Micky Malka, whose Ribbit Capital backs Coinbase, Robinhood and Nubank, declares fintech dead with a 2012-2023 cemetery slide.
Malka expects only 50 compounders among 3,000 fintechs, with 1,500 failures, 500 profitable survivors and 200 acquisitions.
Malka says financial, data and power grids are converging for the first time in 500 years, and AI agents will need money and crypto rails.
Why Ribbit's Micky Malka says fintech had to fail
Ribbit Capital was built on the bet that the financial crisis and the App Store had broken the banks' hold on customers, and that a new layer of financial companies would form. Malka's fintech-is-dead slide is the arithmetic of that bet, and it explains why Ribbit spent a year and a half studying compounders instead of chasing the 3,000. The next wager is on the infrastructure underneath everything, where identity and crypto rails are still missing.
Takeaways
Fintech's decade produced very few compounders. Malka showed a cemetery slide labelled fintech 2012 to 2023 at a Ribbit annual meeting. Of roughly 3,000 backed fintechs, he expected 50 compounders, 200 acquisitions, 500 profitable survivors and 1,500 failures.
Ribbit was designed to reject venture convention. The 2012 fund documents allowed buying crypto, which Malka believes no other fund's did. He put his own money in fund one, refused fee-based incentives, gave retroactive economics to anyone who joined, kept inboxes and data open, and chose Capital over Ventures.
Three grids are converging for the first time. The financial grid is merging with the data and power grids in a way Malka says has not happened in almost 500 years, with AI as a printing-press moment built on 30 years of digitised content. Identity is the missing layer, as India's Aadhaar and UPI show.
Stablecoins are this era's travellers cheques. They began as plumbing so crypto exchanges could move dollars when fiat rails were hard, and consumers took them over. The market is about $200bn, holders forgo 4 to 4.5% of yield, and Malka expects it to reach a trillion.
The crisis and the App Store opened fintech. The 2008-09 crisis destroyed trust in incumbents, banks had built back-end stacks in the late 1990s but never the last mile, and the App Store from 2010 gave newcomers a channel to acquire customers. Malka's Venezuelan inflation shaped the instinct.
Ribbit's hardest task is killing its winners. Malka says staying adaptable means being willing to kill the things that got you here. He treats returns as an output metric and works on inputs instead, and Ribbit now touches 900m people a year with financial services.
Robinhood's January 2021 margin call
Ribbit had a term sheet for Robinhood prepared nine months before the squeeze, and Malka sits on the board.
At 5am the collateral demand landed at $3bn.
Malka called Greg Becker, then CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, and asked him to overdraft every Ribbit line for $500m.
The wire went out by 9:30am.
Malka paced 24 miles that day. He took away the loneliness of a CEO and the value of asymmetric informed risk.
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