Why the Best Fintech Companies Are Staying Private With Sahej Suri, Founder of Blue Dot Investors

Sahej Suri is the founder of Blue Dot Investors, a late-stage growth equity firm that invests exclusively in fintech across both primaries and secondaries. Before Blue Dot he built his career at J.P. Morgan, TPG, and as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors. In this conversation Sahej explains the scrappy origin story of the firm, the overlooked opportunity in fintech secondaries, and his new report with FT Partners on the coming fintech liquidity supercycle, including the finding that the top 100 private fintechs now out-earn the top 100 public ones.

What We Covered

• Sahej’s path from J.P. Morgan to TPG to QED
• The 2008 recession and why access to financial services stuck with him
• The happenstance origin story of Blue Dot
• Why fintech is closer to biotech than to generalist tech
• The gap in the market for late-stage fintech specialists
• Why the top 10 names dominate secondary market activity
• Finding undervalued companies outside the marquee names
• The “Liquidity Supercycle” report with FT Partners and how it came together
• Why the top 100 private fintechs out-earn the top 100 public ones
• The state of the IPO window and the SpaceX bellwether
• Why the 2025 IPO cohort cleared a much higher bar
• The have versus have-nots dynamic in fintech fundraising
• The Blue Dot dinner series and building community
• His AI thesis and where the value creation will land
• A 10-year view on fintech as an asset class

Key Takeaways

• The best fintech companies are now private, and on the top 100 they out-earn their public peers on revenue, a finding Sahej says had never been put on paper before.
• Fintech rewards specialists. Banking, payments, capital markets, and insurance are almost different worlds, and most investors who piled in during 2021 without that depth are no longer around.
• The IPO window is real but conditional. The 2025 cohort was roughly three times the size on revenue and more profitable than historical norms, and the near-term window hinges on how bellwether listings perform.
• Sahej’s bet on AI value creation is not the startups or the large AI labs, but the scaled fintechs that already own distribution and customer trust.

About Sahej Suri

Sahej Suri is the founder and Managing Partner of Blue Dot Investors, a New York-based late-stage growth equity firm investing exclusively in fintech across primaries and secondaries. He previously worked at J.P. Morgan in the financial institutions group, at TPG in growth equity and buyouts, and as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors. Blue Dot came out of stealth in early 2026 and manages roughly $100M in assets, with a team of six and around 30 advisors. Peter is an advisor to Blue Dot Investors.

Cleaned Transcript

Sahej (00:10): We think fintech is actually closer to biotech in many ways, right? It’s super specialist, and that’s where our advisor network really helps us, where we have folks that have built these companies ten or fifteen years ago that can help us get up to speed very quickly. Because I do believe there’s no human being on the planet that knows every part of financial services. It’s just impossible. But that’s where we’re carving our niche, which is classically trained later-stage investors, as well as being a specialist in the industry. We think over the next five, ten, fifteen years there will continue to be some amazing investing opportunities in our niche.

Peter (00:49): This is the Fintech One on One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton, and since 2013 I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives. Today on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Sahej Suri, the founder of Blue Dot Investors, a late-stage growth equity firm that invests exclusively in fintech across both primaries and secondaries. Before starting Blue Dot, Sahej built his career at some of the most respected names in finance, first at J.P. Morgan, then TPG, and then serving as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors, which is where I first met him. Full disclosure, I am an advisor to Blue Dot Investors. In our conversation, we talk about the scrappy origin story of Blue Dot, the overlooked opportunity in fintech secondaries, and his new report with FT Partners on the coming fintech liquidity supercycle, including the staggering finding that the top 100 private fintechs out-earn the top 100 public ones. We also get into the IPO window, his AI thesis, and where he sees the asset class heading over the next decade. Now let’s get on with the show.

Peter (02:11): Welcome to the podcast, Sahej.

Sahej (02:13): Thank you, Peter. Excited to be here.

Peter (02:15): Great to have you. So let’s get started by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. Just hit on some of the high points of your career before Blue Dot.

Sahej (02:24): Sure. So I was born in New Jersey, not too far away from New York City. My family had an import-export garment business, so a family of entrepreneurs. My dad and uncle grew up in India, moved here, and every Saturday I would go to our New York City showroom in the fashion district and watch them build this fashion company in a way. Very much a family of entrepreneurs, right? That is kind of how I grew up, on both sides, my mom’s dad’s side and my dad’s side. So entrepreneurship has really been in my blood since I’ve been a kid. And yeah, when I grew up I had a pretty privileged background, family business doing well, and I went to an amazing middle school and high school in New York City. Childhood was great. I think the 2008 recession hit, and the family business went from doing incredibly well to not great overnight. And it was the first time in my life seeing the importance of the access, of having a bank account, credit cards, loans. It was the first time in my life the pain of hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of people globally, it was the first time I had ever felt it. And it was something I’d never felt before and have never lost since. For me that was always a moment that stuck with me, access to financial services products. In my career, I was at J.P. Morgan in the financial institutions group at the investment bank. I covered some of the first fintechs, so think of the GreenSkys, the LendingClubs, the SoFis of the world. Moved to San Francisco and worked at TPG, which is a private equity firm, and did a lot of late-stage growth equity investing there and some buyouts as well. Think of peak 2021, when we were seeing every company in fintech. You could debate the valuations, but fintech was kind of at the forefront of all the ZIRP era. And we did very few deals, probably for the right reasons at TPG, but it was an exciting place to be. I knew I wanted to be at a place and be at the heart of fintech. To me that was a clear passion of mine. And I had a unique opportunity to work for the founder of Capital One, Nigel Morris, who had started QED Investors. For a couple of years I just hung out with the guy, right? I was the chief of staff. I watched him build QED and watched him build a real business, an early-stage venture fund, but it was still really cool to be at the forefront of fintech. I think for me, I’m definitely a late-stage investor, and now chatting a lot about what I want to do long term, and…

Sahej (04:46): The short answer was I didn’t know. And so I moved to Costa Rica for a couple of months and I was doing yoga and meditation there. That was an amazing moment of my life. My mother called and said, Sahej, you gotta be a little serious and get back. So I came back to New York, and I started following my curiosity, right? Like, how does Robinhood make money, or SoFi, or Fiserv? I was pitching buyout funds on, hey, let’s spin out XYZ assets within these broader public market companies. We were looking at credit risk transfer deals like private credit. And that’s when the secondaries opportunity hit within fintech, which was, you had some incredible businesses out there that were scaled and profitable and growing really well. And people need liquidity on the secondary side. A lot of it were venture funds that I’d known for a long time, or entrepreneurs. And so that was kind of the origin story of Blue Dot. It came a little happenstance, where we just started doing one deal, then the next, then the next. And so today we’re a late-stage growth equity firm and we do a lot on the primaries as well as a ton on the secondary side. All we do is fintech. We cover 450 unicorns, late-stage businesses. This time last year it was just myself with a backpack. Now we’ve got six people on the team, thirty advisors, all really senior people in financial services and fintech. And yeah, it’s been a great journey so far.

Peter (06:06): Well, when you talk about J.P. Morgan, TPG, then QED, there are three just fantastic names for you to gain experience in. And obviously Nigel’s been on the show before. I’m curious then, so you said a year ago it was just you and a backpack. Take us through this first year. You’re coming out of stealth earlier this year. Just take us through the genesis of the last twelve months.

Sahej (06:28): Yeah, and maybe can I touch on those three institutions for a quick second? I think the unique thing about working at J.P. Morgan or TPG or QED is you’re kind of at the forefront of the amazing leaders in financial services ever. So J.P. Morgan was Jamie Dimon’s business, right? And of course I didn’t, it still is. Of course I didn’t know Jamie, but you could feel what excellence was in banking. And at TPG, it’s David Bonderman and Jim Coulter’s business, oozing with talent, and you’re at the forefront of private equity and growth equity and additional products and asset management. And with Nigel and QED, it was at the forefront of fintech. So it was kind of always at the cutting edge, and just seeing what greatness was, is how I think about my career arc up until that point, which was really just learning from incredible people.

Peter (07:19): Right, right. Okay, so then just take us through the first twelve months of Blue Dot.

Sahej (07:23): I never wanted to build Blue Dot, if I’m being honest. It really was a let’s do a deal, and then another deal, and another deal. And that’s actually some of the great entrepreneurial stories, right? We lucked into it. When we first started Blue Dot, I just found an amazing business, DriveWealth, which was a capital markets infrastructure business that in 2021 raised a hypey round led by some amazing investors. Since then the company’s grown a lot, and it’s become profitable and scaling very well. We came in at a pretty attractive entry point to that business. But it was really just a case study of, there are amazing businesses out there in fintech, some that may have fallen out of favor, or people may have forgotten, or the big capital sources have moved on to AI or other parts of the market. So yeah, DriveWealth was deal number one. And then we followed up with another deal and another deal. And I think there was a lot of momentum internally with our advisors, our investors that came in on those deals, which was, hey, you’ve done this multiple times, why don’t you just go out and raise a fund and do this repeatably? So that was kind of how Blue Dot started. Incredibly scrappy. And when I think about some amazing entrepreneurs in financial services, everyone has that scrap, and that is part of the entrepreneur journey. It’s been fun doing it. I think, Peter, when you and I first chatted almost a year and a half ago, it was just me in my childhood bedroom building Blue Dot, right? And so I think every day we’re just continuing to compound, and yeah, we’re on our sixth, about to do our seventh deal, managing about a hundred million of assets now in about a year, six people on the team, thirty advisors, thirty-four LPs. And we did a first close on the fund. I think we’re gaining some pretty interesting momentum is how we see it.

Peter (09:14): Right. And so the late-stage area of fintech seems to be less crowded than some of the earlier stages. And particularly on the secondary side, there isn’t really anybody else doing what you’re doing. Why was there a gap in the market, do you think?

Sahej (09:31): Yeah, I think it’s a couple of things. So when you and I think about fintech, some of the great companies that exist today were very small companies in 2020, 2015, or 2016, right? There were seed checks by what I think of as the great entrepreneurs in fintech that have started venture funds, a lot of them spun out of operating businesses. So like Mickey Malka started his own business, or Nigel started Capital One. And these folks were amazing at mentoring entrepreneurs, of hey, I’ve built a business before, here’s kind of what it takes. And a lot of the great entrepreneurs that have built venture capital firms in fintech focus on early stage. So when we think of great investors in fintech, it’s historically been early stage. The other factor here is fintech as an asset class is maturing in real time. And so those small seed companies are now very big companies. At the same time, you look at the big private equity firms, they’re generalists. They focus on healthcare and consumer and technology, and so the ability to be specialists within fintech was not historically a real place to deploy capital. This word fintech is really an amalgamation of almost different worlds, right? Banking is so different from payments, is so different from capital markets, is so different from insurance. They’re almost different worlds. And there’s a term, fintech, but in reality these are different networks. Like you can be working at Fiserv and never know anything about an insurance business, and you’d have a great career. And look, to summarize your question, I think there’s going to be a next generation of investors in fintech that look a little bit more like me, which is private equity trained, classically trained in later-stage investing, but also able to understand the intricacies of different business models in fintech. And we think fintech is actually closer to biotech in many ways. It’s super specialist. And that’s where our advisor network really helps us, where we have folks that have built these companies 10 or 15 years ago that can help us get up to speed very quickly. Because I do believe there’s no human being on the planet that knows every part of financial services. It’s just impossible. But that’s where we’re carving our niche, which is…

Sahej (11:58): …classically trained later-stage investors, as well as being a specialist in the industry. We think over the next five, ten, fifteen years there will continue to be some amazing investing opportunities in our niche.

Peter (12:12): So in some of the research that you’ve done, and we’ll get to the details of this in a second, it’s really interesting that when you look at fintech, you’ve got the top 10 names in fintech that dominate the secondary market activity. Everyone knows now that Stripe does a tender offer every year, pretty much. There’s a whole universe of fintech companies beyond the top 10 names, but the top 10 names seem to attract all of the attention in the secondary markets. When you look at the whole universe, how do you find those companies that are potentially undervalued? They’re obviously going to be outside the top 10 names, but what’s the thesis there on looking at those companies that investors can get a great return on, and that are open to secondary transactions?

Sahej (13:04): Yeah, look, I think you hit it on the head, right? Stripe or Revolut, there are a handful of these names that get all of the attraction on the secondary side. And that’s in large part because they’re familiar businesses. You don’t really have to explain it, so that’s easy. But to our point on fintech, it really is specialist. I do not recommend investing in fintech companies unless you understand fintech. That’s just my personal bias. And we saw that in 2021. Most of the people that invested in fintech in 2021 do not have jobs anymore.

Peter (13:38): I want to dive into the report that you recently put out with FT Partners. I think this is one of the most interesting reports that I’ve seen, because Steve McLaughlin said, when we did the interview a few weeks back, that FT Partners had never really opened up their data set to anybody else. And you were able to work with Steve and the team there to open up this, to provide new insight into the top hundred fintech companies that had never really been done before. The report, and we’ll link to it in the show notes, is called “The Coming FinTech Liquidity Supercycle.” It looks at the top hundred private fintechs and the valuations of the top hundred private fintechs versus the public. I would have expected the valuation to be higher, because that’s how private markets work. What I didn’t know is the top 100 private fintech companies earn more revenue than the top 100 public fintech companies. And that I thought was just a staggering insight. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of this report and how you were able to get FT Partners comfortable with working with you.

Sahej (14:47): The true genesis is I had an LP that was looking to invest in Blue Dot, and they ended up passing on the phone. I said, why? And the response was, we don’t think the fintech market is that big. God. Right? Like, we think it’s small. And in my heart I was like, that’s just not true. There are 450 unicorns in fintech. You look at the companies that went public in 2025, I think it was about a third of them were in fintech. And the best ones are still private. And so it was a little bit of a frustrating moment. And I was like, okay, we’ll go out and prove it. And so we started just market mapping internally at Blue Dot, the top names in fintech. And I was just chatting with Steve from FT Partners about it. And I was like, look, this is kind of what we’re doing. And I think Steve’s very innovative in the fintech community. And previously I’d done a report with BCG and QED. And part of my push to the BCG folks was, hey, how do we market map fintech, the size of the opportunity? And we ended up coming up with an interesting report. And I thought, why don’t we do this on an individual company level to an extent? And so, for the record, I didn’t have access to the data that FT Partners put together, but I think it was a little bit more, let’s push the thinking, and let’s push how do we think about market leadership in the space. And how do we represent fintech in the broader tech community, right? How do we think about sizing the opportunity? And so it was not a surprise to me to see that the private companies are bigger than the public companies. I knew it was the case, but it was important to put it on a piece of paper. Yeah, we think the best companies in fintech are private right now. To me, that’s what’s really exciting about what we’re chasing at Blue Dot, which is there’s an incredible opportunity here on the private side. And so it was a great partnership with FT Partners, and hopefully good for the fintech community. But also part of our push at Blue Dot is, I tell entrepreneurs all the time in fintech, look, just please, when you go public, I hope that the IPO does well. I hope that when you sell your company that it does well. I hope we continue to represent fintech in a positive way, because in 2021 fintech was a dirty word. When we chat with investors, LPs, or when you chat with big firms, a lot of them were like, I spoke to…

Sahej (17:12): …the head of a very big private equity firm that you would have heard of, and the founder essentially said that he didn’t believe fintech was a thing. He was like, yeah, I think fintech’s a fad. And my heart is like, wait a second, of course not. Financial services is 20% of all GDP of the world, and technology will continue to be a driving force. So how you define fintech, sure, we can debate that. But to me, it did a disservice to the fintech community, all the valuations bid up in 2021. And yeah, I chat with LPs and they look at some of the marks and the firms that have invested in 2021, and it is horrid. Those investors got the thesis right. They knew the digital tailwinds were there. They knew that these companies would probably do well. They underestimated how long it would take. They underestimated how much capital would need to go into it. And they underestimated the true size of the pie. And it was not a healthy practice in 2021. I fear that some of those investors are a little undisciplined now, but in AI or other parts of the market. But I think it’s a good thing, net, for financial services technology to just have true specialists and true experts just focus on the space and do it responsibly. Invest in very healthy companies and do it at disciplined valuations that work for everyone. I have to remind founders now as well, hey, just because you’re getting a really hefty valuation today, you have no idea what tomorrow holds. And your employees may be underwater on their options, and that’s not good for morale. You see really amazing employees leave because they see that valuations have shifted. And then you have messed-up cap tables as well, where you have the late-stage investors at the top pushing for an exit so they can get their money back. And it really is disruptive for overall businesses. And so definitely we’re seeing a lot more discipline now, but ultimately, markets move and human psychology always remains the same.

Peter (19:15): Living through that five years ago, we knew at the time these valuations were crazy and peak companies continued to go out. And what’s interesting is you look at the valuations that were, if the company was private raising in 2021 and they might have subsequently gone public in the next five years, the valuation today for most companies is still nowhere near the valuation they had on their private round in 2021. So anyway, I want to go back to the report and talk about the IPO market, the M&A market. Let’s touch on the IPO market, because we’ve just seen, we’re recording this on what is the date today? The 24th of June. And SpaceX went public earlier this month. It was the biggest public IPO in history by a considerable margin. As of, I haven’t looked at the stock price today, but it’s got a big pop and it’s back down to roughly where it IPO’d. Where do you see the fintech IPO market in the second half of this year and next year? What’s your view on the IPO window today?

Sahej (20:19): So after 2021, when a lot of companies went public, there was almost a little bit of a lull. In 2023, zero companies went public in fintech, which had never happened in history. In 2024, 2025, we saw companies that had always been waiting on the sidelines eventually go public. And that cohort is really interesting. It was actually the second-worst time ever to go public. But the companies that did were a much higher bar, right? So they were three times the size on a revenue scale than historically to go public. They were more profitable than ever before. They were more efficient on a revenue-per-employee basis. And so it was a little bit healthier, those businesses that public markets investors were essentially allowing to go public. So that was like one wave. I think it’s really interesting to see what happens with SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAI, right? To me it’s one of the most interesting questions in capital markets today. It could be a situation where it’s great, and they’re all on the index and a lot of retail traders are in, and people make a lot of money. I’ve always been a little cautious about it. What happens if SpaceX does not perform well in a few months, and what are the downstream impacts? And so I have no idea, right? And I think it’s a little bit more dependent on how SpaceX performs. If it does great, I think you’ll see a wave of fintechs lining up. And we are aware of fintechs that are lining up and have filed. But if SpaceX performs poorly, it’ll be really hard for them to go public.

Peter (21:49): And then obviously OpenAI and Anthropic, we don’t know if they’re going public. They filed both confidentially, but we don’t know when they’re going to pull the trigger. And they’re watching SpaceX just as much as anybody else is, I’m sure, to decide what to do. The thing you mentioned about the state of fintech companies going public in 2025, that was one thing that surprised me about the report. Like three times the revenue and far more profitable now. So the bar is higher. Does that mean that if you’re a private fintech, you’re looking at those numbers, looking at the report, saying, well, my revenue is not quite there yet? Does that, what do you think that does to those companies that are seeing the data now for the first time, the company is not at that revenue level, they’re not profitable? What do you think that does to their IPO time horizon?

Sahej (22:42): We talk to a lot of these late-stage founders. And that is the benchmark I typically discuss with founders. Hey, if you’re not at least half a billion of revenue, or tracking that way, I think you’ve got to temper your expectations of having that liquidity event on NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange. And I think a lot of founders, or a fair amount of them, are very cognizant of this, which is they saw the 2021 cohort go out, less quality businesses, and they have not performed well publicly as they traded. And so I think there are some founders that are aware of this. There are also some founders that, if I were in their shoes, and it’s only probably like three or five that I can count, I would never go public in my life if I didn’t need to. You have this robust secondaries market, people are throwing money at you, and you can essentially name your own valuation. And it’s kind of an interesting thing, the have versus have-nots in fintech. And so if you have, if you have demand from investors, you can pick one of, it’s really like five investors that need to write three hundred million dollars a year per investment, and probably only ten companies in fintech that fit that bill. So for them, they’re a little less valuation sensitive, right?

Peter (23:53): So you’re filling the space where smaller check size, smaller companies, but also quality companies, where they don’t really necessarily need or want a three hundred million dollar secondary round.

Sahej (24:03): Yeah, I think the true game that’s being played at the companies that are getting all the headlines is, these five or ten venture growth equity, private equity firms need to put a lot of money to work every year. They need to think about portfolio construction. They need to think about where does fintech sit, they’ve probably got to do one fintech deal a year or something. And same with that company, they’ve got to raise some money, employee tender or raise primary capital. And so from our perspective, those are very rich rounds that are getting done. And the jury’s still out. They keep going up, right? Every six months, it’s pretty amazing to just see those businesses raising capital. The jury’s out in five years whether those are good deals or not. If you look at some of those companies on the private side and you add up one or two names, and then you add up on the public side the biggest public companies, it’s like, would you rather own Stripe and Revolut, or Robinhood, Nubank, Coinbase? It’s probably like five or six you can combine. And then you have to make a question of, how do you think about valuation? How do you think about risk-reward? To me it’ll be interesting in five years, which cohort’s more valuable.

Peter (25:21): Okay, so I want to talk briefly about your dinner series. You’ve hosted some really big names, including the heads of Bilt, Cross River, Zelle, DriveWealth, MoneyLion, just to name a few. We had one last night with a senior Morgan Stanley exec. What’s the objective of your dinner series?

Sahej (25:38): Yeah, look, I think we can think about financial services, we can think about valuation, this, that, but ultimately business is about people and building community, right? And it really is amazing to hear some of these entrepreneurial stories of entrepreneurs building their businesses, or seeing how big firms are leveraging technology in house. And so that’s been the origin of the dinner series, which is, talk about your business. And on top of that, we’ve got about 30 advisors to our firm, and they’re all really interesting folks in fintech, or our LP base, a lot of them are really senior in this space. And how do we help our entrepreneurs out? That was kind of the genesis of our dinner series, right? How do we just create shared value overall? And so I think it’s been a lot of fun more than anything else, having folks in a room and seeing where conversations go. And it’s been fun just having amazing entrepreneurs telling their stories. I think it’s nice to have a little bit more closed-room settings for those dialogues and conversations.

Peter (26:43): So I want to talk about AI, because I think it’s a really interesting time to be an investor right now, because AI is sort of rewriting the rules in some ways. The question I have there is, when you’re looking at a late-stage fintech company, how do you price, how do you underwrite these deals where AI is going to impact their business one way or another? It might make their competitive moat less, it may make it more, it may make them much more efficient, dropping costs down. But tell us about your AI thesis, shall we say?

Sahej (27:21): Yeah, I get asked this question a lot, and there’s an element of unknown with AI. No one truly knows what the future holds. But here’s what I believe will not change. People will still need banking products. People will still need lending products, insurance products, right? And so when you saw the advent of the internet, or mobile, or now AI, you saw the method of delivery or access change, but the form of the bank account may have been different, deposits are still deposits, right? Ultimately. And so we take a very financial-services-first-principles look whenever we think about AI. And those core needs will never change for the consumer or businesses, is how we see it. So we try not to ever lose sight of that. We also think that money ultimately is formed in trust, right? Trust is the underlying factor when it comes to moving money. And so we think AI will be incredibly transformational in financial services. I don’t know where it goes, but what I do know for certain is ultimately you’ve got to tie it back to fundamentals with financial services. So that’s number one. I think the other interesting thing is, we agree AI will be hugely transformational in financial services, but it’s not clear to me where the value creation will lie. We have a thesis. But I think the question is, will the big banks, the legacy financial institutions, ultimately generate a lot of the value creation with AI? Will it be OpenAI or Anthropic? Will it be the large fintechs, the ones that have already scaled and are profitable and have large customer bases? Or will it be these new early-stage startups? I think our house view is very much these late-stage fintech businesses, and the ones with tens or hundreds of millions of customers today that already have multiple products sold into them. They already know the brand of these fintechs, and the fintechs are very well capitalized. We believe that it’s going to be easier to cross-sell AI products, or to leverage AI in house. And so the Blue Dot house view very much is that those large fintechs will amass material scale.

Peter (29:47): So let’s continue on with that theme to end here. And I’d love to get your 10-year view on fintech, where the asset class is going, and Blue Dot’s role in the asset class.

Sahej (30:01): In 2022 to 2025, 2026, those first seed checks are now very big businesses. And we see no reason why they will not continue to be big businesses. And so we’re pretty bullish that those 450 unicorns, a lot of them will continue to be very big companies. I think when you think about fintech as an asset class in ten years, I do think later-stage investing, minority as well as buyouts, will start to emerge as a real form of ownership, right? Historically, it was venture funds and it was you IPO. I think that’s changing in real time. And I think that’ll continue to change, where there may be some companies that are better off being private than public. Some companies do very similar things, right? Like in 10 years, will they be separate companies, or should they be merged into one? And so I think private equity, later-stage investors, I think that will be the direction where a lot of the value is created in fintech in pretty interesting ways. And so we think more firms that are later-stage in nature, but specialists within fintech, will emerge. And we think they will build some pretty big businesses when you think about the private markets investors in fintech. I also see some amazing early-stage investors in fintech, but there are a lot of them, right? There are a lot of pre-seed, seed, or Series A investors. And it’s not clear to me if we need so many of them in five or 10 years, and what the moat each one has. And there are a handful of just amazing early-stage investors, but there are so many of them. And so to me, it’ll be interesting to see what happens there. And kind of where my mind goes in all of this is, you have amazing learnings at the intersection of financial services and technology, right? You can learn a lot from a pre-seed company today that’s at the forefront of AI innovation. But then you also have public companies, right? And what are they seeing, or how can you share learnings from more mature businesses? And is there kind of a central ecosystem in 10 years from now where you have early stage, growth, buyouts, like multiple products within one platform? There’s probably one or two fintech funds that will build into that…

Sahej (32:28): …is what we see, and I think it’ll actually be a net positive for the ecosystem. And you’ve kind of seen that with the big private equity firms, like the Blackstones of the world, they’ve built multiple products, right? But to do it as a specialist, and to just own the market and know it better than anyone, and just have incredible network effects, I think that’s probably where fintech goes in ten years from now.

Peter (32:50): Okay. Well, that will be interesting to find out. Sahej, we’ll have to leave it there. Fantastic chat with you. Thanks for coming on the show, and best of luck.

Sahej (32:57): Thank you so much, Peter.

Peter (33:04): What I want to highlight here is Sahej’s view on where the AI value will land in fintech. His bet is not on the early-stage startups, or even the huge AI companies. It is on the large scaled fintechs that already have tens of millions of customers and multiple products to cross-sell into. I think he’s onto something. Distribution and trust are the two hardest things to build in financial services, and the companies that already have them are best positioned to take full advantage of these advanced AI capabilities. It is somewhat of a contrarian take in a market obsessed with the newest thing. And I suspect he’ll be proven right. Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.