Author: Caleb Shack , Investment Partner at Variant
Compiled by: Jia Huan, ChainCatcher
Every successful neobank follows the same starting path: identify areas where traditional banks charge too much or provide poor service, use these as a starting point, and then expand into a wider range of banking services.
SoFi found that FICO credit scores are a poor way to price student debt for borrowers with growth potential. Instead, they underwrite based on income trajectories and disposable cash flow, and the accumulated data gradually becomes a real moat. While most banks charge a 3% fee on every foreign transaction, Monzo, Revolut, and Starling all started by offering zero foreign exchange fees. In Brazil, where traditional banks charge punitive interest rates and millions have no access to the formal financial system, Nubank won over the market with its fee-free credit card.
This strategy has remained consistent: find an entry point, capture a specific vertical market segment, and then expand to provide comprehensive services.
Today, thanks to stablecoins, offering checking and savings accounts has become easier than ever. The infrastructure has been largely commoditized. This has spawned a wave of new stablecoin banking startups, but most of them lack differentiation. The "frictionless" nature that allows them to launch so easily will also make it easy for the next wave of competitors to follow suit. There are no moats at the deposit level alone.
The first generation of fintech companies succeeded primarily because they built differentiated products on top of the newly commoditized distribution layer (the internet). This gave them an advantage over existing traditional banks. When commoditization occurred, it paved the way for the creation of new products through bundling. The ease of opening a deposit account didn't spawn a thousand new, independent banks; instead, it made new banks a built-in feature, embedded in platforms that already possessed more valuable assets: a source of revenue.
If you're a creator earning money on YouTube or Twitch, your relationship with the platform is deeper and richer in data than your relationship with Chase. The platform knows your cash flow in real time. It understands your growth trajectory. It's an algorithmic whiz. It can provide credit underwriting for you in ways traditional banks could never do. The same logic applies to gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft, social e-commerce platforms like Whop and TikTok, and modern payroll service providers like Deel and Gusto.
The logic of bundling creator revenue with financial products is simple. Payouts to creators and gig workers, the Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) generated by the marketplace, and employee salaries—once transferred out via ACH, this value drains away from the platform. YouTube alone has paid out over $100 billion to creators since 2021 and launched stablecoin payments in December. Whop has generated over $4 billion in GMV and has begun vertically expanding into cryptocurrency-enabled financial services. With just a few lines of code, platforms can now earn transaction fees and short-term Treasury yields during payments, making bundling these services within the platform a logical next step, and ultimately, enabling them to offer lending services based on their understanding of users.
These companies don't need to be true banks in a regulatory sense. They simply need to provide Bank as a Service (BaaS), including accounts, bank cards, and loans, driven by the platform data they've already accumulated. The entry point here is no longer product tricks or pricing arbitrage; it's the revenue relationship itself.
YouTube will become the next new type of bank. Not because YouTube will apply for a banking license, but because financial services should be where the money comes from.
