People looking to relocate or planning a sight-seeing trip to a metro area may be adding another item to their checklists: Does the city offer wireless access? -- Increasingly, the answer will be yes. This month, San Francisco and New Haven, CT became the two latest major U.S. urban areas to take another step toward providing Wi-Fi connections. They've submitted requests for proposals from technology companies and hired consultants. And Philadelphia -- the first major urban area to initiate a city government-led wireless program -- just announced that it has narrowed its search for an Internet provider to two finalists: Earthlink and Hewlett-Packard. The service will be rolled out in "mid-October," according to Dianah Neff, CIO of the city of Philadelphia. Indeed, approximately 300 U.S. cities and municipalities are now in various stages of wireless rollouts -- up from barely any just a year and a half ago. Greg Richardson, founder of Civitium, an Atlanta-based organization that assists cities in their Wi-Fi efforts, sometimes uses the word "crazy" to describe this phenomenon.
The BaaS model has been adopted across a wide range of industries due to its ability to streamline financial processes for non-banks and foster innovation. BaaS has several industry-specific use cases, where it creates new revenue streams. Banking as a Service (BaaS) is rapidly emerging as a growth market, allowing non-bank businesses to integrate banking services into their core products and online platforms. As defined by Juniper Research, BaaS is "the delivery and integration of digital banking services by licensed banks, directly into the products of non-banking businesses, commonly through the use of APIs." BaaS Market Development The core idea is that licensed banks can rent out their regulated financial infrastructure through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to third-party Fintechs and other interested companies. This enables those organizations to offer banking capabilities like payment processing, account management, and debit or credit card issuance without