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Happy Wednesday, Fintech Listeners!

I really appreciate all of the feedback I received on Monday’s newsletter. It’s a privilege to write Fintech Takes and, occasionally, to share my opinions on what’s happening in the wider world.  

It’s also a privilege to host the Fintech Takes podcast, and I am very happy to share some details about our latest episode, which dropped today.

— Alex 

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3 BIG IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST

This week, I sat down with the one and only Marc Rubinstein, author of the Net Interest newsletter, to chat through a handful of themes Marc has been writing about over the past year that are taking center stage in 2026.

Like why the U.S. still has thousands of community banks (long after the advantages of scale and tech began to disadvantage them), and why the 30-year mortgage remains both a triumph of American financial engineering and a source of deep generational tension. 

Then we drifted into more recent obsessions, like why agentic commerce seems inevitable in consultant slide decks but oddly absent from daily life. And why stablecoin infrastructure is drifting away from crypto idealism and toward large, permissioned, institution-backed systems.

And of course, what all of this reveals about regulatory incentives, institutional power, and the future of financial infrastructure. It wouldn’t be The Fintech Takes podcast any other way!

And read below for my three big ideas... 

I had to ask Marc about mortgages because he is one of the most astute observers and historians of that market (see this and this). According to him, credit availability in the mortgage market is more constrained than it should be. 

This is due, primarily, to the rules put in place after the Great Recession (loan-to-value limits, eligibility requirements, etc.) that make it very difficult for lenders, especially banks, to originate and service mortgages below a certain threshold, even if they would otherwise be comfortable with the risks.

And when it comes to housing, more broadly, the picture gets even darker because credit constraints run straight into supply constraints, and there’s simply nowhere for the pressure to go. 

Marc points out that housing availability is a core part of the problem, not just in the U.S. but in the U.K. as well. Building more housing sounds simple until you run into local zoning rules, planning processes, and political resistance that make new supply painfully slow. In past cycles, credit could stretch to offset that scarcity. This time it can’t. Underwriting rules are fixed, risk-based pricing is constrained, and lenders have no room to maneuver even when the data says the risk is manageable.

And, most importantly, this environment is having a profound impact on younger generations. Slowly falling interest rates in the second half of the 20th century transferred wealth to existing homeowners through repeated refinancing and rising equity. Those outside the market have benefited from neither. Now rates are no longer falling, and entry points remain narrow.

What this leaves behind is a market where risk is low, lender appetite exists, and exclusion is driven by structural constraints rather than creditworthiness.

And, as I have written about before, when people give up on the dream of homeownership, bad things follow.

🎬 DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY

In the mortgage portion of our conversation, Marc and I also talked about the advantages and disadvantages of specialization, which became a very common operating model after the Great Recession. 

Recently, as interest rates have increased and opportunities to originate mortgages for new home purchases and refinances have decreased, large players like Rocket have focused on diversification and vertical integration.

For a mortgage servicing supernerd like me, this has been very interesting to watch! 

Marc had an aha moment when stablecoin usage stopped tracking crypto trading volumes. Up until that happened, you could dismiss the growth in stablecoins as exhaust coming off the crypto economy. And while the crypto economy is still the largest driver of stablecoin usage today, it’s no longer the only one.

Stablecoins are becoming mainstream payments infrastructure.

The adoption path is becoming institution-led and more centralized. Marc points to JPMorgan Chase as an instructive example. The bank has something like 250 people working on various stablecoin projects globally.

Marc is explicit about why this is happening. Centralized systems produce better customer experiences. Additionally, banks (and, increasingly, stablecoin issuers) operate under legal obligations to protect customers and monitor and prevent financial crime. That reality limits how far they can lean into permissionless designs, even when the technology itself allows it.

However, Marc also points out in our discussion that centralization can go too far. Every institution creating its own closed-loop network is understandable, as a matter of individual company strategy, but it will lead to a fractured and illiquid ecosystem.

Interoperability is important. And it seems likely to be a theme in the next era of stablecoins.

For years, fintech companies treated bank charters like liabilities. The goal was to borrow one, not own one. But that posture is shifting.

The Banking-as-a-Service model, where nonbanks accessed the system through chartered intermediaries, worked for a while, but has since shown its flaws. 

That model thrived in a very specific environment. Before 2022, everyone wanted to be valued like a high-growth tech company. This was the era of “we’re not a bank, we’re a software company” (even if they were really more like a bank). 

However, when interest rates went up, tech multiples fell, and the relative value of having a bank charter rose. Vertical integration became more attractive because it lowered costs, improved unit economics, and simplified regulatory compliance.

There’s also been a regulatory shift. If you want an ILC charter, the FDIC is cool with it. If you want a national bank charter, the OCC would love to talk to you! It’s easier to get a charter now than it was before.

The door is open, and, in Marc’s view, a lot of companies will try to go through it. He points to Revolut, the largest non-bank fintech company in the UK, which has been trying (with mixed success) to become a regulated bank in the geographies it competes in for a while.

In the U.S., though, I can’t help but think of Chime, which still shows little interest in a bank charter and continues to see itself as a transactional payments business.

The deeper implication is not that everyone will get a charter. It’s that the industry is in the midst of an identity shift. And in the current environment, a bank charter looks less like red tape and more like a competitive advantage.

WHAT I'M LISTENING TO

A rare opportunity to hear Bill Demchak, CEO of PNC, talk expansively about banking and his strategy for growing PNC.

This is the best recap I’ve heard of what happened to the Clarity Act and where things may go from here.

Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email. 

— Alex  

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