Fintech Infrastructure 101 - Overview & Market Landscape — Chris McCann

Embedded financial products open up entirely new revenue streams to productivity software companies that were previously only accessible by financial institutions. Fintech APIs (like payments from Stripe) allow companies to monetize not with expensive subscriptions but through financial instruments that were previously the purview of banks.

Increasingly, fintech isn’t just about stealing the incremental customer, or participating in the evolution of the industry from analog to digital. It is a fundamental overthrow of how things have been done historically: a complete revolution.

Rather than interpreting fintech's job as bringing Old World institutions online, embedded finance modularizes financial functions. Rather than directly involving a bank, payments can be made across the web through embedded tools like Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, and Square.

Theoretically, with all of these new ‘fintech’ tools available, there should be infrastructure with rich API connectivity that allows for the movement of money across all of these applications through a PFM. Interesting companies like Astra Finance are building in the space of ‘autonomous money’, but many companies are still fairly siloed in their ... See more