Ross

I used to say the neobank explosion wouldn't end well for 95% of them. I still think that's roughly right, but I was sloppy about who I meant. It's 95% of the startups launching one. Neobanking itself is fine but building distribution from scratch while regulated and burning cash is a nightmare A couple of musings: Over the last year more neobanks have launched than have died, and it hasn't been close. This time last year I was expecting the opposite Who's launching right now? FC Barcelona. Sports leagues. Car brands. Clothing labels. Marketplaces. These aren't companies trying to win customers, they've had them for decades. They've got databases zland a level of loyalty the challenger banks spend a fortune trying to copy When people push back on this they usually reference Xinja, Bo and Volt but those were standalone challengers going after primary accounts against banks with customers who were more likely to divorce than change their account. A club with 400m fans is doing something else entirely. It doesn't need share of wallet. It needs a fraction of its base holding a branded card, topping up on matchday, spending on it abroad in the summer. That's a very different business model with an entirely different CAC What's actually changed underneath is the cost of trying. Licence, scheme membership, processor, treasury, a year and a half of build.. all those used to be the barrier to entry and it filtered out almost everyone who wasn't primarily a fintech. Stablecoin rails and a strong BaaS partner like @wirexdevelopers have turned most of that into an integration and a commercial conversation. So the question isn't really whether you can build a bank anymore. It's whether you've got an audience that's worth doing it for The revenue side has got a lot more interesting too and this is the part I think gets underrated. It's not interchange or bust. With Wirex BaaS you can take payments, on/off ramp, accounts, FX, yield, prediction markets, perps, stocks, predictions, push-to-card all onchain, one API, and modular so you take what suits you and leave the rest. A football club will monetise its base completely differently to a car brand or a broker, and there's no reason they should end up with the same product just because they're on the same rails. You build around where the money already is for you rather than taking a fixed stack and shoving it in someone's face. I don't think this flexibility has ever really existed before and certainly not at this price Margin still scales with distribution, though. That bit hasn't changed and never will One last thought. People still talk about fintech and digital assets as separate things. DeFi is fintech. It's the settlement layer that made any of this affordable for a company whose actual business is selling football shirts or anything else for that matter We built @wirexdevelopers on the assumption that eventually the client list is every fintech or corporate with a customer database