Simon Taylor
@sytaylor
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#Fintech Geek. Ranting @ https://t.co/u3KhcpA0w9
Joined January 2009
Arresting cryptographers for writing software is the end of credibility for the west. Bad move. Worse timing. Naive.
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The Ultimate SWIFT and Russia Sanctions explainer . You've probably been reading lots of people explaining SWIFT, but most explainers miss some key details like 👇. 1. SWIFT is not a payment system. SWIFT is a messaging system (like email) used by 11,000 banks in 200+ countries.
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Today: Learning to tweet holding a tiny baby. Welcome to the world little girl. Mum and Dad love you 💗
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I JUST TRIED THIS AND OMG IT WORKS. Wow. Wow. Wow. I'm sorry, I try to stay away from hyperbole I really really do. But lets face it everyone when making a website uses a few other sites as inspo. This is that but 100x faster.
this AI is incredible. Gamma AI now can clone any website in mins and. you just need to copy & paste the link, no coding needed. step by step tutorial:
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Stablecoins aren't cheaper; they're better . The mistake is comparing card fees to crypto network fees. This is Apples-to-oranges (see table). Stablecoins are now over $200bn. Here's how they make payments better. 🧵
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Behold. A McKinsey word salad about Generative AI in finance. TL;DR create committes and a command center and whatever the hell this cube thing is . Lol wut
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So @Europol say €2/3bn is laundered via crypto. If a €500bn market that's 0.5%. Compared to an estimated $2trn of money laundering in wider financial services this is tiny and much easier to detect / prevent. Im surprised it's being briefed against. Cc @ukhomeoffice.
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Monzo's new features for fraud are amazing . 📍 Known locations or "leave your money at home". Places you're comfortable moving large amounts of money but fraudsters are unlikely to access. 🤝 Trusted contacts. If a large transfer is requested your trusted friend must
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Thing I didn't realize until just now. @ensdomains supports DNS domain names. Meaning your .com can also be your .eth. Delightful backward compatibility choice.
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76% of Shopify revenue came from financial services last year. Embedded finance is undefeated as the best way to drive for SaaS businesses if they solve adjacent customer problems.
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This is precisely what working in a bank is like (by @gapingvoid). We need to do something meaningful!
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People now spend more on emotes and skins for video games than the movie industry made in 2019 📈 💸.
In 2020, people spent $54B on skins, virtual goods, and extra lives in games like Fortnite & Candy Crush. It's one example of how fungible and non-fungible tokens enable an internet-native economy, says Patrick Rivera. And it's just the beginning.
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The more time you spend in Fintech, the more you realize. 👉 Payments are easy, but the edge cases are hard.👉 Lending is easy; getting paid back is hard.👉 Getting live is easy; staying alive and regulated is hard.
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A tiny technical change that will reshape payments: . Visa allows banks and payment companies can pay each other with Stablecoins. This will make dollars lower cost, lower risk and 24/7. How? 👇. 📰 Visa is making USDC Stablecoin settlement available on the fast and cheap
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Instagram now has NFTs on @0xPolygon . While JP Morgan conducted DeFi trades on Polygon. Of all the "L2's" - Polygon is becoming the Redhat / enterprise default.
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So much of Adyen's margin and pricing power comes from the fact they're a bank and can settle payments instead of just processing them
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If you have more than 10 Bitcoin you're in the top 1% of all bitcoin holders
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Hands up if every time you discover a new Neobank or Fintech company you scroll to the bottom to see who the sponsor bank is?. #fintechnerds where you at?. ✋.
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Monzo just released its FY2024 results. Spoiler alert. They crushed. - £15.4m profit .- 2.5x revenue growth.- 88% increase in deposits (to £11.4bn). They're executing on profitability and they've barely started lending. Don't see many domestic threats but can they go global?.
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Monzo just passed 10m customers in the UK. That's more than Starling or Revolut. They added 2m new customers in the past 12 months. With 450,000 business customers, and my favorite stat. The average Monzo user has 38 friends who also use Monzo. 🧠 They're slowly becoming
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Eth is down against the Venezuelan Boliviar over the week.
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If you liked this thread, and you want to go further down with questions like. How does SWIFT messaging work?.What does this move mean for Crypto?. My thoughts on why Stablecoins would be an upgrade. Check out the full post here 👇.
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Metaverse and NFTs now are where social media was in 2009 ⌚. Your boomer friend doesn't understand how it will make any money 💰. But every teenager lives there 🏘️.
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Visa just did $5.1bn of adj net income on $8.8bn of revenue . This company is INSANELY profitable .
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talks about "Zero Billion Dollar markets" . The idea that markets exist that today are worth zero that will be worth billions. Being early and winning those markets has massive asymmetric upside. But most people can't think this way. Most assume the.
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PSA FINTECH NERDS. THERE IS A WIRECARD SCANDAL DOCUMENTARY ON NETFLIX. This is not a drill 🤠.
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The sentiment on Crypto appears to be shifting in my network. Fintech talents who hated it / didn't get the point now at least acknowledge it's interesting. Fintech talents who had been open to Crypto are now obsessed with it.
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Confirmed: @stripe's biggest-ever acquisition is of the Stablecoin platform Bridge. Bridge provides software that helps businesses accept Stablecoin payments and simplifies the infrastructure (a bit like Stripe does for TradFi). 🧠 This will go down as an Instagram-like.
This deal is done. $1.1b
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AML is the worlds most in-effective policy experiment. This is a phenomenal piece on just how utterly useless AML rules are. Effectiveness is estimated at 0.1% . Policymakers: But crypto!. That's called the distraction technique.
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Banking software wasn't designed to solve today's problems. It was designed to automate yesterdays processes. Few are re-thinking banking software from first principles outside of the Neobanks building it all themselves.
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ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FUCKING MILLION FOR WEBINARS??!!!. Jesus Christ this is peak silicon valley boys club. is a spectacular failure and someone just needs to kill it. It's not a "hard thing about hard things story". They had insane resources and failed.
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Fintech 1.0 = Better UX.Fintech 2.0 = Embedded finance.Fintech 3.0 = Defi (better infra). H/t @JohnStCapital.
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Look what I just spotted at check out. $5 off for using pay by bank. 👀👀👀
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So @CryptoKitties is Pokémon for Capitalists. It's #esports meets #blockchain . Oh and you can get people to pay to breed with your crypto kitties. This is the new economy. People are weird.
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Finance products are a commodity. So get big, sell lots, hit profitability. Fintech products are a service. Solve a problem, charge a premium, grow rapidly.
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The company was one way we organised for the last 300 years. The religion was another. The government another. Cryptoeconomics are poo poo'ed by many. But a new way to align incentives globally at the species level is an interesting signal longer term.
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On Stablecoins. How I start all my rants is with a bit of an outline of logic. I then work to add evidence and rationale to a thought or statement. This one will likely appear in early Jan.
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The world's largest digital bank just did this 👇. What happens when 100m customers have access to Stablecoins?. Stablecoins become the new normal.
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Nubank hits 100m users .Affirm has a massive earnings beat .Monzo extends it's growth round . Fintech has no chill.
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I've had two VERY senior B2B Fintech company leaders ask me how to get smart on Stablecoins, today. It's 10:43am. In the UK timezone.
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With decentralised exchanges now all the rage we have to learn the lessons of centralised exchanges. 1) user experience has to be better.2) performance has to be better.3) don't fight the law . Expanded below. .
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Chime has . 7m active users .$1.5bn annual revenue .1/3rd cost to serve of a traditional bank.Launching unsecured loans .Will do ETFs soon . This is the "we're ready for IPO" press tour.
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We finally get our first stablecoin IPO! Some thoughts on the Circle S1. 👇. IPO szn is here. Circle is targeting a $4B valuation—the biggest crypto listing since Coinbase. They reported . - $1.7bn revenue, .-39.3% gross margin, .- and an operating profit of $167m.
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The OCC paved the way for banks to 👇. 1. Access public chains (Eth, BTC, Celo, USDC) as payments rails. 2. Hold each of those coins directly or on behalf of clients. 3. Run a node for each of those chains. Biggest legitimization moment of decentralized infrastructure yet 📣.
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13. Over time Russia (and China) may be emboldened to build out alternatives to SWIFT. China is building an alternative to SWIFT called CIPS (Cross-border Interbank Payment System). Today CIPS is small, but China and Russia could provide a regional alternative to SWIFT.
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This year's @ycombinator winter batch had 25 #fintech companies (13% of the total). Here's my breakdown of each of them 👇.
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New report from 11:FS - "Rebuilding financial services from the Inside". Thread 🧵. Get the report here👇.
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Coinbase now has a larger market cap than Barclays. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
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Crypto isn't a developed markets story. It's a developing markets story 👇. % of consumers who say they own crypto
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Just dropped: The State of Fintech 2025. The age of the Fintech Hyperscaler. Fintech companies are growing faster than incumbents and will soon be the largest companies in their category. Includes. - Every bank job title will have an AI Agent team replacing labor. The first
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Wow. A bank pleading guilty to massive AML failings. If only there was some global, public record of transactions bringing transparency to finance.
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🆕 @coinbase launches x402, the HTTP for Money, built on stablecoins for Agentic Commerce. Buzzwords aside, this could be the most significant thing to happen to payments since tokenization. That's not hyperbole. Hear me out. The internet was built to move information, not
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Fintech 🧠 Food - 5th Dec - Stripe Treasury, Moov, Amount, Revolut & Smiling curves in financial services.
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B2B payments are absolutely massive, and horribly under served. If someone can build a better ACH, the TAM is enormous. This is why the card schemes are looking at becoming "multi rail". But I've got my eye on stablecoins, still. Can't shake the feeling there's something there
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Klarna has filled for IPO in the US. This is interesting for a handful of reasons. 1. It picked the US not Europe (its home).2. It could be the dam breaking for Fintech IPOs in 2025.3. It's an incredible comeback story from a massive down-round to multi-billion IPO. 👀 ICYMI:.
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Revolut is launching eSIM plans, and I think it's a genius move. New mobile offering for Revolut customers will allow them access to roaming without extra charges. Subscribers to Revolut's Ultra ($69 per month) plan will receive up to 3GB of data, which resets monthly. Regular
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Full breakdown of Visa's new announcements. If this gets adoption it's a game changer. 👇. 💳 Cards. 👉 Any device is a POS device.👉 Tap to Confirm: Authenticates identity shopping online.👉 Tap to Add Card to wallet: Adds security.👉 Tap to P2P (person-to-person).👉 Choose.
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This is why fintech Vs crypto needs more consideration 👀. Uniswap V3 gives "better FX" than TransferWise 👇👇👇. Weekly rant was all about this.
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Why is everyone doing a web3 Wallet?. Recently, Robinhood Revolut & GameStop announced launching a web3 (self custodial) wallet. Is this a hangover from the late-stage web3 euphoria, some cheap marketing trick, or is there a genuine business case here?. 🧵👇.
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Stablecoins aren't cheaper yet than tradfi. They look that way because people are confusing the network fee with the fees merchants pay. Stripe is charging 1.5% to accept Stables. Regulated debit may be cheaper in many instances.
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Wow! Adyen down more than 40% on H1 earnings. Adyen reported 739.1 million euros ($804.3 million) revenue in H1, up 21% from 2022 but below the expected 40%. EBITDA is down 10% from H1 22. Adyen says talent costs increased as it ramped hiring and customers became more
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So Bank as a Service is a hot #fintech topic, but what is it? 🤔. ● BaaS allows any brand to embed financial.services into its customer experience. 🍎. ● . by picking and choosing capabilities.offered by providers… 🛠️. ● …and licence holders in a modular fashion. ⛓️
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11. Russia has been preparing for sanctions for years. Russia's central bank built up foreign reserves to more than $600bn (40% of GDP), and most of that is held in Euros and Gold. Meaning, it may still be able to run for a long time without SWIFT.
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Everything you need to know about the new Robinhod card. The Gold credit card 3% with cashback is an unbelievable deal, aimed directly at Apple Card and Chase Sapphire. But can it last if it loses money?. Maybe. ICYMI: Robinhood’s Gold card will cost $5 per month or $50
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Wow! Bank of America "Will go into the Stablecoin business" Some thoughts. Since Stripe acquired Bridge stablecoins have been THE payments topic of the past few months. They offer. - 24*7, global, and instant payments.- Companies like Space X and Deel use them to collect
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Deepseek is not a win for China. It's a win for open source.
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Humbling moment 🙏. The littlest newsletter Fintech Brainfood now has 10k readers 🚀. It started as a way to just try and *understand* fintech (and honestly it still is). Other than posting occasionally, I've barely promoted the thing. But the readers response has been amazing.
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Visa launches Visa+ to make P2P payments interoperable. Here's what you need to know and my analysis 👇. Visa is partnering with PayPal and Venmo to make the P2P services work together seamlessly. Users don't need a Visa card, but they create a unique handle (like @ name) and.
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The biggest thing happening in #fintech is every day #wealth #savings and .#investments e.g. Robinhood, Acorns, Plum and Moneybox. This is far bigger than "robo advice" and is well worth your attention if you work in product or strategy.
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Massive massive massive news. Square is now a bank. 🤯🤯🤯🤯.
FDIC approved the deposit insurance application submitted by Square, Inc., to create a de novo industrial bank. Square Financial Services will originate commercial loans to merchants that process card transactions through Square’s payments system.
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Ooof 🤔🤔. Just 10 Addresses Hold Nearly 50% of All EOS Tokens.
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Wondering about @Libra_ ? Is it a #cryptocurrency? Who's involved? 🤔. I went and wrote what I think are the 11 most interesting things about Facebook's new #cryptocurrency 👇.
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My thoughts on @RevolutApp finally getting its UK banking licence. It's UK Banking license will allow it to offer overdrafts, loans, and savings products to its more than 9m UK consumers. 🧠 This is a huge moment for Revolut and UK Fintech. Revolut has talked a big game on the.
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Ok so Lucite AI is WILD. It's an investment banking analyst as a service. Here are some slides it pulled together about $AFRM with just the stock ticker and home page as inputs. Now everyone is @FTPartners 🤯
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Bank innovation labs be like 🤩. 👇🙄.
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In the beginning, there was FICO. FICO took data from banks, lenders, and others and said, "Let there be a score." . On the second day, there were information-based systems. Capital One took consumers just under the 670 FICO score and identified possible good customers close to.
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As a former banker: The Bitcoin ETF matters. Ex-colleagues across big banks I used to work with agree. Here's why 👇. The ETF approvals mean that any pension fund or retail investor can buy Bitcoin without opening a Crypto wallet or ever touching the underlying asset. 🧠 The ETF.
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