When Does White Labeled Solutions Make Sense for Business?

If you’re a FinTech and want to diversify your offerings (while maintaining complete brand control) you have two options: develop a solution yourself, or white label it.  

While opting to build from scratch might be reasonable for some, the benefits of white labeling often outweigh the investments required for in-house development. Unsure if a white labeled solution will suit your business? Consider the following. 

What is White Labeling?

White labeling refers to a fully supported product or service that’s made by one company but sold by another. Opposite of co-branding, where a product integration would require two companies to share the spotlight, white-label products are acquired without branding.  

This means the brand that assumes the white-labeled product saves time and money that would have been spent developing a comparable product in-house, without sacrificing their brand ownership of the new solution. Instead, the business can focus energies on scaling and maximizing overall revenue from the purchase. 

What are Your Strengths as a Business? 

The first question you might ask yourself when considering a white-label solution is how capable your present team would be to achieve the same outcome. Or, in other words, do you have the brainpower on tap to develop a capital solution in-house, and the bandwidth to do so? 

If the answer is yes, it might seem simple enough to opt for centralized development. After all, you know and trust your own team, and you’ll be able to keep close tabs on ground-level customizations. 

Even so, there could still be benefits to white labeling.  

What is Your Timeline for Market?

If you’re working under a short deadline—maybe you need the launch of this product/service to get you out of a profit jam, or it will align with a slim marketing window for your target consumers—white labeling has the benefit of expediency. 

Especially in the case of SaaS products or other software embeds, development is a lot of trial and error that could be streamlined if you choose a prepackaged solution. Cutting to the chase will also save the resources needed to pay for that trial and error. 

What Does Your Budget Look Like?

Do you have the financial flexibility to pay an in-house development team? Furthermore, will the success of the end product offset the initial investment? 

Ask yourself the same for the white-label solution. If this cost estimate seems much lower than what you would have to allocate in-house (in most cases, it probably is), then you might consider setting up a few meetings. 

Is There a White Label Solution Readily Available for What You Need? 

Research whether the capital solution you envision is already on the market and available as a white label. You might have to do some digging to find the service that fits your needs, especially in the case of complex technologies, CaaS, or SaaS solutions. While outsourcing will always have the benefit of a niche-expert eye, keep weighing the cost of the venture against the potential profits. 

How Much Could I Customize?

Many business owners will jump on in-house development simply because they get hung up on the nitty-gritty specifics of what they want the end product to look like and fail to see the potential in the services available to them.  

White-labeled solutions may come with software development kits (SDKs) that will provide you with the tools to customize the offering for branding and functionality requirements. Keep an open mind when you take to the white-label market. 

Find a Partner Who Built with White Labeling in Mind 

Embedded growth capital is a highly marketable resource to have on deck for financial services providers, but it’s a long road to success if you choose to start from scratch. Developing a CaaS solution exhausts not only development resources to set up secure application protocols but by nature of funding being the chief offering, may require access to serious cash.  

Here at Yardline, we developed a first-of-its-kind Capital as a Service (CaaS) white-label solution that’s taking seller resource platforms to new heights they would have had to scale for years to reach on their own. When you partner with Yardline, you leapfrog the pain points and simply reap the rewards of our expert-designed tech and capital resources.

Click below to find out what Yardline CaaS could do for your business.