Fintech touches nearly every part of an ecommerce operation, from buy now pay later at checkout to bill pay on the back end, and most brands evaluate these tools on features and price alone. Understanding ecommerce fintech risks matters far more than comparing feature lists, and the collapse of Parker made that clear. The ecommerce credit card startup filed Chapter 7 with almost no warning to customers, leaving merchants scrambling to figure out what they owed and to whom.

Stephen Brown and Stacy Walker break down a four-part framework for evaluating any fintech vendor: vendor risk, financial risk, operational risk, and strategic risk. The conversation covers why most fintechs are venture-backed and unprofitable, how they sit on top of partner banks like Thread Bank, and what a Silicon Valley Bank style failure could mean if it hit the fint ...