Forbes - USA (2020-03)

THE FORBES FINTECH 50

Money Moves 2020

GIVE YOUR IRA A SECOND WIND

Effective January 2020, Congress made a bunch

of changes to the rules governing retirement ac-

counts. For one, if you have earned income, you can

now contribute to an Individual Retirement Account

no matter your age (the old cutoff was 7 0 ½). That’s

great if you continue to work part-time after you

“retire.” Another boon to Boomers: The age for tak-

ing mandatory retirement-account payouts was

pushed from 7 0 ½ to 72. One new gotcha: Leave your

Individual Retirement Accounts to non-spouse heirs,

and in most cases they must withdraw the money

within 1 0 years. —A.E.

MARCH 20 20

And they actually should have a pretty high rate

of failure. Otherwise, we’re not thinking big

enough.”

C   

rypto has been condemned

as rat poison by Warren Buf-

fett, as a fraud by Jamie Dimon

and the mother of all scams by

doomsday economist Nouriel

Roubini. Where’s the payoff to the economy?

It’s coming, Armstrong says. He posits a fu-

ture in which thousands of startups use crypto

to raise capital in a global marketplace no longer

controlled by Wall Street firms. Within a decade,

he predicts, the number of people participating

in the blockchain economy will explode from 50

million to 1 billion. We are destined to enjoy a

financial system that is “more global, more fair,

more free and more efficient.”

There is an emotional component to the quest

for financial liberation. Coinbase’s newly hired

chief product officer, Surojit Chatterjee, talks

about what happened when India all but de-

stroyed currency holdings in a surprise attack on

the money supply. His 80-year-old father spent

five hours in line to retrieve the equivalent of $30.

Many countries, including Mexico, Argentina,

Russia and Cyprus, have perpetrated wealth con-

fiscations of this sort, in which some store of val-

ue is frozen or forcibly converted into something

less valuable. The U.S. is an offender, too. FDR

seized gold in 1933, replacing it with pieces of pa-

per that have since lost 95% of their value.

Like gold, bitcoin is too cumbersome to be

used as a means of exchange. The convoluted

mechanism for adding transactions to the ledger

means it takes 10 minutes to confirm a payment

and that only four transfers can take place per

second. You can’t run a global economy on that.

Solutions are on the way, Armstrong says. One

is to consider bitcoin a store of value and add a

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MAKERDAO

Ì

NEW YORK CITY

BLOCKCHAIN & BITCOIN

Decentralized finance platform

lets borrowers use volatile

cryptocurrency as collateral

for loans of stablecoins pegged

to the U.S. dollar.

FUNDING: $63 million; latest

valuation of $500 million

BONA FIDES: Generated

$10 million in interest in 2019

FOUNDER AND CEO:

Rune Christensen, 29

MARQETA

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

PAYMENTS

Debit-card transaction proces-

sor gives companies that issue

cards to workers or customers

more control over which trans-

actions are approved.

FUNDING: $378 million; latest

valuation of $1.9 billion

BONA FIDES: $300 million-plus in

2019 revenue, Forbes estimates

COFOUNDER & CEO:

Jason Gardner, 50

MONEYLION

Ì

NEW YORK CITY

PERSONAL FINANCE

Digital bank provides users free

checking, debit cards, paycheck

advances (with direct deposit)

and managed ETF portfolios.

FUNDING: $207 million; latest

valuation of $630 million

BONA FIDES: 6 million–plus users

COFOUNDERS:

CEO Dee Choubey, 38; CIO

Pratyush Tiwari, 43; CTO Chee

Mun Foong, 42

NEXT INSURANCE

Ì

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

INSURANCE

Mobile-first insurance carrier

sells small business lines

(liability, commercial auto

and workers’ comp) packaged

for specific industries (e.g.,

restaurants). Sells in all states

except New York and is a

licensed carrier in 26.

FUNDING: $381 million; latest

valuation of more than $1 billion

BONA FIDES: Serves 79,000

small businesses

COFOUNDERS: CEO Guy

Goldstein, 52; CTO Alon Huri,

43; VP of R&D Nissim Tapiro, 50

NOVA CREDIT

SAN FRANCISCO

PERSONAL FINANCE

Draws on credit-report infor-

mation from eight countries to

produce a standardized num-

ber similar to a U.S. FICO cred-

it score, enabling newcomers

to the U.S. to qualify for loans

and apartment rentals based

on their home-country records.

FUNDING: $65 million

BONA FIDES: American Express

uses Nova data to instantly

approve immigrants from

Australia, Canada, India, Mexico

and the U.K. for U.S. cards

COFOUNDERS: CEO Misha

Esipov, 32; COO Nicky Goulimis,

31; Loek Janssen, 30

OPENDOOR

SAN FRANCISCO

REAL ESTATE

Home sellers in 21 cities can

request all-cash offers from

Opendoor online, receive bids

in 24 hours and close in as lit-

tle as two weeks. New app en-

ables buyers to make offers on

any home for sale in six cities,

including Dallas and Phoenix.

FUNDING: $1.3 billion; latest

valuation of $3.8 billion

BONA FIDES: Purchased

19,000 homes in 2019

COFOUNDER AND CEO:

Eric Wu, 37

JASON GARDNER

ÌNEW^ TO^ LIST

(^1) According to PitchBook