Absolute Unit

What’s notably missing from the existing subscription bundle is financial services. As Neo Banks look to compete with incumbents they have talked about their lower cost structure, and cheaper customer acquisition cost, leading to shorter payback period.

The financial infrastructure platforms of today must be able to handle customers across all jurisdictions, all exchanges of value, all types of use-cases (producers, distributors, consumers), and all from the start.

The last decade showed that questionable business models can subsist for a long time (and even flourish) when capital is abundant. Thirteen years after its founding, Uber is still figuring out how to be profitable: the company’s gross margins actually declined seven percentage points over the past three years, and the net profit margin is -3%.

The most powerful layers of distribution, payment and production remain entangled in oligopolistic platforms where the platform’s owners – not the creators fueling those systems profit the most.