YouTube Is the Next Neobank

Every successful neobank started the same way: identifying where incumbents were overcharging or underserving customers, then using that wedge to break into broader banking.

SoFi figured out that FICO scores were a lousy way to price student debt for high-potential borrowers. They underwrote against income trajectories and free cash flows instead, and the data they accumulated compounded into a real moat. Monzo, Revolut, and Starling all launched by offering zero foreign exchange fees when most banks were taking 3% on every swipe abroad. Nubank won over Brazil with a no-fee credit card in a market where incumbents charged punitive rates and millions of people had no banking relationship at all.

The pattern is always the same. Find the wedge. Win a narrow use case. Then expand into the full service.

Today, thanks to stablecoins, it has never been easier to offer a checking and savings account. The infrastructure is essentially commoditized. That has produced a wave of stablecoin neobank startups, but most of them aren’t differentiated. The same frictionlessness that let them spin up will let the next cohort spin up right behind them. There is no moat in the deposit layer alone.

The first generation of fintechs largely found success by building a differentiated product on top of the newly commoditized distribution layer (the internet). This gave them an advantage over the existing banking incumbents. When commoditization occurs, it opens the pathway for new products to emerge by bundling. The ease of creating deposit accounts doesn’t lead to a thousand new standalone neobanks. It leads to neobanking as a feature embedded inside platforms that already own something more valuable: the origin of income.

If you are a creator earning money on YouTube or Twitch, your relationship with that platform is deeper and more data-rich than your relationship with Chase. The platform knows your cash flows in real time. It knows your growth trajectory. It knows the algorithms. It can underwrite you in ways a traditional bank never could. The same logic applies to gig-economy platforms like Uber and Lyft, to social commerce platforms like Whop and TikTok, and to modern payroll providers like Deel and Gusto.

The rationale for bundling creator earnings and financial products is simple. Income paid to creators and gig workers, gross merchandise value generated in marketplaces, and payroll sent to employees is value that escapes the platform as soon as the ACH transfer hits. YouTube alone has paid out over $100 billion to creators since 2021 and turned on stablecoin payouts as of December. Whop has generated over $4 billion in GMV and has already begun to verticalize into crypto-enabled financial services. Their ability to now earn transfer fees and T-bill yield on payouts with a few lines of code makes it a no-brainer to bundle these services in-platform and eventually lend against what they already know about their users.

These companies don’t need to become banks in the regulatory sense. They need to offer banking as a service—accounts, cards, lending—powered by the data exhaust they already generate. The wedge isn’t a product trick or a pricing arbitrage. The wedge is the income relationship itself.

YouTube will be the next neobank. Not because YouTube will apply for a bank charter, but because the platform that originates your income is the natural home for financial services.

Thank you to Daniel Barabander, Alana Levin, Mason Nystrom, and Chunda McCain for their thoughts and feedback while writing this piece.