Either the market has an endless appetite for banking or capitalism does not in the end deliver what markets want.
It may be cute to say “X is a bank”, but an airline is not a bank. Besides the obvious facts that you cannot withdraw money from an account or pay your bills, if they didn’t fly planes the points would be ~worthless.
The fact that they don’t profit from those activities is a market economy working as intended*. Cars and flights are easily substitutable goods, you’d expect to see the profit competed down to ~nothing.
*Arguably there is getting to be too much consolidation in the airline industry, and also legal limits on airport gates act as a huge barrier of entry for new competition.
(edited for clarity)
To do the "actually send passengers from LAX to ORD" part of running an airline you have to pay for pilots, gate agents, planes, the world's smallest cups of flat ginger ale...
But shuffling around frequent flyer miles as a psuedo-currency? No actual tangible expenses there, just some obligations that end up on some future quarter's balance sheet.
I don’t like it but I think it’s clear this is the case. The demand for “buy now, pay later” seems to be huge, even if it costs more in the end, even for seemingly trivial amounts of money for regular purchases. But I really have no idea how much things like affirm on Amazon actually get used, maybe no one else is using it either.