TabaPay Raises $155 Million to Buy Its Own Bank
The money-movement platform plans to acquire Denver-based Transact Bank, rename it TabaBank, and fold it into a new holding company, giving TabaPay a chartered, FDIC-insured bank of its own rather than relying entirely on third-party sponsor banks.
SAN MATEO, CALIF. — TabaPay, a money-movement platform that routes card-based payouts and transfers for banks, fintechs and gig platforms, said it has secured $155 million in growth financing led by FTV Capital, and that it will use part of the funding to acquire Transact Bank, N.A., a Denver-based, OCC-chartered and FDIC-insured bank. Pending regulatory approval, TabaPay expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, at which point the bank would be renamed TabaBank, N.A. and operate under a newly formed holding company, TabaHoldings, Inc.
The acquisition addresses a structural dependency common to nearly every non-bank payments company: without its own charter, a money-movement platform has to route transactions through one or more third-party sponsor banks, which introduces both a cost layer and a single point of failure if a sponsor bank exits the relationship or comes under regulatory pressure — a risk that has materialized publicly at other fintechs in recent years when a sponsor bank scaled back its program.
Owning a bank outright is a different, and heavier, commitment than the sponsor-bank model most fintechs use. TabaPay will now be subject to OCC supervision and the full range of bank regulatory obligations — capital requirements, examinations, Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering compliance — directly, rather than inheriting a slice of a partner bank’s compliance program. That is a tradeoff the company is evidently willing to make in exchange for controlling its own settlement rails.
TabaPay framed the deal as strengthening its merchant-acquiring capabilities and improving service redundancy — the ability to keep processing if one settlement path has an issue — and supporting payment use cases that are harder to run cleanly through a third-party sponsor relationship. Regulatory approval for a nonbank acquiring a chartered bank is not guaranteed on any fixed timeline, and the OCC has taken a more cautious posture toward fintech bank-charter and bank-acquisition applications in recent years than it did during the more permissive stretch of the previous decade.
The financing and acquisition together mark one of the more direct moves by a payments infrastructure company toward owning its own regulatory perimeter, rather than partnering around it — a strategy several other fintechs have discussed pursuing but few have executed at this scale.