The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 151 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Strange: Nearly every company will become a financial services company
“And that's because in the not too distant future, nearly every company will be a financial services company and get a significant portion of their revenue from financial services.”
Strange: Financial institutions will drop legacy software for AI competitors by 2026
“My big idea for twenty-twenty-six is there will be a dramatic turning point coming to financial services and insurance, where finally the risk of not replacing legacy systems will exceed the risk of change. It's already happening. Major institutions will let l…”
Angela Strange: Next-gen fintech winners will be 10x larger by capturing labor
“The new winners here will be 10 X bigger. Not only because those software categories are bigger, but because software is able to consume a lot of the labor that humans didn't want to do anyways, or that banks or insurance companies couldn't hire for fast enoug…”
Strange: AI agents could increase software revenue 10x
“You know, is that going to increase software revenue two X? It could potentially increase it 10 X.”
Strange: Regulation will become software code in 2025
“In 20, 25 regulation is going to become code.”
Strange: Every white-collar worker will eventually have an AI copilot
“I believe that every white-collar worker eventually is going to have a copilot, and some of those roles will be replaced by agents.”
Angela Strange: Customers Are Replacing 20-Year-Old Actimize Software with Sardine
“So for instance, Sardine is a company that's got a much more modern transaction monitoring system, and they are seeing customers rip and replace Actomize that's been around for 20 years.”
Strange: LLMs will automatically translate legacy COBOL code into modern languages
“You can imagine a world where LLMs get so good that you could feed in large portions of code written in COBOL, And they would spit out the same amount of code or the same functionality of said code in a different language, you know, and we're not there yet, bu…”
Strange: Fintech is default local, unlike global software platforms
“I often say that fintech is default local versus default global, and what do I mean by that? I wouldn't invest in Google for Canada, Google for Brazil, Google for France, like, that's just Google, but I would invest in a bank for each of those reasons, regions…”
Strange: Every financial services company will spin out a fintech
“And now I called this talk from marble to code, but I could have called it that every financial services company will spin out a fintech company.”
Strange: 80% of attendee companies will offer financial services within five years
“I believe that if no one in this room changes jobs five years from now, that number will be closer to 80%.”
Strange: Most financial innovation will come from non-financial companies
“A great majority of it, I think, will come from companies that are adding financial services for the very first time.”
Strange: "Fake it till you make it" in fintech leads to jail
“Fake it until you can make it, and financial services will land you in jail, versus some of the others.”
Strange: Every company will eventually become a fintech company
“So every company can be a fintech company.”
Strange: UK Checking Accounts Generate £8B in Hidden Annual Costs
“Checking accounts, which are advertised as free, account for it's eight billion of costs, and that's just in the UK.”
Strange: Country-specific diaspora networks are more powerful than elite university alumni
“The alumni networks around the top schools are incredibly powerful. I might argue that the international country-specific diasporas are even more powerful. They just often lacked the sort of organization.”
Strange: AI adoption raised mortgage servicing margins from 5% to 50%
“And those companies in some areas like mortgage servicing have been able to turn areas of their business from five percent margin businesses to 50% margin businesses.”
Strange: Bundling AI labor with software eases enterprise sales in regulated sectors
“So now an interesting wedge in is we'll provide you with all of these agents. And oh, by the way, we also have a much better transaction monitoring system that is actually gonna fix the problem. So this labor plus software bundle also helps the sales process a…”
Strange: US efficiently adds regulation but never repeals old rules
“And I think in this country, we have a system where we efficiently add regulation, but we never take away regulation.”
Strange: 2024 will see developers become key buyers in financial services
“I think in 2024 will be a significant rise of the developer as the buyer in financial services.”
Angela Strange: Mainframes still settle 99% of dollars in the US
“Those mainframes are still where, you know, 99% of dollars in the US are settled.”
Strange: US banking infrastructure costs $10-$30 monthly per account
“If you want to stand up banking infrastructure with all the software and, you know, especially in the U S it's going to cost you know, 10 to 30 dollars a month just to keep the lights on.”
Strange: Bank engineers process trillions through open-source ACH library
“There's now an open source ACH library. And engineers from banks are running trillions of dollars through this library and catching all of these edge cases and fixing it.”
Strange: Tech-enabled compliance will become a competitive advantage in 2023
“I believe that in 2023, doing compliance well, tech enabled is going to become a competitive advantage versus an annoying thing that you have to do in the background.”
Strange: Open-source primitives act as Lego blocks for banking
“Essentially, Lego, but for banking. They'd be composable. You could combine any combination of any piece that you wanted to into any use case imaginable.”
Strange: 95% of anti-money laundering software alerts are false positives
“These software companies result in hundreds of thousands of alerts. 95% are false positives.”
Strange: Only 3% of global laundered money is ever caught
“In just one year, in 2019, there were 20, there were ten billion dollars in fines. And so after all of this, only three percent of the two trillion is actually caught.”
Strange: Open-source fintech primitives will drive next billion-dollar companies
“And having seen the accelerating pace of innovation over the last several years, from the marble bank, to mainframe, to ads of service, to now open source primitives, it's impossible not to believe that this is going to lead to the next era of billion-dollar c…”
Strange: Infrastructure-as-a-service models will reduce fintech cost and complexity
“Now this same monumental as a service change is coming to financial services. And as we'll see shortly, it's not just one company, it's multiple companies, because the infrastructure is so complex. But it'll reduce the cost, it'll reduce the complexity, and im…”
Strange: Shopify and MindBody make almost 50% of revenue from financial services
“Turns out both of these companies make almost 50% of their revenue through financial services.”
Strange: Bank compliance systems catch less than 3% of money laundering dollars
“Less than three percent of the dollars are actually caught.”
Strange: Startups win if they get distribution before incumbents innovate
“We have this expression that we use a lot, which is the battle between the incumbent and the startup, is where the incumbent can get innovation before the startup gets distribution, and this applies to any industry, but especially financial services.”
No ground-up insurance startup has reached the top tier in 80 years
“In terms of a ground up new entrance, this hasn't happened in over 80 years.”
Insurance ad spend accounts for $50 billion of Google's market cap
“We did some quick math, and apparently fifty million dollars of Google's, or fifty billion dollars of Google's market cap, can be attributed to insurance.”
Health IQ uses Facebook data to prove health-conscious applicants die less often
“Then, what Health IQ does is they've had millions of people that have filled out this quiz, and this is where this gets just a little bit morbid. People who fill out the quiz, it's attached to your Facebook profile, and when you die on Facebook, your status is…”
Strange: Earnin generates solid revenue through voluntary user tips, not fees
“And what's particularly interesting about Earn-In is that they found that their consumers are so used to feeling gouged by many of the services out there that they voluntarily choose to tip Earn-In, which provides Earn-In with a very good revenue stream and a …”
Strange: Global banking will expand via smartphones rather than branches
“But what we'll see is that banking services in most of the world are not going to arise via branches and credit cards. They're going to come up via your smartphone.”
Strange: Branch will become Kenya's de facto credit bureau
“Take Branch, the lending company in Kenya. As they start to give more and more loans and build more and more credit scores, they will have amassed enough population on their platform such that you can imagine them becoming the de facto credit bureau and layeri…”
Strange: Emerging market startups must build full-stack due to missing modular infrastructure
“Unlike in the U.S., where you can get everything as a service, At every layer of the stack. In many other markets, including Latin America, you just can't do that. There's no sort of, ah, fraud as a stack, KYC as a stack. So you end up having to build everythi…”
Strange: Scaling past $50M requires recruiting sales leaders from mature markets
“One of the tougher things of getting ecosystems going, is you can have very, very smart people, you can land your customers, but then when you look around for who's my sales leader that's gonna take me from fifty million to five hundred million, You probably h…”
Strange: Next-gen leaders of international family enterprises are eager to adopt AI
“Many countries have you know, several powerful families that control a lot of the enterprises, and the next generation in those families Is very, very motivated to become AI native.”
Angela Strange: AI will parallelize financial workflows like mortgage underwriting
“Workflows will finally become parallelized. No more bouncing between screens, cut pasting data. For instance, your mortgage team could see the 400 plus tasks that are needed to underwrite your loan, do them in parallel, and even have agents do some of the more…”
Strange: 80% of Toast's revenue comes from financial services
“Fast forward to today, 80% of Toast's revenue is payments, insurance, like, all sorts of financial services versus software.”
Strange: Core software replacement in fintech failed from lack of 10x improvement
“If we come back to financial services, there's a lot of pretty terrible systems of record where smart people have tried to get them ripped and replaced and just, it was just not gonna happen. And my new conclusion with AI is not that they would never do it. It…”
Strange: Federal agencies enforce 50,000 regulations, up from 10,000 in 1970
“There are 50,000 different rules and regs across different agencies, and that's up from 10,000 in 1970.”
Strange: Regulation is a top cost for banking, healthcare, and insurance
“Regulation is one of the biggest costs to existing companies, banks and insurance companies and healthcare companies specifically, and a huge burden to new entrants coming in and to innovation.”