What is the disruptive opportunity presented by banking-as-a-service and how do Bond and Treasury Prime fit into the landscape?

It's changed over time, and I’ve been an investor in Bond since the very beginning. 

My original thesis on banking-as-a-service platforms was very much like, “Fintech is going to be everywhere, but it’s really hard to do.” It's really hard to offer credit cards and checking accounts, and working with a bank is just difficult. Anyone that's tried to do that knows that. Making it easy to go do that work is the fundamental idea of all the banking-as-a-service platforms.

Candidly, we have different solutions that are being successful right now, but we can't yet tell what's the right model.

Since you brought up Treasury Prime, that's a really wonderful team. Readers will have to forgive me if I get this wrong, but Treasury Prime's history is selling next to banks. They would enable an SVB or another bank via the Treasury Prime API so that bank could be more modern in how they send wires or open accounts. But they're still fundamentally limited to what that bank wants to provide and what their infrastructure could provide.

Bond has the same notion of making it easier, but they're trying to really provide compliance and features and functionality so that you can run an offering at scale. With Bond, you can build a business that offers a small business checking account to every barbershop in the U.S. through their banking platform. That system's going to be compliant and able to work with a banking platform.

Until very recently, I was on the board of Beneficial State Bank, so I can tell you the lived experience. It's really hard to manage that banking relationship and manage it at scale, so that's what I think the opportunity looks like now.

One thing I'll tell you is going forward, there's a big opportunity in building this wide layer of compliance functionality that spans many banks. Right now you can get up and going with one solution quickly and scalably with Bond and others, but over time, it's like, "Can you give me the flexibility to move across banks?"

That’s going to be a really important idea, but we have yet to see that play out. I think things like that are coming.