The Great Convergence: How Fintech and Ecommerce Are Changing The Game

Some of the world’s biggest ecommerce enablers are starting to look a lot like fintech companies.

Millions of Amazon’s Indian customers, for instance, are now taking advantage of instant zero-interest and low-interest credit to pay for products weeks or even months after receiving them. Shopify saw its revenues jump 57% year-on-year after unveiling a new Shop Pay checkout tool. And in Indonesia, ecommerce giant Tokopedia merged with fintech innovator Gojek to create GoTo, a tech giant that contributes 2% to Indonesia’s GDP.

This “great convergence” between fintech and ecommerce is partly driven by the global pandemic, which compressed a decade’s worth of ecommerce growth into a few short months. Customer trust in fintech, perhaps out of necessity, skyrocketed as we worked and shopped from home, and consumers remain eager to use innovations like contactless payments in the post-pandemic era. That’s left fintech players looking to ride the ecommerce wave, and ecommerce companies seeking to tap new fintech revenue streams such as payments.

As investors, we’re never going to turn our noses up at this kind of unprecedented opportunity. But we believe this “great convergence” isn’t just about companies scrambling to grab market share and drive revenue. The reality is that this is one of those rare instances where 1 plus 1 really does add up to 3 — because when you bring the right ecommerce and fintech companies together, you wind up with something that’s much more than just the sum of its parts. And that can only be a good thing for both merchants and consumers.

For example, two members of the Oak HC/FT family — financing pioneer Clearco and ecommerce innovator Cart.com — recently joined forces to provide merchants with access to capital and an end-to-end suite of ecommerce tools to scale their businesses. Cart.com users can now access up to $10 million in instant financing via Clearco — and Clearco customers can use Cart.com’s unified console to quickly and effectively deploy the capital they’ve raised towards marketing, fulfillment operations or software capabilities.

That’s good for both companies, which benefit from reaching a shared customer pool representing over 8,000 top ecommerce brands. But it’s even more exciting because it isn’t just about the synergies that come from bringing together powerful fintech and ecommerce solutions. It’s also about the shared vision for what intelligent fintech integration can help founders and merchants to achieve.

Amid the IPO gold rush, how should we value fintech startups?

My colleague, Tess Munsie and I, originally published this piece in TechCrunch here.

If there has ever been a golden age for fintech, it surely must be now. As of Q1 2021, the number of fintech startups in the U.S. crossed 10,000 for the first time ever — well more than double that if you include EMEA and APAC. There are now three fintech companies worth more than $100 billion (Paypal, Square and Shopify) with another three in the $50 billion-$100 billion club (Stripe, Adyen and Coinbase).

Yet, as fintech companies have begun to go public, there has been a fair amount of uncertainty as to how these companies will be valued on the public markets. This is a result of fintechs being relatively new to the IPO scene compared to their consumer internet or enterprise software counterparts. In addition, fintechs employ a wide variety of business models: Some are transactional, others are recurring or have hybrid business models.

In addition, fintechs now have a multitude of options in terms of how they choose to go public. They can take the traditional IPO route, pursue a direct listing or merge with a SPAC. Given the multitude of variables at play, valuing these companies and then predicting public market performance is anything but straightforward.

The fintech gold rush has arrived

For much of the past two decades, fintech as a category has been very quiet on the public markets. But that began to change considerably by the mid-2010s. Fintech had clearly arrived by 2015, with both Square and Shopify going public that year. Last year was a record one with eight fintech IPOs, and there has been no slowdown in 2021 — the first four months have already produced seven IPOs. By our estimates, there are more than 15 additional fintech companies that could IPO this year. The current record will almost certainly be shattered well before the end of the year.

Not all fintech is created equal

It is important to note that fintech is a complex category with many different types of players, and not all fintech is created equal. Nor will all fintech public valuations live up to the hype. To understand this more deeply, we need to examine the various business models that fintechs employ today and the revenue multiples these models can command on the public markets.

Broadly speaking, we can divide most fintech IPOs into four buckets: (1) Lending 1.0 (e.g., LendingClub), (2) Payments (e.g., Square), (3) fintech SaaS (e.g., Avalara), and (4) BNPL (e.g., Affirm). Just three years ago, all but Lending 1.0 coalesced at ~10x forward revenue, but the forward multiples (and valuations) of these companies have evolved substantially since — particularly in the year since COVID struck.

Lending 1.0

The first wave of lending companies has remained the lowest valued throughout this period at ~2x-3x forward revenue. This is despite recent favorable public market conditions for most tech companies. This low multiple is a reflection of overall deteriorating business characteristics (e.g., negative growth rates, high losses and challenged unit economics). Many of the Lending 1.0 players also served end customers like subprime consumers or brick-and-mortar SMBs that were heavily impacted by COVID.

We expect these Lending 1.0 companies to continue to trade at low, single-digit revenue multiples (likely around 3x). We have seen some consolidation in this space as well (OnDeck was acquired by Enova last year, for example), and suspect that there will be more M&A in the years ahead.

Payments

Payments has been the most consistently valued group of the four categories, rising modestly to ~12x during this three-year period (despite some fluctuations). This group includes scaled businesses like Square and Paypal generating billions of dollars in revenue at decent gross margins (40s-50s) and still growing at around 40%-50% year over year. As they mature and reach scale, many of these companies have diversified their product offerings and looked to inorganic channels for further growth.

We predict that this category will see slight valuation uplift in the coming years to ~13x-15x. This will mostly be a result of younger companies like Stripe and Toast entering the IPO pipeline in the next few years. With strong growth rates, these new entrants will receive higher multiples and raise the average multiple for the payments category.

Fintech SaaS

Like much of enterprise software, fintech SaaS was a very clear winner over the past 12 months, doubling forward multiples to ~20x. This was a result of positive COVID tailwinds, recurring revenue models, high gross margins (70%-80%+) and general business reliance on core financial software systems. Many of these companies also have very high net-dollar retention (in many cases >120%), perhaps the most important metric aside from growth.

That said, there is some potential that this category has experienced the most multiple inflation of the four categories. As we move into a post-COVID era, 20x revenue multiples may not be sustainable. We expect fintech SaaS companies to reset to a new “steady state” well above 10x, but likely in the 15x-20x range.

Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL)

BNPL is the newest and most fascinating basket of the bunch. Pre-COVID, this group quickly expanded up to trade at ~15x due to 100%+ growth rates, hyper network effects, enormous markets and consumer virality. At the start of COVID, these companies saw their multiples briefly dip almost down to Lending 1.0 levels before the market priced in the strength of these models and their enabling of e-commerce merchants (many of which were COVID-accelerated), all while seeing no material impact to loss ratios. While average multiples in this category briefly exploded to 30x+, with Affirm’s debut, we have seen them fall back to earth a bit.

Still, this category currently commands the highest multiples in all fintech at ~25x. Given we are still in the very early innings of e-commerce globally, we expect the near-term steady state for BNPL multiples to be somewhere in the 20x-25x range. We look forward to Klarna’s reception on the public markets later this year.

But what about insurtech and crypto?

Importantly, there are two additional categories (not pictured above) that have begun to emerge within fintech: insurtech (Root and Lemonade) and crypto (Coinbase). While the data is still limited in terms of number of IPOs and time on the public markets, we will eventually add these as their own categories to the chart above. As of the end of April, Root was trading at 6.6x, Lemonade was trading at 46.7x, and Coinbase was trading at 12.5x.

The return of the SPAC

One big caveat to our discussion on valuation and multiples is, of course, the return of the SPAC. In 2020, SPACs burst back onto the scene and have rapidly made an impact on the IPO landscape. Metromile was the first fintech to be taken public via SPAC this year, but there is a wave of additional SPAC IPOs on the horizon (e.g., SOFI, Hippo, Payoneer and MoneyLion) and plenty of demand from investors for SPAC IPOs — there are currently over 150 fintech or financial-oriented SPACs seeking targets.

SPACs represent the Wild West for fintech public valuations. SPACs targeting fintechs is a relatively new phenomenon, and many of these blank check companies are taking fintech targets public earlier than they otherwise would via a traditional IPO. How SPACs perform on the public markets and the impact they have on the fintech valuation story is perhaps the most interesting question for 2021.

That said, whether it be via SPAC, direct listing or traditional IPO, we are likely to see at least 10 to 15 fintechs go public this year — possibly more. That is nothing short of astounding. The spotlight will be bright this year on fintech IPOs as the gold rush continues.

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You can access the data (including the underlying raw data) for the graphs above by clicking the link here.

What is B2B fintech?

We originally published this piece in Forbes here.

Over the last few years, consumer fintech has been all the rage. And for good reason: consumer fintech startups have greatly improved the customer experience across many financial applications. This has led to a number of great outcomes including Intuit’s acquisition of Credit Karma for $7.1B earlier this year and Paypal’s acquisition of Honey for $4B at the end of ’19. And consumers are voting with their wallets: 14.2M Americans (6% of US adults with a checking account) now consider a challenger bank like Chime, Varo, etc to be their primary bank.

While the spotlight has long centered on consumer fintech, 2020 will mark the year that B2B fintech finally steals the show. Not only b/c of the recent exits we’ve seen (Plaid’s $5.3B sale to Visa, SoFi’s $1.2B acquisition of Galileo and nCino’s recent IPO) but also because of the ever expanding purview of B2B fintech. This begs the natural question: what is B2B fintech?

A 20-year Evolution

Defining B2B fintech requires going back in time a few decades. If we look at the evolution of B2B fintech, we are effectively on the cusp of a 3rd wave: fintech 3.0. The last 20 years have witnessed a widening of B2B fintech’s mandate and, as a result, a broader base of enduring public winners.

Modern B2B fintech first began in the early 2000s with companies focused on just two “core fintech” areas: payments and banking-as-a-service. The most notable company to come out of fintech 1.0 was of course Paypal. Founded at the dawn of the internet, Paypal actually operated via a B2B2C model, embedding at the point-of-sale with merchants and enabling consumers to transact with merchants effortlessly. Paypal now has a market cap of over $230B.

In the 2010s, fintech 2.0 emerged and the definition of B2B fintech began to expand. Within “core fintech,” we saw payments and banking-as-a-service continue to deliver big outcomes (e.g. Square, Afterpay and Q2.) But core fintech expanded with the rise of lending-focused companies (e.g. LendingClub, Greensky) as well as commerce infrastructure (e.g. Shopify.) We also saw the emergence of enterprise software/SaaS companies in fintech-adjacent verticals like real estate (e.g. RealPage) and horizontals like finance operations and HR benefits (e.g. Blackline, Bill.com, Paylocity.)

In the 2020s, we are sure to see fresh winners emerge in the fintech 1.0/2.0 categories. Many of these categories (like payments) are evergreen and continuously evolving. Others are still quite nascent in their overall development arc. But fintech 3.0 will continue to further fintech’s broadening mandate. Core fintech will expand to include winners in identity, fraud and risk (several of which are already in the making.) We are also likely to see additional winners in fintech-adjacent verticals like insurance and fintech-adjacent horizontals like compliance, privacy and security.

Historically Strong Performance

Fintech 3.0’s prospects are particularly exciting given just how well earlier generations of B2B fintech (1.0/2.0) have performed on the public markets. With the notable exception of the lending category, every other category has posted at minimum triple digit growth post-IPO. In fact, the aggregate market cap of this basket of B2B fintechs has increased 1,661% post-IPO and is now worth half a trillion dollars.

Themes & Building Blocks for Fintech 3.0

As we look towards the 2020s, fintech will continue to broaden in scope and mandate. We will see core fintech areas like payments, banking and lending continue to re-invent themselves again and again. We will also see a greater number of enterprise software/ SaaS entrants rising up across verticals and horizontals in adjacent areas to traditional fintech.

Perhaps even more intriguing will be the meshing of these fintech themes with the broader trends in technology, product functionality and commercialization. Many of the building blocks seen in other parts of the technology landscape will be expressed through these fintech 3.0 entrants. This will include, for example, the latest tools in machine learning, automation and open source. This will also include a myriad of gtm approaches (e.g. top-down, bottoms up, product-led-growth, etc.)

Suffice to say, the 2020s are going to be an incredibly exciting time to be building and investing in B2B fintech. The number of B2B fintechs that will be public in 10 years’ time will triple, generating well over $1T in total aggregate value. B2B Fintech has arrived and is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Anchoring Oak’s efforts out West

**This post was originally published on the Oak HC/FT website here**

Last month, I joined Oak HC/FT’s San Francisco team. I could not be more excited to help identify and partner with the next generation of entrepreneurs in FinTech, building on Oak HC/FT’s strong legacy of investors and operators who have built enduring companies for decades.

Over the course of the last ten years, FinTech has really begun to hit its stride. There are now nearly 40 FinTech unicorns globally (more than any other vertical) worth an aggregate value of nearly $150B. Not bad for a sector that didn’t have a ton of buzz when Oak first started investing in the space in 2002.

FinTech_CBInsights — Source: CB Insights

And this is just the beginning, there will be much more to come in the next 10 years. As I look to the next decade to come, I’m first and foremost eager to learn from the founders and entrepreneurs building at the fore-front of our industry. That said here are a few themes I have been thinking about deeply in recent months and am particularly excited about:

Vertical payments: We have already seen a few successful versions of this playbook including: Toast (restaurants), Flywire (travel & education) and PayIt (government.) But many more verticals could benefit from a bespoke, vertical-specific payments solution including pharma, logistics, manufacturing and more.

Next-generation commerce: Innovation in commerce in recent years has largely come in the form of new payments options (like Square, Affirm and Afterpay.) The next wave of innovation will enhance in-store commerce, logistics/ delivery/ returns, international commerce and buying via new mediums like voice, computer vision and mixed reality.

Intersection of FinTech + AI: Machine learning is already being used in financial services. Our portfolio company, Feedzai, uses machine learning to help banks and merchants fight fraud. In the years to come machine learning will stretch beyond risk and into underwriting, product discovery, predictive intelligence and a number of other use cases.

Middleware tools for developers: Stripe and Plaid have shown us that developers are the next big consumers of financial data and they require tools to access and use that data: be it payments meta-data, account information or piping infrastructure to connect with other financial institutions. As microservices and APIs continue to proliferate, developers will require more tooling to serve end customers.

Banking Applications: Many financial services incumbents suffer from manual-heavy tasks for workflows that have struggled to make the transition to digital. Our portfolio companies Kryon (robotic process automation) and Ocrolus (digitizing financial documents) are two examples of the new wave of companies focused on automation, software-enabled workflows and refined banking applications.

Back-office application software for SMBs: The software stack for most functions (e.g. marketing, sales, customer support, etc.) within an SMB certainly looks a lot better than it did 5 years ago when Oak first invested in Freshbooks. But the finance and accounting functions remain underserved. As SMBs demand better software for their back offices, new entrants will rise to the occasion, providing these businesses with a better way to close their books, pay their vendors and manage payroll.

Financial services for the underserved: Banking services have improved for many of us but there remain many demographics that are underserved. Oak has a history of investing in this category, dating back to NetSpend, which went public in 2010. I’m excited to see founders focus more on low-income Americans, immigrants, freelancers/1099s, older (and younger) generations, those with large sums of student debt, etc.

Future of real estate: Almost everything about commercial and residential real estate stands to be improved for both buyers and sellers. Moreover, the ecosystem players around them (e.g. brokers, agents, lenders, inspectors, etc.) are still mid-transition to cloud-based tools. New entrants in real estate will find ways to improve workflows for these ecosystem players or generate more economic value for buyers and sellers.

If any of this resonates with you, let’s get in touch. I’m focused on opportunities on the west coast (and that certainly includes more than just the Bay Area!) But even if you are outside the west coast, I still want to hear from you. Looking forward to finding ways to collaborate!

Matrix FinTech Index: 2018 Edition

The full overview of the Matrix FinTech Index 2018 edition is available on TechCrunch here.

At the end of 2017 we published the Matrix FinTech Index for the very first time. In what we hope will become an annual tradition, we are excited today to publish an updated index and set of supporting data.

There is no doubt that this has been another stellar year for fintech. In last year’s version of the Matrix FinTech Index, we predicted the crypto enthusiasm would be short lived and that the fintechs would be the more relevant disruptors in 2018. By most metrics this seems to have turned out to be true. A comparison of search interest in “fintech” vs. “crypto” is one clear indicator of this:

Definition: Matrix Partners considers “fintechs” to be venture-backed organizations that are (a) technology-first companies that leverage software to compete with traditional financial services institutions (e.g. banks, credit card networks, insurers, etc.) in the delivery of traditional financial services (e.g. lending, payments, investing, etc.) or (b) software tools that better enable traditional finance functions (e.g. accounting, point-of-sales systems, etc.)

Methodology & Results

As a refresher, the Matrix FinTech Index is a market-cap weighted index that tracks the progress of a portfolio of the 10 leading U.S. public fintech companies over the course of the last two years (beginning in December of 2016). For comparison, we have also included another portfolio of 10 large financial services incumbents (companies like JP Morgan, Visa and American Express) as well as the S&P 500 index.

With two years of data now in, the results are pretty clear — the fintechs continue to outperform both the incumbents and the S&P 500. 2 year-returns for the fintechs were 133% compared to 34% for the incumbents and 24% for the S&P 500.

Updated Data Now Available

As we did last year, we are releasing an updated data package that anyone can download here and which has a range of other helpful information on both the U.S. fintechs and the incumbents. The updated package has much of what we had last year plus a few newer elements:

Market cap and stock price data for the fintechs and incumbents
Comp sheets with financial metrics
Data on the 20 fintech unicorns
Information on the fintech “Brink list” — companies that have raised over $100M in equity financing
M&A & IPO activity in fintech this past year

As always we appreciate your feedback and thoughts on the process and methodology. And we look forward to sharing our thoughts again in 2019!

Enterprise Payments: The next frontier for payments innovation

Towards the end of 2017, we discussed the rise of the FinTechs and briefly alluded to payments as being a key area for further innovation. The payments ecosystem is an ever-evolving space froth with opportunity and plenty of buyers with deep pockets (see Paypal’s announcement a few weeks back). Furthermore, it is a deeply intricate ecosystem with challenging technical problems, shifting regulatory components and a variety of consumer and enterprise use cases. For all these reasons, it is worth a “double click” to explore further.

We have already seen huge amounts of innovation in payments over the last few decades. In the U.S., this innovation was enabled by a few important advances. The establishment (and operation) of ACH by the Federal Reserve Banks and EPN created a much needed electronic network for financial transactions. NFC technology and POS hardware enabled mobile payments. More recently, pay-out APIs and fraud management systems have allowed developers and those working in risk to manage feature build-out while also keeping an eye out for bad actors. And we are just beginning to see some applications of crypto in the payments space — such as this.

Despite these advances, most of the innovation has been focused on two areas: consumer-to-consumer payments (e.g. Venmo), business-to-consumer payments (e.g. Square) or new entrants that facilitate one of the two (e.g. Stripe). A third category, business-to-business payments, has not benefited from innovation to the same degree as the other two categories. This is particularly interesting given that the market size of B2B payments is 5–10x that of C2C or B2C payments. And yet, technology has been slower to transform the B2B payments world. Case in point, B2B payments made by the good ol’ check, as a share of overall transactions, leveled off around 2013 at a point significantly higher than C2C and have actually gone up slightly to ~51%.

Existing Challenges

In the early days of C2C and B2C payments, there were many intricacies from a technical and regulatory perspective that had to be navigated very carefully. After all, real consumer money was at play so the stakes were high. The same is true in the B2B world, with a few additional challenges that make things even more hairy:

Transaction values are significantly higher: While the volume of B2B payments is much lower (some say in the 9:1 range compared to B2B + C2C), the value of these payments per transaction is much larger. This makes enterprise transactions prime targets for hackers, front-runners and a host of others with bad intentions. Beyond the actual financial risk, enterprises also risk having the banking information of their suppliers and customers exposed.
There is greater complexity: In the enterprise payments context there is significantly more complexity. Let’s take the simple example of someone in procurement trying to pay a supplier. Post RFP, legal review, etc., the buyer will need to first work with the various business units and other internal stakeholder to issue a purchase order. The supplier must do the same in order to provide an invoice to the buyer. The buyer must then send a request to the card issuing bank (via p-card or some other mechanism.) The buyer’s bank must then handle settlement with the supplier’s bank. This may happen via check, credit, debit, ACH or even cash. Post-settlement, the buyer and seller must ensure that both their internal financial systems and/or ERP systems are accurately updated. Imagine the complexity involved when doing this hundreds or thousands of times per day across many different payment types (one-off, recurring, up-for renewal, etc.)
Many people are involved with any given transaction: As a result of the greater complexity, many heads are involved on both sides of the transaction. Procurement, legal, finance and the BU may all be involved at various stages. B2B payments affect the workflows of a much broader set of people than C2C or B2C payments.
The life cycle of a payment is longer: As a result of the added complexity and multiple stakeholders, the duration of the payment is longer than in the C2C and B2C contexts. C2C payments in today’s world can clear in a matter of minutes. On the enterprise side, the payment life-cycle can have a duration of 60, 90 or even 180 days.
The life cycle of a payment is longer: As a result of the added complexity and multiple stakeholders, the duration of the payment is longer than in the C2C and B2C contexts. C2C payments in today’s world can clear in a matter of minutes. On the enterprise side, the payment life-cycle can have a duration of 60, 90 or even 180 days.
The U.S. is not well structured for top-down fixes to B2B payments: When Europe moved to the Euro, all the participating countries did a significant overhaul of their banking systems allowing them to make significant upgrades to the tech stack. In the process, they solved a number of the pain points above (including significant reduction/ elimination of checks). But in the U.S., the Fed does not have the authority to mandate unified standards. Lack of standardization is particularly tough in the U.S. as we have many more banks than Europe (including regional and community players) — creating a major interoperability problem with few bank-agnostic solutions. Meanwhile, the U.S. banks themselves have made little attempt to create a common solution to fix the antiquated system.

Key Opportunities

While these challenges are daunting (they most certainly are not for the faint of heart!), the good news for new entrants is that the banks and other FIs are unlikely to be the ones to fix enterprise payments. We believe FinTech startups are best positioned to make progress here, bottoms-up. More specifically, there is an enormous opportunity to capture value in enterprise payments($2.1T in payment revenue by 2026) across 5 specific subcategories: (1) capital markets, (2) procurement, (3) treasury management, (4) payment dev-tools and (5) blockchain.

Capital Markets: Many parts of capital markets (e.g. HFT, commercial lending, etc.) send/receive very large transactions each day. Most of the time these payments are slow, expensive and require manual reviews to ensure they are valid. In the HFT world, for example, every minute matters when making a trade and fees add up. Payments solutions that focus on speed and automation, without sacrificing security will do well here.
Procurement: In procurement, enterprises and their suppliers face the problem of trying to integrate procurement software tools, with ERP systems and antiquated payment processes. This problem is particularly challenging with services and in the “long-tail” spend, where some enterprises have to pay tens of thousands of suppliers each year. Solutions that integrate with existing software solutions, simplify the enterprise’s workflow and get the money to the supplier faster (e.g. lower DSO) will have the most success here.
Treasury Management: Initiating and managing ACH payments to other businesses, auditing those payments and then closing the books at the end of the month is still not straightforward. Software tools that provide solutions for both the finance and the tech team to navigate this process have a shot at building a must-have for anyone trying to get a grip on treasury management. Particularly for SMBs who don’t have the luxury of simply throwing more people at the problem.
Payment Dev Tools: Companies like Stripe and Plaid have created great APIs and financial plumbing tools. But they are largely focused on C2C and B2C payments. B2B developer tools / APIs that work for the IT and risk departments of enterprises and address the complexity therein will do well. Certainly a hairy problem to figure out but there is a lot of spend here for the right solution.
Blockchain: In the short run, blockchains have enough technical issues (e.g. scaling, interoperability, etc.) to work through. But in the long-run distributed ledger technology can provide a single database of truth between two enterprises, eliminating the need for ledgers on both sides and making verification/ security a bit more manageable. The real question from a B2B payments perspective is not “if” but “when.”

At Matrix Partners we are deeply interested in backing the next generation of enterprise payments companies. We focus primarily on Seed/ Series A investing here in the U.S. Please let us know if you are building something interesting here — would be great to meet up and learn more!

FinTech: We’re just getting started

Global FinTech investment in 2017 was unprecedented with $16.6B of capital (+20% compared to 2016) deployed across 1,128 deals. Despite this, some have argued that FinTech’s days are numbered and that it is less clear how much opportunity still remains for future innovation. Proponents of this line of thought argue that most traditional financial services have already been unbundled and that large startups that dominate areas like payments, lending, and investing have even begun to re-bundle services. Moreover, despite the uptick in investment into the sector, the early-stage portion of overall financing dropped to a 5-year low which has further supported the belief that most of the innovation in FinTech has already happened.

At Matrix, we believe that we are still in the early innings of the financial services disruption. While FinTech startups have done very well in the last decade, there is still room for more great companies to be built. As a follow-up to our previous article where we introduced the Matrix FinTech Index, we have put together a corollary to that piece where we specify 7 tailwinds that have powered FinTech innovation for the last 10 years, discuss key drivers for future innovation, and identify the subcategories we believe are most promising.

Review of 7 important tailwinds for innovation in FinTech the last 10 years

Mobile has been leveraged as an enabler: Companies like Squareleveraged mobile as a way to reduce the cost of doing business for merchants by allowing for new features like secure payments via mobile applications.
The financial crisis created unmet demand: Incumbent’s unwillingness to lend to credit poor individuals and high-risk SMBs created a window of opportunity for companies like Lending Club and OnDeck to fulfill this unmet demand.
The payments infrastructure opened up to developers: APIs and developer tools made available by companies like Braintree and Stripeallowed developers to integrate payment processing into their websites without the need to maintain a merchant account.
Online banking penetration unlocked important customer data: Deeper penetration of online banking has made it possible for companies like Yodlee to allow users to see all their banking information on one screen and others like Credit Karma to provide credit monitoring services.
Core financial services have been unbundled: Many sub-segments traditionally handled solely by the banks have been unbundled. For example, SoFi is helping with borrowing, Xoom with money transfers and Mint with financial management.
The cloud provided a new distribution channel to serve SMBs: Companies like Kabbage, which provides loans to SMBs, can now justify serving lower life time value customers like SMBs due to the lower customer acquisition costs associated with the cloud.
Digital disintermediation provided greater value to consumers: Companies like Wealthfront, Betterment and Robinhood all reduce the fees charged by brokerages and traditional investment managers providing greater alpha to retail investors.

Key drivers for innovation in the next 10 years

Many of these 7 trends will continue to play a role in FinTech innovation moving forward. But we have identified 3 additional drivers for innovation in FinTech going forward.

1. Incumbent failures are really coming into focus.

Traditional financial institutions are anachronistic. They serve their customers with antiquated products and are often slow to innovate due to both their size and regulatory burdens. Moreover, financial products have historically not been customer-centric, as banks devote most of their resources to optimizing their data and analysis and boosting their bottom line. Consequently, incumbents in financial services have largely failed to meet the needs of consumers, and the emergence of FinTech has put their shortcomings under the spotlight.

While financial services as an industry has been notorious for low consumer trust levels, consumer trust has plunged even further in the wake of fraud, scandals, and data breaches (e.g. Wells Fargo and Equifax). Additionally, poor customer experience has left consumers with limited loyalty to their financial services providers.

2. Millennials are emerging as the new source of spending power.

Millennials are the largest generation in American history consisting of over 70 million people born between 1980 and 2000. Millennials are digital-first users who grew up distrustful of banks and are generally more inclined to try FinTech applications. Furthermore, while traditional financial services has focused on large pools of wealth characteristic of older generations, FinTech innovation is making financial services and products much more accessible to younger generations.

3. Due to the transition of profit pools, incumbents are going to become a lot more acquisitive in the coming months.

Incumbents have begun to acquire FinTech companies as a means to compete against innovative startups and other acquisitive incumbents. Many of the acquisitions so far have been centered around automation of basic tasks. In the last 5 years, 18 FinTech startups have been acquired by banks, with 8 acquisitions occurring since the beginning of 2017. We believe that there is much more opportunity and incentive to acquire — especially for technologies that go beyond automation.

5 subcategories we are most excited about

Ultimately we believe the incumbents will continue to lose ground to the FinTechs and that there is plenty of opportunity for entrepreneurs to build enduring companies in the sector. Great companies will certainly be built across the entire financial services industry, but here are a few sub-categories within FinTech that we think are particularly exciting:

Payments: Even with all the innovation to date in payments, there continue to be pain points throughout the category and many customer demographics remain underserved. In order to be successful in this category, new entrants will need to build on-top of existing payment rails, serve large TAMs and go after new use cases.
Investing / wealth management: Despite recent innovation by players like Wealthfront, Betterment, Robinhood and others, wealth management remains dominated by the incumbents. This reality makes the category a ripe one for entrepreneurs as there are large TAMs, poor customer experiences and a new generation (i.e. millennials) that have unmet needs. Success here will require intuitive design, low fees and efficient customer acquisition.
Infrastructure Apps: Financial institutions suffer from bloated cost structures in the middle and back office for tasks like fraud/ risk management, collections, invoice management and customer support. There’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs to provide software tools that reduce costs and allow for more efficient work flows if they can manage the lengthy sales cycles and procurement processes.
SMB tools: Companies like Gusto and Namely, have begun to serve SMBs in areas like payroll and benefits administration. Even so, SMBs remain largely underserved compared to larger enterprises. FinTech companies that can acquire SMBs efficiently and provide enterprise-level experiences will be able to generate enough value to their customers to create large outcomes.
B2B Lending tools: On the consumer side, lending has become pretty crowded with some of the winners already declared. But on the enterprise side, the category is very ripe. The opportunity for entrepreneurs is in leveraging data at cloud scale combined with advances in machine learning to allow enterprises to better assess borrower risk and drive higher yield.

The author would like to thank Sreyas Misra for his contributions to this piece.

Revolutionizing wealth management with Jon Stein, Founder & CEO of Betterment

In this fourth episode of Focus on the Founder, Jon Stein, Co-founder & CEO of Betterment joins us to discuss his career journey, experience starting Betterment while in business school and thoughts on wealth management and investing more broadly.

Achieving Personalization At-Scale

Betterment is a robo-advisor platform that provides investment advice and wealth management at a low price point. The wealth management space is fiercely competitive. Startups like Betterment, Wealthfront, and Robinhood as well as incumbents like Vanguard and Schwab have all entered the space, competing to provide personalized, low-cost advice to consumers.

Since Betterment launched in 2010, their assets under management have grown rapidly, reaching almost $12 billion earlier this month. During this conversation, Jon discusses his experiences growing Betterment, and how Betterment has succeeded in such a competitive environment through truly putting the customer first. As always, you can find the full podcast episode on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Play.

Key Thoughts from Jon on…

The reasons behind founding Betterment:

While working for the First Manhattan Consulting Group, Jon advised some of the world’s largest banks and brokerages. In the process, Jon gained an insider’s perspective on how banks operate and serve their customers. His product-development engagements with banks typically involved working on the key aspects of their products such as default rates and internal transfer pricing. Notably, these larger players paid almost no attention to their customers during the product-development process, as they focused much more on optimizing their data and existing flows, which Jon found perplexing. While working in Australia, Jon encountered user-centric financial products not available in the US at the time, such as the mortgage-offset account which combines a traditional mortgage and deposit account.

These experiences helped frame the problem that Betterment aims to solve — that “the old way of managing money is broken.” Investment management should be held to a higher standard — one which focuses far more on consumers.

Building a team:

Jon committed to starting Betterment before starting his MBA at Columbia Business School. In the early days, building Betterment was a two-fold challenge — building the actual product and navigating the regulatory challenges of being an investment advisor.

Sean Owen, Jon’s roommate at the time, provided much of the early engineering expertise. Sean was a software engineer at Google who studied computer science at Harvard, and built the back-end of Betterment while Jon worked on the front-end. Jon eventually met Eli Broverman during a weekly poker game. Eli, who was then a securities attorney, provided the legal expertise and helped Jon navigate through complex regulatory landscape. Sean and Eli’s skillsets were diverse and congruent with the early challenges that Jon needed to solve.

The fundraising journey:

Betterment launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, where they competed against 500+ entrants, many of which had already raised some amount of funding. Betterment went on to win the competition, giving him crucial exposure to customers and investors. Immediately following the competition, Betterment signed up 400 new customers, who helped drive Betterment’s initial organic growth by way of referrals. The boost in credibility from the event made it easier to hire new employees, and helped Betterment rapidly grow from what was at the time a four-person team.

Just as important, preparing for the Disrupt presentation helped Jon and his team internalize their story and understand how to best pitch the idea. A month following the TechCrunch competition, Jon was able to raise $3 million from Bessemer Venture Partners.

How Betterment puts customers first:

Since the initial investment from Bessemer, Betterment has secured $275 million in funding and has grown significantly in employee count and AUM. In this period of growth, Jon doubled down on the theme of bringing the voice of the customer into every interaction. This focus has helped Betterment withstand the test of time and compete effectively against a host of startups and incumbents offering similar services.

Private Robo-Advisors in the Wealth-Technology Category

Betterment puts the customer first by:

1. Personalizing advice

Betterment’s vision is to provide excellent financial guidance that is easy to understand and available to everyone. Betterment is unique in that it offers a spectrum of interaction-types: customers who prefer human interaction can receive hybrid-robo solutions through Betterment’s unlimited text messaging and premium telephone access services. By prioritizing the education of their end-user, Betterment offers a suite of solutions to improve consumer-access to financial markets.

2. Building trust

Financial services as an industry has historically had a low NPS. Betterment strives to build trust with its customers as both an ethical obligation and a means of differentiation. In addition to investment advice, Betterment publishes scores of articles helping consumers understand their personal finances, navigate through tax reform, and manage their expenses. Betterment also has no holdings of their own; thus, they eliminate many of the conflicts of interest present in most banks.

3. Combining responsibility with wealth creation

Betterment offers a way for consumers to hold well-diversified portfolios that are also socially responsible through their socially responsible investing (SRI) portfolio. Social responsibility doesn’t just afford Betterment an additional dimension of personalization; it also reflects well on their brand as an ethical investment advisor.

The future of investment management:

In this bull market, massive amounts of capital have been pushed into indices and ETFs, which represent a little over 10% of the global equity market capitalization. In fact, these indices and ETFs, spearheaded by firms like BlackRock and Vanguard, have outperformed an overwhelming majority of hedge funds.

Net flows into U.S.-based passively managed funds and out of active funds in the first half of each year

Jon explains that Betterment is here to stay even in increasingly likely bear market scenarios, as the same principles of minimizing cost and managing tax burdens that currently power Betterment’s platform still apply during downturns. Through careful risk-management, alternative investment strategies, and optimizing customer behavior to prevent market panic, Betterment aims not only to protect its customers in bear markets but also provide them competitive returns.

Announcing our new Podcast Series ‘Focus on the Founder’ with our first guest – Ryan Williams of Cadre

Over the years, we’ve heard from our founders here at Matrix that some of the best learning opportunities they’ve had has come from 1:1 conversations with other entrepreneurs. And while there is no shortage of resources for entrepreneurs (including content we have built at Viewpoints and forEntrepreneurs), there are very few public forums where successful founders and operators speak candidly about their career journeys and discuss what has/ has not worked for them as they’ve scaled their businesses.

That is why we are excited to announce ‘Focus on the Founder’ – a podcast series that will do exactly what it sounds like—bring the focus back on the founder. In the coming months, we will be releasing a series of episodes where we ask successful founders and operators questions about their journey into entrepreneurship, how they’ve gone about making critical decisions (e.g. hiring, fundraising, etc.) and what they would do differently looking back.

The initial focus will be on founders and senior execs in FinTech—though this may evolve over time. We will keep the episodes short, informal and frank. The very first episode is with Ryan Williams the CEO and co-founder of Cadre. You can find the podcast episode on SoundCloud, iTunes & Google Play.

In this episode you will learn about…

How Ryan went from selling headbands at age 13 to flipping houses in college to launching Cadre. Or as he puts it “Headbands to Houses to High Rises”
When the real “Aha” moment came for Ryan that led him to believe that there was a big opportunity in real estate technology
What Ryan believes is the single most important characteristic behind the success of companies like Amazon, Airbnb and Fidelity and how Cadre has embraced that characteristic
How Ryan works with his investors and the value they have provided to him beyond the obvious capital injection
The crucial metrics and KPIs that Cadre tracks and measures
What other areas Ryan is excited about and would explore if he were not building Cadre…hint some of them are pretty controversial in the venture world today

Money 2020: 12 lessons from this year’s conference

Earlier this week I attended Money2020 in Las Vegas. In just over 5 years, Money2020 has become the leading industry conference for everything to do with FinTech. It’s a jam-packed but valuable 4 days of expert panels, startup pitches, networking events and keynotes from industry leaders. I was there for just under 24 hours, which meant the experience was even more of a blur. This post is my attempt to capture twelve of the biggest learnings from the conference.

Lesson 1: Money is still the #1 biggest stressor for most Americans, understandably so. Dan Wernikoff from Intuit was one of the keynote speakers Tuesday morning and some of the data points he surfaced on consumer behaviors around money are sobering:

44% of Americans cannot come up with $400 for an emergency.
49% of Mint users spend more than they make.
Intuit customers on average paid $1,700 a year in interest.

Lesson 2: Most financial institutions are not adequately meeting the needs of their customers. Despite the potential opportunity created by the high stress around money, banks and other financial institutions really struggle to provide the experience their customers need. This is in part because most financial institutions are product centric not customer centric. The result has been notoriously low NPS scores and a disenchanted end user. Even more alarmingly, most customers of the leading banking brands distrust their banks:

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Lesson 3: Among an already pretty unhappy customer base, millennials are the most disenfranchised of all. As Philippe Dintrans, Chief Digital Officer at Cognizant put it, most financial institutions are totally missing the mark with millennials. That is in part because millennials exhibit fundamentally different behaviors than earlier generations around things like savings. 63% of millennials are focused on saving towards desired life goals (e.g. getting out of student debt, purchasing a home, etc.) as compared to 45% of gen Xers and baby boomers. 55% of gen Xers and baby boomers are focused on developing savings towards retirement, where only 37% of millennials are planning for retirement

Lesson 4: FinTech startups have capitalized on the failures of incumbents by addressing specific pain-points with carefully designed products. The examples are smattered across financial services but a few examples that stand-out:

Wealth management was traditionally a confusing and fee-heavy landscape to navigate. Betterment created a beautiful and educational product that reduced fees and enabled a better user experience.
Peer-to-peer money transfers traditionally required a manual process that took days and trips to the bank. Venmo made it simple, quick and fun to do P2P payments.
SMBs used to have to use clunky check-out payment methods that locked them into a set location and required back-end processing to reconcile the books. Stripe enabled any merchant anywhere to accept payments with ease using an iPad.
Applying for, managing and refinancing loans was historically a painful process for most students. SoFi provided students with an easy way to apply for and refinance their loans all with the promise of a lower interest rate.

Lesson 5: Barriers to entry have never been lower to starting a FinTech business. It’s not just that the cost of starting a business in tech has been dramatically reduced (which has been well documented). In FinTech, there are also important industry-specific enablers allowing startups to enter and compete with the incumbents:

Insurgents don’t need a large balance sheet to open business. For example, marketplaces like LendingClub and Prosper connect borrowers and lenders without underwriting any of the loans.
Regulatory hurdles, for almost every sub-category within FinTech (with the exception of Blockchain / crypto assets), have been removed thanks to early pioneers like PayPal.
Platforms and developer tools like Stripe and Shopify have reduced development costs and time-to-market dramatically enabling SMB merchants to sell with the same ease as larger enterprises.

Lesson 6: Large and enduring companies have been and will continue to be built in FinTech. In two decades, PayPal, the “original” FinTech startup has reached a market cap of $84B. By comparison AMEX, which was founded a 167 years ago, has a market cap of $82B. Many more enduring companies will be built in FinTech in the years to come.

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Lesson 7: There is no shortage of venture money. As of today there are 36 FinTech unicorns globally – that number represents 17% of the total share of unicorns. The venture market has realized the breadth of opportunity in FinTech and more money has poured into FinTech than ever before. In 2008, the number of FinTech companies funded was just over 200. In 2016, the number of FinTech companies receiving venture capital exceeded 5,000. In the same time period, venture funding from a dollar perspective climbed from <$1B to close to $60B.

Lesson 8: Great companies are being built across categories. With this increase in FinTech funding, great new companies are being built and entire sub-categories, from payments to insurance, are being served in new ways. Some of the really big winners of today either didn’t exist or were in their infancy 10 years ago. A few examples include publicly traded companies (LendingClub, Square, etc.), unicorns (Stripe, Sofi, GreenSky, CreditKarma, AvidXchange, Gusto, etc,) and several others that are well on their way (Betterment, Affirm, Plaid, etc.)

Lesson 9: Many think that the big area of opportunity for FinTech is in Blockchain/ crypto assets but that may not necessarily be true. Blockchain/ crypto assets are certainly getting all the attention right now but there are plenty of other areas that are just as interesting on both the B2C and B2B sides of the table. Some areas that are particularly exciting include:

Consumer: (1) personal financial management, (2) insurance, (3) real estate and (4) investing / wealth management
Enterprise: (1) institutional investing, (2) infrastructure apps, (3) SMB tools, (4) commercial insurance and (5) security & fraud detection

Lesson 10: Blockchain – lots of noise but few clear signals. Bitcoin today is trading at $5,500+ per coin and the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies is $170B. ICOs meanwhile have raised $8B in 2017 to-date. In the midst of this some things are clearer than others. What is clear today is that crypto assets have a definite use case as a store of value. What’s less clear is how we get from there to the end goal of software with no central operator, which is the big promise behind blockchain. The big advantage to blockchain, as Adam Ludwin from Chain put it, is “censorship resistance” (access is unfettered and transactions are unstoppable) but we have yet to see killer applications that can cannibalize existing practices.

Lesson 11: It’s not all about the U.S. ~1/3 of today’s FinTech unicorns are outside the U.S. (Asia + Europe). U.S. FinTech companies can likely learn a bit from their peers in other geographies. Behavioral and cultural differences certainly exist but there are a few clear examples of this that came up during one of the payment-focused panels. For example, in China, WeChat is using messaging capability to allow social payments. Stan Chudnovsky, the Head of Product for Facebook’s Messenger, revealed during one of the payments sessions that Facebook is developing this and expects it to be a key use case in the next 18-24 months. But in this space we are certainly followers not leaders.

Lesson 12: The FinTech community grows more vibrant and robust each year. Money 2020 was founded 5 years ago and since its launch then has grown into the leading FinTech conference globally. There are now 11,000+ attendees, more than 1,700 CEOs & Presidents and 85 countries represented. Still a lot of opportunity ahead but the numbers speak clearly to the vibrancy and enthusiasm in the community. Many thanks to the founders of Money2020 Anil Aggarwal, Simran Aggarwal and Jonathan Weiner for another great conference. Looking forward to next year!