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A banker in your pocket
A banker in your pocket
The line comes from David Velez, founder of Nubank. It describes agents built for specific functions that look after a person's financial life in ways no one has been looked after before. Such an agent would handle recommendations and decisions on investing, commerce, and payments, which frees time and ideas people do not have today.
Rails for agents
Agents need rails that run around the clock. Prediction markets, which some call gambling and which let people bet on anything 24/7, are an early sign of that infrastructure being built. Stripe is building payments for agents, Robinhood is tokenizing assets, and money is moving toward AI later than knowledge did.
The likeliest winners
The likeliest winners are the founder-led companies already building: Stripe, Robinhood, Nubank, and Revolut. Their founders are at an age and a place where they are still as hungry as on day one, and they are moving faster than the incumbents.
How do prediction markets work?
Prediction markets sell contracts that pay out a fixed amount if an event happens, so a price of 40 cents reads as a rough 40 percent chance. The University of Iowa launched the Iowa Electronic Markets in 1988 as a research tool for studying election forecasting. A letter from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission allowed it to operate with each trader limited to 500 dollars.
How did Nubank win customers in Brazil?
Nubank launched in Brazil in 2013 with a purple credit card that carried no annual fee and was managed entirely through an app. Early growth ran through an invitation system and word of mouth. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2021.
How does tokenizing a real asset work?
A token on a blockchain can represent a claim on a real asset, such as a bond or a share of a fund, while the issuer holds the underlying asset. Because the token moves on a blockchain, it can trade at any hour and be split into small pieces. In March 2024 the asset manager BlackRock launched a tokenized money market fund on the Ethereum blockchain, called BUIDL.
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