My interest in the large companies could be summarised by saying that it seems that after the GFC, Goldman had their balls cut off by the US government, and the question is what they do to work around the regulations and how other companies filled the gaps (and what those gaps were/are). It seems to me that Goldman’s push to retail is less motivated by magic massively large edge and more by the fact that they can’t do the trades they used to do (though maybe Goldman is a particularly bad example here and a more traditional IB+retail bank would be better to talk about).

I’m sure there are lots of quirky things going on in the US financial infra but I think I just don’t know what they are. A simple question is what actually happens when money is wired (internationally) and how does that line up with the legal and intuitive concepts of owning the money, but I don’t know if that is actually an interesting question.

This is probably a challenge unless you're in the industry, but I'm curious about how the specific details of a payment for order flow arrangement works. How does a brokerage choose which provider they route an order to (since they have relationships with multiple)? Does a provider have to execute an order if it is routed to them? Etc.

Maybe how international wires work and on what ways providers like Wise or CurrencyCloud are different

Maybe European banking API standards vs Plaid?

Different banking charters, like ILCs. Maybe talking about what tech startups are doing which license?

OnlyFans and banking issues, especially what their CEO said blaming a bank for not processing their wires (iirc)

You’ve tweeted before about a future where tech companies enable a “bank for Beyoncé fans” and such. Maybe that? (I am still skeptical of this)

Maybe different ways tech companies comply with laws vs traditional banks? How much is it taking on extra risk vs improved KYC tech and such?

would be interesting to hear about the 'big unsolved problems' in fintech as of 2021.

Just going to say this was a great read (I'm working on something in the fintech space). I originally submitted it and was surprised it didn't make the HN front page, but happy to see it got a chance from the second-chance pool!

Couple ideas:

1) what happens when I transfer money to someone in another country (eg SWIFT).

2) if you had to design a business model for financial institions from scratch, that was aligned with customers, what would it look like?

This was a super interesting and digestible read. I especially liked the angle of how public policy influences trends in fintech. I'd love to learn more from examples over the past few decades.

Origin of SWIFT. Not the official version, but an actual history.

I think it would be fascinating to take a deep dive into transaction settlement, especially in securities markets.

HN readers might care to know that this newsletter comes recommend by HN-favorite Matt Levine: https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1451586620872867842