Welcome to Moving Money (Right). My name is Fawziyah, and I’ve been building financial products as a software engineer for almost 5 years. I’m a big nerd about this industry, and I want to bring the types of conversations I love having with my colleagues to anyone interested in the world of financial infrastructure + technology. If you would like to contact us, please email [email protected].
I’ve been reflecting on why I like working on financial products, and it reminds me of when I was 20 and starting to build my credit. I was a college student without steady income and a murky residency status in the US. After doing some research, I learned about secured credit cards and applied for a few.
The co-founder of Modern Treasury tweeted asking why we can't just give 16 digit card numbers to agents, because stablecoins are being touted as the more attractive option with the AI boom. Paul Graham responded that it would mean we'd have to pay card fees, and drag the networks into the future with us.
Building a ledger is famously hard to get right. AML and transaction monitoring, to comply with fraud regulations, is tedious. Building your own rewards engine that manages transfers and balances for your customers is complicated.
This week, the start-up Mercury received conditional approval by the OCC to become a bank. This news is part of an emerging trend of software companies no longer using a bank's license to meet regulatory demands and applying for their own charter.