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V-Sum

V-Sum Thirteen

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Supported by Modern Treasury , IowaEDA and Brale

Technical Briefings

Unit Technical Briefing thumbnail
Unit profile

Leah Staniorski

Leah, a client engineer at Unit, walks through the Unit banking-as-a-service platform — the three-part challenge of building banking into a fintech (compliance, technology, bank relationships) and how Unit handles all three so product teams can focus on acquisition and differentiation. The demo covers Unit's two build environments (Sandbox for unbounded prototyping, Pilot for real production with minor limits), generating an API token, submitting a business application through the KYB flow, Unit's optional white-label application form, subscribing to webhooks for real-time events, and issuing a deposit account plus virtual debit card in two API calls. Leah then reveals the full card details using Unit's VGS-backed sensitive-details service and buys a webcam cover on Amazon, closing the loop with the settled-transaction webhook firing back into the dashboard.

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Lance Technical Briefing thumbnail
Lance profile

Oona Rokyta

Lance is a banking app for the 68M independent workers in the US — sole entrepreneurs ranging from Instacart/Uber/Lyft drivers to lawyers, teachers, and NFT creators. Built on Unit for banking-as-a-service and Abound for tax intelligence, Lance tackles the three hardest parts of freelance finance: setting aside taxes, opting into benefits, and building a cash-flow footprint. Onboarding collects standard KYC/KYB plus filer type, state of residence, and a ballpark annual-income estimate — then recommends an allocation across "stacks" (salary, taxes, main expenses, goals). Stacks are Unit-powered sub-accounts delivered to the freelancer from day one instead of year five. Abound dynamically withholds the right tax from each deposit. On the first payment from a new client or marketplace, Lance prompts the user to classify it as 1099, W-2, or personal, so every subsequent payment from that source is taxed (or not) correctly. Virtual and physical cards drop into Apple Wallet, invoices go out in a few taps, and the home screen shows month-over-month income vs. expenses vs. taxes — plus an Abound-generated Schedule C. Crypto investing and a debt-payoff stack are on the near-term roadmap.

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Abound Technical Briefing thumbnail
Abound profile

Alex Cram

Abound demos the tax-automation APIs behind freelancer banking apps like Lance — built on the thesis of "what if the IRS shipped a REST API." Four core products cover the self-employed tax stack: year-to-date federal/state/self-employment tax calculation, tax payments with 100% federal/state/DC coverage, transaction prediction (personal vs. business, deduction category), and end-of-year form generation (1099, Schedule C). The demo shows how Abound sits on top of Unit BaaS: when a Lance user opens a Unit account, Abound automatically registers them on its tax ledger using Unit\'s KYC data and auto-creates a payment method from the Unit account and routing numbers. Every debit and credit on the Unit ledger flows to Abound, which recalculates taxes in real time — income marked 1099 adds to the marginal/effective rate breakdown; business expenses categorized as commission deduct accordingly; a personal Apple Store purchase is flagged by the prediction engine as non-deductible. Abound returns a "smart tax rate" that Lance uses to set aside taxes from every deposit, and the tax-payment API remits $887 to the IRS on April 15 with a full created → pending → done lifecycle.

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Sponsors

V-Sum Thirteen was made possible by Modern Treasury , IowaEDA and Brale