BANKING

The banking license took three years. Every month I wanted to scream. But now we have it, and no one can take it away.

Banks make $35 billion a year from overdraft fees. That's $35 billion taken from the people who can least afford it. We charge zero.

A bank that cannot make a profit is not serving its clients. It won't be able to invest in people, technology, or the communities it works in.

I'm doing God's work.

If the banks don't change, we'll change the banks.

JP Morgan bought 40% of us. An American bank investing in a Brazilian digital bank to learn how digital banking works. Think about that for a second.

We went from zero to 20 million customers in three years. In Brazil, that's not just growth — that's a referendum on how badly people wanted an alternative.

I spent 20 years at BTG Pactual. I knew exactly how banks worked, how they priced, and where they overcharged. That knowledge became C6's blueprint.

Brazil has five banks controlling 80% of the market. That's not competition. That's a cartel with better branding. We built C6 to break that.

Business banking has $10 trillion in deposits in the US. We have a tiny fraction. But we're growing faster than any bank in the country. The incumbents aren't even trying to compete on product. That's how we win.

We're not a bank. We partner with banks. That distinction matters legally, but to the customer it doesn't matter at all. They see Mercury. They trust Mercury. That's the product.

I tried to open a business bank account at Chase. It took three weeks, four visits, and a fax machine. A fax machine. In 2019. That experience was the final push to build Mercury.

We have 7 million customers in the UK. The population is 67 million. One in ten British adults has a Monzo account. For a company founded in 2015, that's not bad.

British banks charge you £35 for going overdrawn by £1. Then they charge you interest on the overdraft fee. It's predatory and everyone knows it. We just said: we won't do that.

We raised a million pounds on a crowdfunding platform in 96 seconds. Ninety-six seconds. That told us everything we needed to know about how much people hated their banks.

The hardest part of building a bank isn't the technology. It's the regulation. Getting a UK banking license took two years and more lawyers than engineers. But once you have it, nobody can take it from you.

Peter Thiel invested early. Tencent came later. A $9 billion valuation for a European neobank with no branches. The thesis is simple: banks are software now. The buildings are optional.

Opening a bank account takes 8 minutes on N26. Eight minutes. At Deutsche Bank it takes two weeks and a physical branch visit. That's not competition. That's two different centuries.

SoftBank valued us at $2.8 billion. For a bank. A bank that lends to mid-sized businesses. Not a crypto exchange. Not an AI startup. A bank. That tells you how broken the lending market is.

We license our credit intelligence platform to other banks too. So we're a bank that lends money AND a software company that sells to other banks. Two revenue streams from the same technology.

After the financial crisis, banks stopped lending to mid-sized businesses. Just stopped. Companies with $5 million to $50 million in revenue couldn't get a loan. We built OakNorth for them.

Banks didn't want to work with us at first. We were screen-scraping their data. They hated it. Then they realized their customers wanted fintech apps, and fintech apps needed Plaid. Now they work with us willingly.

Steve and I ran a previous startup together. The hardest part wasn't the product — it was dealing with our bank. Opening an account took weeks. Getting a card took longer. We thought: we'll build the bank we wish we had.

We got a national bank charter. Do you know how hard that is? The OCC doesn't just hand those out. We're one of the only fintechs in America that is actually a bank, not just pretending to be one.

I left Twitter as COO to run SoFi. People thought I was crazy. But SoFi had something Twitter didn't — a clear path to becoming a bank. An actual bank. With a charter and everything.

Monzo has the brand. Revolut has the hype. Starling has the profitability. We became the first UK neobank to turn a profit. Not revenue — profit. In banking, that's the only metric that matters.

I didn't build Starling to sell it. I built it to run it. There's a difference. Most fintech founders want an exit. I wanted a bank. A real, profitable, lasting bank.

We got our banking license because we believe you cannot build a serious financial institution on top of someone else's license. You need to own the full stack.

UBS tried to buy us for a reason. The big banks know their model is dying. They just cannot cannibalize their own advisor fees fast enough to compete with us.

I don't think crypto replaces banks. I think crypto makes banks better. A bank that can settle in seconds instead of days will outcompete a bank that can't. We're giving banks that tool.

SWIFT takes 3-5 days to settle a cross-border payment. Ripple does it in 3-4 seconds. The technology isn't the problem — inertia is. Banks move slowly because slow is comfortable.

When I bought UBA, people said I was crazy — the bank was nearly dead. I saw a platform that could reach 20 African countries. They saw a corpse. I saw a sleeping giant.

Banks are essentially technology companies with bad technology. We're fixing that. Every bank charges you fees for things that should cost nothing. Currency exchange should be free. Transfers should be instant. We make them so.

DeFi does not need banks. Banks need DeFi. The question is whether they realize it before it is too late.

We have a real banking license. We are not a fintech pretending to be a bank. We are a bank that happens to be tech-first.

I spent 25 years in traditional banking. I saw how banks profited from punishing low-income customers. I started Varo to fix it.

The bank charter lets us hold deposits and lend directly. That changes the economics completely.

The bank charter changed everything. We went from marketplace to bank, and the economics got 10x better.

Open a bank account in 7 minutes without leaving the app. That's not a feature — that's the future of banking.

Fintech isn't about replacing banks. It's about becoming a better bank.

A hundred million customers chose us. Not because we had the biggest marketing budget, but because their old bank was treating them like garbage.

The banks in Brazil were so bad that we didn't need to be great. We just needed to not be terrible.

Brazilian banks charged outrageous fees because they could. We proved they didn't have to.

When banks are forced to sell, they don’t care about getting fair value. They care about getting it off their books. That’s our advantage.

People call our interest rates high. I call them the price of access. Try getting a loan from a traditional bank with no credit score and no formal employment.

The banks did not want to serve 60 percent of Mexico. So I built a bank inside my stores. Now 16 million people have bank accounts who never had one before.

Banking is the simplest business in the world. You take money from people who have it and lend it to people who need it. The hard part is doing it at scale without losing it.

Market share is the only metric that matters in banking. Everything else follows from it.

The best time to buy a bank is when nobody else wants to own one.

Your bank uses your deposits to fund oil pipelines. We don't. That's not a slogan. It's a legal commitment.

We put kiosks in grocery stores. Walk in for bread, walk out with a bank account. A debit card prints in 5 minutes. That's how you bank 9 million people.

Banking is not just about money. It is about trust, and trust takes decades to build but only moments to lose.

We grew because we were honest. In money-changing, your reputation is your only product. Lose it, and you have nothing.

Islamic banking is not a restriction. It is a discipline that protects both the bank and the customer from greed.

My biggest regret with Crane Bank was not moving faster to raise more capital when we had the chance. We were growing too fast for our own equity.

The best protection against political risk is to build something the country needs. That has been our strategy everywhere we operate.

Banking in Africa is not a risk. It is an opportunity. The real risk is not being there.

Morocco's future is linked to Africa's future. We built Bank of Africa because we believe deeply in that link.

Financial inclusion is not charity. It is the most powerful economic development tool available to a society.

During my five years as Superintendent of Banking, not one New York bank failed. That is the record I am most proud of.

The SVB weekend showed that USDC is resilient. It de-pegged briefly and recovered. That stress test proved more than six years of smooth operation ever could.

Being a good steward of what your family built means knowing when to grow and when to hold the line.

We are not trying to be the biggest bank. We are trying to be the best bank for the communities we serve.

The most important lesson dad taught us was to listen to your customers. Not just what they say — watch what they do.

Arvest was built on the same principles my father built Walmart on — serve your customers, treat your associates well, and stay focused on the basics.

You trying to scare me is it?

The banks expanded into one-stop commercial supermarkets, and bankers became product salespeople, not necessarily advisers.

We will need a strong balance sheet that allows us to withstand adversity, while continuing to invest in the future.

You either sell a dream, or you say what you think and do what you say.

You have to lead by example. Banks need to be seen by their clients and stakeholders as entities that behave properly. That starts with the CEO.

Operation Choke Point 2.0 is a coordinated effort by regulators to marginalize the crypto industry by cutting off its banking access.