Rebank: Fintech Analysis

Sheel Mohnot is Co-Founder and General Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, an early-stage fintech VC currently investing out of its $225m second fund. Sheel is a former founder, having built a tech-first card processor way back in 2010 which was quickly acquired by Groupon. Since 2014, Sheel has been angel investing and, as of 2016, investing full-time. Sheel is an incredible Twitter follow and constant source of information, insight and entertainment. In this conversation, we discuss how fintech VC has changed over the last few years, the state of the early-stage market today, what separates elite seed funds from others, building social capital as an investor, the investment areas Sheel is currently focused on and more. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Sheel Mohnot.

Matt Harris is an entrepreneur and investor and the founder of Bloom Credit, an API platform for credit data access and analysis. Currently, Matt is focused on investing and advising, working with VC-backed founders and advising companies in the credit space. Among other things, Matt is an advisor to Commerce Ventures, writing scout checks and helping the fund make fintech investments. Matt is also an active angel, having invested in 10+ fintech companies including TrueAccord, Karat and HM Bradley and a number of others. In this conversation, we discuss the level of understanding among VCs and founders of the credit business, the inputs to effective underwriting, how to build a great credit business, emerging opportunities like embedded credit and more. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Matt Harris.

Stephane Lintner is Co-Founder & CEO of Jiko, a new take on the money storage and transaction layer in banking, a.k.a. checking accounts and cash management. Jiko was founded in 2016 with the mission of providing consumers and businesses with direct access to spendable T-Bills, combining all the benefits of checking accounts with the safety and, depending on the economic cycle, yield of treasuries. Jiko has raised $89m according to Crunchbase, including $40m in October. Jiko offers accounts directly to consumers via an app and to corporates and platforms via API. Jiko owns and operates an OCC-chartered national bank, which it acquired in 2020, and a registered broker-dealer. In this conversation, Stephane and I discuss Jiko's concept and ultimate vision, the implications for the existing banking model, Jiko's successful bank acquisition, the relationship with adjacencies like stablecoins and CBDCs, and more. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Stephane Lintner

Matt Brown is a venture capitalist and Partner at Matrix Partners. Matt is a founder and operator turned investor, having started two software companies, both backed by Matrix, and then led product for AfterPay in the US in the lead-up to its acquisition by Square, now Block. Matt's second company, Bonsai, is a vertical SaaS company for micro businesses which evolved from a pure software company into a fintech through the incorporation of financial products, before embedded finance was a household term. Matt is strategic and thoughtful, writing regularly on fintech market dynamics, with a specific focus on payments, credit and vertical SaaS. In this conversation, we discuss Matt's approach to seed and A-stage investing, BNPL and the implications for digital commerce more broadly, Matt's analysis of payments market dynamics, opportunities for early-stage fintechs in an increasingly saturated market and more. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Matt Brown.

Chris Dean is the co-founder & CEO of Treasury Prime, a leading US banking-as-a-service platform fresh off a $40m Series C raise. Treasury Prime is a software company that connects sponsor banks to customer facing fintechs and by doing so powers bank accounts, cards and money movement. Unlike others in the banking-as-a-service space, Treasury Prime describes itself as building a network of interoperable sponsor banks and customer-facing fintechs in a ground-up approach to Open Banking in the US. In this conversation, Chris and Will Beeson discuss the state of the banking-as-a-service industry, Treasury Prime's approach compared to other software-based BaaS companies and tech-enabled sponsor banks themselves, the economics of banking-as-a-service, the evolving regulatory environment and more. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Chris Dean.

Jared Franklin is an investor at Costanoa Ventures. Costanoa is a seed-stage VC focused on fintech, data and developer infrastructure, applied AI and security, specifically B2B. The firm has $1.5b under management across seed and growth funds, including its $225m fourth seed fund. Prior to joining Costanoa, Jared worked in product across fintech and crypto for BillMeLater, PayPal and BlockFi. In this conversation, Jared and I discuss his experience transitioning from operating to investing, the learning curve as a new investor, Costanoa's approach to identifying and supporting companies at the seed stage, and 7 investment themes Jared is focused on in 2023.

I'm joined by fintech and web3 luminary Lex Sokolin, Head Economist at ConsenSys and author of the Fintech Blueprint, for a discussion about the embedded finance value chain. As listeners know, this is a topic of great interested to me, and I was happy to have the opportunity to dig into it with Lex in a conversation that we're releasing through both of our platforms. In this conversation, Lex and I take stock of the BaaS and embedded finance space in a moment of market dislocation to see what it reveals about what works, what doesn't and where the next opportunities are. If you don't already subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint, I'd highly encourage you to do so for the best analysis in the industry. For an example of their content, check out the post for this episode on rebank.cc. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Lex Sokolin.

Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) has been the subject of much excitement in fintech over the past few years, together with the related but more general concept of embedded finance. It powers companies like Chime, Robinhood and Coinbase and can include products like checking, savings, debit cards, credit cards, lending and more. In this episode, we read an essay analyzing the BaaS value chain, which we argue is not currently in equilibrium and predict will evolve. Read the article here: https://rebank.cc/the-baas-value-chain-is-broken/

Rex Salisbury is the Founder of Cambrian and GP of Cambrian Ventures. Rex is a key figure in the Fintech ecosystem, having started Cambrian as a product meetup in 2015 and ultimately growing it into a community of 15,000 newsletter subscribers, 5,000 meetup members, 1,300 founders and now an early-stage venture fund. Along the way, Rex spent two years at a16z as a partner on the Fintech team, backing companies including Deel and Tally, according to TechCrunch. Though only having just closed the fund, Rex has already made five investments, including in Keep Financial, a bonus management platform started by Kabbage founders Rob Frohwein and Kathryn Petralia. In this conversation, we discuss Rex's approach to fundraising as a solo GP and factors that contributed to his success, raising and deploying a fund in the current market environment, Cambrian's investment and value creation strategy and much more. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Rex Salisbury.

Marieke Flament is CEO of the NEAR Foundation. NEAR is an emerging layer 1 blockchain specifically optimized for usability, along with speed and security. NEAR was founded in 2018 to improve on aspects of layer 1s then in existence. In its short history, NEAR has built an extremely strong institutional backing and vibrant developer community. NEAR has raised an impressive $530m+, according to Crunchbase, from an incredible list of investors including Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, Jump, Alameda, a16z and many more As CEO of the NEAR Foundation, Marieke is responsible for ecosystem development across developers, entrepreneurs, investors and users. In this conversation, Marieke and I discuss competition among L1s, NEARs efforts to establish a foothold as a newer protocol, developer and investor motivations in selecting blockchain infrastructure, opportunities and potential risks deriving from NEAR's institutional investor base, prevailing web3 developer and entrepreneur sentiment given current market conditions, balancing growth and community stewardship as an emerging L1 and much more. If you're interested in this space and want to go deeper, we recently published a deep dive analysis of NEAR, available to Premium Rebank subscribers at rebank.cc. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Marieke Flament.