WORKWEEK

This essay is about Keith Baldwin, a 44-year-old surgeon who lives outside New Bedford, Mass. This essay is about how Dr. Baldwin lost more than 90% of the $177,000 that he had saved over the past decade. This essay is about the house that Dr. Baldwin was planning to buy with that money. And this…

3 Fintech News Stories #1: Reputational Risk  What happened? Adventure Now, Pay Later (or, more accurately, BNPL for guns) is apparently a thing: If you visit the website for gun manufacturer Daniel Defense, the first thing you’ll see is a pop-up message offering condolences to the victims of a gunman who killed 21 people at a…

Liquidity on the Back End, Fragmentation on the Front End In my first essay on this subject, I wrote that the mortgage servicing process is “the biggest missed opportunity in financial services”. Why? Because I had recently gone through the home buying experience and I couldn’t believe how absurd it was. Here’s my description of…

3 Fintech News Stories #1: How Much BaaS Is Too Much BaaS? What happened? Unit, the banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, raised more money: Unit, a banking-as-a-service startup, has closed on a $100 million Series C round of funding led by Insight Partners. Existing backers Accel, Better Tomorrow Ventures and Flourish Ventures also participated in the financing, which…

3 Fintech News Stories #1: We Need a New Name for (Most) Stablecoins What happened? Luna, the sister token of controversial stablecoin TerraUSD, is now basically worthless: Luna plunged to $0 Friday, according to data from CoinGecko, marking a stunning collapse for a cryptocurrency that at one point was worth more than $100. The demise of…

When I announced that my newsletter had been acquired by Workweek, I wrote: Since I wrote that, we’ve seen an acceleration of the slide in public fintech stock prices that is, even for a natural skeptic like myself, a bit surprising: We’ve also seen a corresponding cooling in VC funding for private fintech companies, as reported by CB…