A Brief History of Fintech's Meltdown

Plus, how the market in private company shares dried up.

Number of the Week: 700,000 (explanation below)

A Brief History of Fintech's Meltdown

When we started FIN in October 2020, fintech appeared to be setting the world on fire. There were so many interlocking sectors: proptech, payments, crossborder payments, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), insurtech, and of course cryptocurrency. PayPal was trading at nearly $200 a share, which would grow to more than $300 by July 2021 before heading back to Earth (today it’s at $86). The combination of user experience, loose regulation and a lockdown-driven need for contactless payment seemed to be ushering in a new era in how people interact with money. Private capital was flooding the sector, and even unrelated developments like government stimulus payments propelled the machine forward.

And yet, even then, there were signs that fintech was a bubble.