypto trading or paycheck advances seamlessly shows how infrastructure design directly shapes consumer trust and adoption. Looking ahead, I think this model challenges both fintechs and traditional banks to reconsider whether innovation starts with flashy apps or with the unseen design of systems that make those apps possible.

References.

Oxford, T. (2022). A Red Ball of Light With a Black Background [Photography]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/a-red-ball-of-light-with-a-black-background-B_kP3qYcN3U

Shipper, D. (2025, March). Foregoing BaaS: How owning the core fuels Current’s success. Datos Insights. https://datos-insights.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Foregoing-Baas_How-Owning-the-Core-Fuels-Currents-Success_Final_031425.pdf

Based on Foregoing BaaS: How Owning the Core Fuels Current’s Success (~40%), combined with my own analysis and reflections on design and banking infrastructure (~40%), and text synthesized, structured, and edited with the assistance of AI (~20%). All interpretations remain the responsibility of the author.