Network effects is, with no doubt, the biggest force behind outlandish successes in the tech space. The goal of this post is to dig deeper into the role networks effects play in fintech to provide a sustained competitive advantage.
2032: Financial Tales from planet Earth
The post imagines what the future of finance will be in 2032. It follows the life of a fictional character - John - and analyses how four major trends redefine his financial life.
Buy now, pay later, a new payment standard?
The goal of this post is to provide a guide on what buy now pay later is, which are its main dynamics, why it is so successful and how profitable it will stay in the longer run.
The rise of lifestyle banking
Before smartphones, the corporeal world had a much more relevant role in building solutions to essentially any human problem. Physical constraints strongly influenced the ideation and implementation of these processes. This was obviously reflected also in the banking space. Originally, the banking industry solved the problems of storing money, delivering payments and acquiring liquidity, in...
A lending stack: merging DeFi with Traditional Finance
Last year, I wrote a post defining the most important component of a banking stack. This post is the complement to that one, and i describes the core elements of a modern lending stack, adding some new DeFi pieces to the architecture.
The Apple moment for financial services
The argument of this post is that the Apple moment for financial services is coming and a new generation of fintech startups, built on engagement and coolness factor, is emerging very rapidly.
The Amazonization of retail payments
The phenomenon of “Amazonization” refers to the wholesale disruption occurring across retail and eCommerce thanks to the leviathan-like presence of Amazon.com. Considering the platform shift happening in the retail payment space, I believe the same phenomenon of ‘Amazonization’ that happened to eCommerce will eventually happen to the retail Payments space. In this post you will find an...
A neobank stack
Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time building lending and banking stacks. What used to require vast resources only 10 years ago, is today a much simpler and more inexpensive job, thanks to the enormous number of financial infrastructure businesses born in the last decade. The goals of the following 2 posts are: to highlight which are the key functional components of these stacks, to...
Fintech 2.0, how to survive when your product becomes a feature
The most important narrative in the fintech ecosystem nowadays is arguably that of fintech-everywhere, more formally known as embedded finance. The essence of the embedded finance concept is that, over the next few years, a significant part of the consumer financial services available today will not be distributed anymore by financial institutions; they will instead be natively embedded in other...