Rebank: Fintech Analysis

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.

Giuseppe Stuto is Managing Partner of 186 Ventures, a $37m seed fund launched in late-2021. 186 has made 10 investments since inception, following on from over two dozen angel investments Giuseppe and his partner Julian made over the past few years. Across angel and seed investments, Giuseppe and 186 have invested in UiPath, Chainalysis, Ponto and dozens more. Prior to starting 186 Ventures, Giuseppe founded Fam, a group video app that was acquired by DraftKings. In this conversation, Giuseppe and I discuss seed investing in a bear market, differentiating as a seed investor in a competitive space and themes 186 is currently focused on.

It's great to be back after taking nearly a year off from regular content to build and launch BELLA. The break wasn't really planned, but between launching the business, having a son and moving to LA all while dodging COVID, it was unavoidable. But just because we weren't publishing, doesn't mean we weren't going deep on fintech. The team and I built and launched BELLA in less than twelve months, and we're aggressively scaling it now. In the background, I've continued to trade views and break down strategy with the world's leading founders and investors. Over the next few weeks, we'll share some of the most topical discussions we've had over the past year, and we're also working on new content that you'll start to hear and see. Right now, we're especially interested in embedded finance, DeFi, M&A, new takes on traditional consumer finance products, payments, e-commerce, digital investments and, as always, digital banking. We're always looking to talk to great people in those areas, so please shoot recommendations our way. We're still figuring out the podcast schedule, which we expect to be less frequent than weekly. We'll be increasing focus on our newsletter, especially our premium content. Sign up at bankingthefuture.com/subscribe. In today's episode, we're joined by Tilman Ehrbeck, Managing Partner at Flourish Ventures, a venture firm focused on improving the financial health and prosperity of people around the world. Flourish invests in segments including Challenger Banks, consumer and SME lending, personal finance, data analytics, insurance and financial infrastructure in countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Flourish has invested in companies including Chime, Aspiration, Tandem, Grab Finance and more. I find Tilman to be extremely thoughtful and a great communicator, and he's doing hugely important work. This conversation helped me better understand how impact-oriented VCs like Flourish balance purpose with financial returns in the highly competitive venture space. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Tilman Ehrbeck.

Today, we're joined by Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Simple, the first digital bank in the US, and now co-founder of Sila. Founded in 2009, Simple was the original digital bank, conceived and built to give people more control over their money. After a few successful years, Simple was acquired by BBVA for $117m, under whose ownership it operated until early-2021, when it was shut down. Simple was loved by its users and mourned following it's closing, in what was a sad moment for fintech. Today's breed of digital banks, including Chime, Varo, Current and others, inherited a lot from Simple, who pioneered the space. However, few of Simple's most popular features have been replicated by other players. In recent years, we've seen huge user growth achieved by fintechs offering banking to previously underserved customers, especially those living paycheck to paycheck. Nonetheless, Simple leaves a powerful legacy, and many lessons learned, for the entire fintech industry. In this conversation, we go deep on what worked and what didn't for Simple, why it never hit escape velocity, why its users loved it so much and how Shamir and his co-founder Josh engineered life changing payouts for their employees through the BBVA acquisition. We also discuss Shamir's current company, Sila, which is building programmable money for the next generation of fintech companies. For all of our past episodes, and to sign up for our newsletter, please visit www.bankingthefuture.com. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Shamir Karkal.