Stablecoins Dominate Discussions Alongside a Feisty Debate Over LLMs & Services Businesses at Newcomer's Breaking the Bank Summit Yesterday
Get the download on talks from CEOs of Ramp, Gusto, Plaid, Lead Bank & more.
As Bridge founder Zach Abrams came to the stage yesterday at Breaking the Bank, I called him “the man of the hour.”
Abrams’ decision to sell his stablecoin startup to Stripe for $1.1 billion has helped ignite global business interest in the low-cost, crypto-powered, money-moving technology among the traditional finance set. Visa is getting in on the action, planning to launch a stablecoin card with Ramp. Stripe has leaned in. And Congress is working on passing the GENIUS Act which would make it much easier for traditional companies to join in.
Bridge alone can’t take all the credit for the stablecoin mania, of course — stablecoin issuer Tether is among the most profitable businesses per employee in the world. That’s certainly caught the traditional finance world’s attention.
If everyone at Newcomer’s Breaking the Bank Summit yesterday seemed to agree that stablecoins were the new wave to ride, there was less certainty on how exactly to play the generative AI boom in fintech.
Bain Capital Ventures’ fintech guru Matt Harris returned to our event to deliver his view of the world. He argued that founders should be drilling into hard-to-crack financial services categories, like accounting and insurance, with the help of large language models and agents. Harris said it was less clear to him that all these services plus large language models businesses would be perfect vehicles for venture capital dollars. But for founders, he argued, this was the huge opportunity of the moment: Don’t sell software. Deliver services much more cheaply with AI and reap the rewards.
“After 25 years of investing in fintech, I want to talk about financial services. I’m tired of nibbling around the edges of this $33 trillion industry, and I think it’s time for founders to also embrace that this isn’t about incremental change,” Harris said. “It isn’t about making incumbents better. It’s about fundamentally changing the experience for the better for customers.”
But some of the founders who spoke at our summit yesterday were less optimistic about navigating the minefield that is services-intensive businesses.
Josh Reeves, the CEO of payroll company Gusto, said he was only interested in running such a business long enough to figure out how to automate, or get out. “We take these complex compliance-heavy spaces and do what we do best, which is digitize the heck out of it,” Reeves said.
Similarly, Jeff Seibert the CEO of next-generation accounting software company Digits, said he had no interest in getting further mired in the hard work of running an accounting business. Instead, he much preferred to sell accounting software to accountants. Businesses want AI-powered software that automates their financial metrics but, he said, “they want their books blessed by a real CPA, because you can’t sue the AI.”
— Eric
Below is our panel-by-panel digest of everything that happened at Newcomer’s Breaking the Bank Summit in San Francisco yesterday. We’ll be posting the talks to our YouTube channel over the next couple of days. We gathered together many of the top fintech founders and investors for a one-day summit. Next up, we’re headed to London for the Cerebral Valley AI Summit on June 25.
Thank you to Breaking the Bank’s sponsors Oak HC/FT, Plaid, Bain Capital Ventures, Stifel, and EY.
