Letter from the Editor: The end of “consumer” and “business” as well-defined categories

The ‘Letter from the Editor’ series features exclusive insight and opinion-driven analysis from Tearsheet editor Sara Khairi. The focus is on linking ideas, questioning assumptions, and tracking shifts across both mature and emerging trends in financial services.

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[Writer’s Note: We’re back with a fresh weekly edition after taking last week off for the Juneteenth holiday.]

Issue # 7

“Consumer” and “business” are well-defined categories around which financial services are still structured. Everything is built on that split: products, onboarding flows, risk models, pricing, and even how teams are organized internally. You are either serving an individual or a business. 

For a long time, it was accurate enough to anchor entire product strategies around it. But the way financial systems are being used today is beginning to make that framework feel like a taxonomy that no longer really exists in its original form.

That’s because behavior no longer respects those boundaries.

A retail investor doesn’t behave like a passive end-user anymore. They move across public equities, fractional private markets, crypto, and increasingly model-driven allocation tools that look closer to institutional workflows than traditional retail investing.

A small business is not operating as a “simplified enterprise.” It is running on a stack of embedded payments, credit, payroll, and forecasting tools that continuously adjust in real time. In practice, many SMBs now resemble mini-platforms more than “small versions” of anything.

And large enterprises, in turn, are adopting the opposite posture: consumer-like interfaces, API-first financial tools, and lightweight decision systems that strip away layers of traditional process.

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