Is it more expensive and complex to build proprietary finance infrastructure than it is to outsource aspects to the cloud, akin to AWS?

I think you're exactly right. It actually is more fraught with danger, because there are more pieces involved, there are more things to do, and there are more things that you can screw up. It's been an interesting evolution. Even over the course of the last 18 months as we were doing the pivot, I remember having a bunch of conversations before we were live with the platform -- where everybody was saying, “I'm not going to get burned again, I'm just going to go direct.” That always felt like the wrong way to think about things in this space. The infrastructure really is closer to an AWS. You need it, but it's not your business. 

I think in the financial world, you will continue to see more opportunities for differentiation and specialization. It's a massive market that I think we're in the very early innings of. You're going to continue to see more new entrants come into the space. As long as you've got more and more people who want to build in this world on the client side of things, and you've got more and more financial institutions who want to have a role to play somewhere in there, you've got demand coming in from both sides. That's going to drive more and more stuff happening in this space.

This is definitely not a winner-takes-all space. This is going to be a space where I expect a bunch of big winners. But at the same time, not everybody's going to make it. It's going to be a rising tide that floats a bunch of boats, but not all the boats. If I had to predict, there are going to be some more spectacular crashes and burns in and around this space within the next five years, particularly around things like compliance.

Compliance is probably the hardest piece, especially if you really haven't been down in the trenches doing it yourself to understand just how badly that can go; where the weak spots are -- not just within what you're building, but across partners; how regulators really think about this kind of stuff; and how you give regulators comfort that there is visibility and transparency and control throughout these systems. Particularly when you start to think about how you do that seamlessly and correctly across a variety of different verticals that are regulated slightly differently by different regulators.