About Sila
Sila’s banking-as-a-service platform offers payment APIs and digital wallets for financial products and fintech projects. Technical briefing by Shamir Karkal, Brenden Coen, and John Burk
Overview of Briefing
0:00-1:30
Shamir Karkal, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, opens up the demo with some background on the founding of Sila. Their mission is to make it easier, primarily for developers, to program with money.
Shamir really quickly shows what can be accessed on the Sila webpage. Today, we are primarily walking through Sila’s APIs using a demo application.
1:31-5:25
We start in the demo application. For the sake of timing, Shamir already completed the account set up to access this application.
Shamir starts out by creating a new entity. From there, we determine if the entity is an individual or a business. For this demo, Shamir is creating an entity based on an individual. We then funnel through the KYC process. There are multiple KYC levels offered during this process, Shamir chooses the most standardized version. Typically, the data is verified after about 3-15 seconds.
5:26-7:36
Next, Shamir is asked if there are any wallets he wishes to import. Every user on the platform is given an Ethereum wallet as default.
After this, an external bank account needs to be linked. An option is to manually input routing and account numbers, but Shamir says they prefer Plaid as it gives less opportunities for mistakes and provides a fluid process. A user can have as many bank accounts linked as they want.
7:37-9:42
The user is now onboarded with wallets and a linked bank account. Shamir then moves into showing a same-day ACH transaction. He explains that all things are denominated in Sila, which equals 1 cent. It takes about 5 minutes for an ACH transaction to complete in this demo environment.
For the sake of timing, Shamir moves to a user he created prior to this demo to show a completed transaction.
9:43-10:49
Now that the created user has a balance, Shamir runs through transferring funds from one user to another. We almost immediately see the transaction complete successfully.
Lastly, we see a redeem transaction, which will transfer the funds out of the users wallet and to the bank account they linked during onboarding.
10:50-11:47
Shamir shows the API response on the right side of the screen, where we saw real-time updates as he completed all these transactions. He closes out the demo explaining a few other ACH types they support and the future addition of card onboarding.
Additional Briefing Information
This briefing was held at V-Sum_Twenty on May 16th, 2023. V-Sum_Twenty was made possible by IowaEDA and Brale