Shamir Karkal, CEO of Sila: $20+ Million Raised to Build the Money API For Fintech

In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Shamir Karkal, CEO of Sila, a money API platform that’s raised over $20 Million in funding, about why their innovative fintech development platform is helping to usher in a more diverse future of payments for everyone, and how supporting market disruptors ultimately builds a stronger and more resilient finance sector. Providing developers with the tools they need to build financial applications to handle everything from virtual bank accounts and digital wallets to wire transfers and identity verification, Sila’s mission is to make it easier for everyone to innovate and program with their money.

We also speak about why Shamir’s frustration with the ‘big bank’ lifestyle led him to found a succession of fintech startups, how Sila define their customer problem statement for customers with a wide range of problems to solve, the strengths and weaknesses of traditional banks versus disruptors in the finance space, and a global history of finance and payments, from yap stones to the federal reserve.

Topics Discussed:

• Shamir’s career in the finance space, and why ‘big bank’ burnout took him to the fintech startup sector
• The challenges facing fintech developers in building functional, effective apps to solve contemporary financial problems
• Why established banks and fintech disruptors service different needs in the market, and why that diversity is ultimately a good thing
• How finance has developed over thousands of years through a whole range of technologies, but why the basic problem statement remains the same as ever
• The federal reserve and the history of the American monetary system, what differentiates it from the European approach to finance
• Legacy payment systems, from stones to bank notes, and why they aren’t likely to disappear entirely any time soon

 

Favorite book: 

Debt: The First 5000 Years