Stearns
“Can a community bank become a trusted sponsor bank and fintech infrastructure partner while maintaining its SBA and SMB lending core?”
HQSt. Cloud, Minnesota, USA
IndustryBank / Community
The story
Stearns Bank N.A. is a chartered national bank headquartered in St. Cloud, Minnesota, operating as both a direct lender to small businesses (including as an SBA Preferred Lender) and as a sponsor bank powering fintech and embedded finance programs. The bank has leaned into BaaS and fintech sponsorship by partnering with Lithic for card issuing infrastructure and with Sardine for compliance and fraud oversight of its sponsored programs, positioning itself as a community bank with a fintech-forward infrastructure layer.
Product timeline
2023
Partnered with Sardine to deploy an all-in-one risk management and compliance platform for its sponsored fintech programs — a first-of-its-kind approach in community banking.· banking
2023
Tapped by Lithic to strengthen card issuing infrastructure, confirming Stearns Bank as a sponsor bank behind Lithic's card issuing platform.· card
Regulated entities
2
regulatory licences held by Stearns
Licence types, jurisdictions and registered entities are in the Embedded Finance Index report.
The stack
2 layers disclosed in Stearns’s embedded-finance stack
Card issuing
Lending
in the full report
Accounting gap: none
4 more providers across 1 layer, with confidence-scored evidence and source URLs, are in the Embedded Finance Index report.