Free checklist for fintechs
Sponsor Bank Readiness Checklist
See where your compliance program stands before your sponsor bank asks. Built for fintechs preparing for sponsor bank onboarding, a periodic bank review, or a move to a new bank.
70 items across the 13 areas a bank review covers
Fillable PDF: mark each item Have it, In progress, Missing, or N/A
An action plan page, a scoring scale, and links to the documents that close each gap
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While you wait: see the Sponsor Bank Review Kit
What the checklist covers
Sponsor banks review a fintech’s compliance program before launch and on a regular cycle after that. The requests follow a familiar pattern: who owns compliance, what the risks are, which controls address them, and the evidence that those controls work. The checklist walks through the areas a bank’s review typically covers:
- Governance
- Risk assessment
- BSA/AML, sanctions, and fraud
- Program agreement
- Consumer compliance
- Marketing
- Complaints
- Third parties
- Information security and resilience
- Funds flow, payments, and reconciliation
- Monitoring and testing
- Training
- Review readiness
A few items from the checklist
- Governance: a compliance committee with a charter, minutes, and a standing agenda.
- Risk assessment: a step to update the assessments before a new product or channel launches.
- Program agreement: every compliance obligation in the program agreement listed with an owner.
- Funds flow, payments, and reconciliation: daily reconciliation of the custodial (FBO) account to your ledger.
- Information security and resilience: an incident response plan that names who notifies the bank, and how quickly.
- Complaints: complaints captured from every channel, including email, chat, phone, social media, app reviews, the bank, and regulators.
- Review readiness: an evidence index showing where each policy, report, and log is kept, and who owns it.
Count an item as Have it only if you could hand the bank the evidence today. The scale on the last page tells you where to start. Work at a sponsor bank? Use the free Fintech Partner Due Diligence Checklist for your partner reviews.