Podcast 339: Nik Milanovic of This Week in Fintech

While the media focuses on the unicorns and the massive funding rounds happening in fintech today, there are so many interesting early-stage companies that are often overlooked. The newsletter, This Week in Fintech, has one of the most extensive lists of fintech funding rounds, often reporting on companies that have raised less than a million dollars.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Nik Milanovic, the founder of This Week in Fintech and the general partner of The Fintech Fund I. He has become one of the leading voices covering fintech and his meetups are bringing together fintech enthusiasts in cities all over the world.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Why he decided to leave Google to go out on his own.
• How the This Week in Fintech newsletter came to be.
• The different regions they focus on.
• The fintech trends that Nik is paying closest attention to right now.
• The thinking behind launching his new fund.
• Where he has made the fund’s initial investments.
• How investment decisions are made.
• The average investment size they have made.
• The difference between the syndicate group and the fund LPs.
• What stage of company they are looking to invest in.
• His take on the current state of the funding markets.
• The size of the first fund and the number of companies they are targeting.
• Nik’s vision for This Week in Fintech.

You can subscribe to the Fintech One on One Podcast via Apple Podcasts or Spotify. To listen to this podcast episode there is an audio player directly above or you can download the MP3 file here.

Download a PDF of the Transcription or Read it Below

Welcome to the LendIt Fintech One-on-One Podcast, Episode No. 339. This is your host, Peter Renton, Chairman and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.

(music)

Before we get started, I want to talk about the 10th Annual LendIt Fintech USA event. We are so excited to be back in the financial capital of the world, New York City, in person on May 25th and 26th. It feels like fintech is on fire right now with so much change happening and we’ll be distilling all that for you at New York’s biggest fintech event of the year. We have our best line-up of keynote speakers ever with leaders from many of the most successful fintechs and incumbent banks. This is shaping up to be our biggest event ever as sponsorship support is off the charts. You know, you need to be there, so find out more and register at lendit.com.

Peter Renton: Today on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Nik Milanovic, he is the Founder of This Week in Fintech, it’s a popular newsletter that’s been around for a couple of years now. I actually first met Nik when he was back in Funding Circle many, many years ago right at the start of LendIt and so we’ve known each other for quite some time and wanted to get him on the show because he’s doing interesting work and he’s also launching a new fund which is really interesting. 

What he’s doing here is something I have not seen yet in the fintech space so I wanted to get him on to talk all about that which we do. We also talk about some of the fintech trends he’s paying most attention to and where he is taking This Week in Fintech. It was a fascinating episode, hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Nik!

Nik Milanovic: Thank you for having me, Peter, it’s good to be on.

Peter: Yeah, my pleasure. So, I know you’ve been around fintech for a little while, you know, so I’d love to get some highlights of some of the background that you’ve had to kick it off.

Nik: I know we’ve known each other for a while now, but got my start in fintech a little over ten years ago, was the first hire at Funding Circle when it became a US arm. We’re, you know, attendees of the first LendIt Conference over in New York and it’s been really amazing to watch the space grow so much over the last ten years, but after joining as the first hire at Funding Circle, I was there five years heading up Strategic Partnerships, and then moved over to the early team at Petal where we were building a credit card from the ground up in 2017, at a point where credit cards weren’t yet really a fintech product category. And I’ve spent the last two years working on Google Pay which recently came to a close and so I’m excited to talk a little bit more about what comes next.

Peter: Maybe before we get into that, let’s just talk about, I mean, Google’s obviously a great company to work for, everyone’s fully aware that they’re doing interesting things in all kinds of areas of technology, including fintech, why did you decide to quit Google now and what was behind that thinking?

Nik: It was more about the opportunities outside of Google than it was about anything they do with Google. So, just to give some background, I’ve been working on two products at Google, Google Finance which is the investment research products for public markets and Google Pay which is Google’s digital wallet and payment method for international mobile digital online payments. You know, these are two fascinating products in their own right, but my real background in fintech was working in earlier stages. You know, I joined Funding Circle as their first hire and then I was part of the first seven or eight people over at Petal and I think that that’s really ….those first two years when you have some of the most interesting product grow as you’re really figuring out what you want to be when you grow up. 

And so, for the last couple of years I’ve been writing a newsletter on fintech, much of the focus on new product development and early-stage fintech and that newsletter gave way to an angel investing syndicate about a year and a half ago and that syndicate is now growing into full-sized, closed-in early-stage fintech investment fund. It’s really that opportunity that I think can be pursued in a unique way and I think you can do things to kind of push the limits, move things forward for providing more of the I guess financial support to early-stage fintech companies.

Peter: Right. We’re going to dig into that in a little bit, but before we do maybe step back and sort of talk about why you decided to start This Week in Fintech which is your newsletter that’s widely read these days, an excellent newsletter, I always make sure to check it out every Friday and Saturday, but tell us a little bit about the founding of that newsletter.

Nik: It was actually an internal newsletter for my team at Petal. I realized that there wasn’t really a comprehensive, concise source of weekly news to keep on top of what was going on in fintech and I’d been a long time Lend Academy reader and really liked the coverage and the reporting that your organization puts out, but you’d have one of the fintech companies making announcements in this huge variety of different channels. 

Sometimes they just make product announcements on Twitter, sometimes they’d go out and publish articles with TechCrunch or with Forbes, but as the pace of fintech development picked up, it was very hard to keep tabs on everything going on in the space at once. And so, the newsletter started out just for my team as a concise way to summarize everything that happened over the course of the week at fintech, what changes in just a week, but then when I started showing it to a few other people, friends of mine working in fintech, they asked to subscribe and it kind of grew organically from there.

Peter: Okay. And, obviously, you’ve gone beyond the newsletter and you’ve gone global with the newsletter, why don’t you just tell us about the breadth of offerings that you guys have now.

Nik: Things have changed a lot in fintech over the last two and a half years since I started writing the newsletter, you know, the newsletter has changed with it, of course. So, the newsletter has a global edition, there are regional editions written by Michael Jenkins in London, Christine Chang in Mexico focused on Europe and Latin America, respectively, and then Osborne Saldanha being the one who focuses on India and Southeast Asia. We are looking very hard for an Africa editor as well, the idea there is that there is a lot of regional understand and nuance in fintech development. What really helps us is embedded in those areas to write more currently on what’s going on and they picked up a lot of things that on the global edition we write this. 

In addition to that, we have a great policy issue written by Ben White who works on policy over at Plaid, we have a series of events, the monthly Fintech Happy Hours which has grown into other event formats like dinners, meet-ups that have had over 6,000 attendees and taken place in the US, in Mexico and in the UK and Lagos, Nigeria, will be in a couple of other cities this year. 

And, we have Job Board for early stage fintechs to recruit top tier talent, but I think what’s most exciting is that we’ve been making introductions between fintech founders and capital providers the last couple of years putting fintechs in touch with fintech-focused VCs. And now, we’ll actually be launching our own fund this week for early stage investment in fintech founders which I think will be just another way of kind of giving back to the community.

Peter: Okay, interesting. I’d love to get your perspective on just looking at fintech, what are the trends that you’re paying closest attention to right now?

Nik: You know, I don’t think I’m going to have many controversial answers here, but I think what has been interesting to watch over the course of the last year has been a pivot from traditional rails and infrastructure in financial technology to decentralized rails. I think we are very, very, very early in the space, these are companies that people call mullets which is short for fintech in the front or the user interface and then Decentralized Finance in the back. 

Peter: You’ve been listening to Bankless (laughs).

Nik: Exactly, exactly. The money movement infrastructure in rails and it’s interesting because I think that the first era of fintech was figuring out how to build better user products on top of traditional rails. Traditional rails, depending on what country you’re in, may be designed for a little bit more analog money movement which is a really interesting opportunity in India with UPI and Brazil with Pix and with other de novo rails that are built to be digital infrastructure for instant money movement at very low costs. So, the advent of Decentralized Finance, I think, is provided for exploration into different ways to move money for lower costs and higher speeds and between different jurisdictions and there also interesting products like flash loans that for context are loans where you can instantly post collateral.  The loan either happens or doesn’t happen based on the success of the bet that you’re making so that the collateral is never at risk. 

These kinds of exotic products I think are only possible with these new types of rails, at the same time, it’s very, very, very early in the US especially, there is no set regulatory framework for approaching the treatment of these kind of rails and what’s required of them. And so, I think what you’ve seen is the explosion of interest and there will be a consolidation that we’ll start to see a little bit beyond the early promises in Decentralized Finance and as financial regulators develop clear guidance on how DeFi platforms are treated. You know, one area, in particular, that has drawn some attention recently is DeFi bank accounts that promise 5% APYs and yet in consumers’ minds a bank account is indexed to the thought of FDIC protection of assets and the insurance policy for the first $250,000 of assets held in that account whereas this is something that’s absent in DeFi interest accounts. 

I think developing and understanding over the next couple of years of how to compliantly grow these types of products to the extent that they benefit consumers while avoiding any kind of consumer harm is going to be really critical to the continued growth and the health of this ecosystem. So, that’s just kind of one area that I’ve been paying special attention to recently and out of the fund, we’ve actually invested in PaySail which is providing global cross border business-to-business payments and Ponto which is providing an offering working with local regulators into different digital currencies.

Peter: Okay. So, let’s dig into the fund right now. Obviously, there’s a lot of fintech-focused funds out there, what was the thinking behind launching your fund?

Nik: That is really the most important question that I ask myself before deciding to go down this road. So, I began exploring and putting things in motion for the fund about six months ago, June of 2021. At that time, there were a lot of early-stage fintech funds also watching with emerging managers at the helm and I know many of these managers and they’re people that I deeply respect working in the fintech space. I think they’re going to be phenomenal investors, but there’s no product that I ever want to work on, including this fund, that is effectively just a Me Too and is selling a commoditized product into a commoditized space without any core differentiators. 

As you’ve seen, the funding environment for fintech has changed dramatically over the last two years, it’s become a very attractive early-stage investor category which I think explains the emergence of what these smaller early-stage fintech funds and, you know, that’s had an impact on prices, you know, what valuation funders are raising and on early-stage fintech founders’ ability to draw capital to them. So, on the capital formation side, there’s not much that you can do that really sets yourself apart in the market. A good founding team in fintech will get a check from a top tier VC in all likelihood, absent any irregularities these days, but what I think does really build in the newsletter is the community and the non-financial support aspect here. 

So, maybe let me back up kind of one step and talk a little bit about the genesis of the fund. The newsletter’s been running for about two and a half years and when it started growing in popularity, I had two sets of questions coming in from two different parties. On the one side were early-stage founders saying hey, I love the newsletter and I’d love to get yourself and more strategic angels from the fintech space onboard, on the other side were people who had been working in fintech for a while and said, I’m looking to angel invest more actively, I want to re-invest proceeds from working in fintech into more exciting early-stage companies. 

And so, I launched a fintech angel syndicate about a year and a half ago that was meant to connect this group of people who wanted to invest in early-stage fintech companies to bring a lot of fintech experience to the table with founders who are going out and raising a first round. And at about the one-year market, took a look at what had been going well, what has been going as well, we connected with a lot of great founders who I still talk to week-to-week and deeply respect and we’ve grown to a great membership in the syndicate of people who had a lot of deep fintech experience. but we weren’t able to saturate all the allocation that we were being given. 

So, the fund is really kind of the next step in growth starting with that syndicate where the fund is a similar syndicate mostly backed by individuals. These individuals all have deep fintech experience and expertise, a couple of examples are Anil Aggrawal who started Money 20/20 and sold TXPN to Google, Shamir Karkal who is the founder of Simple sold to BBVA now is the Founder of Sila and Stephany Kirkpatrick, the Founder of Orum. 

So, the idea is that with this fund we really bring a whole community of people who are deeply nuanced and versed in fintech to back early stage founders so that if you’re a founder, you’re taking a lead check and you’re taking the next largest check from a traditional VC that’s going to take board seats, that’s going to provide you a lot of the coaching and guidance and advice that you need from the VC who understands an ecosystem, but you can also take a check from our fund as well and that check bring things with it, you know, the ability to referring customers, to referring new hires, provide consulting if you’re trying slide between two vendors. So, we’re really trying to use this fund as a way to let the fintech community re-invest in the fintech community directly.

Peter: Okay, that’s really, really interesting. Is this broadly fintech, I know you mentioned a couple of investments in the DeFi space, but what verticals are you focused on or is it completely broad?

Nik: It will be about 80% pure fintech and about 20% other bets that include Decentralized Finance so I know I kind of went on to a little DeFi tangent there.

Peter: That’s okay.

Nik: Out of the ten investments we’ve made in the fund, so far, it perfectly fits that ratio, you know, two are DeFi and eight are fintech. So, we’ve invested in Koshex which is a B2B wealth management platform in India, we’ve invested in Simpl which is building India’s leading “buy now pay later” platform, we’ve invested in Emplar which is building a revenue-based funding direct-to-retail, this is a plug into point of sales systems here in the US and so you’ll kind of continue to see a variety of the investments we make that take place in the US, that take place in emerging markets, that are focused on different areas of development in fintech. 

And so, if you’re trying to kind of drop niche circles around  which specific areas of fintech we’re diving into, it’s a little bit difficult because when you’re making this kind of early-stage bets, you have limited signals available to figure decision making and really the strongest ones that we underwrite are the strength in the early team, their connection whether they’ve worked together before, their background and their subject matter expertise in the space that they’re entering, their understanding of what solutions have been tried for this problem before and what’s differentiating about theirs and the dynamics that they need to grow and be successful in this space. So, we’re really making a founding team based bets in fintech and the last thing I’ll say is, kind of my own philosophy about that, I think there are a lot of smart investors who have guided VCs and they say, you know, these spaces are going to be prime for development over the next however many years. 

And then they go out and they find founders who kind of pattern match to their own kind of pre-conceived notions of what’s interesting in the space. My goal here is not to limit the deployment of the fund based on my own thesis about what is and what isn’t compelling in fintech, it’s to let really, really strong founders to come to me and come to us as a fund and say, this is something that I’m competing in every single day, this is a space that, you know, over the course of just nine months I’ve actually become a world expert in because I’ve had to dive so deep into what’s working, what’s not working. And this is why nobody has tried this before and why what I am doing is different, why it’s right. If there is one kind of business that we’re going to deploy in in fintech, I’d be missing out on a lot of conversations from people who have become much smarter than I in a lot of really interesting and compelling spaces.

Peter: Right, right. So then, is it just you making the decision, I mean, when you have a syndicate I presume everyone would go out and talk about different investments, but is there still collaboration or is it you really making the ultimate decision here?

Nik: I feel like you’re zeroing in on all the most important dynamics on what I’m building here so these are really good questions and I get a lot of the same questions from our LPs. So, it is a closed-end solo GP fund in that I’m the sole general partner of the fund today for Fund One, but the syndicate is still involved and so the fund invests alongside the syndicate for most of the deals that we’re doing and the reason for that is that the syndicate group really brings in value in two different ways. On the one hand, LPs in the fund and people and the angel syndicate are deeply connected in fintech and normally are responsible for most of our deals, the founders who are raising who we end up backing. 

The second and this really gets to the question that you’re asking is the syndicate basically provides a Last Pass Investment Committee for the decisions that we make so I still discuss all the deals with the angel syndicate in front of us. A lot of the  times these cryptologists uncover something that as an individual I may not have been able to and it basically acts as a quality check in outsource investment committee before the fund makes an investment which isn’t to say that the syndicate and the founder are always going to invest one-to-one with each other. There are times that, you know, I’ll make a contrarian bet that the syndicate does not make and fund that out of the fund, but for the most part, it helps me do a quality check on the value of these deals that we’re doing.

Peter: Right, right, that makes sense. So then, when you’re doing these deals you said that you don’t get all the allocation you want, I mean, can you give us some sort of sense of sorry, the other way around, you get too much allocation. What’s the size of the typical investment, what are you trying to grow that to?

Nik: Founders come to us and say, we have $200,000 to $500,000 in angel allocation available, you’re bringing a whole group into this, do you want to take that allocation. And so, what I would say when it was just a syndicate is sounds great, let me go back and we’ll get you an answer in one to two weeks when we’ve had time to review as a group and we have a good sense on what everyone wants to invest. Inclusivity is really key, actually ahead of everything of what I’m building here, the newsletter is about to be inclusive, the job order’s about to be inclusive. the advancement could be inclusive and the syndicate is not to be inclusive. What that means is that we have a lot of people who really deeply understand fintech in the syndicate, but are younger in their careers who have less disposable income to fund angel deals with. The syndicate isn’t just going out there and targeting people who have, you know, $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 to drop in angel investments so a lot of times, people are writing individual checks for $3,000 and $5,000. 

So, the average check size that we’ve had out of the syndicate over the first year of its life was $59,000. So, if you’re getting offered $200,000 to $500,000 in allocation and coming back after two weeks with, you know, a $60,000 check, effectively, it felt like we were leaving the opportunity on the table and so the fund is really meant to capitalize on that opportunity and fill the allocation available with really smart founders and really competitive deals. And then the other value that the fund provides back to these founders is I no longer have to say, give me two weeks to figure it out and I’ll let you know what the final number looks like, I can tell them on day one, like it seems like you’re building a great company, I really have high conviction in it, if you can circle us in for $200,000 of allocation. the syndicate will fill some specified amount and the fund will absorb the remaining capacity.

Peter: Is your goal then to keep the LPs of the fund and the syndicate separate or is it the opposite? Is your goal to bring them all into the fund?

Nik: We actually have some overlap between the two so there are reasons that people would prefer to invest on the deal by the LPs than the syndicate. On my side, I keep the syndicate group extremely tight because I’ve been a participant in other syndicates where the group is too large and it really undermines the ability to have meaningful conversations when you’re due diligencing these early stage founders, but you have people who choose to participate just in the fund because they don’t want to be involved in the decision making process on every single deal. They don’t have the bandwidth to pay attention to all the new deals that are coming in in front pf the group and they want to have some exposure to deals that they individually have an investment in. 

So, I have people who are members of the syndicate who aren’t that active anymore and they end up investing in the fund. What they said was, you know, you bring deals to the syndicate and I wouldn’t end up joining the diligence conversation and cutting a check and then six months later, this company is wildly successful and I think oh man, why did I miss out on that. So, the fund is really a good way to kind of index your exposure to just the top deals that we’re doing out of the syndicate.

Peter: Right. You know, I know that VC funding has become a little crazy although it does seem to be slowing down a little bit, but are you talking about pre-seed type deals, I mean, are you talking about seed deals? Series A can go up to $100 Million these days it feels like, but when you say early, what do you mean?

Nik: Yeah. Normally, we are going to be focused on pre-seed and seed stage deals and I mean, to your point, nomenclature is as descriptive now as it was, you know, a few years ago because there is such a wild variation in check size. But, when you’re talking about early-stage investment, people normally have a kind of target multiple that they’re thinking of and a target risk level that they are thinking of for their investments. So, you go on a later stage growth investment, you know, you’re trying multiples that are a little bit lower, but you have more line of say more predictability and less dispersion of possible outcomes because you have more track record for the company. 

So, coming back to this fund and early-stage investing, if the size of the round gets too large or the post money valuation of the company gets too large then the meaningful kind of multiple that you can expect to see on that investment just collapses a little bit and so just to kind of print numbers around it, if you’re making an investment at a billion dollar post money valuation, the wildest possible outcome for you in terms of success is that maybe the grows to be a hundred billion dollar company and you get 100X possible on your money. But, in most cases, you are probably looking at a multiple that is between one and ten or one and 20X. When you go very early stage there is much higher risk, much lower likelihood of success, but you are focused on your successful bets having a higher multiple, at the end of the day. And so, there’s this kind of a circuitous way of saying, we really focus in on early checks and early deals at lower valuations and lower round sizes in order to preserve the ability to, you know, with the best bets that we make get those higher multiples.

Peter: Right, right. I’ve been talking to founders and investors over the last couple of months and it seems like some of the frothiness, and obviously we’re having a correction in the stock market or more than a correction, shall we say, in the crypto space, but are you finding that some of the frothiness that was there at the height of 2021 is starting to fade or do you find that it’s just as frothy now?

Nik: You know, it’s going to be a little bit disappointing, but I think my answer is it’s too early to say.

Peter: Right.

Nik: Early-stage investing is a little bit like deep space exploration where, you know, you send a rocket off and it’s traveling somewhere that takes seven years to get to, the place that the rocket ends up landing is going to look very different in seven years than it did when the rocket took off. If you’re an early-stage investor, I don’t think that the current state of public markets should be as important to your decision making as many other factors, the founding team, the products, the ability to find paying customers, willingness among customers to pay for this product because the market is going to look very different by the time, you know, your most successful companies are finding areas of opportunities.

Peter: Right.

Nik: So, you can over correct, but, you know, a little bit more directly to your question, is the turbulence of crypto prices and, you know, public equities going to have a meaningful impact on the very quick growth in early-stage valuations, I think it’s possible. The question is whether, you know, these price drops become kind of a sustained drop or whether it’s a flash in the pan like we saw after March 2020 with COVID and I think it would, in some ways, make life easier for early-stage founders to set lower targets for themselves to hit rather than chasing the highest possible valuation they can get because it’s a little bit like rolling over debt month to month. If you take a really high paper valuation now, you may be able to do that two or three times, but eventually, you run into a growth trap where you’ve been taking high valuations because they are available to you, but your performance metrics haven’t grown into them. 

And so, what you’re really doing is making a bet on the continued health of the market and that’s something where you have no control and so if the market turns, like it may be turning right now, you put yourself in a risky position down the line where you may have to take a flat round or a down round. At the same time, a lot of funds have been raising these rainy-day war chests where you have $500 Million early-stage, you know, pre-seeded seed funds being raised by fintech investors even if the signals, you know, in the public markets and crypto are bearish, you still have founders who are kind of sitting on dry pattern and feel the need to deploy it.

Peter: Right.

Nik: So, I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to see some persistence in early-stage valuations.

Peter: Right, right, fair enough. Like how many LPs do you expect to have and do you some sense of how big the fund is going to be, Fund One?

Nik: For Fund One, the size of fund is going to be capped at $10 Million and this will allow me to stay in kind of my line in core competency of making $300,000 bets of working with fintech founders at the very early stages and not feeling pressured to write large checks or write more checks than is sustainable for still OGP like me kind of operating on its own. You know, my goal here is that this is going to be successful, not that it merits the fund two…at which point, I would love to bring on more people who understand the space and target a larger fund, but it is going to be quite small for now.

Peter: So, that means you’re targeting like 40/50 companies to be in Fund One.

Nik: Exactly. I think it will be somewhere between 25 and 50 companies with a little bit of capital preserved for follow on checks.

Peter: Right, right, okay. Well, we’re almost out of time so maybe the last question, what’s your vision here, like you’ve got a lot of things going on. We’ve talked about the Fund in some depth here, what’s your vision for This Week in Fintech?

Nik: Even though it has grown so much over the last decade, I really think that fintech has an incredible amount of growth potential ahead of it and now, we’re only starting to see that for the first time over the last couple of years. You know, early financial products were mostly focused on what was readily visible to consumers so that was lending, savings, investing, but there are so many different areas of finance, many of which are very obscure, paper-based and a little bit archaic that can be transformed by technology that we’ve only begun to realize now. So, I think the size of the potential pie for fintech is the size of the pie right today for financial services writ large and even bigger and you’re adding the efficiencies in technology. 

My goal for This Week in Fintech, the Fund, the Job Board, the events is to really provide a built-in community so that people who are operators, people who are investors, people who are founders have the resources and a set of resources they can come to and grasp better what’s going on in fintech and what the opportunities are and get connected really quickly to other people who have the same passion and have this deep subject matter expertise because I think building a fintech company is not like building tech companies in that it really takes a lot of expertise and experience and industry specific knowledge that you may not necessarily need if you’re building a SaaS product in another field. And so, the goal is for this to kind of be a continued resource to accelerate the early-stage development and growth of fintech companies and products so that we can get closer to approximating the size of that total financial services pie.

Peter: Right, right. Well, I’m in compete agreement. I think fintech is just getting started, I think this decade we’re going to see more change than in the last 500 years and it’s going to be exciting to be a part of it. I wish you all the best, Nik, thanks for coming on the show.

Nik: Thank you so much for having me, Peter, you’ve been a big inspiration for the last decade, Lend Academy and LendIt and, you know, I’m really excited for what the next decade holds so thanks for making the time.

Peter: My pleasure, okay, see you.

Nik: Have a good one.

Peter: Now, talking about the financial services pie there, I’ve seen first different things saying that, you know, 15% of the economy, some even as high as 20% of the economy, when you look at the world GDP it’s approaching $100 Trillion, US dollars equivalent so that means we have a financial services industry globally that is possibly tens of trillions, certainly many, many trillions of dollars and the vast majority of that is in incumbent financial institutions. 

Fintech is getting just a very small piece of that pie right now and that’s what is going to change, I feel like. This decade, you’re going to see a lot of that value move into the fintech space so there will be companies that are just getting started, companies that aren’t even started yet that I think will become large, valuable companies by the end of the decade and it’s going to be fascinating to see.

Anyway on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate your listening and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.

(music)

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