Self-Driving Finance: The Fintech Promise AI Finally Makes Possible

Fifteen years of web forms

Amias Gerety says the industry should finally admit that fintech has been a bit disappointing for the last fifteen years. In his view, most of what it did was take web forms and put them on phones. The promise, he says, was that money could move without people filling out their name and credit card 10 times.

He says AI and tokenization are now changing that, and that tokenization has broken containment from crypto into the real world. He also notes that he explained bitcoin to the treasury secretary in 2014.

What AI makes possible

Amias Gerety points to Kudos, which he says can analyze a customer's actual spending and recommend which credit card to use. Nobody in the market does that today, he says, and nobody could until AI. He also cites Collective, whose members save an average of $10,000 on their business taxes.

He warns that the hype phase is over. Two years ago founders could sell "because AI," he says, but AI is now a normal technology. He goes back to the oldest lesson of YC: build something your customers want.

The investment thesis

For QED Investors, Gerety says, the question is whether a company can bridge the power of AI with the mechanistic systems of record that finance relies on. That, he says, is where the money gets made.

Stablecoins, today and tomorrow

Amias Gerety says stablecoins created the first US dollar denominated 24/7 global payment rail, and that demand for global payments is "absolute ripping." He expects the focus to move toward control and certainty, such as giving a bigger discount when cash settles the same day instead of after five days. He also says crypto companies must worry about fraud and AML, and points to Footprint as an identity and fraud layer.