Sacra Logo

Is the customer base of a typical BaaS or card-issuing product similar to that of a venture portfolio?

Ross Fubini

Managing Partner at XYZ Capital

You want to choose and enable high-quality, high-growth cards. You want to be in large, high-volume cards, period. That's how you make the business work.

You want to choose startups or mid-sized companies that are building really quality, novel products—novel fuel cards, novel expense management cards, and so on. You're trying to choose a bunch that can scale, and also, you want to make it possible for many of those folks to get started quickly so that then you can just rise up with them.

At the same time, you want to work with large card programs where you can have a differentiated feature set because you're a modern platform, and then move them over.

Certain providers are better at enterprise sales, and then others are better at helping people get started quickly. Those are different go-to-market motions, though I actually think you need to do some healthy amount of both to win at the end.

Checkr, for example—my understanding is that they had a huge amount of success just riding up Uber's growth curve. That's fine as long as you then diversify out. Twilio did that, and now they’re very widely diversified. You have to have a product that can add more customers in. 

We'll see how—I'm not tracking this closely—Marqeta performs, because it has high customer concentration. There are some rumblings about that changing. Again, I'm not a public markets guy. Maybe that has changed, and I don't know anything really about it on the inside. The benefit, in theory, of a modern technology platform is you take all comers, and then you grow with many folks, some faster than others.

Find this answer in Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Capital, on the biggest opportunities in fintech today
lightningbolt_icon Unlocked Report