“A while back, I got into a to-and-fro on Twitter with Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon about banking, which garnered a fair amount of interest and commentary, after Marc declared that he is “dying to fund a disruptive bank“.
So far, finance startups have shied away getting their own banking licence, opting to use an existing bank instead. Movenbank and BankSimple talked up their plans to shake up banking but, in the end, both dropped “bank” from their name and partnered with CBW Bank and Bancorp respectively (Simple was subsequently acquired by BBVA). In effect, they built a presentation layer on top of an existing bank. I don’t think that’s the path to the future of banking. Even if you ignore the downsides of building a business on someone else’s platform, I believe that you can’t be truly disruptive unless you build the full stack.’
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