Thread by @amandaorson

Fintech thread:

Prior to Curve my background was startups, generally, and my domain expertise had been growth/ martech/ driving traffic and building, selling businesses atop that.

The last year has been going from 0 to 100 in all things payments and fintech.

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A few things I’ve learned, resources I’ve gone back to, and what surprised me as an outsider:

1. Fintech innovation is predicated on testing the limits of regulation and overcoming (or inventing an alternative to) existing infrastructure.

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Regulation (US specific): it’s important to remember that the US is a federated country made up of states, and our banking system reflects that.

In other countries like the UK, there’s one main regulatory body.

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Aside from actually reading Reg Z, Reg E, and far too many pages of Durbin Amendment commentary - smile.amazon.com/Payments-Syste… was an enormously helpful resource.

If you want to get smart about fintech and payments regulation in the US @regulatorynerd is an excellent follow.

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2. Infrastructure - If you’ve traveled abroad and used QR codes to pay for something in SE Asia 7 years ago or wondered why you still had to stand in line for a MetroCard but could seamlessly tap your phone to leave the Tube, you can thank infrastructure.

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We will probably never see as rapid a transition in how we conduct payments as we are seeing right now and the US is still ~ 5 years behind the rest of the world w/r/t contactless adoption.

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3. Domestic payments - aside from the Glenbrook book I mentioned above, I can’t say enough good things about their seminars: glenbrook.com/education/

And I continue to send/ reference their glossary regularly glenbrook.com/wp-content/upl…

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4. International payments is a hard problem to solve because regulation and infrastructure are so different from country to country.

There are dozens of great sub stacks - but linkedin.com/in/marcelvanoo… LinkedIn posts & @11FS's content were my main go-tos to come up to speed.

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5. Payments is like Hotel California: you can check in any time you like but I don’t think anyone ever leaves.

Because the industry is provincial, relatively small, and everyone's a degree or two of separation away from everyone else - your reputation can/ will precede you

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6. From the bias of a marketing background, I was genuinely surprised to learn that direct mail is still an enormously important acquisition source for most large card issuers in the US.

If you can get your hands on the data I bet it'd surprise you, too.

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7. In a conversation I gathered that there was a sense of injustice by a large issuer that they had to pay Credit Karma, Red Ventures et al for leads. They thought they should automatically rank #1 for their own name. (Cue: "that's not how SEO works.")

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It baffled me, but the sense of entitlement (that they should always be the first SERP) is an opportunity and revealing of how they were lapped in the first place.

And it's not specific to payments - that mindset exists among many large incumbents displaced by upstarts.

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8. Random data points that blew me away:

- Apple Pay is growing 4x as fast as PayPal, and already bigger in terms fo the # of transactions and tx volume.

- Alipay has more active users than the population of the United States.

- WeChat does 1B transactions a day.