Anatomy of a Successful Fintech

Plus: Goldman Sachs Partnership Scarcity, Japanese Bank Consolidation, Ulster Bank

Welcome to another issue of Net Interest, my newsletter on financial sector themes. If you’re new here, thanks for signing up. Every Friday I go deep on a topic of interest in the sector and highlight a few other trending themes below. If you have any feedback, reply to the email or add to the comments. And if you like what you’re reading, please do spread the word.

Anatomy of a Successful Fintech

Fifteen stocks in the S&P 500 have returned more than 10x over the past ten years. They include Netflix, Amazon and Apple, obviously. Visa and Mastercard are in there as well, together with biotech company Regeneron. Yet one company has outperformed all of these. Like them, it uses technology to change the way we do things. Unlike them, its name is not well known outside Wall Street. The company is MarketAxess; its mission is to disrupt the way bond trading works. 

The Way Bond Trading Used to Work

The must-read introductory text to bond trading is Michael Lewis’s classic, Liar’s Poker. Here’s h…