How leading fintech players are rethinking their strategies

The FR editors recently sat down with Zack Miller, editor-in-chief of fintech and financial services media platform Tearsheet, for a wide-ranging conversation on industry trends. Comments have been edited for clarity.

You recently published a deep dive into some of the key trends reshaping the industry — in particular, Fintech 2.0, a maturation phase where underlying fundamentals matter more than growth metrics. What prompted you to write about this topic?

These were disparate conversations and data points we were hearing from senior executives across the industry. As we were having these discussions, it kind of dawned on me — they weren’t necessarily saying it outright at an industry level, but they were all pointing to the same thing: ‘We’re figuring out this next stage, this next phase of growth for our company.’

It’s coming out of that era of ‘growth at all costs’ — becoming more buttoned-down, focusing on growing with strong unit economics, and building flatter organizations.

This shift really started over the past year. Companies began rethinking what growth actually means. It’s like fixing the airplane while it’s flying — whether that’s from an organizational perspective or a product one.

In your piece, you also discuss a pivot to more disciplined growth because there are perhaps more strings on the funding, and they were raising at lower valuations. How did that affect companies’ strategies?

These companies are some of the best product companies out there. They’re incredibly well run and have thoughtfully built products. But at a certain point, they can get a little bloated — so Brex removed a couple of layers of management. It was about being lean, doing more with less. I think that reflects the broader market dynamic we’re in right now.

How did these changes impact the way companies deliver their offerings?

Another thing that happened at Brex is they had launched different teams to build different products, and sometimes those teams evolved into mini organizations within the company. They’ve since migrated toward a single roadmap across all teams — so there’s now a clear, top-down vision for where the company is headed, at least from a product standpoint.

With Ramp, they saw the potential of generative AI really early — not just for themselves but across the industry. Because the idea was so broad — that AI could eventually touch every company and every workflow — they began thinking about it from a platform perspective. It was like, ‘If we’re starting to automate 5%, 10%, maybe even 20% of what we’re doing now, but we want to get to something close to 100%, what do we need to build? What steps do we need to take to earn trust?’

What came through in my conversations was that you can’t just start automating everything — you almost need passive permission to do that, from both your customers and your team. There has to be trust that the outputs and interactions will align with what your company promises. And AI isn’t always there yet.

In the early days of Plaid, they prided themselves on being developer-led — no marketing, no sales folks. It was their developers talking to other companies' developers, and that was just how they operated. Ten years later — and with a lot of new products, including a credit reporting agency — they’re in a bunch of new businesses. 

I think the world doesn’t necessarily understand Plaid the way it used to. For them, it was about reaching a point and saying, ‘We’ve actually matured a lot in our value proposition — from when we started to where we are today. We can do a lot more.’ It’s not just about credit reporting, but also the surrounding services that support credit decisioning. So the question became, ‘How do we wrap all of that into a message that really reflects what we do for our clients, who we are, and where we’re headed?’

How do you see the competitive dynamic between fintech startups evolving? 

Every disruptor — every startup — eventually becomes an incumbent, right? So as these companies grow, they naturally become more buttoned-down, more disciplined, and more focused. That also means they get bigger, and maybe a bit more deliberate in how quickly they move. And that creates new openings for the next wave of startups to come in. I mean, when you look at some of the top publicly traded fintech companies today — or the ones that were acquired — some of their core technology is already 20 years old.

You’ve been a fintech media leader since your early days of blogging around 2007, through to launching Tearsheet in 2015. How do you view the trajectory of fintech media and Tearsheet specifically?

There’s no shortage of things competing for people’s attention, and I think it’s getting harder and harder to capture that attention. That’s the core challenge the media is facing right now.

We’ve been working to provide more actionable content for our readers. Whether it’s in our open content or our premium content behind the Tearsheet Pro subscription, we’re trying to create what we sometimes call mini case studies. We’re extracting insights from the senior executives we talk to and turning that into a kind of blueprint — something readers can take back and apply to their own work.

It’s more applicable content — not just ‘So-and-so launched a new product’ or ‘So-and-so formed a new partnership.’ We’re asking: How did they get that partnership done? What were the three metrics they used to measure success? What went wrong, and how did they fix it? Which teams were behind it?

That’s the kind of insight our readers and listeners have told us they really value.

Tearsheet recently launched 4dFi, a group of builders and investors coming together to fund up-and-coming fintech startups. Can you tell us a little more about this initiative?

We’re starting with a syndicate, but moving toward a fund model. We’re looking at fintech opportunities outside of the U.S., particularly for U.S. investors. The most interesting stuff, especially at the early stages, is happening outside the U.S., including in Brazil and other countries in South America.

We have three partners as part of 4dFi. I'm one of those partners. I partnered with two other people who are just fantastic at what they do. One's a chief data scientist at a fintech in Brazil — one of the smartest fintech, ex-AmEx people I’ve ever met. The other guy is our wicked smart analyst. He’s spent the past few years in the investment industry, in venture capital, working on hundreds of deals. He's going to be one of the best in the industry.

And I’m the connector. That’s how we think about how we complement one another. We find good opportunities. We never lead deals — that’s part of the model. We don’t have people on the ground in any of those countries, so we look at opportunities where we can join existing investors that we know and respect, who’ve already done the diligence.

We find those opportunities, we negotiate our way into a deal, and then we bring that opportunity back to our investment community. We’re going to launch content around each deal — there’ll be a webinar, a chance to learn more about the company, to hear directly from the managers and entrepreneurs building it.

Then we basically do an equity crowdfunding round, where — with minimums of $10,000 — these executives can participate. We’re typically looking at writing checks between $300,000 and $500,000.

As for the investors, these are managing directors at some of the largest banks in the U.S., and C-level leaders at some of the biggest publicly traded fintech companies. They’re senior executives who’ve been around the block — and they see the value in Tearsheet in surfacing strong opportunities and collaborating around them.