Bond and The Future of Fintech
By Mars Garza
XYZ is an early stage venture fund focused on enterprise and fin-tech companies. As such, we’ve developed some ~theorems~ on where we see these verticals going in the future.
It’s been a decade since we’ve known Roy. Ross and Roy (say that 10x fast) kept bumping into each other — when Cubetree was acquired by SuccessFactors back in 2010, then when Kapor invested in Twilio, and happily now, during this journey at XYZ with Bond.
Roy was working out a life-long interest in fin-tech infrastructure that perfectly aligned with a thesis of ours: every company ultimately will have to become some form of a fin-tech, but it’ll be really hard. Roy wanted to enable that future using his deep domain expertise from his time at Twilio where he led and scaled out a developer-first platform. The telecom industry was closed and not easy for innovators to access. Twilio’s API platform unlocked the imagination and creativity of developers to build incredible applications like Uber, Airbnb, Instacart, Trulia, and the list goes on. Just as Twilio is the de-facto enabler of the future of communications, we think of Bond as the de-facto enabler for the future of fin-tech.
To hammer in the point, we saw two areas of credibility: fin-tech was everywhere and yet, there was a major difficulty to employ it because plugging into a bank was a complex and arduous process. Ross had real exposure and insight into the opportunity for how banks could work with nascent companies as member and chairman of the board at Beneficial State Bank and XYZ as a portfolio had seen many portfolio companies build an integration into a card issuer. There was a clear and precise opportunity Roy could optimize.
If there is a point of sale system, there will be a lending system. If there is a loan, there will be a debit card. If there is an accounting system, there will be a checking account. If there is a beloved consumer company, there will be a company card. And between all those commas is a whole lot of infrastructure that matches the front end product to the back end operations.
Bond will remove this friction. The team is focused on building an enterprise platform that enables sponsor banks to better onboard and manage brand partners. In conduction to this platform, the team has created APIs brand partners need to build innovative financial solutions.
In the wake of the pandemic, this innovation is critical to the recovery of our economy and to the support of our domestic businesses. Systemic gaps and economic disparities are growing. The quality and distribution of financial services and banking will determine how we as a society can reckon with inequality. With Bond, banking will become seamless and brands can launch innovative financial solutions for their customers, and by extension, underserved populations.
Anyways, the point is we love fin-tech. And we love Bond.
