This week, Isabelle sat down with Daniel Ballen, of Portage to discuss the funding environment for fintechs and strategies for success.
A Team8 report charts the industry’s path by predicting what remains and changes while taking a few big swings at potential mega-trends.
Investments into Latin American fintechs are expected to pick up in 2024 amid rate cuts in the United States.
From a financial incumbent point of view, if you are going to mutualize infrastructure, you need to actually mutualize the infrastructure. This means solving the game theory problem of accidentally giving away the value of your back office systems to your biggest, best-funded bank competitor -- not a competitive equilibrium. To that end, technology companies are a natural place for maintaining crypto systems. However, note that public chains today already have the benefit of billions of dollars in cyber-security spending (i.e., mining) and the dedicated engineering of thousands of open source developers. By choosing to use a public chain, you get this out of the box. With a proprieraty solution, even if the end-results are open-sourced, community is impossible to replicate. Maybe this is why IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion, and Microsoft bought GitHub for $7 billion.
Today we're joined by Brett King, founder and executive chairman of Moven, one of the world's original digital banks, and Lex Sokolin, global head of fintech at ConsenSys. Lex and I discussed Moven's recent announcement to shutter its B2C business on episode 170 of Rebank. And we're happy to have the opportunity to connect with Brett directly to discuss the decision in more detail.
artificial intelligenceaugmented realityCryptodecentralized financeenterprise blockchainMetaverse / xRnarrative zeitgeistNFTs and digital objectsregulation & complianceventure capital
·In this conversation, we talk with Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures. This is a fascinating and educational conversation that covers frontier technology companies and protocols in blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence, and the convergence of these themes in the future. Jamie walks us through the core investment thesis, as well as the commercial model behind shifting from incubation to acceleration of 30+ companies. We pick up on wisdom about marketing timing and fund structure along the way.
Why are high valuations bad? You've heard me talk about how the trend of Fintech bundling, and the unicorn and decacorn valuations led by SoftBank and DST Global, are creating underlying weakness in the private Fintech markets. Of course, they are also creating price compression and consolidation in the public markets (e.g, Schwab/TD, Fiserv/First Data) across sub-sectors. But public companies are at least transparent and deeply analyzed. Private companies have beautiful websites, charismatic leaders, and impressive sounding investors. Often when you look under the hood, it's just a bunch of angry bees trying to find something to sting.
This week, we look at:
Over $1 billion in raises announced last week, and over $10 billion in Fintech company value creation: Checkout.com with $450 million at a $15 billion valuation, Affirm more than doubling after its IPO to $30 billion, lending enabler Blend raising $300 million, and payments enabler Rapyd raising $300 million.
A systems theory framework that explains the stocks and flows of goods and services, and what monetization strategies are available to fintechs
How transactional models are thriving and creating 50-100x revenue multiples
In this conversation, we talk all things Wall Street, FinTech, and Venture Capital with Patrick Pinschmidt, who's the general partner and co-founder at MiddleGame Ventures.
More specifically, we discuss the ups and downs of sell-side research in the early 2000s, the evolution of financial technology to today’s FinTech, an insight into the Financial Stability Oversight Council at the US Treasury Department, the founding of Middlegame Ventures and its impressive investment portfolio, and the transformation of financial services fueled by the rapid innovation in FinTech.
I look at how the news about the spread of the coronovirus are cracking the global economic machine. Some may argue that the number of people effected is still low -- but that misses the entire point. The shock of a global pandemic has revealed weakness in the financial machine, sending the stock markets falling 10% year-to-date. Gross domestic product growth is expected to slow by billions of dollars, governments and central banks are unable to implement policy to compensate with rates at historic lows and borrowing at historic highs, public market valuations will tumble arithmetically, and private Fintech companies will lose a path to exit. At least that's what the conspiracy theorists want you to think!