FINTECH

Technology won't replace financial advisors. But advisors who use technology will replace those who don't.

Cash App started as a side project. Now it has more monthly active users than most banks in America.

Seventy percent of adults in our region don't have a bank account. We're not just a ride-hailing app — we're financial infrastructure for 700 million people.

We wanted to make investing so easy that you could do it without thinking about it. That's the whole point of round-ups.

The biggest barrier to investing isn't knowledge. It's the feeling that you don't have enough money to start.

Robinhood made trading free. We made investing invisible. Those are two very different things.

The financial system was built for 20 percent of the population. We built Ant Group for the other 80 percent.

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

I studied behavioral economics at Columbia and realized: people aren't bad with money because they're dumb. The system is designed to confuse them.

Wealthfront and us basically created this category together. The market is big enough for both. It's the old-school advisors who should be worried.

Banks wouldn't give credit cards to startups because they had no revenue. We said: we'll underwrite on cash balance and funding instead. That one insight built the whole company.

The old banks charge you to exist. Monthly fees, transfer fees, paper statement fees. We charge zero. And we still make money. That tells you how much they were overcharging.

Nubank proved Brazilians would trust a digital bank. We didn't need to prove that again. We needed to prove they'd trust one with investment products too.

India has 70 million credit card users. Only 30 million pay on time. We have 22 million of those 30 million. That's not a user base. That's a financial elite database.

I built an app that rewards you for paying your credit card bill on time. People said that's not a business. Then 22 million high-income Indians signed up.

Brazilian banks make more profit per customer than almost any banks on earth. That margin is our opportunity. Every percentage point we shave off is billions of reais back to consumers.

Brazil has the highest interest rates in the world for consumer lending. Banks charge 300% APR on personal loans. That's not banking — that's robbery with a license.

Secured lending — using your car or home as collateral — drops rates from 300% to 20%. Same borrower, same risk, but the bank charges 15x more for unsecured. We said: that's insane, let's fix it.

In Spain, you get a home equity loan in a week. In Brazil, it took six months of paperwork. We brought it down to days. Technology didn't change the product — it changed the speed.

People said Africa wasn't ready for fintech. Africa was ready. The infrastructure wasn't. We built the infrastructure.

We went public at a $15 billion valuation. For a card issuing company. If you told VCs in 2010 that card infrastructure would be worth $15 billion, they would have laughed you out of the room. I know because they did.

Every fintech company needs to issue cards. Chime, Square, DoorDash, Instacart — they all need a card. We're the API that powers all of them. You use Marqeta every day and don't know it.

The old card issuing process took 12 to 18 months. With Marqeta's API, you can issue a virtual card in milliseconds. We compressed a year and a half into a function call.

Mercado Pago started as a payment button on our marketplace. Now it's the largest fintech in Latin America. It handles more transactions than most banks. The checkout button became a bank.

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.

We started with payments. Now we do insurance, mutual funds, lending, and stock broking. Payments is the gateway drug. Once you have 500 million users making payments, you can sell them anything financial.

Every time you connect your bank to Venmo, or Robinhood, or Coinbase — that's us. Plaid is the pipe between your bank and every fintech app you use. You use us every day and don't know it.

A $5 billion valuation for a business banking platform. In Europe. People keep saying European fintech can't compete with American fintech. We keep raising rounds that say otherwise.

Student loans, personal loans, mortgages, investing, banking, credit cards — all in one app. Every product we add makes the others cheaper to acquire customers for. That flywheel is why we'll win.

We started by refinancing student loans at Stanford. Literally. Alumni lent money to current students at better rates than the government. That peer-to-peer model was the original idea. Everything else came after.

In Korea, your phone is your wallet, your bank, your brokerage, your insurance agent. We just made all of those work in one app.

Regulators told us no 17 times before we got our license. Most founders would have quit after three. We just kept showing up with better arguments.

Korean banks had terrible apps. Sending money to a friend took 14 steps. We made it take one. That is the entire product.

The hardest part of fintech is not the technology. It is earning trust. People do not hand their money to apps they do not trust completely.

The biggest competitor is not another broker. It is the savings account paying zero percent that people are too scared to leave.

We are not a payment company. We are a technology company that happens to process payments. That distinction matters.

Innovation in payments requires trust. Our customers trust us because we deliver results consistently.

Southeast Asia has 700 million people and most of them cannot pay for things online. That is not a payments problem. That is an infrastructure problem. We are building the infrastructure.

Indian brokers were charging 0.5 percent per trade. We charged a flat 20 rupees. That is like charging 25 cents instead of 50 dollars. The industry thought we were insane.

I grew up poor. I know what it feels like to be excluded from services because you can't afford them. KakaoBank exists because regular banks forgot about regular people.

The most valuable thing in crypto isn't Bitcoin or Ethereum. It's a dollar on a blockchain. USDC moves $10 billion a day because people need stable value — not volatile speculation — to actually build financial applications.

I've started three companies. The first made Flash Player. The second made video streaming. The third makes digital dollars. Each one was about moving something analog to the internet. Money was just the last thing to go.

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.

Cash App processes $200 billion a year. We gave millions of people their first bank account. That is financial inclusion, not fintech jargon.

The mortgage industry is broken. It takes 45 days to close a loan that should take 45 minutes.

Africa has 1.4 billion people and broken payment infrastructure. That's the biggest fintech opportunity on Earth.

GoPay is the key. If every rider also uses our digital wallet for e-commerce, the ecosystem becomes unbeatable.

Financial services — car loans, insurance, warranties — have higher margins than car sales. That's where the business really works.

If you have $500,000, Wall Street gives you a wealth manager. If you have $500, they give you an ATM fee. We're changing that.

We invented a new asset class: trading recurring revenue like bonds.

Financial education isn't a feature. It's the product. If people understand money, they invest more.

The internet disintermediated everything except banking. We were trying to change that.

The Stock-Back card is our stickiest feature — spend money, get stock. It makes investing invisible.

Credit cards are designed to be confusing. We built Affirm to be the opposite.

Financial services should be simple enough that your grandmother can understand every fee she's paying.

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

We forced every brokerage in America to go to zero commissions. Whatever else you think of Robinhood, that's real.

Why does it cost $10 to trade a stock when the actual cost is a fraction of a penny? That question started Robinhood.

Getting millions of chai vendors to accept QR payments is harder than any MBA case study. That is real India.

Credit scores are a proxy for trustworthiness. CRED's entire model is built on the hypothesis that trust compounds.

Financial inclusion is not charity. It is the largest commercial opportunity in Southeast Asia. Two hundred million people with smartphones and no bank account — that is a market.

The best fintech companies don’t just move money faster. They give people access to financial tools they never had before.

India's middle class needs financial services that banks refuse to provide. Technology fills that gap.

Digital banking is not a feature. It is the entire future of how people interact with money. We had to become a technology company that happens to have a banking licence.

Young people aren't avoiding credit cards because they can't get them. They're avoiding them because they don't trust them.

The banks had all the data to build what Mint built. They just had no incentive to show it to you clearly, because clarity would reveal how much you were wasting.

The Internet changed the flow of information. Blockchain will change the flow of value. Those are equally important transitions.

The cross-border payments market moves $150 trillion a year and most of it still runs on 1970s technology. That is the real opportunity.

We are building the internet of money. Value should move as freely as information does today.

Global businesses should not have to wait three days and pay 3% to move money across borders. That problem is completely solvable with the technology we have today.

Technology does not just improve finance. It rebuilds it from the ground up.