Fintech

“Then, ah, the healthcare, retail, e-commerce, and telcos are the four of the biggest ones. FinTech is moving the quickest. Of course, it's, you know, slightly different regulatory aspects. But then I think the healthcare telcos is kind of a second and retail e…”

“Fintech made the market much, much bigger for software because of this bundling effect. And that pales in comparison to now software doing the job of labor, because it's like, yeah, fintech made it a little bit bigger, but now, instead of just being a dumb pip…”

“It was an incredible use case for AI. There's so much unstructured data. It is, like, purpose-built to use the models.”

“One of our theses is like fintech is probably going to be like the last area that is somewhat maybe disrupted by AI. I think what you'll see is you'll see a collapse in like domestic fintech and enterprise software.”

“If you're moving money, you're generally in a good place. So anything touches money, We feel there's a very strong moat there, a much more defensible.”

“Even the most deluded AI believer doesn't think that they're going to take over fintech and doesn't take over, they're going to take over energy. So I agree. You can, let me be clear, you can invest comfortably in those two areas and not have to spend a ton of…”

“And this progress is in large part due to stablecoins, where borderlessness allows fintechs to set up infrastructure that works everywhere. Global by default financial services are for the first time a real possibility.”

“We had three rules for countries we wanted to operate in. So one, do they have what we call fintech we want, which is ability to look at bank accounts, open banking. There's some way to reduce the risk so we know what we're looking at... Two is the government …”

“What I realized in FinTech over those, you know, 1618 months, it's a very hard, high churn product. FinTech products are extremely high churn. They're not sticky because in some ways they're experimentational.”

“Like 25% of all venture dollars in that period went into fintech.”

“Starting in like the second half of 2022, like basically zero percent of venture dollars went into fintech.”

“Fintech multiples tend to be significantly more bounded than open-ended AI multiples.”

“We've had several companies in the fintech space that have really done extraordinarily well over the last few years. And their growth has largely been because of the lack of capital in the markets.”

“Housing in some sense for me is like that final frontier of fintech.”

“I don't think defense is a category. And you're like, what? A category is enough that can support an ecosystem with its breadth and depth. I don't think defense is. I think there is your andrills and maybe two to three more in the U.S., and I think there's, yo…”

“I would say that FinTech and the mortgage tech this year, I've seen a huge difference, a change, a mentality change from, Hey, it may not be something that's even relevant to me to today saying, you know what? Fear of missing out. I have to get in. I have to s…”

“I've known fintechs tell me that the number of apps and what apps are there on a person's phone tells a lot about the person's credit behavior.”

“If there's heavy regulatory requirements, you're gonna need compliance. I'm talking fintech. I'm talking healthcare. But if there's light or none, you're Gucci.”

“If you start in an idea with like, You know, if there isn't like a societal level trend that's pushing your kind of space forward, which, you know, I think was true in FinTech in 2017, or it's true in AI now, like it's very hard to iterate around it.”

“I would say to do a fintech company in general, especially one that has like any sort of payments like money movement it's probably three times harder than a software company. Like a software company, you can probably launch at three months, a payment slash ba…”

“Lawyers are pretty useful. They're smart. They know the law, but B they actually like also know people like they know companies that have done this or tried to do this and who have they partnered with. If you think about it, a lawyer is often you know, working…”

“Opportunities like investments around payments and the potential for things like stable coins to enable that and make it easier for people to move money across borders and for cheaper are very interesting and things that we're monitoring, but yeah, and I think…”

“So we tend to look for more technical teams, people who can, designers, engineers, developers, people who can code. Who might have a great idea and the skills to execute on that, but just might not have a network in financial services that allows them to as qu…”

“The average IPO in fintech over the last 20 years is about four billion dollars.”

“I think fintech's a source of, you know, pretty persistent source of IPOs. I mean, historically, you know, we get four or five IPOs a year in fintech. We actually had a couple of few last year, and the only ones people are talking about this year are fintech c…”

“And I think the tech side of it doesn't justify the multiples that like wealth managers have to have like 10 times those multiples.”

“FinTech, you have two customers. You have your usual customers, and you have your regulator. And you need to keep both of them happy. And usually what makes one happy, it makes the other one less happy, right? So you are constantly dealing with trade-offs. Lik…”

“And you know, I think in fintech overall, this is probably the most neglected part usually, but it's also a part that we at Revolut, we pay enormous attention to.”

“Cause like a lot of identity prior to this is very verticalized. You'd have all sorts of businesses who are all like, you know, they all have this idea of we're going to build this universal thing, but in reality, it oftentimes just a vertical, like, Hey, we g…”

“Like, I don't think I would be that excited to back a founder who built Fintech company one and then goes on to build Fintech company two.”

“There's a ton of startup formation at the earliest stages. In the mid stages, these companies have retold are now back to growth at the late stages.”

“Like you absolutely need FIs to get a challenger bank off the ground, to get a FinTech off the ground. Like you have to partner With the incumbent financial system.”

“Typically what you'll see in FinTech, and this actually surprises a lot of people, is that Fintech is actually more of an art or science of integration and orchestration across other people's technology than it is a real science and art of building your own te…”

“If you want to invest in a fintech company today, like actually a lot of these companies are making amazing strides towards profitability. They're not having, you know, everyone and their mother throwing capital at them. And you can find some really good busin…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Stablecoins are taking over all of fintech, all of global finance, all of banking, remittances, B to B you know, international trade settlement.”

“Today it has to be done with a Gen AI element. Core Gen AI, it has to be done in a reverse manner where we start with, Utilizing generative AI and machine learning to build grounds up companies in that space.”

“Especially when you're in like a boring industry, like fintech, meaning like it's just Unsexy. There's not a lot of you know, it's not like this consumer exciting app, but you need the details to be precise, to be intentional in order to breed that trust and c…”

“And FinTech, which I was pretty bearish on, which I'm actually a little less bearish on because there's a lot less people investing in it now. And I think there's actually still money in it.”

“It's clear in these other countries that letting the government do this one part and getting it right leads to all kinds of fintech innovation, because you can transfer money quickly.”

“If you're going to get into that business, you have to have either immediate scale or a very certain path to immediate scale because you just can't support that cost basis on a subscale business.”

“The ones that fell the quickest were the ones that Are in or around generating revenue. So if you think about the first type of technology that I think about in a meaningful way, it's probably like CRM technology. When sales technology designed to help acceler…”

“But when you actually look at the data, even like Chase, a big behemoth, most people don't have a bank and a credit card and a mortgage and all the other products with Chase. Most people have maybe one thing with Chase and then other things with other banks, r…”

“In fintech, the most knowledgeable people were a bunch of the east coast funds that knew that had come, had spent two decades inside of financial institutions and knew the market way better than the west coast funds. And they outsmarted themselves from every m…”

“Matt Harris is, is probably the smartest and best fintech investor out there. I mean, you know, Ribbit's obviously incredible as well, but Matt Harris, I think, you know, has kind of set the direction of fintech for a very long time.”

“I think there is a negative correlation between the maturity of the economy and the penetration of fintech.”

“It's not SAS only SAS. It's not only AI. It's never going to be only FinTech, but the combination of these things together makes for a truly defensible, resilient business that, that I think is going to be really large.”

“So in FinTech, I sort of take the growth for granted and spend a lot of time thinking about, ok, is the moat really wide enough for the profits to be there?”

“Can be very straightforward for fintech companies to grow a lot but then if they grow a lot and you pay the price of a growing company, but then at the end of it turns out to be much more competitive than you thought, and profit margins are low, that's sort of…”

“While there has been regulation, a lot of regulation, especially in FinTech, sometimes in some other sectors as well, but it has also A lot of areas were probably gray. I'd say, you know, five, six years back today, they are black and white. So I think it give…”

“See on an average, a SaaS company takes hundred twenty-five million dollars to touch a hundred million. A fintech company probably takes two fifty million dollars, right? So that way SaaS is extremely capital intensive and B to B marketplace will take probably…”

“That's why I hope in the next two years the word fintech will disappear and it will be embedded finance because they've got distributions. They've got the consumer, right?”

“If you grew really fast off the back of cheap venture debt and cheap venture equity and, It's unclear where the business goes from there. It's going to be a very painful couple of years ahead.”

“And I think also that their actions are a little too strong and harsh because they generally give time.”

“I think that, that identity piece, like who is this merchant? Are they who they say they are? But also what are they, what's their business? What are they selling? And how does that map to This pretty complicated regulatory environment is a really interesting …”

“Bajaj is probably the most understudied consumer finance company in the world. It's probably what every emerging fintech company should aspire to be.”

“A lot of quote fintech businesses are looking like fin businesses without the tech, meaning their margins and their LTV to CAC or their return on invested capital. It looks the same or in some cases worse than The traditional financial services businesses that…”

“I think that in some of these industries that are regulated or highly complicated health and fintech being probably the best examples, but there are others. It's just a lot harder than it looks to go from having a big headline MAU number And some revenue or li…”