There’s been a lot of chatter in the finech space about #funding lately—it’s an important area for all businesses, no doubt, with the hashtag reaching over 3.3 million users on Twitter, according to data from Hashtracking, but the stakes are particularly fierce in fintech, where so many fledgling startups are competing for venture capital.

Unicorn births are down, fintech funding is down—but, cooperation between traditional banks and fintechs has never been easier, and that’s where solutions to this problem may occur—instead of reaching out to venture capital firms, why not try banks?

The recent partnership between Fastpay, a lending and financial workflow solutions provider with Citi Ventures, the section of the company that is driving its fintech innovation forward, is a good example of how cooperation in this space can lead to further innovation:

“The Citi partnership not only brings more capital to our business, but it opens a spectrum of opportunities for FastPay to leverage Citibank’s scale and product-set, allowing us to better serve our core constituency—tech innovators.” says FastPay CEO Jed Simon, regarding the partnership, which was announced earlier this month.

FastPay, which creates lending and financial workflow solutions specifically for digital businesses, is working in one of the “fastest growing industries in the world,” according to Simon, and it’s definitely an area in which cooperation with a bank—and presumably that bank’s more steady availability of funds—will come in handy.

From a traditional banking perspective, investment in fintech companies like FastPay could breathe new life into traditional banking companies like Citigroup, whose fintech innovation space is led by Chief Innovation Officer Deborah Hopkins, the CEO of Citi Ventures–during her tenure at Citi Ventures, Hopkins has cultivated growth by investing in companies like Square and Betterment as well as FastPay.

“Our investment in FastPay can help us, as a traditional bank, think about old problems in new ways, while at the same time we are able to provide our portfolio companies an established partner to help validate and scale offerings,” says Ramneek Gupta, managing director and co-head of venture capital at Citi Ventures. “Our partnership with FastPay can help Citi explore the evolving needs of rapidly-growing sectors… and identify new underwriting models for digitally-based companies.”

To learn more about funding, join us at Bank Innovation Israel in Tel Aviv on Nov. 1-3.Register here.