Why We Invest in Financial Services
Focus isn’t a limitation. It’s an advantage. Here’s why we go deep when others stay shallow.
We don’t invest in everything. We invest in one thing: financial services. People often ask why. And no, it’s not due to a lack of imagination – just the opposite. In a world flooded with thinly veiled generalists masquerading as experts, we double down on what we know best with deep, earned, unwavering conviction.
Our commitment to financial services is deliberate and driven by three core factors: it's where our edge is sharpest, our impact the greatest, and our opportunity the deepest. Allow me to elaborate on each of these points.
Expertise: Our Home Court Advantage
When you think of Michael Jordan, I’m sure you think "basketball legend," not "baseball player." Obviously, there's a good reason for that. Despite his brief foray into baseball, Jordan's legacy is firmly rooted in his basketball mastery. Anyone who doubts this just needs to watch the excellent documentary The Last Dance. Being the best comes from an obsessive, maniacal, borderline unhealthy focus, not dabbling.
In investing, this idea is often described as a "circle of competence." This is an advantage that comes from knowing a domain inside and out, top to bottom, A to Z. While generalist investors try to be an inch deep across countless industries, they sacrifice the depth needed to truly understand what they’re investing in. We take the opposite approach.
We are a team of finance and technology nerds who have been engaged with the space in some way, shape, or form for most of our careers. We have spent time working at some of the most important and relevant firms in the industry that span the range of financial services – banking, payments, insurance, and investments. We’ve also spent similar, if not longer, periods of time in challenger technology-enabled firms that helped to change financial services for the better.
While I won't recite our résumés here, even a quick glance at our backgrounds reveals a complementary mix of experiences that gives us a holistic view of the ecosystem. That depth doesn’t just help us understand where the industry is, it helps us anticipate where it’s going.
We invest at the early stage, where signal is scarce and narrative is noisy. This is where domain expertise matters most. It gives us the ability to see around corners, allowing us to spot both the obvious opportunities and the ones that require deeper insight – opportunities that generalists, by nature, are bound to miss. It helps us identify the right markets, product categories, and founders before there’s traction, and before it’s obvious to everyone else. Once a company is clearly working, growth investors – regardless of domain knowledge – can pile in. But real alpha is earned early, when you need conviction without consensus.
The bottom line is that by focusing on our specialized strengths, we don’t just invest in financial services, we navigate it with insight that generalists can’t replicate. That’s what allows us to move with conviction, back transformational founders, and identify the opportunities that others overlook.
We’ve lived inside this system. And that’s what lets us see its real structure, and the corresponding potential for disruptive transformation and growth.
Transformative Power: The Critical Enabler of Change
Financial services transcends traditional industry boundaries – it is a foundational infrastructure that enables the modern world. Its systems don't simply facilitate transactions; they determine access to capital, risk management, and economic participation. From household decisions to national crises, financial mechanisms are embedded in and enable every consequential choice, serving as primary catalysts that can accelerate or impede progress throughout the economy. Finance is not just a reflection of change – it’s a form of leverage that drives it.
Take insurance, for example. Once seen as a passive hedge, it is now actively repricing risk in entire geographies in response to climate change. Insurers are pulling out of high-risk markets, premiums are skyrocketing, and some areas may become functionally uninsurable. This is not a downstream effect. It is a systemic rerating, and it is being driven by the financial infrastructure itself. We wrote a whole blog post about this (we think it’s worth a read).
Or consider the rise of embedded finance. Once a buzzword, now an essential mechanism for value chain control, allowing non-financial companies to monetize through lending, payments, and insurance. Shopify, for example, didn't set out to become a payments powerhouse, but its payment processing now handles over $290 billion in annual gross merchandise value. And Apple may have started with computers and iPods, but when it launched a savings account, it pulled $10 billion in deposits in just three months. Meanwhile, Apple Pay has also had enormous reach and influence, reshaping how we handle both mobile and in-person, tap-to-pay transactions. The power dynamic is shifting: distribution is increasingly controlled by platforms, not traditional financial institutions. And control over distribution means control over financial infrastructure.
Even at the household level, financial tools are reframing what it means to participate in an economy. Buy-now-pay-later and cash-flow-based underwriting are altering the credit curve for younger generations. Gig workers are accessing wages in real time. Immigrants are building credit histories without traditional banking. These aren’t just features; they are systemic unlocks – rewrites of who gets to participate, when, and how.
And at the public level, fintech is becoming infrastructure. Brazil’s Pix system processed over 42 billion transactions in 2023 (more than all credit and debit cards combined). India’s Aadhaar and Unified Payments Interface stack have enabled hundreds of millions to access benefits, banking, and healthcare with a fingerprint.
By concentrating on financial services, we are not just making isolated bets or chasing headlines. We are positioning Deciens at the nexus of structural shifts that shape economies and underwrite infrastructure for decades to come.
The most profound opportunities for value creation emerge not from following trends, but from seeing the forces that shape them, and backing those bold enough to reshape the system itself.
Potential: A Fertile Combination of Size and Dissatisfaction
If our expertise gives us clarity, and the system’s leverage gives it weight, then the final piece is this: financial services remain broken in ways that are still deeply misunderstood and underpriced.
Financial services account for nearly a quarter of the global economy, yet the industry faces a paradoxical challenge. Despite its enormous size and influence, consumers tend to loathe many of its incumbents. This is due to a myriad of inefficiencies like limited accessibility, sluggish innovation, high and opaque pricing, generic solutions, and generally frustrating user experiences.
This systemic disconnect creates a strategic opening for disruptors to step in and create companies of significant value while the de-materialized nature of the sector generates inherently high margins protected by regulatory frameworks. The result is a fertile environment for startups addressing traditionally underserved markets. Further, it represents considerable opportunities across diverse demographic and economic segments.
We’re especially focused on areas where macro shifts and technological leverage are compounding:
Aging population: More than one in six Americans is now 65 or older, creating massive demand for products that serve seniors and their caregivers. (See: our investment in True Link Financial, a company that offers investment accounts and prepaid cards for seniors and their caregivers.)
Climate-conscious consumers: Sustainability is no longer a niche concern; it is becoming embedded in lending, insurance, and capital markets. (See: our investment in GlacierGrid, which helps small and medium-sized businesses reduce energy consumption and cut operating costs, and we’ll be announcing another investment in this space soon…)
Digital music and streaming: With the rise of streaming music services, the door has been opened for artists to build their careers outside of the major labels, retain ownership of their music, and control their own destiny. (See: our investment in beatBread, which provides advance funding to artists without requiring ownership or future royalties.)
We also focus on hard-to-serve markets where technology is finally unlocking reach:
Cross-border payments: The cross-border payments market is growing, yet markets like Africa remain underinvested, not due to lack of demand but because the problems are complex and high-friction. (See: our investment in Chipper Cash, which powers seamless, low-cost payments across 21+ African countries with built-in AI fraud protection.)
Small and medium-sized businesses: SMBs represent about 90% of businesses globally, but many still rely on outdated, manual financial tools. (See: our investment in SimplyWise, a smart, cloud-based platform that helps SMBs organize financial documents and streamline expense tracking.)
Emerging markets: Roughly 1.5 billion people worldwide remain without access to basic financial services. (See: our investment in Grupago, the first digital bank fully powered by AI, built for SMBs in Mexico, now expanding across emerging markets.)
Our portfolio spans these edges – not just where markets are large, but where they’re changing. And as these underserved segments come online, the global financial footprint doesn’t just shift, it expands.
This is the core of our conviction: the potential in financial services isn’t about reshuffling market share. It’s about growing and rebuilding the system itself through meaningful innovation that unlocks new users, new models, and entirely new forms of value.
Looking Ahead
To put it simply, the financial services industry is vast, complex, and categorically ripe for disruption. Our expertise allows us to cut through the noise, recognize patterns that generalists miss, and engage with financial infrastructure at a fundamental level.
While generalists might be tempted to chase the latest shiny investment trends, we are steadfast in our commitment to financial services. It's seldom glamorous, but it is always essential. Excellence in this domain isn’t about luck or timing; it’s about deep knowledge, relentless refinement, and a willingness to challenge assumptions. Every day, for decades.
Looking ahead, we remain committed to backing visionary founders, generating meaningful returns for our investors, and shaping the industry’s evolution. True impact doesn’t come from chasing what’s popular. It comes from staring at the same hard problems longer than anyone else – and building alongside the people brave enough to solve them.
