The next big fintechs will win with novel distribution, not novel products. In the 2010s the biggest fintechs were product innovators. They closed the gap between the poor UX of traditional financial institutions and the great UX of digital-first products. They combined new tech, regulatory frameworks, and business models to create genuinely novel products: Chime’s branchless bank, Robinhood’s fun fee-free trading, innovative consumer credit products like Earnin’s earned-wage-access or ...
