FULL TRANSCRIPT
Slava Rubin (00:00)
All right, we have a nice group in the audience. Let's get started. My name is Slava Rubin. I'm one of the founders here at Vincent. you could check out our newsletter, the alternative investment report, as well as the podcast Smart Humans. And we have with us Jan-Erik, founder at Sacra Jan-Erik say hi.
Jan-Erik Asplund (00:21)
Hey everyone, thanks for having me.
Slava Rubin (00:24)
Jan-Erik is a new dad, so very exciting. If he doesn't say everything completely correctly, it's because he has some brain lapses for lack of sleep. So that's one of the disclaimers we'll have for today. but yeah, we're excited for today's chat. We're gonna be talking, we haven't really covered fintech for the last few quarters. and there's definitely some momentum, some really big companies that are getting funded.
Slava Rubin (00:47)
All right, let's move on. So here's a snapshot of who's in the room. It's pretty consistent. about three-quarters accredited investors and about three-quarters intermediate or advanced. And right now, about two-thirds are looking at investing in the next 12 months.
So again, a word from our compliance department, which is nothing in this presentation should be construed as an offer to sell securities or solicitation but offer to buy securities. All investments involve risk and the possibility of loss, including loss of principal. And neither past performance nor forward-looking information is a guarantee of future results. So let's just highlight on the next slide these are the four main companies we're going to start off talking about. Stripe.
Ramp, Revolut, Plaid, you'll get to know them quite well. But before we dive in, let's just ask the audience, how many of you are thinking to invest into this space in fintech in the next twelve months? We'll give everybody ten seconds to get a quick response and we'll see how interested people are in deploying capital into fintech now.
Okay, Serve says, whoa. Wow. All right. We have very, very interested audience members. I must say that's the highest percentage I think I've ever seen. So there is some high intent. And so I imagine we'll have some good questions. Let's dive right in. So, Jan-Erik, talk to us about the generations as to how this has evolved in fintech.
Jan-Erik Asplund (02:25)
yeah. So I I think there was kind of this first wave, right? And this is the easiest way, I think, to sort of understand the market in terms of some of these bigger evolutions. The first waves of 2008 financial crisis, you had two things happening. Trust in banks was, you know, extremely low at the time. And on the other hand, you had the rise of smartphones, which was sort of brought about by the launch of the iPhone the year before. and so you know, the the
Trust in banks remained low. You had the iPhone two, three coming out, making it better, introducing, you know, the App Store. And so you had companies emerge at the time like Stripe and Plaid, which you know, their primary innovation was making financial infrastructure, making banking and payments accessible through APIs, which were increasingly important for web and mobile.
App developers who wanted to build this kind of functionality into their platform. So this was kind of like, you know, if you think about the waves, right? This was like the infrastructure wave where you had some of these very fundamental tools emerge that, you know, allowed, for example, an app developer to begin accepting online payments with ease, where before it might have meant dealing with a bunch of banks and merchant accounts and compliance and doing all that when you're a startup is very burdensome. So Stripe turned that into a developer-friendly product.
Glad did that for bank account access. So you could easily build something that would connect to a customer's bank account. And then you sort of had a whole wave of companies emerge on the back of those two names and a few others, like Robinhood and others. Second wave is kind of this, you know, era of ZERP or near ZERP zero interest rates, which we had starting around 2015, 2021. VC money was.
you know, rewarding any fintech company that could acquire customers. And you saw a bunch of these neo banks, Revolut, Chime, N26, Klarna emerge. you know, within that funding explosion, taking customers away from traditional banks and you know, prioritizing customer acquisition over necessarily being profitable. Some of those companies are doing well today and some of them aren't. the third era sort of began when interest rates went up.
in 2022. right. You could no longer get funding for a highly unprofitable fintech that you know was good at customer acquisition. you saw a lot of these valuations compress. You saw a lot of companies that couldn't demonstrate, you know, good economics having a much harder time raising money. And so that's kind of where we're at now, you know, more emphasis on profitable growth, more emphasis on going multi-product, and more emphasis, of course, in the last couple of years on on AI.
And so we're kind of looking at a nice swath of businesses that are all, you know, doing well today, coming from sort of different you know, originating in different parts of this of this timeline. but yeah, I think it's yeah, very exciting time, obviously. So yeah, that's the overview.
Slava Rubin (05:30)
Yeah, and then in the public markets, you mentioned Robin Hood. Robin Hood is really crushing, right? So if you got in in the private markets, you could really could have got in the public markets as well. It went down quite a bit. but it's doing quite well. Or even like you mentioned the firm in general doing quite well. So there is opportunities to find these fintechs in the private markets before they go public. So just give us some perspective of how money is flowing.
Jan-Erik Asplund (05:53)
Yeah, so after that sort of middle period I talked about where interest rates rose and and VC capital started getting a little more you know, skeptical of fintechs or a little cautious around fintechs. What we're seeing now is is, you know, VC money is coming back into fintech. you know, total funding globally hit 52 billion in 2025, up 27% from the year before, which broke a three year decline. now to give you perspective, right? 52 billion last year.
we hit a peak in 2021 with 137 billion. So we're still down significantly from sort of peak exuberance. but where is the money going? You know, mainly to established platforms with real revenue. So Ramp, for example, raised 750 million in June and then just a couple of days ago announced another 1.85 billion. so you have, you know, a large amount of Kapital still.
chasing a kind of smaller number of breakout companies. So you have a little bit larger distribution of what those rounds look like. that's kind of the overall trend.
Slava Rubin (06:59)
Yeah, what's interesting here on the comparisons is, you know, we're going to talk about four companies at first. Three of them are kind of monsters. Plaid is definitely a sizable company, but not quite the same size. but it's interesting to see the multiple differences. We'll wanna try to understand that a little bit as we dive into each of the companies. But these companies are doing a lot of revenue in aggregate. so should we dive into Stripe?
Jan-Erik Asplund (07:23)
So Stripe like I sort of gestured, is probably the most important, you know, probably the most meaningful name, most important company on the list of of modern fintech products. And that's because they came first and they made it so easy to accept payments over the internet, which is sort of you know fundamental to so much of fintech. It is making it easy to accept payments. now they
went from there to do, you know, to offer the ability to create subscriptions, invoicing, tax compliance, lending, fraud banking. So basically open like eating up every single financial function that a business might need. they did two trillion in payments in 2025, up 34%, and did about 6.8 billion in revenue, up very similar number, up 33%. So, you know, they are
Are skimming off the top of this, you know, massive number of two trillion in payments. You know, much of that fee that they charge, which is you know roughly you know two, three percent on payments, goes to the banks, the card networks, and other partners. they take maybe 0.4 percent, like a half of a percent. but they are using, you know, the the the cash flow to acquire businesses. They're looking a lot at crypto at
you know, AI related acquisitions right now. And yeah, we're seeing a huge kind of emerging opportunity for Stripe around agents, of course. So everyone is talking about AI agents. And one of the big questions with AI agents that you know are involved in any kind of shopping or travel or planning your personal life. If you think about these new bots like Grockbot Instinct that people use to manage their manage their life and manage their finances, one of the big questions is how do they make purchases?
Right, which requires a kind of whole rethinking of checkout that Stripe is at the leading edge of right now and really, you know, betting on for their future in a big way. so yeah, very exciting company. Obviously has been an IPO prospect for a long time, valued currently at about 159 billion. so 23 times revenue, which is a a a significant premium versus you know, their public comps. but the question is obviously will they go public? Which is equally sort of open question.
Slava Rubin (09:34)
Yeah, when you say public comps, are you referring to like Visa MasterCard or who else are you talking about?
Jan-Erik Asplund (09:40)
So the main one is Adian, which is basically the Stripe for Europe, you could say. And they are public. They do about half the revenue of Stripe, but they have about an eighth of the valuation, market cap of like 30 billion. So they currently trade at 11x sort of 11x net revenue. Stripe is at 23x. you could look at PayPal and Phi Serve as well, kind of. those trade at like a 1.5x, but
Addian is really the closest kind of comp for them.
Slava Rubin (10:09)
So why are they worth double adding? Is it the stable coin and AI forward approach or or is it the growth rate? where is that coming from?
Jan-Erik Asplund (10:19)
Yeah, growth rate, Stripe being more developer led, stripe bringing having more kind of going on in terms of AI, but also I think you have to look at the sort of public, private public premium is part of it. Stripe One Public, you know, might have trade closer to where Ad Yen is. it's hard to say, and probably based a little bit on the tone of the market and how much they premium they want to attribute to Stripes.
you know, Stripe's stable coins, Stripe's AI commerce, Stripe's vision of sort of, you know, being responsible for the next big wave of of spending on the internet through agents will be part of it as well. But they're also more profitable than Adian, I believe.
Slava Rubin (11:00)
I mean a hundred fifty nine billion is kind of enormous. Obviously if they were public, they're already enormous. So how big can Stripe become?
Jan-Erik Asplund (11:14)
Yeah, it's good question. I think it can sort of it if you think about foundational infrastructure for the web, which is what it was, and sort of every single, you know, the explosion of B2B SaaS in the 2010s, you know, was undergirded by Stripe and they were one of the main beneficiaries of that. If you think about the next wave, right, which is coming and in progress, which is AI, Stripe has the potential to sort of be foundational infrastructure for that.
for where anytime you check out and buy something or your you know your agent buys something, you're using ChatGPT to compare options and you buy something or copilot or claude, you know, Stripe wants to be there providing the infrastructure that lets that happen. And they have 300 million users who already have their info with Stripe to sort of facilitate that and make that very easy. You know, that's how you would say you buy a Chat GPT subscription today. So
There's a world where they are the, you know, one of the key beneficiaries and key drivers of commerce in sort of the AI world, agentic world. And that would be huge. and you know, I I think that would, you know, potentially justify kind of what we're what we're seeing in the valuation if they're the default way for agents to, you know, hold and and distribute money globally, whether it's with yeah, whether it's with
currencies, local currencies or with stable coins.
Slava Rubin (12:39)
Right. let's move on to the next company. Ramp, go for it.
Jan-Erik Asplund (12:45)
So Ramp started off with very straightforward product. People, people, you know, might have a decent understanding, you know, corporate credit cards, where the value proposition is not, you know, you get amazing rewards, which you know, small business owners love their corporate card racking at miles, you know, which is sort of the the old school Amex vision. Ramp's idea was basically instead of you know promising the owner of this business rewards for using their credit card.
Let's promise them savings. right. So you can actually save money in various ways, control what your employees are going to be spending. You know, we're not going to give you rewards, but we're going to invest in helping you basically save money with our credit card. And so this, you know, began as that credit card, it expanded into a sort of wider expense management and procurement platform that, you know, really is kind of like
aiming to be the right hand of the the CFO, and helping kind of get the entire company's, you know, finances and and accounting automated and in order. they are sort of heavily bending towards being an AI company over the last few years. They're probably one of the most, you know, advanced in terms of B2B SaaS companies that have that have built AI labs internally, or quote unquote AI labs. They're one of the more you know serious ones. And
That is sort of why their valuation is, you know, where it is, which is 60 billion on two billion in annualized revenue, a 30x multiple. You know, investors are betting on not everyone having a Ramp, a credit card using a Ramp credit card, but on Ramp being, you know, kind of the the old, you know, the the cliche is operating system, but you know, being really the key software platform for finance and accounting inside.
companies and taking market share away from things like bill dot com for example and other major finance platforms.
Slava Rubin (14:48)
Yeah, I was gonna ask, who would you consider their main competition right now, especially with the BREX acquisition happening? Happened.
Jan-Erik Asplund (14:58)
Yeah, it's a good question. So there is in the public markets, of course, you have kind of you know, American Express is this big competitor on the pure card side. You have you have things like Mercury when it comes to banking and you know, they're expanding out to cover more of what Ramp is doing. and you do have Brex, but like you said, they're they've gone
They've been acquired, so it's it's less important. Bill.com as far as software. You have you know, Oracle products, you have SAP products that people use for the sort of you know, accounting side, finance side that is important, internal SaaS, which they're going up against. What we're seeing is kind of Ramp going up against all these other players across sort of accounting and the back office, while at the same time you have Mercury, and many.
other startups doing corporate cards that are coming after Ramp business sort of from below or or from the side. so it's a it's a yeah sort of saturated saturated field.
Slava Rubin (16:09)
So I must admit, this one for me, one man's opinion, not investment advice whatsoever. It's a little hard for me to understand why it's so expensive and it has so much demand. And what I mean by that is like they're the most expensive in multiple company on the in this presentation. So 30x. You know, you mentioned MX. MX is below a three X. Obviously, MX is much more mature.
Valued at like $200 billion, and you know, doing like eighty-five billion of revenue. You know, Brex, which for a little while it was Ramp v Brex, you know, it was like a competition between the two. And Brex kind of, without having a better phrase, they kind of like imploded, right? Like they had really high valuations and then they sold off for a much lower number.
Why is it that Ramp just raised earlier this year at forty four billion, now raising it at sixty billion, has the highest multiple? What's what's the thinking there?
Jan-Erik Asplund (17:17)
Growth. Growth is the main thing, right? Brex, if you go back to pre-acquisition, they were growing about 30% a year. so 300 mil, 2022, 400 mil, 550. and then they sold in the middle of 2025 at 700 in annualized revenue. Ramp has been doubling every year, so or more than doubling. So they went over that same period around the same size as Brex in 2022.
They more than doubled, more than doubled, doubled to one point two billion last year. And now as of you know, this summer, they're at two billion. So probably end the year at two point two point two, two point three, two point four and double again. I think it comes down, it comes down to that, you know, just a totally different kind of growth trajectory. Ramp that
Slava Rubin (18:09)
So does
Jan-Erik Asplund (18:09)
they've been able to do.
Slava Rubin (18:11)
does Ramp need to hit, let's call it, you know, four billion, three point eight billion in twenty seven for this valuation to hold?
Jan-Erik Asplund (18:21)
I think that would definitely get them, you know, the their their next markup. yeah. to double again for sure.
Slava Rubin (18:29)
Okay, great. Let's move on.
Jan-Erik Asplund (18:31)
So Revolut's different. So a little bit different. It's much closer to a direct competitor to kind of traditional banks in Europe, although we'll talk about their global expansion. The original idea was basically solving this, you know, very European border problem, right? Which is make it very easy for people to spend money and exchange currencies internationally. Don't have to don't have to pay your banks, you know, incredibly high foreign exchange.
spread or fee and really serve this class of people who's, you know, maybe traveling or sending remittances or studying abroad, anyone who kind of has contact over borders in Europe. So they built a whole app around that problem. They progressively added more in the common theme among these companies, they added bank accounts, you know, cards, savings, stock trading, crypto, even business banking. So they're really trying to be sort of the financial super app
especially in Europe, starting with a Neo Bank, but expanding out into all these other things that you'd want to do with money. And, you know, also, you know, common among these companies, they've become very very large, did about 6 billion in revenue in 2025, 2.3 billion in pre-tax profits. So, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a legitimately profitable institution with 80 million retail users and you know, really indexed on different trends over the years. So like 2024,
They grew very fast, driven mostly by cryptocurrency and you know investing when that was really big. So they've been able to sort of ride these different waves as a result. that year they hit 4 billion and then they went to 6 billion last year. So they've diversified heavily, which has been one of the Achilles heels of of some of these other neo banks that we've seen. And yeah, expanding now into business because of getting into competition again with with Airwallets, with Stripe, with some of these companies we're talking about.
and expanding. So US, Latin America, Asia, Middle East is kind of where they have in progress expansion going on.
Slava Rubin (20:30)
Yeah, so they're growing very rapidly as well. So, you know, this is not really an American company. So some people know this company a bit less. would you compare this to Robinhood at some level? Or what would be the comp as like let's call it an American comp?
Jan-Erik Asplund (20:46)
Yeah, I think Robin Hood is definitely is definitely a reasonable one because of the heavy emphasis on you know trading and then also kind of all these adjacent adjacent ones. I I I I think probably the the sort of you know most kind of direct comp is stuff like new new bank, new holdings in in Brazil. You have Chime in the US and you have SoFi in the US.
So you know, Chime and SoFi trade at around 4x, New Bank at around 8.5x, Revolutes at 19. So again, a premium there. but New Bank, which has this 8X, I think is probably the strongest comp, you know, it's outside the US, is a mobile first institution expanding across banking, lending, deposits, all these other services. New Bank is in is more concentrated in Latin America and they're sort of starting to come up against each other there, but
you know, I think the the 19x implies that people are expecting Revolut to succeed in some of this geographic expansion and to win in some of these other markets and to continue, you know, monetizing customers across new products and and and producing these new products.
Slava Rubin (22:02)
You took it exactly where I was gonna go, which is the nineteen X seems very expensive here. And in the last couple of rounds, Revolut all of a sudden went from like, let's call it decently priced rounds to becoming quite expensive. Do you think this can sustain itself or what's the risk there?
Jan-Erik Asplund (22:19)
Yeah, the risk is, you know, I I think the the justification is, you know, good growth, right? forty six percent, highly profitable. So, you know, it's it's among fintechs it's it's unique and that it's growing, you know, more at tech company speed than than financial company speed and and it's profitable. And they have a huge number of customers that they're not necessarily monetizing to the fullest yet. But like you said, it's
it still kind of implies a a good deal of growth or or builds in a good deal of growth, I would say into the future. So I think you would want to see them continuing to grow with this like 50% rate for a few more years to to just to justify the assumptions there.
Slava Rubin (23:03)
Let's go on to the next company
Jan-Erik Asplund (23:07)
Plaid sort of may be forgotten by some people. you know, they've had sort of a lull. they are also overall one of the least kind of visible, least obvious companies. But you know, it's a good chance that that if you've never used StripeRamp or Revolut, you you use Plaid because if you've opened up a fintech app in the last, you know, 15 years and you've connected it to your bank account, you've probably used Plaid. That has been their bread and butter.
since launching connecting you, the fintech app you're using to your financial institution in a secure way so that these apps can pull from your data, which has historically been made very hard to do by the banks themselves. So they blew up doing this initially, you know, kind of rose with the rise of things like Robinhood. And then when the downturn happened, so that kind of 2022 period that I mentioned when
You know, maybe investors started looking a little more skeptically at fintechs. Their business model was very exposed to you know, that downturn and to some of the downturns of their customers because their pricing was all usage based. So there's less customers opening less accounts, you know, creating less usage of Plaid and less revenue growth. Now, what is sort of interesting about Plaid is kind of this turnaround they've had over the last few years, going from you know, kind of pure connection.
API to more financial data, financial intelligence, like instead of just hooking you up, hooking your app up to a customer's bank account, telling you, is this customer, you know, legit? looking at these transactions, are they suspicious? Is there a credit risk in lending to this customer based on what we can see about their behavior? Do they have enough income to qualify for a loan?
And so on and so forth. So they've launched new products for fraud or predicting whether a customer will do a return or chargeback and other kinds of sort of identity related products, which you know are are you know when we saw data 2024, you know, they had become a fifth of revenue and they were growing, doubling year over year. So they're moving up market, serving bigger companies with these products that's helping stabilize their revenue. And they hit
by 50 million ARR in 2025, up about 40%. And you know, not as fast as some of our other companies here, but 80% gross margin, you know, profitable reportedly, and valued at around eight billion still at this point. So, you know, they said they're gonna IPO. so this might be one to look out for as the next the next one to go public on this list.
Slava Rubin (25:42)
What are the chances that this becomes a BREX?
Jan-Erik Asplund (25:44)
Yeah, I think there's a possibility. I mean, I again, it's
Slava Rubin (25:47)
And what I mean by rest growth growth slows and they gets an acquire o overnight.
Like a s a surprise acquirer.
Jan-Erik Asplund (25:58)
Yeah. I think it's like growth is not, you know, obviously growing. It's not growing at the rate of some of the other companies that we've mentioned. and again, they're indexed on a lot of the activity in fintech itself. So it's a little more contingent on what's happening in fintech versus companies like Ramp and stripe.
That are more indexed on on businesses.
Slava Rubin (26:27)
Talk about the competition, like the the landscape between these these companies. Give us some perspective here.
Jan-Erik Asplund (26:36)
Perfect. Yeah. So this the idea here was to kind of give you some give you some competitive dynamics or s or some you know kind of axes on which to think about how these companies compete, right? So you have payments, on payments specifically. And this is because these are kind of four different businesses, right? Competing on on four different levels. So Stripe is working on payments, and in payments, they're competing with these companies, Ad Yen, which like I mentioned, the European Stripe.
publicly listed, checkout.com and Airwallis, which is big in in in Southeast Asia, Australia. And among these companies, you know, what we're seeing is basically that that being able to process the transaction, you know, is increasingly table stakes. You know, the real distinction between them is is this kind of platform and and the breadth of the platform. What can you offer your customers, you know, at the best possible price? Spend management is kind of
Turning out similarly, you have companies like Ramp, Mercury, now acquired BREX, and others who are competing to own this financial function, kind of like the virtual CFO function, automating your finances, automating your spend management, and also owning the credit card or or card that you use to make your make your purchases.
right now they're all competing on or offering, you know, the best incentives. we're seeing a lot of that margin get competed down, and we're seeing them innovating on the software side and trying to win on the software side. so that's kind of key there. neo banking, like we sort of just went through, is a battle of you know geographic expansion, where you have US players like SoFi and Chime, European Revolut, you know, New Bank in South America, and we're starting to see.
The collision there as each one of them looks to geographic expansion to get more customers. and clad. Yeah.
Slava Rubin (28:30)
Is is there anyone that's really the emerging markets play in the banking or in any of these verticals that, you know, it's not so obvious, but is really an emerging markets leader?
Jan-Erik Asplund (28:42)
Yeah, so if we go back two slides from here, we have a selection of five companies that we thought you know, are sort of the next wave of fintechs to look at. And and some of these Mercury are well known. but on that topic of sort of who's emerging, there's a few here I really like and think are interesting. Kapital you have Kapital and Cloudwalk. Maybe if we look at emerging markets, Kapital is sort of SMB banking for Latin America.
which has a very unique set of circumstances, right? Where financial services are very inaccessible or SMBs. The most basic kind of banking services are hard to get. And so they kind of leapfrogged, in a way they leapfrogged like a Mercury or a Ramp, which you can do uniquely in Latin America. And so they offered, you know, they they brought in banking, a complete software suite for SMBs, lending, you know, now these these AI-based tools.
And they sort of became the all-in-one. if you're a Latin American SMB that you know is in need of you know, advanced capital you know, kind of like revenue-based loans, you go use Capitol, you also get their whole software network. And it's a huge market for modern SMB banking. They don't have a Ramp or a Mercury or anything similar. So I think that's really exciting one. And Cloud Walk sort of adjacent there, living on the payments side.
And helping you know Brazilian merchants accept payments. So that's where they started. they're big into kind of stable coins, which is also a big focus for Kapital, and you'll see across every emerging market. but these are companies that I think, you know, when you say emerging market, I think they have launched these sort of more all-in-one products into these emerging markets, and thus they have sort of a greater opportunity to maybe earn an outsized share of market.
because they're doing it before anyone else, before a Ramp or BREX has had time to, you know, enter and do their thing in those markets. and obviously, you know, huge, South America's huge. So
Slava Rubin (30:42)
Yeah, you didn't say this explicitly, but is maybe the valuation to growth opportunity in Latin America right now, where you can try to find some value and might be able to get some better opportunity there.
Jan-Erik Asplund (30:55)
Yeah, absolutely. Kapital, for example, like you can see there, you know, last valued at 1.3 billion. And in 2025, they did 548 million in revenue. So that's barely two barely two and a half X revenue multiple. You know, these are businesses where you want to understand the market, obviously, well and understand the challenges, you know, of Latin America. But I think the opportunity there is definitely different from, you know, paying 30x for Ramp.
Slava Rubin (31:24)
Great. in regards to that competition slide, the Ramp, Rex, etcetera, Mercury, i are they just competing with each other and taking each other's customers, or is there room for their all to grow and take customers away from the traditional banks? Said a different way. Is there only going to be one of these five years from now? Or will it all three be successful?
Jan-Erik Asplund (31:47)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think early on today were, but it's changing now. you're seeing kind of different them positioning themselves differently for the enterprise. So Brex Brex positioned itself very much as kind of you know, best of breed for different for different use cases where an enterprise might want to use, you know, use it just for let's say
you know, use Brex for doing travel payments. you could sort of mix and match Brex. they had a bunch of these partners that were very big that they were using Navan for travel. so so you could kind of get access to a bunch of these big players. I think Ramp is more an all in one product. So you know Ramp is saying we will kind of do everything in one platform for you. And both have had enterprise, you know,
Enterprise success going kind of penetrating into the biggest names and stealing market away from Amex with those different value props. So we are seeing, you know, that expansion of the market upwards. At the low end, there's some of that pennibilization among them, Mercury and other upstarts. But yeah, we are seeing the enterprise become more important for them.
Slava Rubin (33:05)
Of all the companies on this slide right here in the competitive landscape, which one do you consider the most AI forward?
Jan-Erik Asplund (33:10)
I would have to say Ramp, no question, just based on current of the year, they're hiring recruitment and building of kind of a, you know, what amounts to kind of an AI neo lab in so much as as that is a legible category these days, but they've definitely pushed harder on that than than other than than some of these other businesses.
Slava Rubin (33:37)
And who will be second?
Jan-Erik Asplund (33:39)
Probably Stripe just for their kind of how on the leading edge they've been of of kind of agentic commerce, even though that's still quite nascent.
Slava Rubin (33:49)
So I completely agree with you. So so far, no surprises. I think this is the dotted line where it gets interesting. Who's third?
Jan-Erik Asplund (33:58)
Yeah, who's third on our list? I would probably say
If I just go off of Stripe, Ramp, Revolut, and Plaid, kind of our our main big four, I think maybe I'd give it to Plaid, just because I don't see I don't see Revolut, Like I don't see I don't see a huge Revolut you know, kind of AI premium emerging or or kind of like anything of that nature. But I do think for Plaid
They have some AI features on on the back end that they're kind of using and selling. And also think maybe they're more indexed, you know, and a sort of more of a beneficiary of of some of this, some of this AI commerce stuff because agents will sort of need they will need fraud protection, obviously, will be very important and that sort of thing. So I think I would just give it to Plaid.
Slava Rubin (34:52)
So I think the quickness of your response to Ramp and stripe, I think, is kind of evident is what I'm thinking as well. It feels like they're kind of a bit ahead on kind of the AI native feel. I guess I'm leading the witness here, but if you had to stack rank which one you're interested in at these valuations between the four that we're talking about first, what's your stack ranking one through four as to which one you were you invest your thousand dollars into first?
Jan-Erik Asplund (35:20)
Yeah. it's yeah, it's a tricky one because Ramp Ramp unfortunately just had to raise at at sixty billion. and so that makes things a little trickier for me if you had to help me to think about valuation as well. But I still think I put them first. based on the growth, which is you know, it kinda get
you know, immune to this looking at open AI and anthropic all day, but you know, more than doubling every year. I think it's huge. and their AI stuff is really impressive. So I I still put Ramp at number one, even at the 60 billion. and then I think maybe out of left field, but I think Plaid at 8 billion, you know, is is kind of looks like a like a remarkable value. and then I think Revolut and then I think Stripe.
Slava Rubin (36:14)
Why is Stripe last?
Jan-Erik Asplund (36:17)
I think Stripe at 159 billion.
is very rich. I I'm I'm not sure like the the hesitancy to go public, I feel like has always kind of made it look like they are worried about how they'll be judged in the public markets. you know will that multiple get cut in half immediately? once investors start thinking about it as an ad-yen comp versus as a private startup and just the highest price
Highest price, lowest growth. I think I'd be more excited about the other names. even even Revolut, which I think is highly valued. but yeah, that's my that's my list. Maybe a little unusual.
Slava Rubin (37:02)
I like it. we're not exactly in the same place. So I definitely have Plaid last. I'm nervous about Plaid. are they AI forward enough? And will AI eat at their business? so I'm a bit nervous about that. I think Revolut is fully, fully valued. Like fully valued and very expensive. I think it's a great business. I'm not sure if they're AI forward enough. So
they're kind of definitely above Plaid, but they're not in my top two. Stripe and Ramp are in my top two for sure. I think Ramp is just very expensive. Now very expensive often means a great company, which is awesome. I don't know. I think Stripe just has a legacy of executing. Is Stripe gonna get you a twenty bagger? Definitely not. I think Stripe has a ways
to go before it can be worth a trillion. but I think the downside on Stripe is very low. and I think the upside is a 3x. So if you're playing for that, I think there's an opportunity. If you're playing for more high risk, high return, I think you have to go to Ramp. but I think Stripe and Ramp are, in my opinion, way above the other companies. Now that is easily an argument because Revolut is crushing. but I'm just nervous.
about their business in an AI world. So let's talk about AI here for a second. Beyond agenc payments, which everybody's talking about, where do you think FinTech goes for fast growth and excitement two years from now?
Jan-Erik Asplund (38:40)
Great question. We do need some excitement. you know, given the growth rates we're talking about, are not quarterly growth rates like Anthropic is reporting, 45% growth in the quarter. and I think where we're going is is well, on the one hand, you have sort of AI completely replacing you know, the the sort of the finance function at companies. so I think that's an exciting one. You have
You know, a whole legacy of software that we've we've made and sold that helps finance departments operate. And the next step, what we're seeing now is software that's automating all that operation. So reconciling accounts, receivables, doing procurement, loans, fraud, financial statements, bookkeeping. It's entire, you know, departments of you know, massive departments of Fortune 500 companies that, you know, there's an opportunity to automate and
Ramp is sort of at the you know forefront of that. I think stable coins is a huge one, which we haven't you know gone in too in deep on, but are a huge focus for Stripe, for Airwallets, for Kapital, for some of the other companies on this list. The stable coin opportunity is biggest in these emerging markets we talked about, where people you know, people want access to US dollars and getting those is very expensive and very difficult.
And banking in general is difficult. And the opportunity is big in B2C and remittances, that kind of thing, but it's even bigger in B2B in cross-border payments, which is you know, many billions of dollars per year. And Stripe, Airwalls, and others are going after this, and you know, potentially gonna eat up, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in payments. And I think those are kind of those are kind of the two biggest. You can also look at tokenization.
AI native insurance, AI native lending, and more embedded finance. But I really think for me it's it's sort of finance, back office, getting automated plus stable coins are where I think in a very bullish fintech view, you see a lot of growth in those two areas.
Slava Rubin (40:51)
I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now there's a couple of names on here that we weren't expecting where AI got applied against more of a service-oriented manual experience, then all of a sudden they're crushing an insurance or an accounting or et cetera, et cetera. like the Harvey of legal, but for it to be in the accounting and fintech space, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a name or two like that show up here. So okay, great. What
What are you predicting for the future? You've already given some opportunities and some exciting so where where do you see this all headed?
Jan-Erik Asplund (41:23)
Yeah, I think Plaid will go public. we're gonna start to see signs from Ramp about going public and Revolut as well. I think Revolut has maybe talked about 2028. so as they get their banking licenses lined up. so I do think those will be sort of exciting to see and we'll maybe have to wait on Stripe. you know, unclear. they've never been very excited about that. I think we'll be
yeah, we'll we'll have to see what happens on on, you know, I think interchange, you know, sort of the the original business model for Ramp where you make money off of every credit card swipe. I think we'll probably see, you know, companies that are heavily dependent on that getting you know, re rated down because it is you know, not necessarily the kind of revenue that's gonna be super durable.
in an AI world and they're gonna be looking more for that software recurring subscription revenue that's based on you know owning the tools that people use to run their business. and then I think probably maybe my most sort of explicit prediction is around consolidation. so we had BREX's sale to Capital One earlier this year for five billion. We'll probably continue to see that as you know this market, like I saw like I mentioned, is getting more consolidated.
you know, bigger companies, more capital into fewer names. I think we'll probably see more of these companies get acquired that can't necessarily compete independently. maybe a Plaid, but I think, yeah, large banks, large payment processors are going to make some acquisitions, maybe some of the companies that we've talked about.
Slava Rubin (43:10)
Yeah, I love these predictions. The other thing that I would say, which is maybe obvious, but it's just two flavors of what AI is doing. I think some of these companies are going to, you know, really lean into AI a la Ramp or stripe. And I think they're gonna continue to accelerate and do quite well.
While others are going to try to keep pushing their business models without trying to really lean into AI aggressively. And I think they're going to be left behind. And I think that's going to be a bifurcation that really happens in the next 18 months. Similarly, just like as mentioned, I think there's going to be new players, upstarts that come out of nowhere, which are really tackling industries that never had significant software against them, but now AI is changing that.
And I think we're gonna have some surprises. So you know, I hate to be repetitive, but I think AI is changing the game, even in fintech. So I think this talk a year from now will be quite dynamic and and different. All right, awesome. Lots of good questions. Jan-Erik, so good to have you back. You
Jan-Erik Asplund (44:21)
So good be back.
Slava Rubin (44:23)
so you pretty much said all the sentences coherently. great job. So that brings us to end of
the state of FinTech. Thank you everybody for joining and we'll be in touch for the next one.
