I asked a couple dozen female founders and founders of color in fintech about their experiences raising money from VCs and how that process can be improved.
Here’s what they said:
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good perspective from
🤔 would a B2B proposition from EWS be better?
Banks can overcome the trust issue better than consumer fintech in B2B verticals
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This week's edition of The Interchange is packed with fintech news:
- Stripe's decisions, decisions
- Bolt lays off, again
- X1 raises $16V in venture debt
- Ex-Plaid product marketing lead Victor Umunze launches Wafi
- Better not giving up yet
and more...
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🔥Fintech Biz Weekly just dropped
New research: How credit card rewards programs redistribute $15 *BILLION* in wealth from poor to rich, from less to more educated, from high- to low-minority areas
Read: fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com/p/credit-card-
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This is after like an hour of intensive heating of the plane.
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Delayed getting to ’s #AOBA conference because it was -20 degrees this morning at the airport here in Montana and the airplane door had frozen shut.
For real.
Don’t move here!
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Seven of the biggest U.S. banks are planning to boldly go where many others have gone (or tried to go) before.
Will ‘Belle’ succeed where Isis, CurrentC, and Chase Pay failed?
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I wonder if USAA is quietly very happy that Wells Fargo exists so that they can take all the “big banks are screwing over the little guy” heat.
If Wells wasn’t constantly stepping on rakes, it feels like USAA would be a bigger story.
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Big banks don't usually get below satisfactory grades on their CRA exams. When they do, they never have them for more than one testing cycle... until now.
@USAA received a "needs to improve" rating twice in a row, both driven by consumer violations.
americanbanker.com/news/auto-lend
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Wait, what?
A bunch of those new folks you onboarded just lost all their money when a lot of the self-referential revenue got sucked out of the ecosystem and they got left holding the bag.
Maybe “real use cases” isn’t a terrible idea. twitter.com/pythianism/sta
This Tweet is unavailable.
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How are #banks feeling about 2023? They see #creditcards as a growth opportunity, they're increasing loss reserves, net-income is slumping, and more!
Great read by
via
bit.ly/3J6cEL5
#fintech
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And if you enjoy fintech stories like this, you should subscribe to my 2x weekly newsletter: 👇
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More on Ami Kumordzie and Sika Health here:
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3) No fintech-focused VCs participated in Sika's rounds.
All the investors were either generalists or healthcare-focused VCs.
(One exception - Plaid's co-founders participated. Well done !)
Fintech-focused VCs NEED to get involved in money-adjacent areas like this.
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2) As a Black woman, overcame crazy odds to raise money from VCs.
She did it by leaning into what makes her different (she has an MD and MBA from Stanford and knows healthcare backwards and forwards) and hiring a team to complement her strengths.
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1) is solving an important problem.
In 2020, $4.2 billion in healthcare benefits went unused. Sika is building a BNPL-like service for connecting employees with HSA/FSA dollars with merchants where they can spend them.
Reducing breakage in healthcare benefits is 🙌
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When I was playing Pickleball in my 11th grade lifetime sports class I didn’t foresee it becoming the fastest growing sport in the U.S. but here we are.
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36.5 MILLION people played Pickleball in 2022.
That's equivalent to ~15% of adult Americans, or roughly the population of California.
A new franchise just launched to meet this demand:
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The idea of being able to fire your bank with the push of a button is the animating impulse behind everything the CFPB is doing on 1033.
It's important to keep that end goal in mind when thinking about what the final rule looks like and what the effects will be.
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The @CFPB is developing a rule that will give people more control of their personal financial data and allow them to more easily fire a bank that isn't serving them well. reuters.com/markets/us/us-
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New : 9 feelings that banks have about 2023:
1) Net interest income 😁
2) Lending 🫤
3) The economy 🫠
4) Hanging on to deposits 😬
5) Wealth management 🤫
6) Tech spending 🤑
7) Crypto 🤬
8) BaaS 🙋♀️
9) Fintech partnerships & acquisitions 🫡
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The FDIC’s bank-funded reserves (DIF), not taxpayers, bear the risk of reckless FHLB lending. FHLB loans are heavily collateralized, claiming assets that otherwise would be available to the FDIC to make depositors whole if the bank fails. wsj.com/articles/crypt via
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This is mean.
A bunch of people just lost their jobs. Resist the urge to shitpost about it.
Try offering to help instead.
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"though, of course, new matters will arise and existing matters will develop over time."
NEW MATTERS WILL ARISE!
Or not! Or not! You don't have to break the law or lose track of your customers' money. You can just be a regular bank!
eat your heart out.
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OMFG
Wells Fargo gets into huge legal trouble so often that it has started talking about it as a category of regular operational expense in its earnings.
Here's the CFO explaining how operating losses due to legal problems were down $2.3 billion between September and December.
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I'm reading through basically all of the big bank earnings transcripts as part of the research I'm doing for tomorrow's essay and I gotta say ... thank god for Mike Mayo.
Dude is a gem. He asks smart, no-nonsense questions and clearly annoys the CEOs.
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Timing is everything.
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When economic uncertainty rises, there’s a flight to safety among VC investors. They invest in what they feel comfortable with, which is bad for female founders.
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BTW, sending someone your Calendly link doesn’t count. That’s not a power move, it’s just efficient!
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A common courtesy - if you request a meeting with someone, try to accommodate their schedule, give them available times in their timezone, and set up the calendar invite rather than asking or expecting them to do it.
I'm surprised how often folks don't do this.
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A little bit of color commentary here.
There has been some tension between Bank of America and EWS (the company operating Zelle) over potential changes to fraud liability within the Zelle network.
I'd imagine this won't exactly ease that tension.
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Interesting how a premium feature in Twitter is the ability to slow down the speed that your tweets are published to give you the chance to undo a mistake ... and yet in payments, we consider this delay a bug not a feature & we can't wait to push people to real-time payments.
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Advice for fintech infrastructure companies ...
If you want to book a lot of sales and have customers that will relentlessly push you to improve your product, sell to fintech startups.
If you want to make a profit, sell to banks and legacy tech vendors.
Trust me on this.
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I'll be so so curious to see if this works.
Non-media companies very rarely have the stomach to stick with independent media brands.
That said, Snacks has been an amazing success story for Robinhood, and it's not like their core business is going great.
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I wrote about this in yesterday’s newsletter. It’s real weird that Revolut can’t seem to get its regulatory filings done.
And an MLK-inspired question:
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Do not give these people more money.
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EXCLUSIVE: 3AC founders Zhu and Davies pitch to raise $25 million for new crypto exchange theblock.co/post/202589/3a
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Fintech 🧠 Food - India as the bull case for Fintech
📣India is a bull case for Fintech (and humanity)
💸 4 Fintech Companies
👀 Coinbase Layoffs
👀 JP Morgan ❤ TikTok
📚 The P2P Payment delusion by
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The $1.5 trillion U.S. auto lending market has never been more screwed up than it is right now.
My latest essay explains what’s going on and what might happen next.
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