What Happens When Mobile (Really) Hits the Wallet?

Alex Rampell

watch time: 25 minutes

The checkbook (or rather the checking account) used to be the springboard for banks to continue, well, banking on their relationship with customers by upselling other services. But now the fundamental platform is rapidly shifting from the checkbook, to mobile.

This means that tech companies can now become the entry point to banking in ways that were simply not possible before — especially (though not only) through payments. Yet payment adoption has been slow until now… why? It has something to do with pajamas, and shopping at Costco.

So why is all that changing now? In this presentation, a16z general partner Alex Rampell discusses the underlying trends, shifts, and where opportunities for the tech industry lie thanks to mobile as the router through the digital wallet “stack”. Various startups have been unbundling specific pieces of the bank homepage for a while now, so how will companies now rebundle around payments in new ways? How does digitizing the mobile wallet affect other companies? And finally, how does all this affect marketing?