Bank

“The full embedded lending journey from a first origination window all the way down to balance sheet is on us. So we have the full infrastructure layer. We have the balance sheet. We have the whole regulatory framework required being a bank ourselves to enable …”

“If you keep the bank's risk appetite and build a fantastic product from a text tech and UX perspective, you're still not going to be able to serve the like 70% that we do. You would be declining 90%.”

“Back then the defense of a country or of a democratic society was grouped for banks in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking.”

“You know, you could go to a bank and raise fifty-plus million dollars, but getting anything less than 20 was, like, really, really hard. I mean, it's still really hard, but it was really hard back in twenty-twenty-one.”

“Banks do fractional reserve. So they've lent out most of the money, and that's partly why they're so heavily regulated. They're doing fractional reserve. So in a stablecoin issuer is a hundred percent reserve. The only risk they're taking is At most a 93 day U…”

“So banks and telecom companies and healthcare companies, while their engineering and innovation has stepped up in its velocity, the main bottleneck now is compliance, security, and just general resilience.”

“Whereas if you compare it with banks, once they move out from IITs and go towards other instit institutes, tier two, tier three institutes their NPS shoot up to close to around a 10% sort of level.”

“So I think there's going to be great buying opportunities, but we're finally starting to see, which is exciting, is it banks are starting to make people deal with problems or sellers are now capitulating a bit. There's going to be a much more active investment…”

“And precisely because of regulatory capture, the banks have kept our government from doing that. They've, the government wanted to, they have something called FedNow, but there's massive pushback in the finance committee in Washington, so it never happens.”

“And so the same thing, by the way, is happening in the global fixed income market dominated historically by 10 large banks. It's about to be dominated by five large banks and five large tech companies. As much concentration as exists in the equity market, That…”

“If your bank sees you logging in from two separate places, say your computer and also a data center, it will probably lock down your account. And we'll ask you to come to a branch with a passport.”

“Probably, but I think most of the forward looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular see, see, see that in the next few years, probably all banks are going to be forced to adopt this to be competitive.”

“There's two clear industries that have moved from the banks to the private sector. One is the private credit industry is effectively taking what the banks are doing and doing that off asset manager balance sheets. One is the market making industry, taking what…”

“Interestingly, credit growth in Australia was growing at 10% per annum and hadn't been less than 10% for many, many years. And so you had this huge growth in leverage coming into the household sector that drove the profits of the banks.”

“The biggest funder of private capital is actually banks or private debt.”

“We're having more engagement with more banks In the world than we've ever had before.”

“Asset managers are less heavily regulated compared to banks, and so they tend to be leading when it comes to adopting new tools because it can make a real difference. They are always trying to create that little bit of alpha, because they manage assets on beha…”

“We were able to approach banks and buy tens of billions of bank debt at a time at deeply discounted prices. We started accumulating enormous amounts of corporate debt.”

“They have quietly become the most important organizations in the world, and I don't put a caveat on that one. They are the cornerstone of our modern social welfare state. They are integrated into so much policymaking from Saudi Arabia to United States to Austr…”

“The average bank spends 93% of its cost, of its tech cost, on maintain initiatives. Seven percent go into building new things.”

“I do not think there's going to be some calamity. The structure that the asset managers are using is just much better than what the banks used to use. You know, borrow short, lend long. So these are very long dated structures, which is great. You can work thro…”

“People in the U.S. Do not have a good mental model for how different the banking ecosystem in every other country is, because the U.S. Is so sweet generous, it's like, 5000 banks or whatever the number is currently in the U.S., whereas every other banking mark…”

“Well, and that's the thing, it's like, you know, software, like I'm very confident that all of the banks Cannot build software, will not be able to build software, will not build software.”

“By the way, it wasn't just individuals that was investing and overextended with margin, but the banks would take depositors' money and they were going along the stock market.”

“Even, especially in the US, right, like, a lot of banks that you would think would be, like, historically maybe more conservative, like, maybe not the earliest technology adopters, like, they are very, like, AI forward and tech forward.”

“I will always be a little paranoid and insist that we finance all we do from our own earnings. It seems to me that's the only way to control your own destiny. The banks can't take away your business if you don't owe them any money. So we carry no long-term deb…”

“If they could remove the banks out of the loop and just do stable cone transfers behind the scenes, I think they become a lot more successful and they can do a lot more for, you know, a lot less.”

“I think Bitcoin is here to stay. Crypto is here to stay. This has lasted long enough. It's getting mainstream, whether it's banks or asset management firms who told you five years ago, we'll never touch this thing.”

“And to be really accurate, there is cost in the UPI system today, which is borne by the banks. So it is, Not zero cost for everybody, but it's zero cost for the user and the merchant, right? To be really accurate. And that caused by the banks, there is also a …”

“Whenever a bank was explaining something complex, your rule of thumb should be whenever a bank was explaining something complex, you're losing money.”

“Last year, two out of five Americans borrowed 74.9 billion dollars to pay their out-of-pocket costs for health care from banks.”

“I didn't have any money. I didn't know people with money and that's really kind of almost how you have to start a restaurant. You know, bank's not going to just take a bet on you and give you a 600 grand to go open a brick and mortar restaurant.”

“So we see it as banks doing more deals with the same number of bankers than banks doing the same number of deals with fewer bankers.”

“A lot of the reasons that wires are like that is because banks don't have, like, true TOTP authentication, right? Like, when you, I mean, nowadays, I guess they mostly have SMS kind of verification, but that's very easy to, you know, steal someone's phone numb…”

“I'm not a billionaire. I'm not a billionaire by choice. I'm offered often, ah, you know, ah, huge venture deals, ah, a bank, very famous, well, the one of the most powerful banks said to me, Damien, you know what? I'll give you a 1.3 billion credit line.”

“If you look at the history of banks from up until 2007, a lot of banks were earning 30% equity. Most of them went bankrupt. We never did that much. Okay. But in oh eight and oh nine, we were fine and they weren't.”

“However, the banks would continue to charge, I think at that time it was 25 dollars, now it's more like 34, 35 dollars, every overdraft event.”

“The reality is when we started our company, banks, We're making about thirty billion dollars in overdraw fees. Thirty billion dollars.”

“And normal people are not going to switch from credit cards because it's just kind of entrenched. But the way Visa deals with like banks, I think it's going to change because they don't have to care about banks as much anymore. They can actually just do everyt…”

“Look, fine. So they shouldn't use it which is going to be another reason why banks are going to be left behind, whatever.”

“We're trying to get legislation, and that will, I think, further accelerate it, because you've got, essentially, You know, 99, think of it as a network effect, and you've got 90, probably five, 90, or high percent, or some percentage of the nodes on the networ…”

“Well, at a minimum, they're better international wire transfers. That alone justifies their market cap. That's like, Tens of billions of dollars in Marquette because they just save you from 25 dollars and more importantly, you know, banks are only open like ni…”

“As that market continues to evolve, and as the banks start to get back into some of these areas, we do think returns are going to come down. Probably by about 200 basis points on average.”

“When you look at the wind and solar industry, those industries are fairly de-risked, And so oftentimes you can, you know, sign a commercial agreement very early on and go finance against that commercial agreement because there's a lot of certainty around the e…”

“I think in 10 years time, it'll be obvious that like, oh yeah, your bank is really powerful, and it can do all of these things, and it's all fully integrated. So yeah, that's just a freaking huge opportunity”

“I, you know, I've said many times is that if you look at the European landscape, majority, vast majority of the European GPs have not spent a single day working in a real company. They've worked in consulting firms, banks, but they haven't worked in a real ope…”

“We very deliberately went after asset managers as our early customers, why they're more progressive. They want to make more money. They're earlier adopters of technology and have less regulation to deal with, say, compared to banks, which just have, it's more …”

“The banks were chastened, lost some of their capital, were more tightly regulated, We're discouraged from risk taking, and that led in 2011 or 12 to the creation of the private credit market, which is now over a trillion and a half. In oh seven, I think it was…”

“Because banks never learn from their loopholes. So if a fraudster is hitting them, banks will wake up two, three months down the line, and they've never pieced together the modus operandi.”

“I don't know anyone who's using anything in any interesting scale.”

“The fintechs, one of the things the banks are scared about is that they're becoming AI agents, which treat the banks as a commodity.”

“Bank secure is like not very secure. And the other is that they, that your money just sitting there in a big vault somewhere, whether it's like in dollars, physical dollars, or there's bits in a computer somewhere, but that's not how our banking system works. …”

“And the banks always fantasize too, that they can do upsells or cross sells of other services. And generally that doesn't work because they're the end user, the contract from this case, they're loyal to the SaaS. They're not loyal to the bank. They don't even …”

“But today it's hard to get deposits because they're competing against all these fintechs who are frankly better marketers than they are. Always better marketers than banks are.”

“It seems obvious it's going to happen, right? Like people like me are spending their whole lives, like making this.”

“Part of our pain in the fintech system is that neither the fintechs nor the banks, unregulated, regulated, and the regulator have remained true to this three lane model while everybody says this is the right model.”

“We typically don't do a lot with the banks not an area where we feel like we can really add value. There is regulatory risk and all the, and we don't think, you know, those are not sort of don't really measure against our quality filter as businesses.”

“The way we're updating the product such that the message comes from the user, this can't get shut down, because essentially, the banks would be blocking their own customers.”

“If you're paying us a million dollars to build this for you, what's your marketing budget for it? We didn't ask that question. We should have said, do you have a marketing budget? And in reality, if they say, no, we don't, we're just going to see what happens.…”

“Our security scores are used by over 2800 customers worldwide. Nine of the top 10 banks, governments in 46 different countries, insurance companies, but the average deal size is about 30 to 40 K.”