Are you a foreign fintech considering entering the U.S.?

Are you a foreign fintech considering entering the U.S.?  It's not as easy as saying "we're just going to do it." Here are three key pointers.

Develop an informed strategy

This means asking the big questions:

• What products will you launch (and do they all make sense for the U.S.? Perhaps only some, or only in phases?)

• What are the best-in-class sponsor banks with experience with your specific products and needs?

• What talent, processes, and systems will you need?

• How much funding and time will you need to allocate? 

Above all it means asking “Why?” and “So what?” Why do you want to enter the U.S. market? And how will the U.S. benefit from your market entrance?

Don’t assume the U.S. works like a single market with one rulebook

Foreign fintechs entering the U.S. market face a daunting reality: 50+ different jurisdictions, each with distinct requirements for money transmission, lending, banking relationships, and card network access. This means that unless you’re a chartered U.S. bank (and in some cases even if you are a bank), you’ll need to research and obtain dozens of money transmission licenses, “MTLs.” Too often I hear from non-U.S. fintech CEOs who assume that they’ll simply obtain a single MTL and that will unlock Visa principal membership and access to payments rails (ACH, FedNow, etc.) because it generally works that way with European EMIs, for example.  And this is a wrong and costly assumption to make.

And MTLs and other state licenses, in addition to being costly (millions of $$ and 2+ years for some licenses) are not a “golden ticket.”  Sure, they’ll enable you to offer some of your products but you’ll still be bleeding capital in bank partner and other fees to access payment rails and card networks. 

The cost of getting expert guidance upfront is always cheaper than unwinding months of work built on faulty assumptions, because by the time you realize one state MTL doesn't give you what you thought it did, you've already hired a team, signed vendor contracts, and promised your board a U.S. launch date.

Plan for a team effort

When you’re bringing a regulated business to market for the first time, success depends on seeing the full chessboard:

• How regulatory strategy affects economics,

• How operations influence licensing timelines,

• How bank partnerships intersect with compliance.

If you’re an international fintech expanding to the U.S. for the first time, this isn’t something a single expert can solve. You need to navigate regulation, compliance, legal, operations, and commercial strategy, and understand how those pieces fit together.

U.S. market entry requires what amounts to a "mirror C-Suite," with someone who can represent each critical function. Together they can debate the effects of every decision on the rest of the ecosystem and come up with the fastest path to getting to the desired outcome.

That’s why we’ve built Klaros the way we have. Within Klaros we have a multidisciplinary group of more than 20 partners and senior advisers who’ve held every major role across the fintech and banking ecosystem, from regulators and GCs to operators and compliance leaders. Getting siloed advice (one expert at a time) risks critical missteps and delays. Having the full team under one company is the Klaros difference.