Ahon Sarkar, SVP and GM of Helix by Q2 Holdings Inc – Interview Series

Ahon Sarkar, SVP and GM of Helix by Q2 Holdings Inc., leads the Helix business unit, overseeing the development of a cloud-native core platform designed for banks, credit unions and fintechs to rapidly build personalized, embedded-finance products serving millions of people. With prior leadership roles at StoneCastle and a stint at Bridgewater Associates, he has deep experience in banking-as-a-service (BaaS), product strategy, and fintech partnerships.

Under his guidance, Helix operates as one of the first true embedded-finance cores and is part of the broader Q2 ecosystem—Q2 Holdings Inc.—which provides digital-banking, onboarding, risk/fraud, and API-driven platform services to more than 1,200 financial institutions and their account holders nationwide.

You’ve played a pivotal role in shaping the modern Banking-as-a-Service ecosystem—from building Cambr at StoneCastle to leading Helix by Q2. What initially inspired you to focus your career on modernizing financial infrastructure through technology?

I’ve always been struck by how much people’s financial lives are shaped by systems they never see. Growing up without much money and later working at a large hedge fund showed me the gap between how the financial world works for the wealthy versus everyone else. The people who can least afford it end up paying the most in fees.

Namely, I understood that the majority of people who are out here paying bank fees, sometimes more than $300 a year, are the same people that are living paycheck to paycheck, and the reason that those people are paying fees is because they don’t have enough money.

Most of that inequality stems from infrastructure built decades ago. Traditional systems make it expensive to serve people who live paycheck to paycheck, so banks either avoid them or recoup their costs through fees. That traps people in cycles of financial instability.

I realized that the only way to really start tackling the wealth inequality problem was to start by changing the infrastructure. We wanted to make serving the “everyday consumer” both possible and profitable. That idea became the core of my work in BaaS.

In 2023, the BaaS industry went through what many called a “forest fire” — with providers shutting down, regulators cracking down, and banks cutting ties with fintech partners. How did that period of collapse ultimately strengthen the ecosystem, and what lasting changes did it spark?

In a forest, overgrowth can block sunlight and prevent healthy growth beneath it. A fire clears out what doesn’t belong, leaving only what’s deeply rooted and sustainable. Banking-as-a-Service went through a similar cycle.

When we started, the “forest” was empty. A few strong companies—Credit Karma, Chime, Square—took root early because they had real differentiation and real business models. But once hype built and venture money poured in, many new entrants appeared with no plan, no business model, and no real value for consumers. They raised money simply by using the right buzzwords, creating the illusion of a business rather than solving a real problem.

The reset forced everyone to confront hard questions: Do you have a viable operating model? Are you differentiated? Are you creating lasting value? It was painful, but necessary. What emerged is a healthier ecosystem of profitable, purpose-driven companies and a more thoughtful approach from newcomers. Now, instead of “I want to do BaaS because it’s hot,” we hear, “I have a specific use case and a clear customer problem to solve.”

It mirrors other technology cycles, like the dot-com era: early hype, inevitable collapse, and then a period of normalization where real, durable value is created. BaaS has now entered that phase—and that’s where the meaningful, long-term impact happens.

Helix’s mission centers on making finance more human. How do you translate that philosophy into the design of your products and partnerships in an increasingly automated, AI-driven financial world?

At its core, being human is about empathy—recognizing that people’s lives and circumstances are different and meeting them where they are. That idea applies directly to finance. People don’t want financial products; they want outcomes. No one wants a loan—they want a home. No one wants a CD—they want to save for their child’s future.

Yet the financial system has been largely one-size-fits-all. A single mom, a college student, and someone preparing for retirement have completely different needs, but the products rarely change with them. People value community banks because someone understands their situation. That level of understanding hasn’t translated into digital finance, even though leading tech platforms personalize everything they deliver.

To change that, we focused on building personalization into the infrastructure itself. That means enabling a wide range of products, allowing companies to combine capabilities to create tailored experiences, and lowering the cost to serve so that people with less money can still be served profitably. The goal is simple: financial products that adapt to people—not the other way around.

Banks are now rebuilding on cloud-native cores rather than relying on legacy middleware. Can you walk us through how this technical shift is changing what’s possible in embedded finance?

Middleware adds a modern API layer on top of a legacy core, but it can’t overcome the core’s underlying limitations. If the core doesn’t support things like user-level controls or real-time changes, no amount of abstraction will fix that. We’ve seen this firsthand at Q2, because we work with every core out there. We enable our customers to do some really amazing things, but there is a line, because there are foundational things that you cannot change with a core. There’s only so much you can do without replacing the engine itself.

Key capabilities such as cost structure, real-time data access, personalization, and contextual decisioning are dictated by the core. If the core can’t do it, the customer experience can’t do it either, and today’s users expect all of these things.

That’s why banks are moving to cloud-native, real-time cores. They provide the visibility, auditability, control, and segmentation regulators expect, while also enabling the modern, personalized financial experiences today’s customers demand.

Helix powers major fintech brands like Credit Karma, Betterment, Gusto, and Acorns. How do you maintain scalability, compliance, and differentiation across such diverse use cases?

From the beginning, we set a simple rule: there would only be one version of the platform. Traditional cores and many prepaid providers built separate, customized instances for each major client. It seems attractive at first, but maintaining multiple bespoke versions quickly becomes unmanageable and leads to slow development, compliance gaps, and oversight issues.

We still wanted customers to differentiate, but we also needed the stability and consistency of a single platform. The only way to achieve both is through granularity—giving clients powerful tools to build unique experiences on top of a shared foundation.

That’s why we ship one platform update every two weeks, and everyone receives it simultaneously. The infrastructure remains consistent and reliable, while each customer’s “secret sauce” lives in their own business logic layered on top. This model allows for both differentiation and scale.

Regulatory scrutiny was one of the biggest pressure points during the BaaS shakeout. How are banks of record approaching compliance and risk management differently in 2025 compared to that turbulent period?

Between 2019 and 2022, BaaS often felt like the Wild West. Many banks viewed BaaS providers simply as customer aggregators—receiving files, opening accounts, and seeing deposits hit their core. What they didn’t fully appreciate was that these were their customers, just coming through different delivery channels. When problems emerged in 2022–2024, it became clear that banks had not been applying the same level of oversight they used for their own direct customers.

Today, banks understand that BaaS isn’t an “easy button.” It’s a full business line that requires operational readiness, strong compliance, and rigorous risk management. The energy not spent on product design and marketing gets redirected into back-office processes, monitoring, and program governance. That shift has made the ecosystem safer and reduced the risk of another Synapse-type situation where consumers discover their deposits aren’t actually there.

This new mindset is also driving the move toward modern cloud-native cores. To manage risk consistently across multiple programs, banks need real-time visibility, multi-tenancy, granular permissions, and strong auditability—capabilities legacy systems can’t provide. Building that modern foundation is one of the most important outcomes of the past few years.

Artificial intelligence is becoming central to how financial systems operate. How is Helix leveraging AI across areas like fraud detection, personalization, or program scalability?

AI is a powerful tool, but it’s most effective when applied to targeted problems. We’re already seeing meaningful impact in fraud prevention: tools like Q2’s Sentinel, along with partners such as Sardine and Unit21, analyze behavioral and transactional patterns to detect suspicious activity before it becomes fraud. That kind of programmatic trend analysis is becoming essential infrastructure.

AI is also speeding up how financial experiences are built. With capabilities like Vibe coding in Q2’s SDK, institutions can create new interfaces and workflows far more quickly instead of waiting years for custom development.

Where I’m most excited, though, is in transforming the back office and improving consumer guidance. Back-office work is often repetitive and deterministic—tasks that take nine steps today could be reduced to one with AI-driven automation. On the front end, AI can help people understand their unique financial situation and match them with the right products or actions. That creates a future where consumers don’t need to be financial experts; they can rely on personalized, ongoing guidance tailored to their goals and circumstances.

With your advisory work at ModernFi and Primary Venture Partners, you have a front-row seat to fintech investment trends. How are venture investors thinking about the next wave of embedded finance opportunities?

Those venture investors have come to understand what came out of the forest fire, which is that in order to be successful, you must differentiate, which requires building a type of product that other people cannot offer, and that has some kind of moat, that has in-built profitability and a good business model so that it can sustain itself.

And that oftentimes isn’t just a wrapper. It’s actually down to the infrastructure, because wrappers are easily replicable. And so, where you’re seeing a lot of interest is on infrastructure-first plays, on plays that combine two ecosystems that have oftentimes been disparate, and on plays that focus on specific demographics instead of trying to be everything to everyone.

Many analysts believe traditional banks are evolving into infrastructure providers, powering fintech experiences behind the scenes. Do you see this as the future of banking—and what risks come with that transformation?

Not every bank should pursue BaaS or become an infrastructure provider. Doing BaaS well requires a deep competency in managing third-party partnerships—something only a subset of banks have developed through experience in areas like prepaid or credit-card programs. Those banks understand that even if customers arrive through partners, they are still their customers and require full oversight and back-office support. Most banks aren’t set up for that operating model.

Becoming an infrastructure provider is an even bigger shift. It requires building true product and engineering capabilities—essentially becoming a product company. Only a few banks, like Cross River and Column, have invested in the talent and discipline needed to go down that path.

My advice is simple: don’t chase trends. Start by understanding what your bank is genuinely great at. For some, it’s deep local relationships; for others, it’s serving higher-risk or underserved communities, or excelling in high-volume or complex lending. If you chase a direction that isn’t aligned with your core strength, you risk losing what made you successful in the first place. The banks that will thrive—just like the fintechs that survived the BaaS “forest fire”—are the ones that stay focused, differentiated, and grounded in their true competencies.

Looking ahead, how do you define “BaaS 2.0”? What traits will separate the platforms that thrive in this next era from those that fade away?

First, BaaS 2.0 will be closer to the metal. More providers will rebuild core infrastructure rather than relying on thin abstraction layers. Real control over cost, compliance, and personalization comes from owning the underlying architecture.

Second, successful platforms will be differentiated and economically sound from day one. A real moat and a clear, profitable target customer are essential. Companies that rely on fundraising and marketing instead of true product strength won’t last.

Third, winners will excel in operational discipline. It’s easy to focus on launching something shiny; it’s harder to build strong back-office processes, manage fraud, and run programs safely at scale. But those operational competencies are what make a program viable. In the long run, the platforms that “run” the best—not just look the best—will be the ones that succeed.

Thank you for the great interview. Readers who wish to learn more should visit Helix.