Some conclusions from the @FirstCitznInnov report & event in NYC yesterday: -fintech didn’t shrink, AI just made it look small. ~$40B is going into fintech this year, almost 2x last year, yet its share of venture $ fell from ~20% at peak to ~6% -a ~$300b stablecoin mkt is basically a top-25 US bank that nobody calls a bank. The surprise is who’s adopting it now: banks, asset managers, payment networks & corporates, vs crypto natives. The instis that spent years treating stablecoins as a threat are now integrating them -5 yrs of fintech startups are worth ~$1.1T on paper, but only 1% have IPO’d. 16% have exited & ~20% have shut down. Most of the rest (65%) are still VC-backed, & half of those haven’t raised in 2 yrs. VCs’ answer is to pair those founders with AI engineers & start new cos. They’re backing the founders again, vs the old companies -the bigger regulatory risk is old rules, not new ones. This admin is deregulating by not enforcing, not by changing the law. Best line of the day: “the current teacher is not collecting homework doesn’t mean the homework’s not due.” Any business model built on an enforcement gap is effectively a bet on the 2028 election. Only statute holds -the next big problem for banks: transactions the customer authorized thru an agent. For 10+ yrs the consensus on “self-driving money” was that no one would ever hand over the keys. Now ppl are handing AI agents full account access, & banks can’t easily tell an agent acting on instructions from an account takeover. Liability, identity & personhood are all unsolved, which is why banks like Citi want to fund that infra layer