Treasury Prime CEO Chris Dean on Banking-as-a-service, embedded finance, and the evolution of Fi...

Hi, this is Lex, and welcome to the Fintech Blueprint. It's your podcast about fintech, decentralized finance, digital banking, investing, robo advice, artificial intelligence, and all the other frontier technology that is transforming financial services. To get more content like an illustrated transcript of this conversation in your inbox, subscribe at Fintech Blueprint. So, without further delay, let's jump into today's episode. I am so excited about today's podcast. We have Chris Dean, who is the CEO at Treasury prime, with us today. We'll talk about banking as a service, fintech, APIs, embedded finance, and the general evolution of the fintech banking industry over, over the last decade. So with that, Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Lex. It's great to be here. I really appreciate your time.

Absolutely, my pleasure. So you have a fantastic background of technology and entrepreneurship, and you've been in and around the space of reimagining how banking infrastructure works for quite a while. What got you engaged in fintech? And was it fintech when you started?

That's a great question, because when I started, I didn't really know what money was. I had a bank account, I paid my mortgage, but I didn't really know how money worked. My background is as a technologist. I used to be a machine learning researcher. And at some point my family moved up to the Bay Area and I had to get a real job as opposed to an academic job. And that started my startup world. And I eventually started founding companies as the technology person, as CTO and VP of engineering and that sort of thing, and, and great time and like sold a couple companies, one for a good amount of money. And at some point my friend Dan said, I need help at my startup, says Dan, and I'm like, I'm too tired to do another startup, Dan. I can't be a founder. He says, don't worry, you don't have to be a founder because we're nine months old or whatever they were at the time. And that was very funny. But Dan's startup was this one called Standard treasury. And Dan said that they needed some technology help at Standard Treasury. So I didn't know anything about banking then. And Dan did the most amazing thing of sawing me in the room that this was a good idea. And I said to Dan, look, I don't know anything about banks, about money, about really anything like that. He said, that's okay, as long as you know how computers work, we can figure it out. And we did. We ended up selling that company to Silicon Valley bank after a couple years SVB was our first client and they ended up buying us. So that's how I got into it and that all my learning came from that. One day then I were at a meeting at a coffee shop and from then on it was like drinking from the fire hose. Still drinking from the fire hose.

I hope the fire hose is always full. I can't help but ask, you framed it as not knowing how money works. What do you mean by that? And how does money work?

Right. I can tell you my level of understanding even now, like seven, eight years in of like how money works is not good enough that I can explain it to someone quickly. But in some sense, money is a belief between people about assets and about value. And if you look at the particulars, like just the nuts and bolts of it, if you are a technologist, you start to think about the physics of it all or the ones and zeros of it all. And really at the end of the day, the money system in most places is held together by the banking system. And if you understand the banking system, you understand how money works in that place. And I've decided that I'm really going to focus on the United States because my opinion, the US has the best economy in the world, but the worst banking system of any first world country. And it really is interesting to see how these are in conflict. Right. The innovation wanted from the economy side is not as well supported from the banking side and the money side as we'd like. So how does money work? People want things to be liquid, people want to be able to move assets around, they want to be able to exchange things for value. And, and banks are supposed to facilitate that. In general, they do an okay job, but in the US they could do so much better. So much better.

The description of the American financial infrastructure as the worst in the developed world I think is probably too kind.

Based.

On my experience there. So tell us a little bit more about what Standard treasury was targeting and why Silicon Valley bank, which is one of the sort of more innovative banks, partly by its virtue of looking at startup companies. What did it see in Standard Treasury?

Yeah, that's great. So Standard treasury had noticed what was happening in the rest of the world, particularly they had noticed some of the open banking things that are happening in the uk, in London, and they realized that this was, if successful in the US would be a huge game changer, right? Would be like a lot of that was really oriented towards how consumers would access their bank accounts and then also how commercial entities could access their banker, like in a Programmatic, high volume way, which really is pretty hard to do in the us. So that was the pitch there. So our idea was that we go to the top 100 banks. So, you know, at the very tail end of the top 100 banks is SVB. And this is like banks of, you know, 100 billion or maybe 50 billion in deposits, like kind of that number. And go to them and say we can help you move into the modern era and contact and work with your best clients, you know, your very biggest clients, by providing them a technology layer where they can access the bank. And I say that to them and to a nerd who listen, I'd say, hey, we have a cool API we can wrap your bank with. And depending on the audience, they would take it differently. And I can tell you, pretty much every US bank was interested, sort of interested in that banker way where they're like, let's have another meeting and never pulled the trigger. Except for Silicon Valley Bank. They immediately saw the value and because of the nature of their clientele, you know, it's like you said, startups really engineering focused, they really wanted an API. So they were our first client and eventually they just purchased us partly to keep us off the table from some other banks and you know, partly just because I think at that point we had realized that if we were going to make a big change in the United States, we'd have to have a different strategy than going to the biggest banks and saying you should put an API on, because they didn't really want to do that. So we ended up being purchased by SVB and I ran the FinTech group there for couple couple years.

That's super interesting. And there's a couple of macro context issues around here as well, because one thing is regulation. And so in London and the UK that you mentioned, as well as across Europe, you had the open banking regulation of PSD2, where it was motivated by competition. And it's now in 2021, five years later, that the Biden administration is trying to motivate competition in financial services as well. I think it was an announcement last week, and without putting the house on fire, so to speak, there's not really an incentive for the large banks in the US to open up. Which gets us to the second point, which is it sounds in a way that this was almost defense against data aggregation and the plaids of the world coming in from the outside, sort of crowbarring their way through data scraping. Was that a concern that banks had when you talk to them at all?

Not back then it's far enough ago that it wasn't a concern. Part of our view was that a plaid like people view of the world is interesting, but hard to implement in a way that works all the time, where if you look at the bigger banks, they have early warning, they have some partnerships like that. They could turn this on tomorrow if they wanted to. And like you said, we wanted the PSD1, PSD2 stuff in the US we thought that would help the economy and we thought that would help the banks. But the bigger banks realized that in some ways they have a monopoly on certain activities in the US and the big banks really dominate that. And they said, why would we do that when we're doing fine in the uk it's really different. Like if you look at Challenger banks in London, you know, they have a whole program to start what we would call de Novo bank, and they would call it probably Challenger bank. And they have rules for how to do that. And the whole point here is to create competition among the banks. And we don't have such a thing in the United States. What we do have is, if you count all the credit unions and whatnot, is 10,000 existing financial institutions who can hold funds. And that's a lot. And so if you look at, from a policy perspective, you'd say, well, do I want 20,000? Maybe not. But the side effect of that policy decision is that you don't have competition. And so what standard treasury tried to do was create that competition. And I would say ultimately we were successful in the sense that a variant of the APIs that Jim wrote, which is my partner Jim, Jim Brewster at svb, you can see them all over the place. Like the names are the same. Some of the concepts are very similar. You can see those all over the place. So in that way we won. But ultimately, I think at the time, the US just wasn't ready. And it had to be someone like Platt or someone who came in, more like a pirate who came in and said, we're going to figure this out even if the banks don't want us to.

Absolutely. And there is a great thread in what you've described which I think will connect us into the customer of FinTech APIs, especially as we talk about Treasury Prime. But I do want to linger just one more round on open banking, which is the European PSD2 stuff. And in particular BBVA and their platform, you know, and the history of BBVA's platform is that they bought Bank Simple. Bank simple was an early B2C Neo Bank. They're about know, seven years too early. So I think the team had Twitter backgrounds and sort of smashed themselves into the wall building a thing that couldn't get customers, but was acquired for 100 million by BBVA. And they, they really pivoted it around to be an API first platform for banking services. And I was almost heartbroken when it was shut down, I think last month or so. Do you have any sense for why some of the earlier attempts at API led banking kind of didn't work? Or are there just banks that cool enough to pull it off? Like, what is it about the magic touch that's missing?

It's a good question. I can tell you when we were at Standard treasury, later at svb, the only technology stack we really thought was good is the simple one. It was actually from a technology point of view, it's excellent. It's just really well done. And I too was heartbroken when BBVA shut it down. But really the day they shut it down was not really the day they stopped using it. Right? It's, you know, you and I probably both know these people who tried for years to get on the BBVA platform and could not and they had to go somewhere else. You know, some of them are my customers now. The problem is, I think for BBVA is that they saw from their European perspective as the, you know, the parent company, the value of having open APIs in the right market. But in the US generally, the banks don't need to do that because there's not that level of API competition. If you look at the banking customers that treasury prime has, that there really are smaller banks who are really looking to grow a market substantially. I think if you asked any banker, they would say, oh yeah, APIs are going to be a big deal. And then they pick a number, five years, ten years or whatever. But I don't need to do that today because I have such a good business. It's the smaller folks who are worried about Citi or Wells eating their lunch who are doing the cool APIs. BBVA is too big. When they got bought, the parent, the new bank said, well, we don't really need this. We didn't need it yesterday, we don't need it now, so let's just shut it down.

It's really amazing when you zoom out because, you know, Revolut has, I think about 300, 400 million in revenue, maybe a smattering over 10 billion in assets, which in the US, in that long tail that you described, would be not all that impressive. And yet the valuation's $33 billion, which is 10 billion more than all of Deutsche Bank. And so, you know, I think there's, there's some pretty crazy arbitrage that's available. But you know, we'll leave that for later if we go back, you know, Silicon Valley bank, the acquisition. Can you tell us about your journey at SVB and then how it led to Treasury Prime?

So it's interesting, like not everyone realizes this about svb. SVB is a very, it's a substantial bank. It's a well run substantial bank. When I joined they were just under 50 billion because they were trying to stay under that magic number. At some point they couldn't stop from going over it and so they just went, said fine, we'll go up to know where they are now. 90, 100 billion. Just deposits, just very big. So you think of them as a big bank. You think of them like a competitor to Fifth Third, which is a large regional bank in the Midwest or even the giant ones in New York or on the west coast like Wells or Citi or whoever. But really they're not, they're a different sort of bank. They're really a community bank. It just turns out that their community is super, super rich. They have a tiny number of clients relative to a bigger bank because it's almost entirely a commercial bank. And who do they bank? They bank people like treasury prime. They bank startups and startups generally have a lot of cash for a while and so until they all of a sudden don't or they get hugely successful. And that's how SOV works. You know, they have just tiny number of clients. But those clients are all the same. They're all brand new companies, they're all very sophisticated. Almost all of them have strong software engineering backgrounds. And so what they were clamoring for even before Standard treasury existed was a better way to access the bank. Like they just wanted to do pay or check their balance or you know, other things. And that was why SVB was our first client. It was actually a pretty easy pitch because we made our pitch and they're like, oh, we get it, what are we signed? And we, you know, they're our first client. And then later they bought us. And when I was running the group at SVB that just kept building, building, you know, we had a lot of, you know, interesting people who were our partners and we had no marketing, very little sales from the bank. But still people were beating down our doors for the API and you know, we had people who's an interesting person, we bank so we did the first version of Stripe Atlas. We were the backend for that, which is like a service where you create a corporation, then open a bank account as part of that. And Stripe's reasons to do that was because they had a lot of international companies whose money was stuck somewhere in a Wells account because there's no US entity to transfer the money to. And we were the backend for that. And that was great. And that was kind of an interesting experience for us. That and one other thing were part of the aha moment. As soon as we started opening bank accounts, the bankers inside the bank said, oh, wait, you could do that. That's interesting. Like, how long did it take SVB to open a commercial bank account? Remember, there's not a lot of incentive to be fast for them because they have so few clients, but really, it would often take two or three weeks to open a bank account really slow. And what we found, shockingly, was that's not unusual for a lot of banks. And the way they do it is very manual. There's emails that fly between people. Sometimes there's a ticketing system. You think it'd be just press a button and you're done. But for most banks, it's not like that. So we built a system to automatically open a bank account, and then we wrapped an API around that, and that's what Stripe used the first version. And then later, you know, the bank itself start to use that. And that was kind of an aha moment for us where we're like, wait, we built one tool that both the fintechs and the bank itself want. And then shortly thereafter, some folks from the payment groups came to us and said, hey, we want to send some ACH or wires. And we hear you have an API for that. Of course we have an API for that. We send all our stuff to you. You know, we have an API. And they said, well, we want to use the API to send our own stuff. And imagine it from my perspective. I'm sitting in a chair and someone's coming to me and says, who are you? Like, they're the ACH team. It's, I don't know, 20, 30 people. They're like, great, we met before. I love you guys. What do you need? We want to use your API so you can send ACHS to us. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. You can skip the middleman here, buddy. You don't need. You just send it to yourself. You're sitting right there. You don't need to send it out. The Door, just use it. And they said something that was like, I remember Jim commenting this afterwards. He was like, what they just said was there's enough exception processing that they have to do manually that they want an automated system to do it. And I said that's right. And I said this to the payment guys too, is that, you know, we're just a small team of programmers and programmers are well known to be super lazy and like we are not going to do things manually. We're going to spend, you know, 100 hours writing a script and a workflow system to save ourselves all that time. And we did that. And that was another aha moment where the bank itself wanted to use our system to send payments itself. And this was great. This was the genesis of the idea for treasury prime because Jim and I realized something really early on is that we had thought about leaving and doing basically what SYNAPSE ended up doing, which is like capture a bank and put an API around it, disintermediate the bank and you're good to go. We see this as just a failed strategy, right? This is not a strategy which will work long term. If you want to actually fundamentally change how banking works, that won't do it. And the short reason why is that there's like a trillion dollars in deposits somewhere for all the fintechs in the world in the US and there's not going to be a single new bank that takes a trillion dollars deposit. So you're going to need to spread that around most of the U.S. so you're going to need a network of banks. And that's kind of where we came in. But we could never figure out how to do it. And that's why we're here at svb, just kind of marking time, you know, sitting on the roof, you know, watching the earn out happen. And that was the, we said, hey, we can make a product here and we can sell it to all the banks for them to use themselves. And as a side effect that creates a fintech platform for all the fintechs in the world to access all these banks. And that's what we did. You know, we chewed on the idea for a few months. You know, I, I quit svb, we went down the Apple store, we bought new laptops and started typing. That's, that's Treasury Prime.

The most important part of any startup idea is the, is the, the laptop.

That's right, got new laptops. We didn't want to get in trouble with svb, right? So we stole anything. So we just got new Laptop.

That's fantastic. So what is the treasury prime platform do today? How has that evolved from your original idea? And you know, if you were explaining it to a novice, like what's, what are the flows that you enable?

The idea is incredibly similar to that those first couple weeks when you're figuring it out. So what treasury prime does is we create a network. We create actually two networks. On one side we have a network of banks, and these are regular commercially chartered banks in the U.S. you know, they're regulated by DSC or COCC or someone like the. That OCC rather. And that's a regular bank. And we have a network of them. And then on the other side we have a network of fintechs. And there's seemingly at the moment an inexhaustible supply of fintechs. So no matter how many banks there are, there's 100x more fintechs in the world. And we connect these two entities together in a mutually beneficial way. So we're never trying to disintermediate the bank. What we do is we connect these two entities and you can think of the analogy like Uber. Like on one side you have passengers, at Uber on one side you have drivers. If you have no passengers, the drivers are going to get bored and go home. And the passengers in our case are the fintechs. If you have no drivers, however, the passengers are just going to be standing on the corner waving their phone, waiting for a car to show up. And the drivers in this case are the banks. So what we try to do is create an ecosystem where there is both entities, they can connect to each other. Traditionally, these two groups have great difficulty talking to each other. And partly it's a technology problem, partly like they didn't have a good way to do that. So we have an API, the best in class API. So it's great. But also there's a cultural problem, is that they just generally speak different languages. Generally banks and startups and fintechs are just very different entities and they have just very different people at them and goals. And a large part of our problem is to help these two entities slowly over time, you know, be able to come to the same table. And that's what we are. Ultimately, treasury prime is a software company. Like we make software that connects these two entities together. And I think this differs from some other people, like, you know, maybe I mentioned SYNAPSE already, I'll mention them again. They're trying to disintermediate the bank. We have no such goal. Right. We don't want to be a bank. We have no desire to do that.

Why? The concept of many smaller banks aggregated together as a side of a network rather than like you mentioned before, kind of two or three monolithic megabanks. Why does that long tail create a better counterparty?

You think, you know, if you went to the biggest bank in the US you know, so you went to JP Morgan and you said we want you to make an API and then you can capture all possible fintech business. They seem not to be able to do that and they seem to have very little interest in it. They look at the, historically especially they've looked at the fintech market and said it's too small for them to worry about. However, if you go to the smaller side, instead of a trillion dollar in deposit bank, you go to a billion dollar in deposit bank like most of ours are. Those are hungry entities, you know, generally they're smaller groups. So like a couple hundred people working in the banks we're at instead of you know, 100,000 or however at JP Morgan. And they're hungry. They see the writing on the wall, they see how even though there's still 10,000 financial institutions, there used to be more than that and the smaller ones are getting gobbled up or going out of business. And for many of the banks who want to become fintech banks, they say this is a client base that is good and valuable and a great long term partner. I want to learn how to do that and those people are willing to do it. Now it turns out as we have more and more success, the bigger banks are starting to take notice and eventually that will happen, but just in the same way that there's a lot of banks in the world, in the US at least, it's just a lot of them and they all serve a market and I think that that will probably continue even as fintechs grow.

How, how do you connect into them? You know, is it that. I guess in, in my experience most of those types of entities sit either on Jack Henry or FIS or, or fiserv and those are not easy counterparties either, you know, so let's say of somebody who spends 20 years managing a core banking system is similarly uninterested in how Chime is revolutionizing payday loans. Yeah. So I guess the question is what are the hooks that you found and how were you able to make them repeatable on the depository side?

Right. This is a great question. This is like what I was alluding to before that there's fintech wants to talk to a bank or they want to actually just be able to move money around. There's generally an impedance mismatch. There's a technology barrier here. And that there's. You described it perfectly. Typical bank, even a small bank, like you know, Lending Club bank, which is one of our banks, they will still have to do even basic things. Maybe a dozen, 14 different systems, the core being the biggest one, but still only probably 50 or 60% of the activity. And each one of these systems is generally from a software point of view, from my point of view, terrible. You know, there was software that was originally built in the 80s. It's been patched over the last however many 40 years just to keep going. And it's hard to work with. You know, it's a mixture of crazy technology formats, arbitrary downtimes, failures, full of bugs, and you have to learn how to navigate your way through all those problems. And I think what we did is we just decided, we were at Silicon Valley bank when we decided this, we were just going to figure it out and do it anyway. And so we just connect all these systems and sometimes we're lucky and we use like a system from FIS, like CodeConnect, which is an okay API and we'll do like maybe three or four systems but sometimes it's connecting to some old timey mainframe and it is no fun. But once you're done, you're done. And you know, if you think about our system like if you want to be a nerd in the audience, like an object relational mapper, like how you'd connect to Postgres or SQL Server or MySQL or whatever. We have a layer like that where we have a bank layer. We've decided what we think the fundamental axioms for any bank are and we implement that layer for at every new bank. And as banks share systems like if they share a core, then we can just reuse that. We have zero banks though that share 100% of their backend systems. They all use a different core or different KYC or different card vendor or a different ACH system, or a different wire system or a different cold storage or a different CRM or. And it goes on and on and on and we just connect them all. And once we do that, we present a different view to the fintech which is everything's the same. It's not, not perfectly the same. If you wanted something special, there's a few edge cases, but the basics are the same. You want to apply for a bank account, you can open a Bank account, any kind, retail, commercial, any kind. If you want to like send a wire, you can send a wire and that just works everywhere.

That's really interesting to hear. It's very analogous to the registered investment advisor industry in the US where.

Yep, exactly. Yep.

I had worked on a company that was trying to do this, but for the advisor desktop. And you're not contending with core systems, but you are contending with custodians and portfolio management. And it's just a nightmare of overnight CSVs that break and you have giant reams of people trying to figure out why this is a plus one and this is a minus one and the prices are different, you know, and it's, it is just such a, such a mishmash. When you look on the other side of the network, on the side of the customers, you kind of mention them as fintechs. But what's their profile, who are they, what are they trying to do?

Yeah, they're all over the map actually. But generally the things that they have in common are that a fintech has knowledge or insights into a specific market that's often been underserved or it hasn't been really served properly for the last few years. And that's really what they know. Like if you think about it, fintech is just a classic startup in the sense that they see something changing or they see a need and they fill it. It's that in the past it was hard to do this when you wanted to touch money. And in the past like before treasury prime, it would take, you know, six months and 10, 20 engineers to hook up to your bank. Now you it in an afternoon, it's pretty fast. But most of the fintechs have an insight into a market. And like at one extreme you have commercial neobanks who are doing some sort of commercial thing and some are just general purpose commercial neobanks like you look at, I don't know, Lenovo's or the north ones of the world, right. They're looking to bank small businesses, but we see those and there's, we have a few of those on the retail side as well, on the personal side as well. But really the more interesting ones are the folks who have a very specific market. Like one of my favorites is this commercial neobank called Zibo and they bank landlords and if you think about it, that's probably a really good market. You know, landlords, they have a lot of money moving, they had a lot of deposits, but it might not be big enough for a bank to make a Specialized offering for, you know, at least initially because they wouldn't know how to access it. But that is a very specific product for a very specific industry. And if you talk to the Zebo folks are great. They will tell you that they're really not a neobank. What they are is a management platform, a SaaS app for landlords. It just turns out that the banking part of that is just a big important portion. So if they didn't do that also, they would be in trouble. But besides taking rent and security deposits, they also need to fix people's windows and do background checks and things like that. And those are the interesting ones at one extreme. And then the other extreme, like you have people who are just doing what I would call relatively simple money movement. Like we have a couple clients who are doing things like I'll just pick one in Mud Flap. What they do is they pay for gas at a truck stop. And if you think about it, this is like the old school. One of the original ideas for cards, how closed loop cards work. So I'm a trucker, I go get gas at the truck stop. Gas is a huge expense. I want to make that as efficient as possible. And Mud Flaps figured out a way to do that. And all they do is they have a whole bunch of complicated ACH rules and that's all they're really doing in an app. But they could do it because they know that market really well. They do it because they know it better than anybody else. And those are the people we see. At one end it's flow funds app like Mud Flap and the other end it's full on neobanks like cbo.

Yep, that makes a lot of sense. You know, one shorthand that we've used is to think of fintech as really distribution, as the storefront of some other manufactured product. And you know, in this particular case, the depository account or the investment account or you know, insurance product or underwritten loans, you know, and then you've got a digital front end that connects to the audience in a way that, you know, a megabank like a Wells or a Citi probably can't. And so I imagine more and more specialization over time. But then there's another concept that I wonder if it's true or not. And I bet you would see it in your customer base or your data, which is that historically the banking product, there was an attempt to brand it. So the distributor is also in a sense the manufacturer. And even though every single credit union and community regional bank is offering you a checking and A savings account and these are commodities. There's some attempt at a brand and at this particular account being special. But when you think about like Tylenol, you've got the branded version of Tylenol and then you've got generics. And to get Tylenol you don't go to the Tylenol store, you go to a pharmacy with lots of stuff. And most of it doesn't have to be branded, it's just the chemical in there. And I'm trying to apply the same sort of thinking to, you know, the banking industry where there's this bundling between buying the bank account from a bank and that seems to be breaking in the sense that you've got fintechs who are distributing bank accounts that they don't make but that serve a purpose inside of their application. And then one more layer up, you have large E commerce platforms where people are actually buying stuff now integrating the banking and financial products of fintechs who are distributing, you know, third party through platforms like treasury prime, which is integrated yet again into the underlying sort of depository commodity. And I wonder whether number one, is that the right frame and number two, are you seeing these edges of commerce starting to spill into the client set?

Definitely see the spilling. It's a good analogy. I think part of the difference here is that banks are really the only ones. Like a commercially chartered US bank are the only ones who can do the things that we all want them to do. They're the only ones who can actually hold funds. They're the only ones who have access to ACH or the wire system. And that makes them unique in the space. Like I can't tomorrow just decide I'm going to start a new bank and have that be ready by in a couple months or weeks. It's a process that takes a long time and it's hard to do. It's different from I could spin up a new factory and start spinning out new cars or new Tylenol generics. Assuming I had done all the regulations, I could do that relatively easy. But it's harder on the bank side. I would say that our estimation, banks are really, really great at two things. They're great at risk management. And if you just talk to a banker after a while you can see that that's like overwhelmingly how their brains think. They think about the risk of everything. They also are good at having a great customer relationship with their best clients. Right. For the big clients, they know their banker like I have a couple bankers and they're great, they know my business and they are here to help me. And those are things that banks are good at. Banks are not good at the stuff that startups are good at. Like they're not good at the marketing, they're not good at finding what the new product should be. And in that sense, like if you look at the chimes of the world, that's amazing. They have great product, but they also have a great marketing arm, far better than most banks ever would. And that's really the main difference we see is that the Findex really understand the market. Some of them don't understand banking at all and that's not great, but it's okay. But the banks just can never get past that point where you say, I'm going to make an innovative product up. As soon as I say that to them, they go, what if it fails? And I go, well, then you try something else and try get it not to fail. But the fact that it could fail just in their risk mind just makes them stuck and it's hard for them to keep going.

Yeah, absolutely. We've gone through a wonderful journey with you in this conversation. I want to wrap us up with your view of how this all plays out. You've got the chessboard in place of the platform. You've got the long tail of smaller banks that are not being plugged in and redistributed by all sorts of different types of fintechs. You have the mega banks who are slowly turning around and I'd say burning a lot of opportunities, but nonetheless they can still come in and do a lot of splashing around. And so how do you see this fast forwarding on a five year time horizon, you know, not next year, but what is the longer run outcome? And I guess you throw the core banking platforms in there as well. How does it all look in the blender? Right.

It's a great question. I think the thing that people on our side of the problem generally believe that people outside of our little bubble do not like, especially the bankers, do not, is that the amount of fintechs that people are estimating are just their orders of magnitude too small. There's just way, way more. And I always use the analogy of the Internet back in the, you know, the 90s, it's 1995, zillion years ago. Amazon, Yahoo, ebay, that's all the Internet companies you need, right? They can do everything. Maybe you add one or two, Hotmail, you had one or two, but that's all you need. You fast forward five years from that and every single company is an Internet company. My pizza place has a website. And I think the same exact thing is going to happen on the fintech side. It is true that the biggest players in the fintech world, whether it's people doing things like a firm or people doing things like Chime, they are taking a lot of mindshare right now. But I think we're just a hop and a skip and a jump away from every single company saying, actually, I want direct access to my bank and my customers demand that I give them services that allow them to connect directly to their financial system. And I see in five years it turns out that we're 10 times more fintechs than even now, maybe 100 times. The banks on the bank side by themselves, even the big banks, I don't think they can keep up. They're just not. They can't move that fast. So it's going to fall on people like us, maybe a few of the interesting software vendors out there, the fiss and fisers of the world, they're going to give it a go to try to make this possible because it's going to happen regardless. The pressure is too big now. I think banking has been in almost stasis since the 2008 crash and when everyone stopped minting new bank charters and the pressures from the economy is just too big. And this is, frankly, this is the moment I've been waiting for for four years, right? It's like, great, finally there's enough pressure on the system that we're going to start growing exponentially when we have been just growing linearly before.

We are all fintechs now and we will all be customers of Treasury Prime. Chris, thanks so much for hopping on the podcast with us. Fantastic to have you.

Thank you so much. Have a great day. Day.

Hi everyone. That's it for this week's episode of the Fintech Blueprint. For more technical deep dives into all things fintech and decentralized Finance, check out FinTechBlueprint.com and grab a free subscription to the newsletter. This is Lex and I'll see you next time.