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April 18, 2022

Whitepaper: Best practices in bank-fintech partnerships

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QED Investors and Boston Consulting Group are excited to share our co-authored whitepaper on the case for bank-fintech partnerships. Download the full paper below.

Banks have come to recognize that fintechs are neither a passing fad nor a mortal enemy. They must now determine what form their relationships will take: competitor, partner or a combination of both.

Those who successfully select and integrate fintech offerings to fill product gaps, improve customer engagement, drive operational efficiencies and generate incremental revenue will have a potent advantage over those who opt simply to coexist alongside fintechs.

Check out our new whitepaper looking at the case for successful bank-fintech partnerships co-authored with Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

- What are the best practices that banks need to keep top of mind when they're considering partnering with fintechs?

- Most fintechs started out as monolines, but many are now expanding their offerings to become full-service providers. What impact will this have?

- Categorizing fintechs in one of three buckets: direct competitors, adjacent competitors and enablers. There's not just a terrific opportunity for enablers, but also among adjacent competitors.

- The barriers to bank-fintech partnerships and the opportunities for success.

View and download the presentation here


‍

‍

QED Investors and Boston Consulting Group are excited to share our co-authored whitepaper on the case for bank-fintech partnerships. Download the full paper below.

Banks have come to recognize that fintechs are neither a passing fad nor a mortal enemy. They must now determine what form their relationships will take: competitor, partner or a combination of both.

Those who successfully select and integrate fintech offerings to fill product gaps, improve customer engagement, drive operational efficiencies and generate incremental revenue will have a potent advantage over those who opt simply to coexist alongside fintechs.

Check out our new whitepaper looking at the case for successful bank-fintech partnerships co-authored with Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

- What are the best practices that banks need to keep top of mind when they're considering partnering with fintechs?

- Most fintechs started out as monolines, but many are now expanding their offerings to become full-service providers. What impact will this have?

- Categorizing fintechs in one of three buckets: direct competitors, adjacent competitors and enablers. There's not just a terrific opportunity for enablers, but also among adjacent competitors.

- The barriers to bank-fintech partnerships and the opportunities for success.

View and download the presentation here


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‍

Download White Paper

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01

Settlement Collapse

Value transfer moves from days - corresponding banking, T+1 securities - to seconds. Working capital tied up in float is released.

02

Cost Collapse

Marginal transaction cost approaches zero: fractions of a cent, versus 1-6% on card and corresponding rails.

03

Programmability

Money becomes an object that carries logic - escrow, splits, rebates, compliance - executed by code, not back offices.

Pure infrastructure with no revenue accrual

Layer-1 chains and general-purpose middleware — outside our circle of competence and typically outside our stage.

Speculative asset creation

NFT platforms, memecoins, prediction markets styled as products — mapping to none of the five functions; structurally uninvestable for us.

Three structural truths cut across all five functions.

(a)

Regulated-first wins

The 2020/21 cycle proved permissionless purity does not survive contact with real financial regulation. GENIUS, MiCA, CLARITY and the UK/Singapore regimes are producing founders who start from “how do we get licensed” and build backwards — precisely the founder profile QED has always preferred.
(b)

Incumbents upgraded, not disintermediated

JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are jointly building a tokenized-deposit network; Visa launched a stablecoin platform in July 2026; 140+ businesses signed an open stablecoin standard. Banks migrate — and new-generation infrastructure companies own the picks and shovels of that migration.
(c)

Emerging markets feel it first

Every function improves most where the fiat experience is worst: cross-border payments, dollar access, investment product availability, working-capital finance. Those are exactly the geographies where QED has fintech ventures’ deepest footprint. Our geographic distribution is not incidental to the tokenization thesis — it is the thesis.

Trade & working-capital finance

Finkargo( LatAm import finance) and OatFi(B2B working-capital infrastructure) sit directly on flows whose logical settlement layer is stablecoin.

Collateralized digital-asset lending

Tokenized Treasuries, equities and stablecoin holdings as instant, programmable collateral.

On-chain private credt

Maple, Centrifuge and emerging institutional protocols - credit funds migrating to programmable rails.

Why QED is advanced

Credit is QED's craft: distinguishing lending businesses from fintechs pretending to be one, charge-offs earned from charge-offs deferred. On-chain credit is a straight-line extension, not a stretch.