Beyond the Big Banks: A New Partnership Aims to Reshape Main Street Commerce

NEW YORK, NY – June 09, 2026 – A quiet but significant shift is underway in the world of commerce, one that could rebalance the scales for the small businesses that form the backbone of our communities. A new partnership announced between payments infrastructure platform Braid FI and in-person payment specialist Koard aims to turn nearly any modern smartphone into a secure payment terminal. While the press release speaks of infrastructure and ecosystems, the true story is about access: providing community banks and their local merchant clients with the kind of sophisticated technology once reserved for national giants and Silicon Valley darlings.

This collaboration will integrate Koard’s ‘tap to pay on phone’ technology into Braid FI’s platform, which is already used by financial institutions for services like real-time payments and card issuing. The result is a powerful, all-in-one system that allows smaller banks to offer their business customers a way to accept contactless payments without any extra hardware. It’s a move that speaks directly to the systems that either hinder or help local economies thrive, transforming a simple transaction into a statement on technological equity.

The Software Revolution at the Point of Sale

For decades, accepting credit cards meant a clunky, dedicated terminal tethered to a counter, often accompanied by complex contracts and monthly fees. The new model, known as SoftPOS (software point-of-sale) or ‘tap to pay on phone,’ blows that paradigm apart. It leverages the Near Field Communication (NFC) chip already built into most smartphones, turning the device in a business owner’s pocket into a fully functional and secure payment acceptance tool.

The benefits for small and mobile businesses are profound. Imagine a food truck no longer needing to juggle a fragile card reader, a farmers' market vendor accepting payments seamlessly in a field, or a plumber taking a payment on-site with just their phone. This eliminates hardware investment, a significant barrier for micro-merchants. The global market is responding accordingly; Juniper Research projects the value of transactions handled by SoftPOS systems will explode to over half a trillion dollars by 2030.

This convenience does not come at the expense of security. The technology relies on tokenization, which replaces sensitive card numbers with a unique, one-time code for each transaction. This encrypted data is invisible even to the merchant's device, making it a more secure method than traditional card swipes. “This is a tech equalizer for businesses of all sizes,” noted one industry analyst, who pointed out that the technology is driving payment acceptance growth “like Square did when it first debuted, except without the need for a dongle.”

Rebalancing the Scales for Community Banks

While the technology is transformative for merchants, its true systemic impact lies in how it’s delivered. For years, community banks have struggled to compete with the massive technology budgets of national banks and the agile innovation of fintech behemoths. This partnership is designed to directly address that imbalance.

Braid FI has built its business on an “institution-first approach,” providing the plumbing for banks to build and control their own modern payment programs. By integrating Koard’s technology, Braid FI extends that philosophy from back-end money movement to the front-line, in-person customer experience. Instead of a community bank’s small business client having to sign up for a separate service like Stripe or Square, the bank can now offer a competitive, integrated solution under its own brand.

“Braid was built to help financial institutions take greater control of the infrastructure behind modern payment programs,” said Randy San Nicolas, CEO of Braid FI, in the announcement. “Partnering with Koard allows us to expand that vision into in-person acceptance with a solution that aligns with our institution-first approach.”

This is a crucial distinction. It allows community banks to deepen their relationships with local businesses, offering a complete suite of services from loans to deposits to state-of-the-art payment acceptance. It keeps the local economic loop more tightly closed, preventing the revenue and data from being siphoned off to a third-party tech firm in another state.

The Invisible Architecture of Modern Payments

Peeling back another layer reveals the partnership’s importance to the fundamental architecture of our financial system. Koard’s “developer-first infrastructure” and Braid FI’s comprehensive platform represent a move toward more flexible, modular, and interconnected payment systems. Instead of monolithic, closed-off systems, they provide the building blocks—the APIs and SDKs—that allow for rapid innovation.

“Koard helps platforms, PSPs, and financial institutions launch modern in-person payment experiences without having to build the entire acceptance stack from scratch,” explained Sesie Bonsi, Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Koard. This is the essence of the modern digital economy: one company specializes in creating a complex but essential tool, making it simple enough for another company to plug it into a broader platform, which is then offered as a seamless service to the end customer.

By combining Braid FI’s capabilities in ACH, wire transfers, and real-time payment networks like FedNow with Koard’s expertise in in-person acceptance, the partnership creates a holistic system. A bank can now support a business customer across the entire financial spectrum, from receiving an instant payment from a customer’s tap to using those funds immediately to pay a supplier via a real-time network. This is the kind of efficiency that strengthens businesses and fosters economic resilience.

This collaboration is a clear example of the trend toward embedded finance, where financial services are woven so seamlessly into business operations that they become almost invisible. The goal is no longer just to process a payment but to make the entire commercial experience smoother, faster, and more secure for everyone involved. For community banks and the local businesses they serve, having access to this level of sophisticated, integrated infrastructure is not just an upgrade; it is a vital tool for survival and growth in the digital age.