everyone in fintech is competing to build the next neobank or payments company. meanwhile, there’s a company doing almost $500m/year manufacturing metal cards. this might be one of the most overlooked businesses in fintech. pretty much every fintech or neobank with a card program needs someone to actually manufacture, personalize, and ship their physical cards. CompoSecure is one of the biggest players in the space and the largest manufacturer of metal payment cards, doing around $500m in annual revenue. the interesting part is that i’ve spoken with a bunch of card issuance teams and they all seem to have similar complaints about their existing manufacturers. they’re great at the actual manufacturing and logistics. but the tech stack sitting on top of it usually sucks. bad APIs, slow integrations, outdated dashboards, long approval cycles, and everything takes forever. most of these companies were built as manufacturers first, not technology companies. i think there’s a massive opportunity to build a modern card manufacturer with great software and APIs sitting on top of the manufacturing layer. it’s a super unsexy business. you’re not building fancy software or AI agents, you’re pumping out raw metal in a warehouse. but it can still become a massive operation. more and more fintechs will launch card programs and someone still has to physically make all of them. boring business, huge market.