Thread Teams With Fiserv to Power Embedded Community Banking

Thread Bank picked Fiserv’s Finxact as its core banking platform, according to a Tuesday (Aug. 26) news release.

“As the embedded banking market continues to evolve, Thread sought a modern, real-time core that could offer the bank a homogeneous solution that will allow further scalability throughout the bank’s deposit and payments infrastructure,” the release said. “Finxact’s API-first approach, combined with Fiserv’s experience in compliance, was a perfect fit for Thread’s long-term strategy.”

Thread, a community bank based in Tennessee, is also working with Infinant and its Interlace Platform to provide the embedded banking layer for Finxact’s API core, per the release. This will let Thread and its customers access and manage Thread’s embedded and core banking capabilities as well as payment processing.

“Our partnership with Fiserv and Infinant serves as a blueprint for community banks looking to innovate, drive new deposits, and ultimately thrive in an ever-changing landscape,” Thread CEO and President Chris Black said in the release. “We did extensive due diligence to find a core that could meet the breadth of our product requirements and deliver in a modern, compliant way. Ultimately, it became very clear to our team that Finxact was the best solution to meet those needs.”

Community and regional banks are being challenged to adapt to digital-first demands or risk obsolescence.

“Throughout the history of financial services, community banks have played a vital role in local economies,” PYMNTS reported July 1. “They provide loans to small businesses, serve underbanked communities and offer a level of customer service that megabanks can’t easily replicate. Yet they now face unprecedented pressure, ranging from stablecoins to FinTech platforms like Square and Block seeking to ‘bank their base.’ It’s a challenging landscape out there for smaller banks, and that’s not even including competition from larger financial institutions.”

Modernization is not simple when banking tech stacks are a century older than the iPhone. Insights from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s 2025 Request for Information (RFI) on community bank digitalization indicate the problem is a financial and architectural dilemma.

“Most community and regional banks are constrained by decades-old core systems with brittle integrations and limited data portability,” the report said.