Purchasing Synapse would have been “a half measure,” TabaPay CEO Rodney Robinson said. “So we learned to go full measure and get a bank.”

LAS VEGAS – TabaPay’s 2024 near-acquisition of Synapse Financial may have been ill-fated, but TabaPay CEO Rodney Robinson credits the miss for his firm’s decision to pursue a bank deal instead.

“The idea to get a bank actually germinated from then because we looked at their lending licenses and their brokerage,” Robinson said in an interview at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas. “But we couldn’t do everything we wanted to do with that, so [buying] a bank was the next logical choice.”

The money movement platform announced plans to buy Denver-based Transact Bank in September. The deal has been in the works for two years, he said, and was spurred when someone on his team spotted a “for sale” sign in Transact’s branch window. (The sign was for the building, but the bank, as it turned out, was also for sale.)

Synapse, though, was the first acquisition target that caught TabaPay’s attention. The middleware company had an in-house issuing platform, lending licenses, and a captive brokerage, and its technology would have made for “an interesting acquisition,” Robinson said.

But more than a year of closed-door talks started and stopped well before TabaPay later almost bought Synapse out of bankruptcy in April 2024.

“We walked away because the books were a mess,” Robinson said. “The technology was interesting, but you couldn't separate the two.”

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