You can find Interchange on Spotify, Apple or your favorite podcast platform.
Well, it turns out the future of financial services needs an app-store.
Why? Because one company can’t build everything.
The power of partnership is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to i2c and Bond.
In his book, The Third Wave, Steve Case states that the next innings of entrepreneurship will be powered by partnerships. A partnership in, for example, the automotive space might look far different than one in the fintech space. But, the critical ingredient remains the same — partnerships.
To simplify that argument, let's look at it as a formula: i2c + Bond > Bond alone.
On this episode of Interchange, we dive into why that's the case. We cover Amir’s journey as an immigrant entrepreneur in the US, what i2c does, where processors fit in the puzzle of fintech, and how i2c has grown into the processing behemoth it is today.
During our conversation, Amir explains that he thinks we will see "many, many new use cases that we don't think of today" and be able to "enable some of those good use cases, and be the first to do" as Bond and i2c work together.
Here are a few of the key takeaways that stuck out to us from our conversation with Amir.
Spend time around big industries with big problems
Amir’s early days as an entrepreneur weren’t focused around building a single product. He and his partners were building one-off software solutions for a plethora of financial institutions, gathering a rich, yet diverse, set of knowledge.
That time he spent learning about the seemingly never-ending number of potential problems and solutions in financial services led Amir to favor building one product, not thousands. Enter i2c.
Amir saw the gaps in the market and issuance processing was one with a clear, big market and a lack of innovation or technology in general.
Build the legos, not the whole object
It’s tempting for visionary founders to try and build the world they want to see in the reflection of their first product. They have high hopes and even higher standards. But, after they fully bake versions 1, 2, and 3, the product usually falls flat.
Amir and i2c took the direction of building legos and building blocks for other entrepreneurs, instead of building a stand-alone product itself. They're creating something which entrepreneurs can create and build on top of. By containerizing and building microservices, a brand using i2c has an incredible degree of nuanced control to craft something wildly complex or minimalist and simple. The choice is theirs as they're building out their vision.
Give tools to the builders and let them build
Remember that game back in school where you and a group of classmates would be charged with the task of building a spaghetti and marshmallow tower? Well, maybe this was a midwest thing. But, no matter what your cafeteria-style brick and mortar materials were, building infrastructure is similar.
Give the founders and creators the tools and let them build. Some will flounder and break your proverbial, technological spaghetti; some will build skyscrapers worthy of the entire cafeteria's respect.
The partnership between Bond and i2c falls into a similar camp. We are building tools for builders. At Bond, we want to bring together top notch partners so that we can create new tools, infrastructure and helpful paths to integrate with.
During our interview, Amir summed this up beautifully saying, "You are the App Store of financial services. You are providing the ability for a single developer to build an app and put it on the App Store. Without the App Store, how would they build the distribution? How would they even sell to anyone? Well, you are not solving a distribution problem, but you are solving the infrastructure problem for those people to really build a product they can take to market. I think we will see many, many new use cases that we don't think of today and being able to enable some of those good use cases and be the first to do so on Bond and i2c together would be great!"
If you have a passion for building seamless integrations into cutting edge technology partners like i2c, Bond is hiring!
Reach out to zach@bond.tech or check out our careers page and let’s chat!
.png)