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Banks have always frontended KYC, thereby adding friction to their onboarding, and increasing abandonment rates whereas, at least since the times of PayPal, fintechs have backended KYC, thereby improving UX of onboarding, and increasing conversion rates.

However, when the rubber hits the road, fintechs expose the hidden steps, friction increases, and it all evens out at the end. 

We've seen that long ago with PayPal's light KYC of merchants at onboarding followed by full fledged KYC when money enters the merchant's account and merchant wants to transfer it to this bank account.

In the latest fracas over nonbank BNPL cards in India, we're seeing that with Partial KYC carried out by fintechs, which has come to surface because the regulator rained on fintechs' operating model parade by reiterating its rules on prepaid accounts, and now fintechs are admitting that they have been doing only partial KYC all along and are now offering to do Full KYC in return for regulator rolling back its recent PPI mandate.

On-demand Reports have been around for ages but, as long as the SECs of the world mandate the 10-Ks of the world, ondemand finance reports will never kill standard finance reports.

Plaid is not a social organization. Of course, Plaid is self-serving but it's arguably better to take the advice of a company that, by hook or crook aka phishing or scraping, has acquired 80M Open Banking customers in USA, in order to drive adoption of Open Banking customers in EU from the measly 5M.

Open Banking: EU v. USA

Embedded Finance guys are selling themselves short. They consider the choosing of BNPL or Loan at Checkout is an example of Embedded Finance. Why not Credit Card or NetBanking? If they included those choices, the adoption rate of Embedded Finance will be 100%.

Also, Embedded Transport can claim 100% adoption since every customer who pays for something on an ecommerce website will want to have the ordered goods delivered to them.

Ditto Embedded Advertising.

In his latest monthly newsletter, David Barrett, Founder CEO of Expensify, stated that Expensify is the only company that has succeeded with expense management software for SMEs. He was referring to the latest pivot to enterprises by Brex.

Maybe SMEs ARE risky, expensive and difficult to serve?

Looking left and right while crossing the road is a safety best practice or bias??

I've always wondered if skew is in the dataset and the analyst is merely surfacing the reality and not ating with any personal bias. I'm becoming more convined about that take after reading that SME lending has not changed in 30 years. If the bias was with banks, by now, alternatives to banks should have come up and grabbed the opportunity? Why has Brex pivoted away from SME??

Despite tectonic changes in technology, consumer behavior, alternative payments, blah blah blah, credit card industry has maintained its 3-4% MDR (in unregulated markets) through its entire 70 year history.

Why won't BNPLs be able to sustain their 4-6% MDR for a similar period?

I'm not among those who predict that BNPL will achieve dominance. That said, through the last 35 years of observing emerging competition to credit card, BNPL is the only credit card competitor that I think has some chance of putting a slight dent on credit card volumes.

We've seen the banking regulator stopping withdrawals from banks on the verge of failing.

Crypto lenders and exchanges do it on their own. 

Whatever does "run on a bank" even mean?

Exhibit 99: Cross-selling is hard. It's not just Meta / Facebook. 

No, no, the higher valuation was because of Klarna's sound business model and solid performance aka intrinsics whereas the lower valuation is because of worsening macroeconomic conditions aka extrinsics.

Per TechCrunch, during the period when Klarna's valuation has fallen from $45.6B (Jun 2021) to $6.5B (Jul 2022), the company's fundamentals have improved sharply e.g. higher user count, greater revenues. 

So Klarna's valuation has fallen due to inflation concerns, Russia-Ukraine war, and fear of recession, which are extrinsic, macroeconomic factors that have also rekt the stock prices of dozens of other companies including AirBnB, Amazon, Apple, Coinbase, Facebook, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Robinhood, Shopify, Tesla, et al.