Exits & Deep Reads

The 10 Best Deep Reads of 2024 (TWIF 1/3)

Hi fintech friends,

One of the great things about the holidays is having some real time to read (and catch up on sleep).

I'm still on my honeymoon, but wanted to send out a couple retrospectives to start the year.

I build up a substantial backlog over the year of blog posts, articles, op-eds, and product teardowns, saving them all in Pocket. Five years ago, it was hard to find thoughtful, well-articulated fintech content. Today, I can hardly keep up with the great writing from people like Simon, Jason, Alex, Lex, Jareau, Jas, Jevgenijs, Matt B, Matt G, Francisco, Giorgio, and many, many others.

There were many great deep reads in 2024, but these 10(ish) in particular stood out to me. They touched on themes from open banking to stablecoins to the fintech cycle to banking-as-a-service. I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I did.

- Nik

Best Deep Reads of 2024

Matt Brown's Fintech from first principles was a great read to start the year. As a Philosophy major, I have a soft spot for writers who can break down complex systems into their component parts – simply – and Matt does this elegantly by separating four key actions in fintech: pay, invest, borrow, insure.

In Stablecoins, The Monetary Upgrade, Circle's Peter Schroeder captures the zeitgeist that had its zenith this year in Stripe's acquisition of Bridge. Stables – decentralized tokens pegged to fiat currencies – are quickly finding user adoption in financial services. Will they eat into conventional payment rail market share? Will they presage a crypto regulatory regime? Only time will tell.

Banking as a service had a rough 2024, but that doesn't mean that embedded fintech is going away. As Contrary Research notes, "83% of Toast’s 2021 revenue came from financial services alone." In The Great Bank Unbundling, they dig into why more platforms are choosing to embed financial services.

No 2024 wrap-up would be complete without some commentary on AI. In his piece on AI Agents in Banking and Payments, Ravi Loganathan digs into the implications of delegating financial actions to bots, the obstacles and risks posed by agent payments, and what steps we need to take if we want an autonomous future.

When we think of bitcoin, we tend to think of Lamborghinis and Miami, but Observers details how decentralized payments are finding surprising adoption – completely undrelated to speculation and HODL – in emerging markets with high mobile and low financial penetration.

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In State of the (FinTech) Nation, written at the start of the year amidst fintech layoffs and down-rounds, former Monzo operator Thomas George makes a good case for consumer fintech: the experience still isn't perfect. And until it is, there will be more opportunity to build.

How quickly times change: In June last year, it felt like fintech had reached its bottom. BaaS providers were imploding, large fintechs were going through RIFs, and some were shutting down entirely. In a precient presentation, Matt Harris talked through the concept of the Hero's Journey and why things look their worst right before the rebound.

Last year, the CFPB issued rulemaking on financial data access, marking a pivotal point in a decade-long journey to give consumers the same control over their financial data that they have for their personal data. In Navigating the Future of Open Banking, the Commerce Ventures team talks about what comes next – standardized connectivity, lower prices, and (hopefully) better experiences.

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Apple's tap-to-cash might be the most under-reported fintech story of the last year. After years of legal back-and-forth in the EU, the mobile giant agreed to open up access to its NFC payment capabilities to third-party developers. This in-turn incentivized Apple itself to be more innovative with its own payment features. Users can now tap each others' phones to make peer to peer payments and merchants can easily use taps from phones or cards to accept purchases. I wrote 14 years ago about mobile phones replacing wallets – in 2025, it looks like it actually may happen.

For payments nerds, Tom Noyes' blog is the canonical text on How Things Work. In Digital Wallets – Core Functions and Competitive Strategies, he takes the Apple Secure Element analysis a step further and unpacks what a digital wallet is to begin with, outlining five core 'functions': Customer Experience, Security, Authentication and Identity, Acceptance, Economic Model, and Data and Intelligence.

As a special bonus read, we co-authored Opportunities for Generative AI in Financial Services with Visa last year. In the paper, we discuss the exciting emerging applications of generative artificial intelligence, evaluate how fintechs and banks are incorporating Gen AI differently, based on each of their relative strengths, and dig into areas for Gen AI that are still underexplored.

Looking forward to more great reads in 2025!

(Even though I could only pick my top 10 – well, 11 – long reads from 2024, I realized when I made my list that there were many, many pieces on stablecoins and decentralized payments. I want to share five honorable mentions below, each of which deserves its own time.)