Archive
Everything published by Fintech Takes.
April 2026
March 2026
- MAR 30Supply-Driven Financial Nihilism
- MAR 27No One Knows Anything
- MAR 25Thinking in (Credit) Systems
- MAR 23Confidence in the Face of Uncertainty
- MAR 20Prediction Markets
- MAR 18Rhythmic, AgentCard, Rowspace, & Burst
- MAR 16If you don’t own distribution, you don’t own anything.
- MAR 13Five Thoughts on the Future of Fintech
- MAR 11The Celebrity Card Graveyard
- MAR 9Playing Checkers
- MAR 6Fintech Player Comps (The 90s Edition)
- MAR 4Bureaus, Betting, and Block
- MAR 2A Home Base for Financial Nihilism
February 2026
- FEB 27New York State of Mind
- FEB 26Embedded Payments: From Product Feature to InfrastructureFor most of modern business history, payments sat outside the product. You sold something, then you figured out how to get paid.
- FEB 25O Canada!
- FEB 25Mapping the Cash Flow Lending Adoption CurveThere was a time, not that long ago, when the idea of leveraging consumer-permissioned bank transaction data to understand prospective…
- FEB 23MVNO is the New BaaS
- FEB 20Bank, Credit Union, or Fintech?
- FEB 18Kairos, Vault, Vennre, & Buy Now Pay Maybe
- FEB 16Is Fintech a Moneymaker for MrBeast?
- FEB 13Tricked by Product-Market Fit
- FEB 11Fintech Takes VS. Super Bowl
- FEB 9The Party is Almost Over
- FEB 6Ideas Xchange
- FEB 4Nuked Bills, Fake Numbers, & Blackmail
- FEB 2Well, it’s Groundhog Day … again.
January 2026
- JAN 30What Do You Do When You Can Do Anything?
- JAN 26This isn’t advertising. It’s a tax.
- JAN 26When Uncertainty Becomes the RiskEconomic uncertainty has become a defining feature of the consumer financial landscape.
- JAN 23Capital One Buys Brex
- JAN 222026 PrioritiesJanuary is a time for thinking about the future.
- JAN 21Sanctions-Evasion-as-a-Service
- JAN 19Is This Video Game Too Hard?
- JAN 16Who Gets to Give People Money?
- JAN 14Kontigo, Givefront, Beycome, & Cash App
- JAN 12The Apple Card Has a New Home
- JAN 92026 Predictions
- JAN 7Recapping 2025 (and worrying about 2026)
- JAN 5Credit Cards Have Become a Luxury Good
- JAN 2The CFTC regulates hedging, not sports gambling.
December 2025
- DEC 31Diving Deep with Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm
- DEC 29Big Fintech Bookshelf Energy
- DEC 26Questions That Defined 2025
- DEC 24Fintech Takes Goes Full Die Hard
- DEC 22More Banks!
- DEC 19Fintech Takes Wrapped
- DEC 17Fraud, Mortgages, & the Art of Judgment
- DEC 15The OCC Turns in the First Draft of Its Debanking Homework
- DEC 15Closing the Gap Between Trust and ProofWhen Synapse collapsed in 2024, tens of thousands of customers discovered an uncomfortable truth about pooled For-Benefit-Of (FBO) accounts: they weren’t built for the world we live in now.
- DEC 12Hope Is The Strategy
- DEC 10Where are the biggest trouble spots (and blind spots) in consumer credit?
- DEC 9Acquisition Requires Attention. Retention Requires Trust.Competition in financial services has always been a function of proximity.
- DEC 8Robinhood Should Not be Allowed Anywhere Near Trump Accounts
- DEC 5Open-loop vs. Closed-loop Credit Scoring
- DEC 3Access, Identity, & the Cost of Complexity
- DEC 1Rebuilding the Warp Core
November 2025
- NOV 28Black Friday
- NOV 26Surviving the SEO Apocalypse
- NOV 24Sports Betting May Make It Harder for Borrowers to Pay Back Their Loans
- NOV 21And now his watch is (temporarily) ended.
- NOV 20Refactoring Risk Decisioning with Agentic AIAs we near the end of the 2025 fintech conference circuit, I can say with confidence that the most overhyped technology this year was…
- NOV 19The Complexity of the Modern Payments Stack
- NOV 17Honor Some Cards?
- NOV 14Builders Summit, Complete
- NOV 12Friction, The Fine Print, & Faith
- NOV 12The End of the Back OfficeEvery day, small business owners have to act like CFOs, controllers, and procurement managers before they ever get to do … the thing that motivated them to become entrepreneurs in the first place.
- NOV 10Carrington Labs, Zest AI, & Coinbase.
- NOV 7No one is being honest about stablecoins.
- NOV 5Live from Money20/20: AI, Stablecoins, & More!
- NOV 3Barclays Buys Best Egg
October 2025
- OCT 31Spooky Season
- OCT 29The Biggest Unsolved Problems in Open Banking
- OCT 27Fintech 3-2-1 Goes to Vegas
- OCT 24A Fortress of Distrust
- OCT 23Unlocking Pay by Bank’s PotentialThe last time I wrote about pay by bank, I observed: An easy way to spot emerging trends is to look for examples of market incumbents…
- OCT 22Debt, Data, and the New Repayment Hierarchy
- OCT 20The Open Banking Fight You’re Not Paying Attention To
- OCT 17Neighborhood Networks
- OCT 15EtherFi, Lunos AI, Circuit & Chisel, & Figure
- OCT 15Building Sustainable Bank-Fintech PartnershipsEditor’s Note — We are republishing this deep dive essay, which was initially published in October of 2024.
- OCT 13Blocking and Tackling
- OCT 10The Cash Cow is Dead
- OCT 8The Economics of Addiction in 30 Minutes
- OCT 6FICO Hits Back
- OCT 3How OpenAI Can Avoid Google’s Mistake
- OCT 1Open Banking, BaaS Trouble, FICO’s Small Ambitions
September 2025
- SEP 30A New Roadmap for Building Customer Lifetime ValueI’ll be honest with you. Of all the terms I run across in my job, one of the ones that I understand the least is customer lifetime value, or…
- SEP 29Aim Small, Miss Small
- SEP 26Standardizing Fairness and Financial Health
- SEP 24Startup Truths and Venture Realities
- SEP 22Chime’s Tough Choice
- SEP 22How Would You Design a Credit Bureau in 2025?Here’s a question: If you were to sit down and design a credit bureau from scratch, in 2025, what would it look like?
- SEP 19Plaid Defects
