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digital lending eCommerce Investing neobank roboadvisor

·May. 29, 2020

Brex Raises Again, Shopify Launches Bank Accounts and M&A Ideas for Goldman

Welcome back to the Fintech Blueprint / Rebank podcast series hosted by Will Beeson and Lex Sokolin. In this episode, we talk through a few recent events that are indicative of the Fintech world right now. Brex raised an additional $150 million at a slightly improved valuation vs. its last round just as Monzo is reportedly looking at a 40% down round. Why? Shopify launched bank accounts for its merchants and announced the Shop app, basically an Amazon competitor plus Klarna, just as it worked with Facebook to support the launch of Facebook Shops and joined the Libra Association. Lots going on. Lastly, we discuss why Goldman’s M&A activity over the past couple years leads to the natural conclusion that they should buy Schwab.

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asset management decentralized finance digital lending music industry p2p & crowdfunding

·Oct. 9, 2020

Why Peer-to-Peer models fail against oligopoly, with Lending Club shutting down p2p platform, Seedrs/Crowdcube merging, and Morgan Stanley buying Eaton Vance for $7B

This week, we look at:

Lending Club, the peer-to-peer lending innovator, turning off peer-to-peer lending after having a bank in its pocket
Consolidation of the UK's largest crowdfunders, CrowdCube and Seedrs, and their limited economics
The scale of the Morgan Stanley and Eaton Vance deal, creating a $1.2 trillion asset manager
The struggle of peer-to-peer models more generally, and whether the blockchain movement can overcome the Prisoner's Dilemma

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digital lending neobank paytech

·Aug. 14, 2020

Millions of users and millions in losses — analyzing neobanks Monzo, Starling, and Revolut

In this conversation, we break down recently published annual reports from Revolut, Starling and Monzo, three of the leading European digital banks. There are some fascinating insights to be drawn from the documents, especially in the context of the broader global fintech market. This is rich subject matter, and we surely didn’t cover everything.

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Crypto digital lending monetization / commercial Social / Community

·Apr. 5, 2021

Getting paid now for future performance with Pipe’s $150MM raise and BitClout’s $200MM of Bitcoin

This week, we look at:

Pipe’s $150 million raise at a $2 billion valuation to turn annualized revenue run-rate into a new peer-to-peer asset class
BitClout’s $200 million of Bitcoin contributions and its mechanisms to turn social media profiles into digital assets
How both projects trade future performance for current monetization

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Crypto decentralized finance digital lending enterprise blockchain entrepreneurship fixed income neobank roboadvisor

·Jul. 17, 2020

Figure, SoFi and the Disruption of Finance with Mike Cagney

Mike Cagney is the Co-Founder and CEO of Figure, a full stack financial services blockchain company with consumer offerings in market or on the way in lending, banking and more. In late-2019, Figure raised $103 million at a $1.2 billion valuation and continues to grow.

Prior to starting Figure, Mike co-founded and ran SoFi, one of the most successful consumer fintech companies ever.

In this conversation, we discuss Figure’s routes to asset origination and capital markets disruption, Figure’s previously unannounced consumer banking and payments offering, lessons learned building and scaling multiple billion dollar companies and more.

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digital lending digital transformation fixed income

·Nov. 5, 2021

Building a $15B+ embedded loan management platform, with LoanPro CEO Rhett Roberts

In this conversation, we chat with Rhett Roberts, the Co-Founder and CEO of LoanPro – a new breed of software company that is API-driven, cloud-native and easily scalable. Rhett and his co-founders created the company out of necessity when they ran an auto lending business as they could not find anything flexible enough to suit their own needs.

More specifically, we touch on all things around the lending industry, the auto lending industry and how everything there works, and of course, why LoanPro is such an awesome company, and so much more!

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acquisition digital lending Embedded Finance IPO / SPAC paytech

·Jan. 15, 2021

Who wins and loses in the Plaid/Visa divorce, and the $10 Billion in new Fintech SPACs (Spakkt and Spofi), with Will Beeson

In this conversation, Will Beeson and I break down a few important pieces of recent news — the SPACs for SoFi and Bakkt, and Plaid/Visa falling apart.

SoFi is going public with a SPAC deal worth over $8 billion. A few things we touch on in detail: (1) this is still largely a lender, (2) there is a gem of an embedded finance play called Galileo that SoFi owns, and (3) the multiple is a little over 10x T12 revenues, which is not crazy expensive, but not cheap.

Speaking of Galileo and finance APIs, we transition to Plaid, and how it is is not going to be one of the networks in Visa’s network of networks. Who wins and who loses in the equation? And last, we cover the Bakkt SPAC of over $2 billion and our view on its future.

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acquisition big tech Crypto digital lending fixed income IPO / SPAC venture capital

·Aug. 9, 2021

Acquisition arbitrage between public and private fintech revenues, highlighted by Figure and Starling

In this analysis, we explore an overarching framework for the M&A activity in the fintech, big tech, and crypto ecosystems. We discuss acquihiring, horizontal and vertical consolidation, as well as the differences between growth and value oriented acquisition rationales. The core insight, however, is about the arbitrage between the fintech and financial services capital markets, as evidenced by the recent transactions for Starling and Figure.

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artificial intelligence chatbots & other robots Crypto digital lending paytech regulation & compliance

·Jun. 30, 2021

Building the best payments fiat to crypto onramp, with Ivan Soto-Wright of MoonPay

In this conversation, we have a really cool conversation on fintech, crypto assets, payments and all the things around it with Ivan Soto-Wright, the CEO and Co-founder of MoonPay.

More specifically, we discuss Liability-driven Investment (LDI), the proliferation of AI in personal finance to drive sound decision-making, innovation in finance is following the same trajectory that resulted in VOIP for the telecommunication industry, the geographical maze of crypto KYC, payment networks, and crypto payment processing.

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China digital lending eCommerce Metaverse / xR neobank small business Social / Community super app supply chain / trade

·Jun. 13, 2021

The links between tech, commerce, and finance behind Klarna’s $45B valuation and Pinduoduo’s $150B marketcap

This week, we cover these ideas:

Klarna’s $640 million raise and its $45 billion valuation, and how its business model arbitrages the payments revenue pool to build a lending business
Pinduoduo’s growth path to a $150B marketcap, and the links between shopping, media, and financial mechanisms that help it compete with Alibaba
A comparison of approaches to growth and economics
Implications for crypto assets for capturing “the real economy”

Klarna is raising $640 million on a $45 billion private valuation, with over $1 billion in net operating income. The buy-now-pay-later company has over 90 million active customers and 250,000 merchants. It was founded in Sweden in 2005.

On the other side of the ocean, Chinese ecommerce company Pinduoduo is beating Alibaba with 820 million active buyers, generates over $3 billion in revenue per quarter, connects buyers to 12 million farmers, and has a market capitalization of $150 billion. It was founded in China in 2015.

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