Timeline is excited about the $20k Neo robot. Watch it try to close a dishwasher. We are not ready. 😅

Arresting cryptographers for writing software is the end of credibility for the west. Bad move. Worse timing. Naive

The Ultimate SWIFT and Russia Sanctions explainer You've probably been reading lots of people explaining SWIFT, but most explainers miss some key details like 👇 1. SWIFT is not a payment system. SWIFT is a messaging system (like email) used by 11,000 banks in 200+ countries

JPMorgan clients can now swap JPMD for USDC on Base. That sentence should break the internet. JP Morgan payments moves $ trillions PER DAY It dwarfs the entire stablecoin industry. This is how 1000x more dollars go onchain 🧵

Today: Learning to tweet holding a tiny baby Welcome to the world little girl Mum and Dad love you 💗

Visa wants to give AI Agents "tokens" so they can pay without you ever seeing a checkout page. Visa's CEO told investors this is their #1 priority. Here's how it will work 👇

I JUST TRIED THIS AND OMG IT WORKS Wow. Wow. Wow I'm sorry, I try to stay away from hyperbole I really really do. But lets face it everyone when making a website uses a few other sites as inspo. This is that but 100x faster.

But millennials spend too much on avocado and toast... 👇🙄

What you need is a step.

Look, the vision is amazing. But the execution right now: - 67 seconds to grab water - 5 minutes to load 3 dishes - Physically cannot close the dishwasher door smoothly - Can't go outside, can't get wet, can't cook

Stablecoins aren't cheaper; they're better The mistake is comparing card fees to crypto network fees. This is Apples-to-oranges (see table). Stablecoins are now over $200bn. Here's how they make payments better. 🧵

Guess what, Fintech Nerds? I got a new job. I'm joining Tempo, the payments-focused L1 blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. I’m moving to an advisor role with Sardine (💙)to focus on @tempo as my full-time day job. (And yes, I’ll still be doing Brainfood, Nerdcon, and Tokenized. Because I love this stuff.) I covered my full rationale for joining in the Fintech Brainfood that just dropped.

Rumor doing the rounds: "Cursor does $0.10 of revenue for every $1 of cost" That could be way off, but if it's even half-way true, wow, are we in for an AI-bubble reckoning at some point. (not substantiated, I'm just some guy on the internet, DYOR)

Wow! @stripe just dropped the annual letter and the numbers are HUGE. - $1.4trn of Total Processed Volume - Acquiring Bridge for $1.1bn - $500m ARR for Billing alone 💸. I had a 20 minute Q&A with John Collison and here's what we talked about

Behold A McKinsey word salad about Generative AI in finance. TL;DR create committes and a command center and whatever the hell this cube thing is Lol wut

More importantly—buried in the marketing: "Expert Mode" means 1X employees in VR headsets remote-pilot your robot when it fails. No defined end date for this "testing phase." "We can't improve without your data" means you're paying $499/month to let them harvest training data worth millions. "By 2026, MOST work will be automatic" means even after another year of your data, some tasks still need humans.

Woah. 😳 Cash App just announced stablecoin support launching early 2025. Not Bitcoin. Stablecoins. Starting early next year, Cash App's 58 million users will be able to send and receive stablecoins directly in the app. Some thoughts 🧵

So @Europol say €2/3bn is laundered via crypto. If a €500bn market that's 0.5% Compared to an estimated $2trn of money laundering in wider financial services this is tiny and much easier to detect / prevent. Im surprised it's being briefed against. Cc @ukhomeoffice

The most insane 72 hours in startup history just ended. $5.4 billion. Three deals. One coding startup. Zero precedent. Here's how Windsurf's founders got rich, Open AI lost, Google got played, and a company called Cognition just pulled off the acquisition of the decade: 🧵

Monzo's new features for fraud are amazing 📍 Known locations or "leave your money at home". Places you're comfortable moving large amounts of money but fraudsters are unlikely to access 🤝 Trusted contacts. If a large transfer is requested your trusted friend must approve. Hugely helpful if your phone is stolen or for vulnerable populations. 🤫 Secret QR codes. Print out a QR code and keep it in a safe place to scan when needed. If these aren't available the fallback is step up KYC. 🧠 Thoughts - All of this is possible with smart device and user behaviour tech but the user education and experience is key - I love how these are announced to a community. Show me another large bank who does that well? - You never see the big banks innovating on these types of features even though they talk a lot about "trust" being their most - I give it a year before most other big banks have copied and pasted these features. Let's raise the bar

Thing I didn't realize until just now. @ensdomains supports DNS domain names Meaning your .com can also be your .eth Delightful backward compatibility choice

Being articulate and British

When payments people tell you we have 'instant' cross-border, they're lying. What we have: $25M pre-funded in foreign banks so transfers LOOK instant. Stablecoins will eliminate pre-funding entirely. Here's the phase transition most are missing 🧵

Meet Amelie Rose Taylor

This shouldn't exist yet. I've tested @perplexity_ai 's travel search and booking and... No scrolling 847 hotels and photos trying to spot a decent gym, I asked: "Find me a hotel in Amsterdam with a serious gym, walkable to conference venues, under €300/night" Result: Perfect recommendation. The exact hotel I actually use.

Nubank's results are INSANE. Every other bank CEO must look at these and be like... HOW? Here's the breakdown... * 122.7 million customers (+4.1M net additions) * $3.7 billion revenue (+40% YoY) * $637 million net income (+42% YoY) * $12.2 monthly revenue per active customer (+18% YoY) * $0.80 cost to serve per customer * 83.2% monthly activity rate

BREAKING: Stripe just made their second major crypto acquisition. Wow! 😮 After spending $1.1bn on Bridge, they just bought Privy for an undisclosed sum) Most people missed what this combination actually means. Here's the play that's about to change everything: - Bridge ($1.1bn) = Stablecoin Infrastructure Stripe can now process stablecoin payments like any other transaction. - Privy (just acquired) = Wallet-as-a-Service Makes wallet creation, balance management, and transaction signing as simple as an API call. The combination is lethal: - Bridge handles the stablecoin rails - Privy handles the wallet complexity - Stripe keeps its reputation for simplifying complexity for developers What this enables: - Any marketplace can offer "crypto" wallets to users - Any fintech can add stablecoin accounts - Any platform can settle globally in seconds - All through APIs developers already trust. The real insight: Stripe is going beyond payments. They're building infrastructure for every business to become use crypto rails without the complexity. Without the technical headaches. The dial-up era of crypto integration just ended

Did crypto just have it's Kodak moment?

76% of Shopify revenue came from financial services last year. Embedded finance is undefeated as the best way to drive for SaaS businesses if they solve adjacent customer problems

This is precisely what working in a bank is like (by @gapingvoid). We need to do something meaningful!

The bank lobby is furious about stablecoin yield under the GENIUS Act. They're calling it a "loophole" that needs closing. But here's what they're missing: We've seen this movie before. And it built an entire generation of fintech companies. 🧵

Love this 👇👇👇 Evolution of language used by regulators to describe #crypto or #bitcoin or...

People now spend more on emotes and skins for video games than the movie industry made in 2019 📈 💸

The more time you spend in Fintech, the more you realize 👉 Payments are easy, but the edge cases are hard 👉 Lending is easy; getting paid back is hard 👉 Getting live is easy; staying alive and regulated is hard

A tiny technical change that will reshape payments: Visa allows banks and payment companies can pay each other with Stablecoins. This will make dollars lower cost, lower risk and 24/7. How? 👇 📰 Visa is making USDC Stablecoin settlement available on the fast and cheap Solana Blockchain and partnering with Worldpay and Nuvei. 👉 While the swipe feels real-time, the money doesn't move between banks or payment companies until overnight or days later via Visa Treasury. 👉 Visa Treasury is how banks that give you cards (issuers) and money to banks who pay merchants (acquirers). This service creates real-time settlement available to clients, meaning acquirers can get paid instantly. 🧠🧠🧠 Here's why it's a game changer 🚀🚀🚀 🤔 Acquirers are like the internet service providers (ISPs) of payments. They help merchants, shops, and e-commerce stores accept card payments globally. With this service, the acquirer can receive funds in the form of USDC faster from Visa. In turn, the acquirer (e.g., Worldpay) can immediately send the USDC to the merchant as soon as they receive it. This will operate 24/7 and anywhere in the world. 🧠🧠🧠 🤔 This instant settlement is very different than the type offered today. Today, companies like Square might offer instant payouts to merchants. But what they're doing is they're essentially delivering payment now while they wait for funds to clear. They're taking that risk. Another way to do this is to hold a pool of dollars in multiple jurisdictions to give "instant dollars." But both options involve risk and cost. With USDC, the settlement is instant, and the money has actually moved. 🧠🧠🧠 🤔 This is a huge validation for the core value proposition of Stablecoins: lower cost, lower risk cross-border US dollar delivery. Not every merchant will be ready to accept USDC, but every merchant wants instant settlement. Visa creates a huge unlock across the ecosystem by starting at the acquirers. How will you adapt anon? HUGE, well done Cuy Sheffield Subscribe to the blog for more (link in bio)

Instagram now has NFTs on @0xPolygon While JP Morgan conducted DeFi trades on Polygon Of all the "L2's" - Polygon is becoming the Redhat / enterprise default

So much of Adyen's margin and pricing power comes from the fact they're a bank and can settle payments instead of just processing them

If you have more than 10 Bitcoin you're in the top 1% of all bitcoin holders

Hands up if every time you discover a new Neobank or Fintech company you scroll to the bottom to see who the sponsor bank is? #fintechnerds where you at? ✋

So #bitcoin is now crossing over to the masses. Love this chart.

The actual product: You pay $6k/year to QA their R&D while they build the AI that eventually replaces the remote pilots. Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics pay enterprise partners to test.

Monzo just passed 10m customers in the UK. That's more than Starling or Revolut. They added 2m new customers in the past 12 months. With 450,000 business customers, and my favorite stat... The average Monzo user has 38 friends who also use Monzo. 🧠 They're slowly becoming the everything finance app. They've mastered product extension. I made the image below to show a non-UK audience how they're gradually taking over my financial life. They've not replaced the big banks directly. They're just there, being awesome and gradually becoming the top of my wallet. 🧠 They're the winners in the UK but nowhere else. Revolut is massive in Ireland and growth economies like Poland and Romania. Monzo's next big geographic expansion isn't obvious. They're still not yet started in the US either. (When I bring them up to folks in the US, people go, yeah I've heard of them but they're not really relevant). 🧠 The best thing they could do for US market awareness is list on the NASDAQ but I doubt they will. Everyone in the US Fintech ecosystem knows who Nubank is, and Nubank keeps crushing. Monzo will list in the UK, because they're nice like that. (Counterpoint, that hasn't been an issue for Wise who listed in the UK, but they're also very well known because remittance).

Monzo just released its FY2024 results. Spoiler alert. They crushed. - £15.4m profit - 2.5x revenue growth - 88% increase in deposits (to £11.4bn) They're executing on profitability and they've barely started lending Don't see many domestic threats but can they go global?

Huge congrats @kudabank @Babsogundeyi on the $55m raise From @11FS and Fintech Baby 🙌

Eth is down against the Venezuelan Boliviar over the week

If you liked this thread, and you want to go further down with questions like How does SWIFT messaging work? What does this move mean for Crypto? + My thoughts on why Stablecoins would be an upgrade Check out the full post here 👇 sytaylor.substack.com/p/fint…

I've now interviewed @tryramp and @brexHQ CEO's and the contrast is fascinating Ramp - ships daily, uses partners, product is the center of gravity for decisions Brex - ships quarterly, vertically integrates, Pedro is arbiter of the roadmap Both episodes out now 👀

Metaverse and NFTs now are where social media was in 2009 ⌚ Your boomer friend doesn't understand how it will make any money 💰 But every teenager lives there 🏘️

Visa just did $5.1bn of adj net income on $8.8bn of revenue This company is INSANELY profitable bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

We just lived through most consequential 24 hours in financial services law for the past two decades. And it will bring the biggest transformation of financial technology since the 1970s. Here's what happened and why it matters 👇

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talks about "Zero Billion Dollar markets" The idea that markets exist that today are worth zero that will be worth billions. Being early and winning those markets has massive asymmetric upside. But most people can't think this way. Most assume the goal of a company is to take market share. But market share is expensive when a market is already big. It's cheaper the earlier you get there. Zero billion Dollar markets don't appear on a spreadsheet or business school case study. But they're everywhere.

Ethereum, Ripple And Litecoin Have Arrived on Bloomberg Terminals bit.ly/2ChYWPD via @CoinDesk

1X found early adopters who'll pay THEM while providing home access, edge cases, and patience. As a business model for AI training? Actually brilliant. As a risk-adjusted return on $20k to automate dishes? The math doesn't math yet.

Most people think stablecoins are just another payments rail. Stablecoins are a platform: EVERY fintech company will become a stablecoin company. This shift will be 10x more dramatic than the fintech boom of the past decade. 🧵

🚨 BREAKING: Citi unveils it's stablecoin strategy. And it's GENIUS (😁). Circle spent years fighting for regulatory clarity. Guess who benefits when the Genius Act passes? The banks. Here's what most people missed:

PSA FINTECH NERDS THERE IS A WIRECARD SCANDAL DOCUMENTARY ON NETFLIX This is not a drill 🤠

The sentiment on Crypto appears to be shifting in my network Fintech talents who hated it / didn't get the point now at least acknowledge it's interesting Fintech talents who had been open to Crypto are now obsessed with it.

Confirmed: @stripe's biggest-ever acquisition is of the Stablecoin platform Bridge. Bridge provides software that helps businesses accept Stablecoin payments and simplifies the infrastructure (a bit like Stripe does for TradFi). 🧠 This will go down as an Instagram-like all-time great acquisition. It solves a huge long-term pain point for Stripe. Accessing a 24/7, instant, global, dollar-based rail means they can provide new value to customers. Sell from anywhere and get paid instantly in dollars without dealing with crypto complexity. 🧠 This is the largest acquisition in Crypto history It marks a narrative shift from Crypto being about price, to it being about business value. 🧠 Stablecoins are 24/7, global and instant. There's no other way to move dollars as instantly and cheaply. If you're still doubting them, take another look, they've come a long way since 2021. 🧠 Today Stablecoins infrastructure is complex. If you want to move Stablecoins in a way that's cheap, instant and compliant that's hard. You have networks like Ethereum and Solana, Wallets, and different coins like USDC or PYUSD (PayPal). 🧠 Bridge simplifies it. Bridge makes all of that go away. Bridge makes Stablecoins work like someone who's never used Stablecoins think they should. Which is exactly what Stripe does for traditional rails. 🧠 Strategically, this solves a big pain point for Stripe. Stripe is not the same company outside of the US and Europe. The long tail of Asian, LATAM and global south markets are very expensive and slow to integrate with. Stablecoins fix this. 🧠 Stablecoins are increasingly infrastructure not a consumer experience. Stripe can now offer US dollar liquidity, 24/7, instantly to sellers anywhere in the world. That seller can then choose to "off ramp" into their local currency or rail at their convenience. PS. We did an hour long conversation with Bridge founder @zcabrams on the Tokenized podcast (find it wherever you get your podcasts)

I thought it was an open secret that Singapore and Hong Kong operated as arms length satellite's to on and off ramp to china for decades?

Clubhouse is fintech techcrunch.com/2021/01/24/cl…

The Payments industry is undefeated

🚨 BREAKING: Revolut — the neobank with 50M customers — is quietly building its own stablecoin. Does everyone need their own stablecoin? Can this threaten Circle and Tether's dominance?

AML is the worlds most in-effective policy experiment This is a phenomenal piece on just how utterly useless AML rules are Effectiveness is estimated at 0.1% Policymakers: But crypto! That's called the distraction technique... tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…

Banking software wasn't designed to solve today's problems It was designed to automate yesterdays processes Few are re-thinking banking software from first principles outside of the Neobanks building it all themselves

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FUCKING MILLION FOR WEBINARS??!!! Jesus Christ this is peak silicon valley boys club Earn.com is a spectacular failure and someone just needs to kill it It's not a "hard thing about hard things story" They had insane resources and failed

Look what I just spotted at check out. $5 off for using pay by bank 👀👀👀

Fintech 1.0 = Better UX Fintech 2.0 = Embedded finance Fintech 3.0 = Defi (better infra) H/t @JohnStCapital

So @CryptoKitties is Pokémon for Capitalists. It's #esports meets #blockchain Oh and you can get people to pay to breed with your crypto kitties. This is the new economy. People are weird.

Finance products are a commodity. So get big, sell lots, hit profitability. Fintech products are a service. Solve a problem, charge a premium, grow rapidly.

New X Article Stablecoin Linked Cards - A bank saw a future when I bought them a coffee on a stablecoin-linked cards - How stablecoin-linked cards work - How this is bringing the ultra wealthy strategy of financing against assets to the mass market

Nobody in fintech wants to say this but Branches work cnbc.com/2024/08/05/jpmorgan…

The company was one way we organised for the last 300 years. The religion was another. The government another. Cryptoeconomics are poo poo'ed by many. But a new way to align incentives globally at the species level is an interesting signal longer term.

BOOM! 💥 At Sardine we're announcing our $70m Series C today. I couldn't be more excited or proud of this team. Here's why I joined @Sardine and why I think what we do matters

On Stablecoins. How I start all my rants is with a bit of an outline of logic. I then work to add evidence and rationale to a thought or statement. This one will likely appear in early Jan.

The world's largest digital bank just did this 👇 What happens when 100m customers have access to Stablecoins? Stablecoins become the new normal.

Nubank hits 100m users Affirm has a massive earnings beat Monzo extends it's growth round Fintech has no chill

I've had two VERY senior B2B Fintech company leaders ask me how to get smart on Stablecoins, today. It's 10:43am. In the UK timezone.

Stablecoins are not a consumer phenomenon B2B now dominates stablecoin payment flows Chart courtesy of @artemis

With decentralised exchanges now all the rage we have to learn the lessons of centralised exchanges 1) user experience has to be better 2) performance has to be better 3) don't fight the law Expanded below...

Chime has 7m active users $1.5bn annual revenue 1/3rd cost to serve of a traditional bank Launching unsecured loans Will do ETFs soon This is the "we're ready for IPO" press tour

We finally get our first stablecoin IPO! Some thoughts on the Circle S1. 👇 IPO szn is here. Circle is targeting a $4B valuation—the biggest crypto listing since Coinbase. They reported - $1.7bn revenue, -39.3% gross margin, - and an operating profit of $167m

The OCC paved the way for banks to 👇 1. Access public chains (Eth, BTC, Celo, USDC) as payments rails 2. Hold each of those coins directly or on behalf of clients 3. Run a node for each of those chains Biggest legitimization moment of decentralized infrastructure yet 📣

BLACKROCK CEO: "We're not spending enough time talking about how QUICKLY we're going to tokenize EVERY ASSET" 😳 We talk a lot about AI We don't talk enough about - What tokenization means for the dollar - What tokenization means for FX - What happens when every company uses a digital wallet

Every damn time.

13. Over time Russia (and China) may be emboldened to build out alternatives to SWIFT. China is building an alternative to SWIFT called CIPS (Cross-border Interbank Payment System). Today CIPS is small, but China and Russia could provide a regional alternative to SWIFT

New report from 11:FS - "Rebuilding financial services from the Inside" Thread 🧵 Get the report here👇 11fs.com/reports/rebuilding-…

This year's @ycombinator winter batch had 25 #fintech companies (13% of the total) Here's my breakdown of each of them 👇 sytaylor.substack.com/p/y-co…

New report: Embedded Finance is reshaping #fintech * Banks core business model is broken * New players are disintermediating the bank relationship * Banks that that lean in can capture a $trillion opportunity How? New @11FS report 📑 11fs.com/insights-banking-as… tl;dr 👇

Coinbase now has a larger market cap than Barclays Oh how the mighty have fallen

The absolute schooling the Internet is doing of @chamath trying to act tough on @pitdesi is hilarious. The wisdom of the crowd

Crypto isn't a developed markets story It's a developing markets story 👇 % of consumers who say they own crypto

Bridge AKA @Stablecoin (acquired by Stripe) filed for an OCC national trust charter to "tokenize trillions of dollars." Circle did it in July. Ripple in August. Paxos followed. Coinbase this month. Why is every stablecoin company getting OCC Trust Charters? Here's why 🧵

Just dropped: The State of Fintech 2025. The age of the Fintech Hyperscaler. Fintech companies are growing faster than incumbents and will soon be the largest companies in their category. Includes - Every bank job title will have an AI Agent team replacing labor. The first adopters will be Fintech companies not incumbents. - Embedded finance will come roaring back in 2025, as regulatory pressures ease. - Big banks had a banner year helped by rising rates and a return of investment banking income - Digital banks outside the US continue to become some of the biggest in their region, will more Neobanks get charters in the US in 2025? I think yes. Find it at the link in my bio.

Stablecoins solve a bottleneck in the internet economy. 20th-century money is too slow, expensive, and infrequent for the demand of internet-scale payments. This is a pattern that repeats in history. 🧵

Wow A bank pleading guilty to massive AML failings. If only there was some global, public record of transactions bringing transparency to finance... reuters.com/business/finance…

Build a closed loop payment network That's compatible with all other payments networks Every merchant will want in

🆕 @coinbase launches x402, the HTTP for Money, built on stablecoins for Agentic Commerce. Buzzwords aside, this could be the most significant thing to happen to payments since tokenization. That's not hyperbole. Hear me out. The internet was built to move information, not money. For 30+ years, we've been patching together credit cards, bank transfers, and subscriptions that weren't designed for today's digital economy with tokens. Coinbase's new x402 protocol just changed the model. It resurrects the dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code that's been sitting in web protocols since 1992, turning it into a native money layer for the internet. x402 lets developers and AI agents pay for APIs, services, and software directly with stablecoins over HTTP. With just a few lines of code, x402 offers built-in authentication and automatic settlement. Here's why this matters for the future of AI agents and payments: Every AI transaction today is bottlenecked by humans - AI can search for hotels but needs YOUR credit card to book - AI can craft emails but needs YOUR subscription to send - AI can design logos but needs YOUR account to buy assets Agents today can think but can't pay without some link back to a human. Stablecoin wallets are an elegant solution in theory, but in practice they're hard to use and have limited adoption. x402 makes digital money move like data Coinbase's solution is brilliantly simple: - When an AI agent hits a paywall, the server returns a 402 status - The agent automatically attaches a signed stablecoin payment - Transaction settles instantly and content/service is delivered - No credit cards, tokens, or human intervention Just a few lines of code turns any API into a pay-per-use service. The practical use cases are mind-blowing: - AI agents autonomously buying GPU compute on demand - Bots purchasing real-time sports data to place bets - Virtual assistants paying for premium research without asking you first - Automated inventory systems buying supply chain data in real-time I think I'm most excited about having a genuine alternative to subscriptions in the internet economy. But there will be practical barriers to adoption. Coinbase has made a good start with AWS, Anthropic and Circle as partners (as well as NEAR, who's founder co-authored attention is all you need, the seminal paper that lead to ChatGPT) But this is just one model - Visa and Mastercard just released their "agent tokenization" toolkits - Stripe and PayPal are building their own agent commerce systems - KnotAPI's just launched a cool "card-on-file" for AI Agents My prediction: x402 could do for money what HTTPS did for security andbecome the invisible standard that powers trillions in transactions. IF it gets momentum. If I were a card network, I'd be leaning into this HARD. Because tokens should compliment not compete.

Biggest story in stablecoins nobody noticed Alipay, the mobile payments wallet with 1 billion users, will launch a EURO Stablecoin BREUR, to the European market They're only the second to be listed by the European Regulator ESMA. This is HUGE for reasons you're missing 🧵

Klarna has filled for IPO in the US. This is interesting for a handful of reasons 1. It picked the US not Europe (its home) 2. It could be the dam breaking for Fintech IPOs in 2025 3. It's an incredible comeback story from a massive down-round to multi-billion IPO 👀 ICYMI: Klarna submitted its paperwork to the SEC on November 12th. There are reports of a $20bn valuation, but Klarna hasn't announced pricing or the number of shares on offer. Klarna claims 85 million customers and over 575,000 merchants. The company delivered its first adjusted profit in the first half of 2024. 🧠 The US is the logical place for a firm with large US presence to list. - The US stock market tends to be much kinder to tech companies than the UK or European stock exchanges. - Adyen and Wise are notable exceptions, but even UK companies like ARM listed on NASDAQ. - Europe HAS to get its act together to capture growth companies in the future. 🧠 Announcing now, as tech and finance stocks are up is great timing. - Klarna has got a lot of PR mileage out of its AI usage, but its timing on profitability and the market cycle is ideal. - Investors in 2023 were bearish on Fintech generally, we saw no IPOs. But as the index has improved so has investor sentiment, maximizing the chances of a strong launch. 🧠 What a comeback story. - Klarna once valued at over $45bn, dropped to $6.7bn during Fintech winter, only to be recently revalued by an investor closer to $14bn and potentially IPO at $20bn. - That's a massive number. 🧠 BNPL is one of the best and most true disruptive innovations in Fintech - I've written before that BNPL based on all available data I've seen is less bad than revolving credit lines (like credit cards) and WAY better than pay day loans. - Things can still go wrong of course, as they can with any product, but I think the BNPL = bad crowd have now firmly lost the debate. 🧠 Nobody is talking about BNPL and fraud. - Anything that allows more frictionless commerce is a fraud risk. - A common use case is wardrobing (buy, wear once, send back without ever risking cash). But there's also more sophisticated attacks. - The industry will react well to this, but merchants now need to figure out where BNPL and other non card methods (like pay by bank) fit in their payments and risk strategy. Kudos to everyone at Klarna for making it here. Game on!