Guy Bentley

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Apple Mac. If consumer electronics have changed this much during that time, why haven't payments❓ I wrote a blog exploring the shifting dynamics of the payment infrastructure industry, as we transition from incumbent to innovator🌱

@HadickM @sapiom

Ok, who is the single smartest builder/operator in the SF fintech scene on agentic payments?

@ColinGardiner Happy to chat and point you in the right direction

From what I am learning the UK angel investor is a bit of a unicorn.

@HarryStebbings @awxjack Fintech infrastructure is a grind to build. But once you are there, you have a real moat. People 4 months ago claiming “Triple, triple, double, double” is dead might need to eat some humble pie

The public markets have decided that SaaS revenue durability and growth is challenged at best and extinct at worst. So where is value in a world of uncertainty. Gnarly, f****** hard, backend businesses. Fintech for one. Airwallex and @awxjack the level of integrations, partnerships, permissions with banks around the world. Insanely hard. OpenAI ain’t coming for this. 😉

@jameswise @openclaw When you don’t build guardrails or security by design, it speeds things up significantly!

The truly incredible thing about @openclaw isn’t in all the videos of AI doing wild things that are going viral. It’s that a tiny, unfinanced, opensource team have shipped a better product than any of the private labs, backed with unlimited capital and compute, have managed in years What a time to build!

Full post here - open.substack.com/pub/guybentley…

"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." — Lord Kelvin, 1895. History is littered with people confidently being wrong. So, naturally, I’ve decided to publish my own 2026 Fintech Outlook.

@SebJohnsonUK @Revolut @NStoronsky @thulme has a good framework for this. You have four types of investor. Smart active, smart passive, dumb passive and dumb active. The first three are fine. If you have the latter on the captable you are in trouble.

VCs add ZERO value outside of the capital they invest. That's according to the Founder of Europe's most successful startup - @Revolut In a recent interview @NStoronsky said that VCs are not value add. The interviewer pushed back and said many claim to add value he said: "That's their side of their story" 😂 Absolutely savage. I'm sure the reality is that founders like Nik do not need VC support, however I'm sure many others do. Any VCs want to weigh in?

Payment volume for non Defi stablecoins is $70 billion. We are so early.

@BigJohn043 You can’t use AI or new systems to rebuild 15 years of face to face customer relationships. When the original team finish their earn out, what happens then? Like search funds there will be outliers, but majority will be overly confident post MBA 28 year olds with 0 experience

My view is that these VC roll-ups are going to end poorly. Roll-ups are really easy to describe but much harder to execute. You have to find a bunch of small companies that are interested in selling. You have to DD and negotiate the deals. This is hard in small businesses. But then you have to integrate. The easy part is the IT systems. You generally have to move them to a new ERP and they often don't have CRM, HRIS and operating systems at all. But you also need to evaluate and integrate the team. Often they don't have a real operating cadence. Etc. Etc. It is really hard. VCs are really good at scaling growth tech businesses but this is very very different than running a typical small business. Was on a board with a bunch of VCs once and they literally didn't go through financial statements in board meetings. It is really really different. These VCs have no idea how to do a roll-up and they don't even have the basic skills to learn it. And AI is not a game changer in any of these businesses yet. It is a helpful tool but not a game changer. And everyone is using these tools to at least some extent. It certainly isn't a big enough impact to make up for not doing a good job at buying and integrating. Once again, I think this ends poorly.

Talk to anyone in PE who has done rollups and they’ll all tell you the same thing The majority of services businesses require strong human to human relationships When most rollups fail they’ve failed because of churn If the VC rollups aren’t focusing a lot of their AI products on how to improve that customer relationship and are only focused on less headcount for service delivery and AI driven growth they’ll be doomed Home service companies, MSPs, vacation rental management…history shows us the mistakes that have been written

The London-based startup makes a non-invasive device to measure blood flow and pressure in the brain. sifted.eu/articles/plura…

94 M&A deals have closed in the fintech sector so far this year, according to Sifted data. sifted.eu/articles/finte…

@sytaylor How can they be ready for volume when the underlying liquidity infra providers (OpenFX, Bridge), mostly use OTC desks and offer rates that are marginally equivalent to traditional fiat rails

Remitly the crossborder company with 5m users just announced they plan to launch stablecoins in September of this Year. Distribution is being unlocked on a far larger scale than we had before. 5 million users. Real customers. Real money movement. But the volume and market share? Unknown. I'll be curious to see what % of volumes move to stables over time. This follows Western Union announcing they plan to add stables to their last mile distribution. The pattern I'm seeing is this is becoming a default and essential infrastructure upgrade for these companies. MoneyGram, Airwallex, WorldRemit, dLocal - they're all building similar plays The Catalyst GENIUS Act gave them regulatory cover What was "maybe someday" became now. What am I missing here? The September timeline feels aggressive - are they ready for that volume on stablecoin rails?

Great to have you on board Shawn!

I’m Shawn, founder of Memories.ai, former researcher at Meta and CS PhD at University of Cambridge. Today we’re launching Memories.ai: we built the world’s first Large Visual Memory Model - to give AI human-like visual memories. Why visual memory? AI to date is chat-based, which has great applications, but humans are not only chat based. Humans have visual-memories, and are visually driven. Memories.ai enables AI agents, softwares, and even robots to see and remember the world the way humans do. We just raised an $8m seed round led by @susaventures to build the visual-memory layer for AI. Why is Memories.ai so groundbreaking? 👇

We're thrilled to announce @crane_vc's expanded partnership into Asia-Pacific with MassMutual Ventures. This means $450 million of capital across new investments and portfolio will be overseen by Crane, significantly strengthening our global support for early-stage founders in Europe and APAC. Since 2015, we've backed remarkable companies across post-quantum security, robotics, infrastructure software/tools, and AI systems. We believe in early conviction and long-term commitment – being "first to believe, last to leave." This partnership reinforces that commitment, now with even greater reach and deeper insights to help founders scale. A huge thank you to all our founders, LPs, team and supporters. globenewswire.com/news-release/2…

my wife arguing with chatgpt for 8 messages //1

@Stablecoin @Visa What are the fees for merchants compared to interchange?

1/5 Today, Bridge and @Visa launched a stablecoin card issuing product!

Hyphens are the giveaway of AI generated content

I might be missing something, but Circle’s new CPN adds on FX spreads + network fees, basically glorified correspondent banking fees. Not exactly the low-cost ethos of stablecoins for cross-border payments...