Intro

Recently, we looked into TabaPay, a money movement platform built specifically for fintech innovators. TabaPay was founded in 2017 in Mountain View, California for domestic payments. By 2021 they were expanding to be able to process international payments as well.

Last year TabaPay announced its partnership in the launch of Visa+. In February 2024 TabaPay was named to the Forbes Fintech 50 list. In addition, TabaPay has been in the news quite a bit recently as they announced they would be acquiring the assets of BaaS startup Synapse, which recently filed for bankruptcy, but then a few weeks later pulled out of the deal because of troubling information revealed over the course of Synapse’s bankruptcy hearings. With all this attention, our interest was piqued to look more closely at TabaPay.

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Product

TabaPay’s platform supports instant payouts and payments that are, according to their website, “secure, reliable, and lower cost.” They have access to 15 banking partners who provide banking services to a majority of fintechs in the US and Canada and 14 networks (including all the major ones) through a single API connection. 

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Creativity

As another player in the payments sector, TabaPay is unique in that it specifically targets fintech companies as their niche. While that may seem limiting, we actually like that they’re choosing to focus on a specific kind of company to make their product work really well for them. Instead of being everything to everyone, they’ve chosen their audience and are hyper-focused there.

Several times across the TabaPay website they talk about how their pricing and fees are significantly lower than others. We obviously like that, assuming it’s true, but nowhere on the site did we find an actual breakdown of costs or a specific comparison between providers. They say they have “full cost transparency for every transaction,” but we couldn’t find anywhere that they included even a generic description of what that would look like. That seems like a miss to us, especially after looking at a few other payment companies that did include that information. 

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Website

The website is pretty easy to navigate and has a lot of information, although it also contains a lot of marketing jargon and fluff terminology. We like the distribution of text and diagrams across the website as well as how they provide so many use cases for how TabaPay could be integrated into a diverse array of industries, including things like digital tipping and crypto-related apps. 

We also appreciate they have a general timeline of their company’s history and photos + bios of their founders on the website. These things help inspire trust in TabaPay as a company developed by real people who care about the work they do. 

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User Experience

TabaPay’s main website links to a separate sub-site that claims it is specifically for developers (“Recipes”). We appreciate them having this section, but when we looked deeper into the content of it, we were pretty disappointed. According to our developer at Pentadata, the actual step-by-step content of TabaPay’s recipes are lorem ipsum, i.e. they don't make sense. While we assumed this section was meant to show us how the API integration could actually take place, it doesn’t at all. It seems like this entire section is meant to simply look good to the unknowledgeable eye instead of actually showing us how integration would work, and that’s disappointing.

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Overall Recommendation

With all the attention it’s getting, TabaPay does seem like a legitimate payments startup to consider. There are a lot of things we liked about it as we researched, but there were also some holes, particularly about costs and integration, that we would want more information about before giving it our wholehearted recommendation.