15 Mar 2021

10-Q, Member Exclusive

May’s public fintech theme: Operating systems over products

• May’s shifts show many firms moving beyond product expansion to control the infrastructure and workflows powering financial decisions.
• Firms like Coinbase, LendingClub, Green Dot, Citi, and Intuit appeared to be converging around the same direction.

SMB Finance

How Intuit is turning QuickBooks into an operational coordination layer for SMBs

• Digitization made SMBs more efficient, but also more fragmented, leaving owners to stitch together as many as 25 disconnected apps themselves.
• Intuit's launch of Quickbooks Workforce is shifting the playbook to a unified data model, merging payroll and HR directly with financial context.

Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Digital banks have different answers to what banking should become next

• Digital banks are evolving in different directions despite emerging from the same response to traditional banking’s slowness, fragmentation, and inaccessibility.
• We look at the evolving definitions of money management in a world where financial activity is becoming more embedded, automated, and fluid.

Member Exclusive, Payments, SMB Finance

Intuit wants to turn workforce management into a financial operating system

• Intuit is addressing fragmentation by launching QuickBooks Workforce, an AI-native, end-to-end human capital management platform built directly into QuickBooks.
• The firm is building a unified SMB operating system where finance, workforce, AI agents, and operations continuously feed into one another.

AI Innovation, Business of Fintech

The new M&A logic of owning the workflow before AI does

• The recent wave of fintech deals suggests companies are taking ownership of the infrastructure powering future AI-driven commerce.
• That theme runs through the recent acquisition moves by NMI, Anthropic, Coupa, and SoFi.