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