Author: Caleb Shack

Translation: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

Every successful neobank follows the same starting path: identifying areas where traditional banks charge excessively or provide poor service, using this as an entry point to penetrate the broader banking business.

SoFi found that FICO credit scores are a poor method for pricing student debt for borrowers with growth potential. Instead, they underwrite based on income trajectories and disposable cash flow, and their accumulated data gradually becomes a real moat. While most banks charge a 3% fee for every international transaction, Monzo, Revolut, and Starling all started by offering zero foreign transaction fees. In Brazil, where traditional banks impose punitive rates and millions are wholly excluded from the formal financial system, Nubank has captured the market with no annual fee credit cards.

This approach is consistent: find an entry point, dominate a vertical niche, and then expand into comprehensive services.

Today, thanks to stablecoins, providing checking and savings accounts has become unprecedentedly simple. The infrastructure has essentially been commoditized. This has spawned a wave of stablecoin neobank startups, but most of them lack differentiation. The "frictionless" characteristics that allow them to easily launch also mean that the next batch of competitors can easily follow suit. At the deposit level alone, there’s no moat.

The first generation of fintech companies succeeded mainly because they built differentiated products on the newly commoditized distribution layer (the internet). This gave them an advantage over existing traditional banks. When commoditization occurs, it paves the way for new products to emerge through bundling. The convenience of opening deposit accounts will not create a thousand new independent neobanks; rather, it will make neobanks an embedded function, integrated into platforms that already possess more valuable assets: sources of income.

If you are a creator making money on YouTube or Twitch, your relationship with that platform is deeper and richer in data than your relationship with Chase Bank. The platform knows your cash flow in real-time. It understands your growth trajectory. It knows the algorithms. It can provide credit underwriting in ways that traditional banks never could. The same logic applies to gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft, social e-commerce platforms like Whop and TikTok, and modern payroll service providers like Deel and Gusto.

The logic of bundling creator income with financial products is simple. Income paid to creators and gig workers, gross merchandise volume (GMV) generated by the market, and salaries paid to employees all drain value from the platform once transferred via ACH. Just YouTube alone has paid creators over $100 billion since 2021 and started a stablecoin payout feature in December. Whop has generated over $4 billion in GMV and is starting to vertically expand into cryptocurrency-supported financial services. With just a few lines of code, platforms can now earn transfer fees and short-term treasury yields during the payment process, making it a no-brainer to bundle these services inside the platform and ultimately offer loan services based on their understanding of the users.

These companies do not need to become real banks in a regulatory sense. They just need to provide banking as a service (BaaS), including accounts, debit cards, and loans, driven by the platform data they have already generated. The entry point here is no longer product gimmicks or pricing arbitrage; the entry point is the income relationship itself.

YouTube will become the next neobank. Not because YouTube will apply for a banking license, but because wherever the money comes from, financial services should be there.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。