What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time
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Networks & Processors 10
Adyen
Adyen won by refusing to do the thing everyone else thought was smart: buying their way to a payments stack.
March 2021Block (Square)
Square started as a piece of plastic in a headphone jack. That little dongle carried a worldview most of the industry found beneath them: the small merchant is not a small bank's customer. They're an
May 2023Checkout.com
Checkout.com is what happens when you take Adyen's thesis seriously and decide there's room for two. But only if you're willing to live in the parts of the world the others find inconvenient.
February 2019FIS
FIS is the other invisible giant. Fiserv's mirror image, running the back office of a huge slice of the world's banks, and like Fiserv it got enormous by being something no consumer will ever name. Bu
April 2026Fiserv
Nobody has ever had a Fiserv account, and that's the whole point. Fiserv is the company your bank runs on while pretending it doesn't. Log into a regional bank's app, watch a credit union post a trans
September 2020Marqeta
Marqeta's insight is quietly inverted, which is why I love it: the card was never the product. The moment of authorization is the product.
December 2025Mastercard
Being second is underrated. Mastercard spent decades as the other card network, and that turned out to be a feature. The follower doesn't have to defend a throne. It can move. Visa is the incumbent's
July 2019PayPal
PayPal won the war it was fighting and lost the one it wasn't paying attention to.
October 2021Stripe
The most underrated sentence in fintech: accepting money on the internet was a developer problem, not a banking problem.
January 2025Visa
Visa is not a payments company. Almost everyone gets this wrong, including, in my experience, people who work there. Visa is a set of rules. A court nobody ever has to walk into. A language banks who
November 2023Asia, LatAm & Global 10
Ant Group (Alipay)
Alipay started as escrow. That's the whole story, and almost nobody remembers it.
March 2024Klarna
Klarna understood something subtle and slightly dangerous: the friction in checkout isn't technical, it's emotional, and you can sell people the removal of that hesitation.
August 2024Mercado Pago
Mercado Pago is the same escrow story as Alipay, told in Spanish and Portuguese. Not a coincidence. A law.
December 2021Nubank
Nubank's whole vision fits in one line: the customer's enemy was the bank, so they made the customer's anger the product.
February 2021Paytm
Paytm bet that India would copy China. India copied the idea and rejected the moat.
May 2023PhonePe
PhonePe won by refusing to own the thing everyone else was fighting over.
August 2023Razorpay
Razorpay understood that in India the consumer-payments war was a bloodbath nobody could win, so they went where the money actually was. The developer.
January 2021Revolut
Revolut's original insight was tiny and exactly right: the spread is theft, and everyone knew it but nobody had made it visible.
March 2022Tencent (WeChat Pay)
WeChat Pay is the best proof that in fintech, distribution beats product. And it's the most uncomfortable lesson, because builders like me want the product to win.
March 2019Wise (TransferWise)
Wise is the most honest company in fintech, and it built a moat out of honesty, which almost nobody believes is possible.
March 2024Neobanks, Investing & Lending 10
Affirm
Affirm's real product was never installment loans. It was honesty as a wedge. The whole company is a bet that the credit card industry built itself on a lie, that "0% APR" and "minimum payment" and "r
July 2024Afterpay
Afterpay won by refusing to be a lender, and that refusal was the entire strategy. Pay in four. No interest, ever. Miss a payment and you're locked out until you settle. That's it. While Affirm was bu
September 2021Chime
Chime figured out that the most profitable customer in American banking is the one the banks treat worst. That's the whole company. While everyone chased the affluent millennial with the metal card an
July 2023LendingClub
LendingClub had the most beautiful idea in fintech history and it was, in the end, almost too beautiful to survive contact with reality. The thesis: cut the bank out of lending entirely. Why should a
January 2026Monzo
Monzo built a bank the way you'd build a cult, and that's a compliment. The hot coral card was the tell. No bank had ever made an object you'd want to put face-up on the table, banks make cards you hi
June 2022N26
N26 had the best idea in European fintech and the hardest continent on earth to execute it. The thesis was beautiful and correct: Europe is one market on paper and twenty-seven markets in practice, an
May 2024Robinhood
Robinhood is the most misunderstood company in fintech because everyone argues about whether it's good or evil and almost no one engages with what it actually proved. It proved that the price of stock
May 2022SoFi
SoFi's founding insight was almost embarrassingly simple and almost no bank wanted to act on it: not all debt is equally risky, and the credit system was too lazy to tell the difference. A newly minte
February 2026Starling
Starling is the neobank that didn't want to be cool, and that turned out to be the contrarian masterstroke. While Monzo was building a coral-card cult and Revolut was chasing every shiny vertical, Sta
June 2021Upstart
Upstart asked the one question the credit industry had quietly decided was settled: what if the FICO score is just wrong? Not biased, not outdated. Wrong, as in leaving real money on the table by judg
October 2025Crypto & Infrastructure 10
Binance
Binance won by refusing to have an address.
April 2023Brex
Brex started with one sharp, almost rude observation. Startups had money but no credit.
February 2020Circle
Circle figured out the most valuable thing in crypto is the most boring number on the screen. 1.00.
April 2020Coinbase
Coinbase bet that the killer feature in crypto was the one crypto people openly despised. A front door you can't lose.
February 2022Galileo
Galileo is the company you've used a hundred times and never heard of, which is exactly why I find it interesting.
June 2020Mercury
Mercury understood something almost embarrassingly simple. Founders hate their bank.
October 2020Modern Treasury
Modern Treasury picked the least glamorous problem in all of fintech, and was right to. Moving money is easy. Knowing what happened to the money is hard.
December 2025Plaid
Plaid built the thing every fintech founder needed and nobody wanted to build. The boring, soul-destroying work of connecting to thousands of banks that have no API, no standards, and no interest in h
January 2022Ramp
Ramp did the one thing no other corporate card company would say out loud. They built a product whose explicit goal is to make you spend less.
December 2022Ripple
Ripple is the most interesting wrong-shaped right bet in crypto.
September 2024Wallets, Remittance & Cautionary Tales 10
Airwallex
Airwallex is what happens when engineers who actually had the problem rebuild the cross-border stack from the silicon up instead of reselling someone else's.
October 2020Cash App
Cash App is the most underestimated product in American fintech, and the reason is the people underestimating it have never been poor.
June 2022FTX
I was building in crypto while FTX was ascending, so this one isn't abstract to me.
September 2019GoCardless
GoCardless built a company on the least glamorous corner of payments, and that's exactly why I respect it.
March 2024Nium
Nium made a bet most people in fintech are too consumer-brained to take seriously. The winner in cross-border won't be the app the end user touches, it'll be the invisible network the apps run on.
January 2025Payoneer
Payoneer figured out something the consumer-fintech crowd was too busy chasing TikTok virality to notice. The most desperate, underserved customer in cross-border money isn't the migrant sending $200
January 2019Remitly
Remitly read Western Union's business correctly and then built the inverse of it.
January 2024Venmo
Venmo turned money into a social object, which is either the best or the worst idea in the history of consumer finance. I still can't decide.
December 2020Western Union
Western Union understood one thing so deeply they're still alive 175 years later despite getting almost everything else wrong. People don't send money, they send obligation.
February 2023Wirecard
Wirecard is the cautionary tale fintech doesn't like to tell honestly, because telling it honestly means admitting how badly everyone wanted to believe.
January 2020