Baselane Review (2026): Is It a Bank? What the Records Show
Quick Answer
Baselane is not a bank. Its website says it is “a financial technology company and is not an FDIC-insured bank”; the accounts are issued by Thread Bank of Rogersville, Tennessee (FDIC certificate 9499), and the account agreement names a middleware company, Unit Finance Inc., as a service provider. Three things the review sites skip, as of October 9, 2026. First, Thread Bank operated under an FDIC consent order (FDIC-24-0022b) from May 21, 2024 to December 22, 2025, 580 days (our arithmetic), that told the bank to set risk limits for each fintech partner and to keep an exit plan. Second, the “up to $3,000,000” FDIC claim assumes Thread spreads a balance across program banks at $250,000 each, which is 12 banks (our arithmetic) out of the 27 Thread listed on November 7, 2025, and Thread's own disclosure says there is no set time within which the FDIC must pay. Third, the headline 2.88% APY is a formula: every tier is the Fed's target-range midpoint minus 103 to 268 basis points, and that formula reproduces all seven posted rates from the Fed's September 16, 2026 range of 3.75% to 4.00% (our arithmetic). The core plan costs $0 a month; we found no complaint naming Baselane or Thread Bank in the CFPB database and no SEC filing under the Baselane name.
Key Takeaways
- Three layers sit between you and your money: Skylight Financial Services Inc. (Baselane), a middleware provider named in the agreement (Unit Finance Inc.), and Thread Bank. The savings agreement calls the account “your business demand deposit account with us”, meaning Thread; Baselane's payment policy says it “never takes custody of money transferred using the Services” (company claims).
- Thread Bank had $1,110,596,000 of total assets and $1,000,034,000 of deposits on June 30, 2026 (FDIC data), 2.66 times its assets at December 31, 2022 (our arithmetic). Its net income was a loss of $3,907,000 in 2022 and $285,000 in 2023, then a profit of $7,075,000 in 2024 and $3,439,000 in 2025.
- FDIC consent order FDIC-24-0022b (May 21, 2024) required Thread Bank to approve risk-tolerance thresholds for individual fintech partners, write an exit plan covering third, fourth and fifth party providers, and stress its liquidity plan for BaaS deposit volume. It was terminated on December 22, 2025. The order does not name Baselane or any other fintech.
- The Synapse precedent is documented: the Chapter 11 trustee reported a shortfall of $65 to $96 million between pooled accounts at four banks and the middleman's ledger in June 2024. The same report says banks told the trustee that ordinary DDAs “can be easily reconciled”. Baselane's documents describe individual accounts, not a pooled one, but they still run through a middleware layer.
- The APY is variable and tiered by total balance. On $20,000 all held in savings the posted rate is 1.94%, or 2.29% if you collect rent through Baselane: $388 or $458 a year (our arithmetic). The website and the savings agreement disagree on what counts as collecting rent (the prior calendar month versus at least $1,000 in the prior 3 months).
- Fees are low on the core plan: $0 maintenance, minimum balance, overdraft and ACH out; $15 outbound wire (waived at $50,000 combined balance); 1% same-day ACH, capped at $15; tenants pay 3.49% on cards and the pricing table says $2 to $5 for tenant ACH while the FAQ and payment policy say $2. Rent takes 5 business days on Core and 2 on the $20-a-month Smart plan.
- The CFPB complaint database returns 0 matches for Baselane and 0 for Thread Bank on October 9, 2026, against 29,228 for a consumer fintech used as a control. Business accounts are mostly outside that database, so zero is not a clean bill. EDGAR has no filer called Baselane, and the website's “$44M funding raised” has no Form D under the company's name that we could find.
CSV · 172 rows
Baselane in primary records: the account agreements, Thread Bank's FDIC data and consent order, the APY formula, program banks, Synapse figures, CFPB and SEC searches
172 sourced rows: Baselane's pricing, fees and APY claims dated October 9, 2026; the Thread Bank agreement terms; Thread Bank's assets, deposits, equity and net income from FDIC BankFind; the FDIC consent order and its termination; the 27 program banks; the Synapse trustee and FDIC figures; CFPB and SEC searches.
Baselane is not a bank: who holds the money, in its own documents
Baselane is the trade name of Skylight Financial Services Inc., which is how its footer and the account agreement name it. The agreement calls it the “Program Partner”, responsible for assisting the bank with administration of the program. That sentence is the whole legal role: the deposit contract is with the bank.
| Layer | Who | What the documents say | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| App, bookkeeping, rent invoices | Skylight Financial Services Inc. (Baselane) | “Program Partner” assisting the bank; says it is not a bank | Deposit agreement disclosures; baselane.com, October 9, 2026 |
| Middleware | Unit Finance Inc. | Named as a third-party service provider; providers “may in turn use their own” providers | Deposit agreement, section 1.14 |
| Issuing bank | Thread Bank, Rogersville, Tennessee | Tennessee-chartered; the account is “your business demand deposit account with us” | Deposit and savings agreements; FDIC BankFind |
| Sweep banks | 27 program banks listed, Thread itself included | Thread acts as agent and custodian and places less than $250,000 per account in each bank; “you will not have a direct relationship with the Banks” | Thread sweep disclosure and program-bank list, as of November 7, 2025 |
| Rent payments | Stripe named for online payments | Baselane “never takes custody of money transferred using the Services” (company claim) | Payment policy, last updated December 16, 2025 |
Two details are easy to miss. The checking account is not interest-bearing; the agreement says “No interest will be paid on this Account”, and only the savings account earns the advertised rate. And the sweep is optional wording on Baselane's side: the agreement says the bank “may place your deposits with program banks”, so which banks hold your balance on a given day is a question for Thread, not something the website answers.
Thread Bank: what the FDIC's data and orders show
Thread Bank was established on April 1, 1906, has been FDIC-insured since January 1, 1934, has 3 offices and is supervised by the FDIC as an insured state nonmember bank. Its size changed fast. The FDIC reports balance-sheet data in thousands of dollars; the table converts them.
| Date | Total assets | Total deposits | Total equity | Net income, year to date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 31, 2022 | $417,178,000 | $382,511,000 | $21,564,000 | -$3,907,000 |
| December 31, 2023 | $682,474,000 | $600,140,000 | $51,516,000 | -$285,000 |
| December 31, 2024 | $768,394,000 | $698,646,000 | $62,143,000 | $7,075,000 |
| December 31, 2025 | $953,615,000 | $845,555,000 | $93,495,000 | $3,439,000 |
| June 30, 2026 | $1,110,596,000 | $1,000,034,000 | $95,858,000 | $2,989,000 |
Assets grew 2.66 times and deposits 2.61 times between December 31, 2022 and June 30, 2026, and equity was 8.63% of assets on the last date (our arithmetic). Equity rose by $26,080,000 between September 30 and December 31, 2025, the quarter in which the consent order ended; the FDIC data do not say why.
The 2024 consent order
On May 21, 2024 the FDIC issued Consent Order FDIC-24-0022b against Thread Bank under Section 8(b) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act. The bank agreed to it “without admitting or denying any charges of unsafe or unsound banking practices or violations of law”. The order is not about Baselane; it is about how the bank runs partnerships like it.
| Order paragraph | What the bank had to do | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| 2 to 6 | Update the Strategic Plan: financial goals, a profit plan, liquidity and funds management, internal controls and AML/CFT support | 120 days |
| 7 | Board to approve risk-tolerance thresholds for each individual fintech partner, based on analysis under expected and adverse scenarios | 120 days |
| 14 | Fintech risk program with documented customer due diligence and transaction monitoring, and an exit plan that monitors fintech relationships, “including third, fourth, and fifth party providers, for service interruptions” | 120 days |
| 15 | Document BaaS and LaaS policies: partner and customer approval, due diligence, growth and stress modeling, AML/CFT monitoring and steps to unwind partners | 120 days |
| 16 | Update the contingency funding plan with stress scenarios “which include current and prospective BaaS deposit volume” | 90 days |
| 9 to 13 | Anti-money-laundering staffing, plan, risk assessment, customer due diligence and suspicious-activity reporting | 60 to 120 days |
| 18 | Written progress reports to the FDIC Regional Director | 45 days after each quarter |
The FDIC terminated the order by a one-paragraph order dated December 22, 2025. It gives no reason, so we do not offer one. We searched the text of both documents for “Baselane”, “Unit”, “Synapse” and “Evolve” and found none of them: the order does not say which fintech partners were examined. A consent order is an enforcement action, not a finding that depositors are at risk, and Thread consented without admitting or denying anything. What it does show is that, for 580 days (our arithmetic), the bank's regulator required board-level limits on each fintech partner and a plan for unwinding one.
If the fintech or the bank has a problem: what the Synapse record shows
Synapse Financial Technologies was a middleware company between fintech apps and partner banks. The FDIC's October 2024 proposal describes it as a “middleware provider” and says that in these arrangements the fintech companies “maintained the ledgers of their customers”. The Chapter 11 trustee's third status report (Doc 287, filed June 20, 2024, Case No. 1:24-bk-10646-MB, United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California) says the money sat in omnibus “For Benefit Of” (FBO) accounts and in DDAs across four partner banks: American Bank, AMG National Trust, Evolve Bank and Trust and Lineage Bank.
The numbers in that report: an initial estimated shortfall of $85 million between cash in the FBO accounts and Synapse's trial balance, then a range of $65 to $96 million, part of which reflected about $31 million of interest and rebate funds not yet determined to belong to end users. The same report says partner banks told the trustee that DDAs “can be easily reconciled”; the hard part was the pooled accounts. The FDIC wrote that since May 2024 it had received “more than a thousand inquiries, complaints, and concerns” about the Synapse bankruptcy, and that consumers “may have believed that their funds would remain safe and accessible due to representations made regarding placement of those funds in IDIs”. On June 14, 2024 the Federal Reserve announced an enforcement action against Evolve Bancorp and Evolve Bank & Trust over anti-money-laundering, risk-management and consumer compliance deficiencies, and said it was “independent of the bankruptcy proceedings regarding Synapse Financial Technologies, Inc.”
| Question | Synapse, per the trustee, FDIC and Fed | Baselane and Thread, per their own documents |
|---|---|---|
| Whose name is on the bank account? | Pooled FBO accounts, described by the trustee as “a pooled account that allows a company to manage funds on behalf of” users “without assuming legal ownership” | The savings agreement says the account is “your business demand deposit account with us”, kept in the name of the business entity on the bank's records |
| Who kept the customer ledger? | The fintech companies, per the FDIC | Not stated for Baselane. The agreement says Thread and providers such as Unit handle account operations; Thread's disclosure says Thread keeps a custody record of the deposit accounts at other banks |
| Was there a middleware layer? | Yes, Synapse | Yes, the agreement names Unit Finance Inc. |
| What did the trustee say about plain accounts? | DDAs “can be easily reconciled”; the $65 to $96 million gap was in the FBO pool | Baselane's documents describe individual accounts, not an FBO pool; they do not say how Baselane's or Unit's records tie to Thread's |
| Insurance language | FDIC proposed new custodial-account recordkeeping so it can promptly determine insurance | “Pass-through insurance coverage is subject to conditions.” (Baselane) |
The FDIC proposal was published in the Federal Register on October 2, 2024 and a notice extending its comment period on November 20, 2024; in our Federal Register search on October 9, 2026 we found the proposal and the extension and no final rule. Here is what each failure would mean on the documents alone.
| If this fails or acts | What the documents say | What they do not say |
|---|---|---|
| Baselane stops operating | The deposit contract is with Thread Bank and Baselane is the Program Partner; its payment policy says it never takes custody of rent | How you would reach statements, ledgers and tenant payment schedules, or who would run rent collection |
| Unit stops operating | Thread says it may use providers such as Unit for account set-up, transaction monitoring and “providing technological connection to Program Partner and Bank” | Which records govern if Unit's system is unavailable; in Synapse the delay came from ledger and data access |
| Thread Bank fails | Deposit accounts at the other program banks are obligations of those banks, not Thread. Baselane claims up to $3,000,000 and $250,000 at each bank. Thread: “There is no specific time period during which the FDIC must make insurance payments available” | Whether your balance was spread across 12 banks on that day; you can tell Thread to treat a bank as ineligible |
| A program bank fails | Deposit accounts at that bank are insured up to $250,000, principal and accrued interest; Thread says it will collect the insurance and credit your Thread account, with no obligation to credit you in advance | How long that takes |
| Thread or Baselane restricts or closes your account | “Your Account is subject to security and fraud prevention restrictions at any time, with or without notice.” The agreement also lets the bank suspend or block transactions to comply with sanctions rules and close an account if you do not provide identity information | A time limit for a review. The agreement requires individual arbitration, bars class actions and sets 2 years to file a claim |
For a landlord with a handful of doors, the Synapse episode is the loudest risk in the record, but the contract language puts the nearer risk on the last row: an account restricted or closed while rent and deposits are moving through it. Whether that has happened to any given customer is not in any public filing we found.
Fees, limits and what is free
| Item | What Baselane's pages say (October 9, 2026) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Core plan | $0 a month: banking, bookkeeping, rent collection | Company claim |
| Smart plan | $20 a month on an annual plan, 30-day trial | $240 a year (our arithmetic); adds auto-tagging, 2-day rent, shared access |
| Account fees | $0 opening, monthly maintenance, minimum balance, inactivity, ATM, return and overdraft | The account can still go negative; the bank may close it after 60 days negative |
| Sending money | ACH $0; same-day ACH 1% capped at $15; wire $15 (waived at $50,000 or more combined); mailed check $2; checkbook $15 | Wire waiver depends on combined balance |
| Rent from tenants | ACH $2 in the FAQ and payment policy, “$2 - $5” in the pricing table; card or debit 3.49% paid by the tenant | Landlord can absorb the ACH fee; the fee is waived for deposits into a Baselane account |
| Rent timing | 5 business days on Core, 2 business days on Smart | Float matters if you pay a mortgage from rent |
| Other tenant services | Split rent $30+ a month, rent reporting $5 a month, screening $24.99+ | |
| Refunds | All fees and payments are non-refundable; Baselane may reverse funds from your account after a tenant chargeback or dispute | Payment policy, sections 3 and 4.4 |
| Standard tier limits | ACH out $25,000 a day and $100,000 a month; checks $10,000 a day and $50,000 a month; debit card $5,000 a day; mobile check deposits available within 5 business days | New accounts start in the Standard tier; Baselane decides moves to higher tiers |
The agreements carry different dates: the deposit-agreement disclosures say last updated March 13, 2026, the agreement text July 17, 2025, the savings agreement is effective October 24, 2025 and the payment policy was updated December 16, 2025. The savings agreement says the bank may change the agreement and any fees and features by posting an amended agreement on Baselane's website, so the table is a snapshot.
The APY: what 2.88% is pegged to, checked against the Fed
Baselane advertises “up to 2.88% APY”. The savings agreement explains the mechanism: each tier is the midpoint of the Fed's federal funds target range minus a fixed number of basis points, compounded monthly. The Fed's September 16, 2026 statement set the target range at 3-3/4 to 4 percent, a midpoint of 3.875%. Applying the agreement's margins gives every rate Baselane posts as of 9/16/2026.
| Total balance (checking plus savings) | Agreement formula (midpoint minus) | Implied APY (our arithmetic) | Posted by Baselane |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $10,000 | 268 bps | 1.20% | 1.20% base |
| Under $10,000, with rent collected through Baselane | 233 bps | 1.56% | up to 1.56% |
| $10,000 to $24,999 | 195 bps | 1.94% | 1.94% base |
| $10,000 to $24,999, with rent | 161 bps | 2.29% | up to 2.29% |
| $25,000 to $49,999 | 161 bps | 2.29% | 2.29% base |
| $25,000 to $49,999, with rent | 126 bps | 2.65% | up to 2.65% |
| $50,000 or more | 103 bps | 2.88% | 2.88% |
Three consequences. The rate is not a promotion: a quarter-point cut in the Fed's range would lower every tier by the same quarter point (our arithmetic), and Baselane says rates are variable and can change after account opening. The 2.88% belongs to the top band and, per the agreement, carries no rent requirement; a landlord with under $25,000 sits in the 1.20% to 2.29% rows. And the bonus conditions differ by page: the website footnote says an APY bonus is applied to accounts that “collect rent via Baselane banking within the prior calendar month”, while the savings agreement requires “at least $1,000 of rent into your Account via Baselane’s Rent Collection tool in the prior 3 months”. On $20,000 in savings the rent bonus is worth about $70 a year (our arithmetic), less than the $240 a year Smart plan, which is not required for it. Thread's sweep disclosure adds that each program bank pays Thread “a fee equal to a percentage of the average daily deposit balance”; the percentage is not stated.
Complaints, SEC filings and the funding claim
The CFPB complaint database, searched on October 9, 2026 and last updated that day, returns 0 complaints matching “Baselane” and 0 matching “Thread Bank”. The same search returns 29,228 for “Chime”, so the tool works for a consumer fintech. The database is built around consumer financial products, and the savings agreement says the account “may only be used for business purposes”, so the zero says little either way.
On EDGAR, a company search for “baselane” returns no entity, and a full-text search for the phrase “Skylight Financial Services” returns 0 hits. The only name match for “skylight financial” is an Atlanta company with a single filing dated 2002, which does not appear to be related. Baselane's About page says “$44M” in funding raised and its pages claim 50,000+ customers; these are the company's statements, and we found no Form D (the notice a company files after an exempt private raise) under its name. The raise may sit under another legal name or may not have been noticed to the SEC; the record we searched cannot tell. We could not complete a search of the state licensing database NMLS Consumer Access, so this page says nothing about state money-transmitter licenses.
What you can do with this
- Ask Thread which banks hold your balance today. The sweep disclosure says you can designate a program bank as ineligible; the list was last dated November 7, 2025 and Thread says it can change at any time.
- Treat the account as an operating account. The agreement lets the bank restrict or close an account with or without notice; many landlords keep a second bank for the mortgage payment and reserves. That is a design choice, not a finding about Baselane.
- Test the rent flow with one unit first. Core rent takes 5 business days; the Standard tier caps ACH out at $25,000 a day.
- Export your books regularly. The page lists “Export reports to CSV”; the Synapse record shows the cost of records that sit only in the middle layer.
- Check the APY against the Fed. Subtract the margin for your balance band from the target midpoint; if the Fed moves, your rate moves the same amount.
- Run the property first, then the bank. Whether a rental works is a numbers question before it is a banking one; see our DealCheck review for the tool we use for that, and our rental property calculator for the inputs.
- Read how Synapse played out elsewhere. What happened to Fund That Flip and what happened to Mainvest follow two platforms whose cash was caught in it.
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FAQ
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Sources, read on October 9, 2026: baselane.com home, pricing, savings-rate and About pages and its Thread Bank Business Deposit Account Agreement and Disclosures (agreement text dated July 17, 2025, disclosures March 13, 2026), Business Savings Account Agreement (effective October 24, 2025) and Payment Policy (December 16, 2025); thread.bank sweep disclosure and program-bank list (as of November 7, 2025); FDIC BankFind institution and financial data for Thread Bank, CERT 9499 (report dates December 31, 2022 to June 30, 2026), FDIC Consent Order FDIC-24-0022b (May 21, 2024) and the FDIC Order Terminating Consent Order (December 22, 2025); the FOMC statement of September 16, 2026 and the Federal Reserve press release of June 14, 2024; the FDIC proposed rule “Recordkeeping for Custodial Accounts”, Federal Register 2024-22565 (October 2, 2024); the Chapter 11 Trustee's Third Status Report, In re Synapse Financial Technologies, Inc., Case No. 1:24-bk-10646-MB (Central District of California Bankruptcy Court), Doc 287; the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database API; and SEC EDGAR company search and full-text search. Statements attributed to Baselane or Thread Bank's websites and agreements are the companies' claims, not verified by us. Sums, ratios, implied rates and counts are our arithmetic. We have no relationship with Baselane and earn nothing if you sign up. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal, banking or tax advice.
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