Immad is the CEO and founder of Mercury Bank - one of the fastest-growing fintech companies today, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Naval Ravikant and many more top-tier investors. Ian is the CEO and founder of Fintech Today, a community and content company focused on the fintech startup ecosystem.
So embedded finance when non financial companies are embedding financial products into their offerings.
And then fintech is when embedded fintech is when financial companies are implementing the various products from fintech companies into their services. So I guess the wanted to ask, first of all, I mean, Immad, you brought this up as something really important.
How do you think about this in the context of in the context of Mercury, in the context of the industry in general, how will things go and is embedded financial fintech more important or they equally and it totally depends on whose world you're speaking from.
I mean, this is, I think, one of the fundamental shifts, like, I mean, nowadays, I guess people outside fintech probably see a lot of Challenger banks, right? There's a lot of Bank for this Bank for that. I actually just invested in a Bank for people speaking a specific language in the Us. I'm not saying just in case that guy wants to keep it secret, but my point is there's tons of these kind of branded Bank. There was like two of them that just got funded. They're doing like teen banking just last week as unicorn valuations. And the reason there's been all this nation, especially in the Challenger Bank space, but across a bunch of Intech things, is because there's this underlying products, which in the case of banking, are called banking as a service products in the Chase, there's ones for lending, there's ones for insurance. And those things have really dropped the barrier to entry to become a Fintech company in the space.
So it's real fundamental shift before 2017, these things didn't really exist. And to become a tech company you'd have to raise five to 10,000,000 dollars. And even then, you'd be lucky to get a product in market. Now you can raise a million dollars, get a product in market, get real users, get real traction and quickly prove out, like, whether that's the best product market fit or not. So I think that's, like, probably the most fundamental change.
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