NEW YORK — The bank accounts of tens of thousands of U.S. businesses and consumers have been frozen in the aftermath of the abrupt shutdown and bankruptcy of financial technology company Synapse, which acts as a middleman between financial technology companies and banks.
Synapse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April and has shut down its services to some of its fintech or bank partners, including Evolve Bank & Trust. That has caused disruptions for customers of Synapse's partners, leading to accounts being frozen or showing funds not existing at all.
Synapse's shutdown has ''needlessly jeopardized end users by hindering our ability to verify transactions, confirm end user balances, and comply with applicable law," said Memphis-based Evolve in a statement last week. Because Evolve is a bank and is required to comply with banking laws, it has to make sure all customer deposits are accounted for to the penny, which may take time.
Evolve also stressed that, despite customers' deposits being frozen, it is well capitalized. A source who is familiar with the size and scope of the number of accounts impacted at Evolve estimated the number of frozen accounts to be under 200,000. The person was not authorized to speak on the record.
Other banks or fintech companies that San Francisco-based Synapse partnered with included Tennessee-based Lineage Bank, as well as savings rewards company Yotta, a company that gives prizes to customers who save money. Reddit message boards for Evolve, Synapse and Yotta were full of customers complaining about being unable to access their funds.
The scale of Synapse's disruptions could widen. Synapse, in court documents, estimates that before it filed for bankruptcy it had roughly 100 customer relationships that exposed roughly 10 million Americans to their services. However, banking regulators believe that figure is extremely high and the number of impacted Americans will be thousands or tens of thousands.
Synapse's creditors have been pushing in court to convert the bankruptcy to Chapter 7, which would liquidate the company. In court, representatives for Synapse's customers argued that liquidation could make the disruptions to customers' funds even worse.
Fintech companies, more often than not, are not banks themselves due to the high cost and paperwork necessary to create a new bank. Instead these companies partner with banks — many of them smaller institutions with a minimal national profile — and use that bank as a place to store customer funds without having to be a bank themselves.
