First Principles of Investing in FinTech

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.

Ultimately, leading players want to take over the rest of the finance space leveraging their user base, technology and brand. Payment companies doing loans. Payroll providers starting to act like aggregators of services. Accounting solutions doing planning. Expense management platforms doing procurement.

We may balk at having “personal market caps,” but many of us already do – it is simply denominated in the currency of followers. As social media platforms have increased in importance, the blue-chip entities of this exchange – influencers – have found ways to transmute social capital into financial capital.