Looking Back
2022 was a tumultuous year for the fintech and crypto industry. As global central banks raised interest rates to fight inflation, stock prices fell across the board. Publicly-traded fintech companies were hit especially hard, with stock price declines in excess of 50% in many cases. This was accompanied by a crash in crypto currency values, bringing about the onset of another “crypto-winter”. And of course the lowering tide exposed a number of questionable business models, leading to the multi-billion dollar bankruptcies of companies like FTX and Celsius.
Even though last year presented many challenges, I am proud to say that Sila managed to weather the storm and grow.
- Monthly transactions grew by 5x
- Monthly dollar volume grew by 2.5x
- Total number of end-users increased 4x
- ACH volume increased at an 14% average monthly growth rate
We also managed to grow monthly revenue by over 70%, which is a testament to the incredible team at Sila and their dedication to supporting and helping our customers.
Looking Forward
These are great accomplishments that need to be preserved and expanded upon. To that end, we started to look into strengthening our senior leadership team mid-2022. I am very happy to announce the results of these efforts.
Tommy Abel has been appointed Sila’s CEO & President. Tommy brings a wealth of experience from his time as COO of Swift Financial (acquired by PayPal), and additional executive roles at Aon, Acima, and Bank of America. With him managing overall operations, Sila will be in great hands.
I transitioned into the role of Chief Strategy Officer at Sila. This new role will allow me to focus on what I enjoy doing the most.. I am looking forward to spending more time with customers, and working to create products that will allow Sila to deliver on its mission to make it easy to innovate and program with financial networks.
Looking forward to 2023, I am excited to see what the future holds. The transition from a branch and mainframe based world to a mobile and cloud based world continues, and there are many exciting milestones ahead. Markets are not as frothy as in 2021, but for builders who are in it for the long haul, this is a great time to build.
— Shamir Karkal, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer