Is card issuing a separate model from banking-as-a-service, or are they related?

There’s definitely a separate opportunity to build a card issuing platform. We've invested in Highnote and Marqeta, obviously. Marqeta was modern several years ago, and so that was a big opportunity versus other solutions. Highnote and new challengers are offering basically purpose-built solutions for what enterprises are looking for now, which tends to be lower-level APIs. They want to see SKU-level data to introduce workflows into those low-level APIs for approvals and things like that and then be able to run across multiple kinds of rails.

It's not just, "Hey. Here's your credit card, but it’s expense-management aware." It’s about being able to integrate that card into other systems. Think about companies like AtoB that do fuel cards and want to run their own card systems on a modern issuer so they can wire those cards into other systems to drive decisioning and control.

This is part of the expansion of what happens when you want to build a modern closed-loop card. A closed-loop card is like a Starbucks card inside your mobile app. It has different economics, different risk profiles, and different usage profiles, and those are things you can now build on platforms like Highnote.

The ones that win here, in my view, are the ones that can do two things. 

One, provide these very rich API sets and therefore, attract very large card programs over time. It's great to be enabling a new startup company, but it's more interesting if you’re enabling a new startup company and they become as big as Uber. 

Two is that you can actually go run Uber's new card offering because you're a better solution. That's the opportunity right now.

The last thing I would say is that as a naïve venture person, when they were building Highnote, I used to harass the CEO going, "Who's your ideal customer?” 

It turns out once Highnote launched, it was basically everyone that wanted to get live quickly. That just speaks to the amount of pull that's in the market and the amount of energy and enthusiasm, whether that’s people trying to do crypto on top of cards, or fuel cards, or just modern expense management solutions.