Ashwin Kumar: Hey, everyone, I’m Ashwin Kumar. I’m on the Startup Partnerships team at Stripe. We’ve got an incredible group of leaders here to talk about how fintech has evolved over the years, and how banking-as-a-service is powering the next generation of financial products. Why don’t we do a quick round of intros? Will, do you want to kick us off?

Will Kim: Sure. Hi, I’m Will, cofounder and co-CEO of Karat Financial. We’re the best card for creators. We underwrite your favorite YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and TikTokers based not on their FICO scores but on their socials and financials. Long term, we’re laying the financial infrastructure for creators to scale their businesses.

Ashwin Kumar: Mackenzie, what about you?

Mackenzie Burnett: Hey, I am Mackenzie Burnett. I’m the CEO and cofounder of Ambrook. We build software that helps farmers and ranchers manage their finances and make more money. So we started with helping producers find and apply for the $30 billion a year in US farm funding. We are now building bookkeeping that understands that your business is a farm. So a lot of farm-specific tax deductions, for example, or other types of reporting, as well as a number of different features related to understanding field profitability. And we’re also building an expense management card.

Ashwin Kumar: Ethan, what about you?

Ethan Senturia: Hi, my name’s Ethan Senturia. I’m the chief fintech officer of Housecall Pro. We are a software platform that delivers an end-to-end operating system to home services professionals. Think HVACs, plumbers, and electricians, enabling them to drive sales, execute jobs, manage money, and operate their businesses efficiently with insights reporting and coaching.

Ashwin Kumar: Ethan, chief fintech officer; that’s not a title I’ve heard a lot, and I’m assuming we’re going to hear it more. How did Housecall Pro come to that, that they needed that role?

Ethan Senturia: Yeah, so about five years ago or so, Housecall Pro introduced payments into its software platform. And at that point it was just a product. And so payments went out there and started taking off, and it became a business, not just a product. And that business started to represent a significant portion of Housecall Pro’s growth, and a lot of value for the customers.

And as the fintech ecosystem evolved, there was a realization that we could probably replicate the success of payments with lots of other financial products and services for our pros. And so they said, “We need someone to help us do that.” They asked me, and I came into the role as SVP of fintech and figured one day I might get promoted and not know what my title should be. And so, fortunately, that happened and they said, you’re chief officer. And I went on LinkedIn and I searched for a chief fintech officer; I found one at the Bank of Singapore and I said, “I’ll take it.”

So that’s how I got the title. But more than the title, what it means is a commitment to build a whole set of financial products and services so that our pros can run their businesses, both front office and back office, in a single place.

Ashwin Kumar: Yeah, wow. It’s an enviable role, and I’m sure a lot of people are going to have it because it’s speaking to what’s happening in the industry. Right? And for all of you, what I found fascinating is you didn’t get to fintech necessarily from the get-go. Mackenzie, you have a really interesting story of how you got to where Ambrook is today. Did you start off with what the product looks like right now, or did you start off somewhere else?

Mackenzie Burnett: We started by making it easier for farmers and ranchers to find and apply for farm funding. So that didn’t necessarily leverage embedded bank accounts or card products or other types of integrations. We actually found that a lot of these producers, when they were applying for these funding programs, really actually at the end of the day, needed help with financial organization.

And so the card product helps producers keep track of real-time expenses. Linking cards and bookkeeping, for example, wasn’t something that QuickBooks could do necessarily when they first started, but it’s incredibly easy for us to do that today, because a lot of the infrastructure around fintech has just grown dramatically over the past three years. And so, Ambrook I don’t think would’ve been possible to build even three to five years ago.

Ashwin Kumar: At Karat, you all are doing something similar?

Will Kim: That’s the same story. Eric and I started exploring this creator economy space maybe five years ago. Eric was working over at Instagram and I, at the time, was running this VC fund. We were seeing these creators, YouTubers and TikTokers, making real money and operating like real businesses, hiring a whole team around them, and yet oftentimes not doing their taxes; they weren’t incorporated; they had no concept of payroll other than Venmoing people money. And we said, there needs to be a new kind of infrastructure to help these small businesses scale up.

Our thesis was, hey, we’re seeing this emergence of a new class of small business where I’m not selling stuff; I’m not selling services; I’m selling media, and that’s a really different kind of business. And so we backed into it where our North Star was not “We want to be a card for creators,” but rather, “Hey, how do we help this new class of small business actually interface with an old-school financial infrastructure?”

Ashwin Kumar: Who are these creators? There are some examples you brought up that I found really interesting.

Will Kim: Creators are such a diverse bunch. They’re all over the place, and they’re from all sorts of backgrounds. We have creators like Dylan Lemay. He started out as a Cold Stone ice cream scooper and he watched TikTok for a week straight, 16 hours a day, five days a week, and got obsessed with the short-form content. He attached a little GoPro camera to his chest as he was scooping ice cream and made these looping videos, blew up on TikTok, and now has 10 million followers. He’s now launching his own ice cream store called CATCH’N out in Soho, because he has this rabid following that wants to taste his ice cream flavors.

Ashwin Kumar: Yeah, that’s incredible. Do they think of themselves as small businesses or…?

Will Kim: It’s a great point. We have one creator who has almost 10 million subscribers on YouTube—she has a full team of five people full-time around her—and she said, “I just realized I’m an entrepreneur, like, I’m a business.”

And it was like, “Of course you are.” Like, you’ve been doing this for years. You have a whole team around you; you have a business engine that generates content and then generates cash off of advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, and merchandising.

They’re expanding into these massive business empires. And so there’s this kind of emergence into this common consciousness of creators—“Hey, I’m a business and I need to start thinking like a business. I need to professionalize into a full business.” And when they turn and look to the traditional banking rails, they are then rejected for business banking accounts. They’re then rejected for business credit, because the banks don’t understand how you could possibly be making millions of dollars off a random YouTube video talking about Pokémon cards.

Ashwin Kumar: Is that the same for all of you? That the markets you’re serving are underserved by the financial system?

Ethan Senturia: You know, I think it may have to do with our customer base but, for us, it’s not just focusing on people who are locked out of the banking system or can’t be served. And broadly speaking, if you go around and look at the US and the scale of banking, if all you’re doing is focusing on those who are not in the banking system, you’re probably going to end up with a small market. Most of the people who have the highest transaction volumes and are doing the most commerce are in that system.

And so, for our pros, it’s not that they can’t get a bank account or that they can’t get a loan or find a credit card or find a software to run their payroll. Certainly there are some that are underserved and would prefer a better solution or a solution at all. But what they really value is those services being in one place and not having to have five- or six-point solutions to run their payroll, to do their accounting, to manage expenses, to process payments. And so it’s not necessarily using financial technology or building new financial products to address a customer that can’t access those products anywhere. It’s that they can’t access them in a way that helps them achieve success, which is either to grow their business, or operate more efficiently and have all those things in a one-stop shop.

Will Kim: I love that one-stop shop. I mean, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do at Karat as well. It’s like, hey, if you have this kind of business that is selling media and the banks don’t even understand you on getting a business bank account, why would any of the other rails work for payroll? Why would it work for invoicing? Why would it work for money management? It just doesn’t make sense. And so I think that one-stop shop is huge for our fintech plays. Earlier today, when you were talking about Ambrook, it sounded really similar.

Mackenzie Burnett: The ability to build these types of one-stop shops, or the way that we think about it is, we want to build the product that everyone in the farm finance ecosystem can collaborate through. And that the intermingling actually unlocks further opportunities, right? Because we can understand better leading indicators of how a business might be doing, and especially if a business wants to expand into another sort of crop type, we can pull information from other producers we’ve seen in our system that might have been investing in that. And we can actually de-risk that in a way that a local banker might not have the information to necessarily be able to do. We can surface that information to those banking partners in order to be able to have them help producers really expand and diversify their operations in a way that can actually handle today’s market.

And I think that type of intermingling unlocks a lot of those types of opportunities for people to be able to succeed; which is, at the end of the day, what we care about—helping our customers succeed, because their success is our success, right?

Will Kim: Right. And I think what’s really beautiful about building in this type of vertical is that you really do care about the success of the ecosystem as a whole. And so the rising tide lifts all ships.

Ashwin Kumar: Yep, Ethan, you brought up something related to that where, because these products are in one place, there’s something you can do better than if they had them in separate spots, right? You brought up an example about how to help predict the cost of a service. Can you go into that a little bit more?

Ethan Senturia: Yeah, certainly. So the pros that we serve generally don’t have super fat margins. They operate on 10, 15, 20% margins, and so every dollar matters. And one of the things that’s very hard for them to do is to actually cost a job with real expenses, for materials, labor, and other things.

So when you give a pro the ability to actually incur expenses on a card, to pay bills out of the same software platform, to run their payroll whether that’s for W-2s or 1099s, and actually assign each of those expenses to an individual job, they can actually get the real profit margin on that job. And a lot of times when they do that they will realize, “Oh, I’ve been doing some job for a long time, and I’ve been pricing it wrong.”

And one of things that pros and lots of businesses are always concerned about, maybe less now in an inflationary environment, is raising prices—because they want to be competitive. And that’s the sort of information that can help them understand, “Gee, like, I have justification to raise my price and I’m not doing something adverse to my customer. I’m doing something that helps me sustain my business, which is ultimately good for all of my customers.” And so that type of insight is just very hard to do if you’re incurring these expenses, processing these revenues in four or five different systems, and stitching it together on the back end.

Mackenzie Burnett: I think we’re doing something very similar. Instead of costing per job, ours is getting profitability per product, or per revenue stream. And so the revenue streams can be a particular crop you’re growing or livestock you’re raising, but it also can be the hay delivery service that you provide or the seed and chemical local distribution hub that you run.

And producers also in America have margins that are similar to what you quoted, and I think in an environment where every dollar matters, you can have a lot of intuitive understanding of your business. But when you can break things down with specific P&Ls, it actually enables individuals to make better financial decisions, which they can then represent to the banking ecosystem in a way that they can get better terms on loans they can justify, or even with grants.

A lot of times for farm grants, there’s a lot of farm funding out there, but the producers that are most successful at being able to apply for that are the ones that have a big staff that can write business plans, right?

And if we can actually produce reports that enable smaller businesses or businesses that might not necessarily have that huge staff to be able to leverage that, you can have a much more diverse funding ecosystem as well.

Ethan Senturia: And that’s the thing—the beauty of fintech and financial products, at least to the customers, is not because they want the financial product, right? They want to work simpler; they want to grow smarter; they have some definition of success.

And when you have them using these products, you then have the data, you have the insights, you can deliver reporting. (And I’ve been selling financial products to small businesses for 10 or 12 years, right?) And they all say they want to understand their business better. And they all say they want insights and reporting and dashboards, and you give it to them and then they don’t consume it because they don’t have time and they’re too busy. And so you have to be able to deliver those insights context dependent, at the point of time when they’re in the field doing the job, and this is when they need to know that thing costs five dollars more than that thing. Or that now is the time to offer consumer financing because you’ll sell a bigger job. And so it’s the ability to do those things context dependent, which is what will drive a pro or a customer or a farmer or a creator to adopt those products and services.

It’s not that they care about, “Oh, I want a business banking account; I want a debit card,” right? They want to run a better business, and they need to be given the insights that the financial products generate in a way that they can consume them, that doesn’t require them to set aside an hour at the end of their day when they want to be sitting with their kids and say, “Now I’m gonna consume my graphs,” right? “My financial dashboard.” They’re not going to do that.

Mackenzie Burnett: I want Ambrook to be an app that a farmer can look at every morning and it makes them feel better. We actually think about really what we’re building is something that reduces the day-to-day anxiety of running a small business in America. And I think that what you’re saying in terms of what people actually want to get value out of, it’s very similar to how we think about it. Yeah, I think that’s quite right.

Ashwin Kumar: So, you know it’s interesting though as you said the operating system for Housecall Pro, Ethan, that’s what keeps them there, and it’s the financial products that are kind of added on top. But then, Will, what you found in your journey was actually it’s the financial, it’s the access to capital that’s the problem, and do you find that for these creators that that is the value proposition to them when they come to you? “I can get a loan here, or I can get credit here, which I can’t get anywhere else.”

Will Kim: Yeah, I think it’s getting access that’s the initial hook. “Oh my God, I got a 10 times better credit limit than any bank would’ve given me.” “I’m actually getting credit that a bank never extended to me.” That’s extremely powerful.

But what we are seeing is that these primitives themselves, like a debit card or a bank account, are becoming commoditized over time. And, for us, it becomes hyper-personalization that becomes far more powerful. Because when we think about the traditional banking infrastructure, it’s about the lowest common denominator. How can I build something that serves billions of people, or millions, or all Americans?

And so, yes, they can try to go to a bank and say, “I’m going to try and wrangle together my own business operating system from scratch.” Which is what creators are doing somewhat successfully by trying to figure out their personal banking with their payroll on PayPal, with their invoicing via texts, and asking people just to figure it out and work with that structure, which is kind of just Scotch-Taped together. And this is where the personalization comes in.

If we can understand these creators as full-fledged businesses, then can we provide that one-stop shop where we say, yes, you get this access to credit through our credit card. Yes, you get access to a debit card through our banking product. But, more powerfully, on top of this atomic unit where every single dollar coming in or out of a creator’s finances is touched by Karat, we can start saying, “Hey, tax season’s rolling around the corner. I see that you haven’t paid a single cent to the IRS in the past five years; it’s a little dicey. And, guess what? I’ve automatically done your taxes for you and will charge it to you for like, I don’t know, a thousand bucks.” And you’re done. And all of a sudden, for a creator, it becomes that peace of mind where I don’t need to figure out, “I forgot that tax season is here; I forgot for five years.” And now that Karat’s here telling me proactively and reaching out to me, “Hey, I can help you with this.” And that is where it comes back to the hyper-personalization that’s going to keep them there.

Ashwin Kumar: I mean, it’s tempting to say, “I want to launch a debit card, I want to launch an account, I want to launch tax services now, and I want to do bookkeeping.” Mackenzie, you brought up, it’s like almost a buffet of choices?

Mackenzie Burnett: Yeah.

Ashwin Kumar: How do you think about where to start first for each of you? Like—what’s the wedge?

Will Kim: For us, as we were talking to our users, we first tried to almost force-feed, “You’ve got to pay your taxes; we’ll do it for free, like, you’ll not have to worry about anything.” And they just didn’t care. And so we went back to the drawing board, and what creators were asking us for was, “Hey, can you spot me like $10K? Can you spot me $5K? I have a big invoice coming in.” And we started with that wedge product of credit, because that was a higher on-fire need for the biggest creators in the world, hitting hyper-growth.

Ashwin Kumar: Mackenzie, for farmers it’s kind of similar?

Mackenzie Burnett: Oh, the cash flow cycles are just so unpredictable. For farms, you are growing something in the ground; there are growing seasons; there are very specific cash cycles, and so a lot of what we think about is:__ What do the next 50 years of farm finance look like? And how can we build products that actually support that and are able to leverage modern tooling that a lot of these banks, which are really well intentioned and oftentimes want to service their communities, just aren’t able to adopt fast enough.

Ethan Senturia: One thing about Housecall Pro is we serve pros that are owner-operators and may look more like a freelancer, creator, right, or gig worker. And we serve all the way up to the midsize pro, the 20-person sort of professionalized shop. And one of the things that one of our founders told me when I first joined the company was, even though we try to create a product that guides the customer in terms of how to use it, if you put 20 pros in a room, you’ll see 20 different ways.

Mackenzie Burnett: Yeah, we see it too, yes, totally.

Ethan Senturia: And so when you think about where to start, I like the frame of reference of vitamins and painkillers. It’s usually easier to sell someone something that eases pain and then tack on something that’s a vitamin later.

But, as you look at a diverse customer base, the things that are painful for the zero-to-one-person shop are not the things that are painful to the 20-person shop and vice versa. And so, if you have a whole suite of financial products and services, you can sort of pick and choose which of those is the right thing to be the on-ramp to a digital financial world for your customer. So, for a lot of people, it’s like, “Hey, I just want to be able to take payments.” But if you go talk to a 20-person shop, their biggest pain might be, “Takes me forever to run payroll.” And so if you have these different solutions tied to sort of a centralized core, you can create different on-ramps and sort of create your own adventure, because they’re not all the same.

Ashwin Kumar: Yeah, it sounds like for each of you, you’re in very different industries, but because you are so specialized in that, you really understand the customer there in maybe ways that are not as easy for a larger national bank, or other kind of financial services product, to do.

Will Kim: I think that’s exactly right, and I keep coming back to this; the traditional banks have relied on the lowest common denominator to be able to juice the most kind of dollars out of the largest group of people. And that worked forever until it didn’t. In the past couple of decades, with the emergence of the internet, the ways to monetize a business have changed dramatically—where it’s no longer about just getting a regular W-2 salary.

It’s become much harder for the banks to understand and predict and say, “Hey, wow, I’m going to personalize a service to you.” And branch banking itself is on the decline. And, as a result, the traditional banks are offering less and less personalized services with the same exact legacy infrastructure that hasn’t shifted for decades.

And then in the meanwhile, I think companies like ours are trying to understand that there’s an interesting segment here that we can go deep on and understand proactively what they might need so we can provide almost an autopilot financial system. Where it’s like, “Oh, like, I’m a creator; I’m a business; I had no idea that I needed to do my taxes; I had no idea that this was the right way for me to run my business; and Karat now sets up the scaffolding for me to be able to grow into this.”

Mackenzie Burnett: Yeah, I think this is where agriculture is a bit different than both of your industries, because there is a much more specialized, local banking infrastructure that services a lot of these farms.

But again, I think the thing that a lot of our customers have been asking for is, “Look, you know, we love our local bank; they’ve been really good to us, but like, we really want to expand in X, Y, or Z, or really want to not have to worry about expense management or payroll or all these other pieces.”

And so there’s almost an opportunity to surface a lot of information to this ecosystem while building in a lot of the more financial tooling around them. And then, for the producers who aren’t actually able to access the credit they need to be able to diversify, then we can step in and diversify that. Or, a lot of these producers want help with paperwork for applying for USDA grants, for example; that is also something that we’ve done pretty successfully.

And so, for us in particular, a lot of producers either do fall into the trap where they don’t actually have a very personalized relationship with their banker, or even when they do, there’s a lot left to be able to build there.

Will Kim: And are you starting with that gap and then expanding into the banks?

Mackenzie Burnett: Yeah, there’s unprecedented wealth creation that’s happening right now in America. And the thing that I’m afraid of is that, once again, middle America will be left behind. Producers should be able to have savings accounts that return multiple percentage points like year over year, right? They should be able to access all the modern things that we, if you’re more tech native, are able to know what products to use for that. And I think it is going back to the comfort and the one-stop shop. What we’re building is trust and wanting to solve a lot of these problems. Ambrook is the product that helps farmers make more money:__ that is our mandate. How do we help farms make more money so that they can invest in sort of the behaviors and the investments on their operation that enable them to be more sustainable in the long term and more resilient to climate and market shocks? So, our long-term mission is how do you make sustainability profitable? Because that is how to increase these producers’ bottom lines in the future.

Ashwin Kumar: So there are all these different products that you can build. Let’s say I’m a founder right now, and I want to build the next fintech company, and I think, okay, I can launch a card; I can launch an account; it’s easy enough. I can launch a company over the weekend and do this. What am I missing? Is it that simple? I know, Ethan, you’ve brought up a lot of the complexity around launching one of these services. Can you talk about that a bit?

Ethan Senturia: Sure. I think one of the reasons I’m in the seat that I’m in is because Housecall Pro realized that each of these financial products is a business, not a product. And so you’re building a business every time you launch one of these.

And so if you do payroll and expense cards and bank accounts and payment processing and check deposit and whatever these services are, you’re building six or seven businesses at the same time. So what you have to do to build a business is more than just build a product, right? And so here are a couple of the challenges that we see, or things that I would say to be aware of.

One is, don’t think if you build it, they will come. Certainly the people on this stage are building vertical software platforms. We serve specific communities, and you’re asking people to adopt financial products from someone who they probably didn’t expect to be their provider when they first came to that platform.

And so, you have to go to market with these products, and you have to do that consistently and repetitively and in many different mediums. Because you don’t just put a bank account in front of someone and they say, “Great, sounds good.” They look at it and go, “You’re going to screw me. Like, is this real? Is my money going to go away?”

And so you have to overcome that through a combination of education and persistence, and then obviously really good product marketing helps too. The other thing that you need to be aware of is risk. For example, in our business, we take a risk on a lot of financial products that we deliver, and I’m sure others do too. It’s really easy to give money away. It’s a lot harder to get it back. That’s sort of the trick of lending.

Ashwin Kumar: What advice would you give to a founder that came to you? I’m sure some of them do and some want to.

Will Kim: Yeah. When we first started the business, when we first launched our card product, we thought that the most important part was going to be the underwriting. We were like, “Oh, our underwriting model—it’s going to be so sexy; it’s going to be amazing; we’re going to underwrite their socials and all the financials, and it’s going to be so cool.”

And what we quickly found out is that, no, underwriting is one part of the broader story where there’s a story in three parts. The first part is acquisition, as you were talking about. Can we actually understand these users deeply and their needs and find the right financial product with the right levers that actually fit their needs?

And for us, we started with cash advances, a really complicated revenue-sharing product that none of our creators really understood. And then we pivoted into a card product, because that’s what creators understood, and that’s what took off.

So once we figured out acquisition, which I think is the secret sauce, then the underwriting comes out, because we are getting more data; we’re acquiring users cheaply. So we can actually learn on the underwriting side. Underwriting itself we at first thought 0%—we should always be getting 0% loss rates. But no. Learning is about how growth comes from failures. We need to get some of these kinds of losses, so we shoot for like a 1, 1.5% loss rate, just so we can know and fine-tune.

Ethan Senturia: You’re not lending enough if you have no losses.

Will Kim: Exactly; you’re not growing if you have no losses. It made no sense at the time, and over time we realized, oh, that’s so true. Because as we take more risks, we’re able to underwrite vastly different types of creators, and that helps us grow our underwriting models to serve more creators effectively.

And the third and final piece of the kind of pillars for these fintech businesses is cost of capital. Are we able to find capital cheaply, secure that financing so that we can then front that money back to creators so they don’t need to worry about, “Oh, gosh, this is so much more expensive than my typical bank.” And so those are the three pieces that we always come back to.

Mackenzie Burnett: Yeah—to complement what has already been said, if you are considering building for a more vertical market, you just have to really love your customers. Like, you just have to love talking to your customers every day. And if you don’t love, really love, talking to your customers, your customers will most likely be the last thing that changes about your business. You can pivot all the different types of products to figure out what exactly will fit. But if you’re changing your customers, that is a fundamental pivot of your business. So I think that’s something that might sound a bit simple, but I’ve come to be very grateful about how much I just love talking to our customers every day.

Ashwin Kumar: As you bring up all the things that you would advise people around risk and compliance, going into this, have you now found some kind of respect for what banks actually do in some of these domains? It’s very easy to say they’re missing the mark in all these areas—what’s come up for you as, “Ah, I never realized what goes into offering financial products.”

Mackenzie Burnett: Compliance. I don’t want to have to think about it—I’m just glad that there are a lot of products that are able to abstract away from us building. When you’re thinking about the meta of building these types of businesses, something like four years ago, it would’ve taken two years and $2 million to build a bank account, or just launch a card, right?

Today it takes four weeks or whatever. It doesn’t actually take that much time or capital to launch an embedded bank account, for example, or to launch a card product. And so, that speed of iteration is incredibly crucial when you’re thinking about building these types of businesses.

And the reason why it doesn’t actually take that long is because a lot of layers have been abstracted away. So companies like ours can actually just build for the end customer. And so, yes, a tremendous amount of respect, but also it means that that is our competitive advantage.

We can be much more nimble than a traditional bank; we can be much more nimble than a traditional card provider. Or—if all your company did was provide payroll services, for example, because they are locked into their years and labor structure of infrastructure.

Ethan Senturia: I don’t think I ever lacked respect for what banks did. And, let’s be honest, everyone sitting on this stage is building on top of a bank. So let’s not get it twisted; we are using the traditional banking system. We’re just decoupling the distribution and delivery of products from the infrastructure and compliance regime behind it.

And those two things needed to exist together in a world of physical spaces, but they don’t need to exist in the world of the internet or software. But we all wouldn’t be building the businesses that we are building, and Stripe wouldn’t have the business it has, without banks. So how can you not respect them?

Ashwin Kumar: Totally, and in fintech, a lot of people focus on the “fin” part of all these financial products. But, as you were talking about your products, there’s a tech element—when you said, “What if there are eight developers that go and build a product and put it out there.” That’s a very technology product–focused way of thinking.

Do you feel like banking-as-a-service abstracting that away allows you to focus on the tech, or do you feel like you still have to walk that line where you have to think about both more often than you would want?

Will Kim: I mean, for us, the technology part—because the banking-as-a-service providers are really abstracting away through a lot of this, kind of magic—it allows us to then shift a little bit more of our tech focus toward understanding our customers, deeply based on the data that we’re accessing about how they’re spending, where they’re spending, how much money they’re making.

And then based on this we can now understand, how can we not only help you manage the money that you’re making, but how can we also help you make more money in your business? Because we can now understand a creator business and the levers that you might have depending on the platform, depending on the content vertical, depending on the stage of the audience that you’re speaking to.

And, as a result, we’re then able to really focus on, not only, can we help you manage your money, but can we help you build your business proactively.

Ashwin Kumar: I know we could keep talking about this for so long; there are so many topics to think about, but as we wrap up, I would love to ask each of you a question that’s a little bit related to this. Let’s say we come back here in 10 years and do this panel again—what would you hope that we’d be talking about around fintech? What inspires you that’s coming down the pike? Will, what about you?

Will Kim: I think it’s autonomous finance. Can we have the self-driving-car version of “Your bank understands you, fully deeply” because it’s looking at how you are operating and understands your business type and says, “Hey, here are proactively the things that you need to be thinking about, and here’s a solution.”

So it’s no longer a descriptive view or dashboard of your business that you now have to interpret, but rather, descriptive analytics of how your business is operating. But also the prescription of “Here are the things that you should be doing.” And “I recommend this route forward. Do you want to try this? And here are the costs and benefits to that.”

Ashwin Kumar: Mackenzie, what about you?

Mackenzie Burnett: I would hope that in 10 years we were talking less about the way in which these products need to be built, and I think more about what has fintech enabled in terms of wealth creation for these communities.

That is something that motivates us every day at Ambrook. And not just wealth creation but the types of behaviors and the ways in which they’re able to build their businesses. They’re able to build more sustainable, more resilient businesses to be able to handle anything that comes down the pike.

And I think that’s something that I would be really excited about in a decade from now to check in on. At the end of the day, this fintech revolution actually ended up delivering on the promises that we all really want to be working toward for our customers.

Ashwin Kumar: What about you, Ethan?

Ethan Senturia: Yeah, I guess I have a view that 10 years isn’t so long. I mean, we’re always frustrated that we’re not going fast enough and growing our business or product lines as quickly as we can.

And then I remind all of us that it was in the eighties when we talked about doing online mortgages—and that happened in like 2012 or something with Rocket Mortgage, right? So, like 30 years. So 10 years from now, the world’s probably less different than we might think it is.

It probably looks more like today. So my aspirations maybe are a little more muted; which is, I hope that in 10 years, “fintech” is not a word—it’s just finance. Like, it’s just the way things are. So there is no more separation between, “Oh, there was this old finance and now there’s fintech” and sort of old versus new, but it’s just the way it is.

And the way that manifests itself to me is that we move beyond bank accounts with a card. That is the primary way that companies in fintech are delivering services to their end customers today. That’s usually the starting point. To me it would be that we wake up and it’s totally normal for, in my case, a pro to have only one provider of financial services in their life, and that to be a software-as-a-service platform. If that’s normalized in 10 years for even a plurality of small businesses, that would be a big win.

Ashwin Kumar: And that’s why at Stripe, we’re so excited to keep abstracting those pieces away so you all can be building these businesses and serving your customers. That’s all the time we have today. So joining me today was Will Kim of Karat Financial, Mackenzie Burnett of Ambrook, and Ethan Senturia of Housecall Pro.

Thanks so much to all of you! I’m Ashwin Kumar at Stripe. If you’re interested in building on any of Stripe’s banking-as-a-service products, please reach out, or visit stripe.com to learn more. Thanks so much for watching.