What are some new and exciting trends in the fintech startup space? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Angela Strange, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz, on Quora:
Infrastructure! Sounds boring...but it’s the most exciting. It’s getting faster and cheaper to start a fintech company. This will be great for scaling businesses and even better for consumers. We can expect more infrastructure companies, founded by a diverse set of entrepreneurs addressing still up-tapped problems that will seem so obvious in a few years from now.
For example, as I’ve written before, 20 years ago, if you had a great idea for an online business, it would take significant time and capital to launch. First you’d buy some servers and some networking gear; next you’d have to buy software licenses; then develop a custom web server, a database, a front end server to handle requests… etc. Then came Amazon Web Services—and the next 10 years transformed all of that to a few simple clicks by providing all of those capabilities into abstracted services as APIs or GUI based clicks. Today, you can launch a new company with little more than an idea, a laptop, and a credit card.
The same will happen with financial services technology with new infrastructure. Companies like synapse.fi are already making it easier . But even more infrastructure opportunities exist. For example, whenever a scaling company needs to hire dozens of people to do a critical task that is non-core to their business this will become an opportunity for a new infrastructure company. Some larger marketplaces have >100 people just working on payments. In the future, a company could simply plug into a new infra co, rather than build their own from scratch organization. The same way companies plug into AWS. It will be faster, cheaper and easier to add financial services technology to companies of all types and sizes.
This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter and Facebook. More questions:
