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In this month's fintech newsletter, we look at how AI is driving a new beginning for fintech. Plus, when fintechs look more like banks, what does it mean for valuations?
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Blackstone's CTO describes the qualities he looks for in early stage companies and predicts AI's impact on real estate, credit, and energy.
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This month, the a16z fintech team went to Fintech DevCon, payments platform Moov’s annual conference for the fintech developer community.
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Latin America is emerging as a tech powerhouse, but it's not a one-size-fits-all market.
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A conversation about the role startups are playing in partnership with big banks and where Tim disagrees with the zeitgeist on the adoption of AI in financial services.
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a16z General Partner David George interviews Capital Group's Mark Casey on his investment philosophy and what sends him into what he calls "barnacle mode."
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Here's where AI agents and software can have the most immediate impact on your business, and make you more efficient and productive.
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BNY's Akash Shah on the company's approach to adopting AI and what advice he would give to fintech startup founders.
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a16z General Partner Angela Strange, Plaid CEO Zach Perret, and Marqeta CEO Simon Khalaf discuss how AI and fintech will shape the future of banking.
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a16z General Partner Alex Rampell recently spoke to CEO of Rocket Companies Varun Krishna about his newest role, AI, and the future of real estate.
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May Fintech Newsletter: New a16z Fintech Podcast, Q&A With Rocket Companies’ Varun Krishna, and More
In May’s Fintech newsletter, we introduce our new podcast “In the Vault,” where we share exclusive conversations with financial industry leaders.
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The stakes are high. The opportunities are profound. From the creation of new medicines to bolstering national defense, this is our vision for the AI-enabled future.
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There’s likely a whole category of non-AI companies and products that can FINALLY exist *because of the productivity gains of AI.*
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a16z Fintech connects ambitious technology founders with financial services leaders who recognize the power of generative AI.
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In this In the Vault episode, a16z General Partner David Haber talks with Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti about fintech, financial services, and GenAI.
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In this In the Vault episode, a16z General Partner Angela Strange talks with Jeff Sloan, former CEO of Global Payments, about industry trends and AI.
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In this In the Vault episode, a16z General Partner David Haber talks with Sixth Street Partners' Marty Chavez about his storied career and AI's promise.
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We have provided many resources in this series for this stage of your business journey. We’d like to wrap up by focusing on how to manage debt post-closing.
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a16z’s Alex Immerman chats with Mercury cofounder and CEO Immad Akhund and BILL CEO René Lacerte about fintech's future.
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In this month’s newsletter, we gauge where AI solutions are emerging in financial services, Reuters’ AI war chest, and the big real estate settlement.
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3 financial service giants cornered the market on data at the dawn of the digital age. What can founders learn from them?
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Jamil Khan explains how H&R Block is using AI, as well as what advice he would give founders looking to build in this space.
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In this newsletter, we launch some new features: a monthly Q&A with a fintech leader and a "chart of the month" on a market trend.
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As students of financial markets, we’re keenly interested in moments of inflection which alter market structure, spawn dominant new institutions, and catalyze the growth of new asset classes. Historically, these shifts h...
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As 2024 kicks firmly into gear, we’re keeping our eyes on some interesting stats and observations that may yield bigger developments down the line. Here are 4 things that stood out to us this month.
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Over the past decade, data infrastructure across industries has been modernized by many disruptors like Databricks, Fivetran, et al. The modern data stack has made it much easier for companies to ingest, store, query, an...
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a16z partner Seema Amble talks with Dimitri Dadiomov, the co-founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, about the challenges of creating a new category.
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Smart energy grids. Voice-first companion apps. Programmable medicines. AI tools for kids. We asked over 40 partners across a16z to preview one big idea they believe will drive innovation in the coming year.
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Episode Transcript
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a16z partner Seema Amble talks with the founder and current executive chairman of Marqeta Jason Gardner about how to expand in multiple verticals.
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a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Pilot Waseem Daher on pricing and never stepping away from doing founder-led sales.
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a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund about how to compete in a category already filled with incumbents.
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The CFPB published its proposed Personal Financial Data Rights rule, which could usher in an open banking shift.
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We aim to demystify the “B2FI” (or “business to financial institution”) for fintech companies, with lessons from those who have experienced it.
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Embarking on a debt raise can be a daunting task and we aim to demystify the debt-raising process at large and navigate you through it.
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a16z’s Fintech partners analyze Intuit’s new AI assistant, JPM’s partnership with Gusto, and mark a recent embedded fintech development.
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How cross-border infrastructure, instant payments, and open banking advances are creating a more integrated, financially inclusive world.
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The company of the future is default global. Top fintech entrepreneurs are pursuing integrated cross-border payment infrastructure and full-stack solutions.
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The process of moving money between countries is complicated and costly. Here's how foreign exchange works and what happens when you send money abroad.
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The UK is the goldilocks of financial services: big enough to be meaningful on a global scale, but small enough to make decisions faster than the U.S. or the rest of Europe.
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Fintech has the potential to fully drive India’s economy. One major factor: the Reserve Bank of India has enacted progressive regulations at a rapid pace.
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Advances in licensing and open finance, the promise of ubiquitous instant payments, and regulatory support for solutions are feeding a fintech surge.
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Through the introduction of open banking and other regulatory advances, the B2B sector is poised to reshape the financial landscape for enterprises in Mexico.
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a16z will lead the Series A of Moment, a new company building infrastructure that abstracts away the complexities of embedding fixed income investments in any application.
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Generative AI is likely going to usher in a far more profound method of company transformation.
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Many digital-first companies have been propelled by generative AI. However, selling these digital products globally is not a straightforward undertaking. Here's how to simplify the cross-border selling experience, get in front of the right customers, and build long-term value.
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Pieter van der Does, co-CEO of Adyen, Anthony Noto, CEO of SoFi, and Kristo Käärmann, CEO of Wise, sat down with a16z Partner Alex Immerman.
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If you’re looking for something fun, or a bit more business-minded, to read, watch, or listen to, a16z’s Fintech partners have you covered.
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When pricing a new B2B fintech product or service, simplicity is the key, especially at the earliest stages.
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Though there has been a significant increase in the number of funds and banks offering debt financing to startups in Brazil, many founders in the country still find raising debt capital to be a complicated process. This resource offers a practical roadmap.
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How large language models could help gather relevant data for with more complex underwriting processes, like commercial and life insurance.
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Those who complain about hallucinations miss the point. A dispersion of outputs (including hallucinations) will unlock a whole new category of product design: probabilistic products.
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At this early stage in generative AI, technologists and product pickers will likely have the biggest impact on which companies emerge as winners.
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This deep dive explores the sustainable differentiation that results in a compounding flywheel, with a focus on financial services companies that sell commodity-like, nonphysical world products like money and insurance.
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How technology will make our healthcare system more intuitive, efficient, and cost-effective.
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We believe there is a significant opportunity for startups to serve companies building in high-risk industries like games, sports betting, and cannabis.
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The emergence of generative AI could yield the largest transformation the financial services market has seen in decades.
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When computers were first built, each new application had to be programmed specifically for each chip. This was very complicated for developers and, as a result, the companies that created operating systems to simplify t...
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Visa and Mastercard currently facilitate more than three-quarters of all credit card transactions in the United States, at a time when post-pandemic Americans are now using credit or debit cards for roughly 57% of all tr...
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This article is the second of four installments in our new series, How Fintech Companies Can Simplify Their Funding Strategy. Read part one on Choosing the Right Funding Structure here.
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Today’s startups are harder-pressed to manufacture explosive growth in short periods of time. Yet that's what they need to do to compete with big firms.
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As we first shared in 2019, everything is relative — especially home prices in the Bay Area. These prices have continued to rise on an absolute basis over the last 12 years; the typical home in Palo Alto, for example, ro...
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From entertainment franchise games to the precision delivery of medicines, small modular reactors to loads of AI applications, here are 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for 2023.
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Multifamily real estate in the U.S., which includes apartment buildings, condominiums, townhouses, and mixed-use developments, is one of the largest asset classes in the world. Approximately 44 million residences are con...
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If you’re a fintech nerd like me, you’ve probably opened up more neobank accounts than you can count.
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In this episode of a16z Live, we are joined by Titan co-founder and co-CEO Clayton Gardner; a16z General Partner Anish Acharya; and a16z growth partner, Alex Immerman. The trio starts their conversation by diving into th...
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Instant payments, tiered licensing for fintech startups, sandbox programs, and other regulatory changes have had a marked impact on financial services.
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Choosing the right funding structure can have a meaningful impact on the trajectory of your company, its ability to scale, and your bottom line.
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Now that the launch of the highly anticipated real-time payments network FedNow is finally happening, what will it mean for real-time payments in the U.S.?
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The way businesses move money internationally has not changed in decades. Why do cross-border transactions take so long and cost so much to complete? The distributed global ledger is to blame. Here are the three key wedges to create other types of business payments.
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Over the past several years, the field of fintech infrastructure has exploded with venture capital investment and entrepreneurial attention. Between the emergence of Stripe, Plaid, and other category-defining decacorns;...
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When the U.S. government pursued its huge Covid stimulus package in 2020, they likely had little idea their actions would have such an impact on consumer fintech.
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As I reflect upon my experience building Bond Street (an SMB lending startup we sold to Goldman Sachs in 2017), one of the biggest challenges we faced was in scaling customer acquisition. In retrospect, there were two cr...
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Much opportunity exists to build a modern software stack that supports the next generation of default global companies, from local employment law and talent sourcing to multi-country incorporation and expense management.
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Fintech companies with pay-as-you-go pricing have more revenue volatility, but they also align cost and value for a low barrier to adoption, fast and high rates of expansion, and strong customer retention.
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At its core, wealth management is fairly straightforward: an advisor helps a customer optimize their tax and investment strategies to maximize wealth creation and preservation. But while this premise may seem simple, its...
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Plus, envisioning a new consumer banking stack, Apple & contactless payments, and building to reduce medical debt.
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Over the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic shift in capital flow from the public to private markets. Since 2000, private market assets have grown over 10 times, representing over $6 trillion globally. This trend h...
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We are in the early days of consumer fintech -- today, only 15% of Americans bank exclusively through fintechs, and Wall Street real estate remains dominated by legacy players. But that is poised to change, and we are se...
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As businesses become more global, payment complexity increases. Financial operations is an emerging software category that presents a massive opportunity.
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Open source will catalyze the financial services industry's biggest evolution to date. This evolution will shift the power in this $25 trillion industry from business executives to developers, not just in fintech compani...
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In the last 10 years, as neobanks emerged and consumer financial services came online, the prevailing assumption was that credit unions and community banks would slowly die off. How would a locally-focused, relationship-...
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On behalf of the entire a16z team, I am thrilled to welcome David Haber as our newest general partner. I am equally thrilled to say he will be based in New York City, our first full-time GP in Manhattan. As software cont...
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There is an enormous amount of untapped opportunity in Latin America for financial services of all types. The region is currently experiencing an explosion of fintech activity, and this is just the beginning. Here are the key market dynamics, the headwinds, and where we believe the next billion-dollar companies will emerge.
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Conventional wisdom holds that passive trading is the rational investing strategy. Active traders are often portrayed as gambling rubes or lucky opportunists who will (eventually) be handily beaten by index funds. But th...
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Imagine you never had to think about buying insurance—that it was automatically attached to everything you own. Your apartment is broken into? Renters insurance came with your lease. Your dog breaks his leg? Your vet bil...
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In the wake of the GameStop short squeeze, payment for order flow—the practice of market makers paying brokers to execute customer orders—has fueled no small amount of debate: Is it a tactic deployed by large capital mar...
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The internet has many legacies, but its greatest one is disintermediation. And the greatest disintermediation—of the banking system—is coming soon to an app near you.
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This year, as “every company becomes a fintech company,” fintech surged into mainstream consciousness. The fallout from COVID-19 crippled the economy, depressed small businesses, and scrambled many people’s financial out...
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One of the most important catalysts for the recent growth in financial services has been fintech enablers and infrastructure. Companies like Plaid wrap otherwise byanztine legacy infrastructure in modern APIs, allowing e...
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Millennials and Gen Z have been hard-hit by the one-two punch of the 2008 and 2020 financial crises. That experience has radically shaped their approach to finances and their mindset around credit and debt. This episode explores how fintech founders are now designing products tailored to the financial challenges of younger consumers, from managing and avoiding student loans to building credit to saving and budgeting apps.
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Hemingway famously wrote that there are two ways to go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. In many ways, the impact of technology on our day-to-day financial choices has followed a similar trajectory. Fintech has been a...
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By adding fintech, vertical SaaS businesses can increase revenue and open up new, previously inaccessible SaaS markets.
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This episode is the second in a two-part series that examines the pandemic’s impact on real estate. This episode, Part 2, focuses on the fallout for renters and landlords.
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This episode is the first in a two-part series that examines the pandemic’s impact on real estate. Part 1 focuses on prospective home buyers, sellers, and existing homeowners. Part 2 (streaming on 6/17) addresses renters and landlords. How has social distancing shaken up the market to buy? What’s the ripple effect of eviction freezes and a record number of homes in forbearance? And how can tech streamline the inefficient process of renting, buying, and selling a home?
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This post was updated on 4/27/20 to reflect additional fintech efforts.
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