Latest / The Dutch Investors / #106 | The Payments Industry | Industry Deep Dive

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#106 | The Payments Industry | Industry Deep Dive · The Dutch Investors

• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Every single year the world moves about two quadrillion dollars through payments.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's a two, followed by fifteen zeros.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: I had to write it out myself the first time I saw the figure, because your brain simply doesn't process it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: And out of that ocean of money moving around, cash, cards, transfers, crypto, whatever, about two and a half trillion dollars gets skimmed off as revenue for the industry that makes it all work.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Today we want to take you into that industry, not from 30,000 feet, but from the ground up, coffee shop to Wall Street, because payments are everywhere, completely invisible, and full of some of the best businesses on the planet.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's also full of businesses that look attractive on the surface, but might actually be value traps.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: And by the end of this episode, we want you to be able to tell the difference.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to a TDI deep dive into the payments industry.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: You tap your card, and milliseconds later, the transaction goes through.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: What just happened in that gap is a small relay raised between a handful of players.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And understanding who they are is the whole foundation for everything else in this episode.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Industry people call it the four-party model.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Funny thing, there are actually five parties involved, but nobody cared to rename it.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll just go with four.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: First, there's you, the card holder.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: You want your coffee.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: You tap your card because it's convenient, and maybe you can even get some points for it.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Second, the merchant.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: The coffee shop, they want the sale, and they'd rather not deal with a drawer full of cash, so they eat a small fee to accept your card.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Third, the acquirer.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's the merchant's bank, or increasingly a company like Pfizer V or Stripe.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: They're the ones who hand the shop the card machine, collect the money, and deposit it into the shop's account.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Fourth, the issuer, the issuing bank, your bank, Chase, City, ING, whoever gave you that card.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: They check that you actually have the money and they promise to pay the merchant's bank.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And fifth, the one that got left out of the name, the network, Visa, MasterCard, or a local scheme.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Think of them as a digital highway that connects you and your bank to the merchant's bank.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's actually a sixth character worth naming too, even if it's not part of the official four.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's the payment processor, the workhorse.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is where companies like Agen come into play.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: They exist purely to help merchants process transactions successfully.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: And increasingly they're bundling the gateway, the frag checks, and the in-store terminal all into a single platform.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the thing to hold on to as we go through the rest of this deep dive.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: You and the merchant are the foundation.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: Every single dollar of revenue in this entire industry originates from that basic transaction.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: Everything above it, the acquirers, the networks, the processors, is essentially built to serve that base layer, and they all take a slice of the pie as the money flows past.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that whole trip swipe to settlement costs somewhere around 1 to 2% of the total transaction, mostly paid by the merchant, not by you.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: So let's walk through where the pieces of that 1-2% actually go.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Chapter 2 Point of Sale.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Every time you eat out or buy a t-shirt, you're touching a POS device.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Point of sale.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Literally the point where the physical world plugs you into a payment system.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Toast, Clover, LightSpeed, Shift 4 at the restaurant, Worldline, Square, Stripe, Agen at the retail counter, WorldPay, embedded into the parking meter.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: The money in the POS isn't really the hardware, actually.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's what happens behind the terminal.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: The payment processing.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Some of these POS companies don't even process their own payments.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Lightspeed and Toast, for example, actually rely on AGEN to do that for them.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Agent takes its cut, and so do they, layered on top of that.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, is this an attractive segment to invest in?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly, not particularly, at least not on its own.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's highly competitive.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Just look at some of the margins.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Shift 4 is running around 8% EBIT margins, toast around 5, block around 7, NCR barely 1, and Lightspeed, burning cash to fight for some market share.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: So why is it so competitive?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because on the surface, POS terminals can look like a commodity.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: But the real mode, if there is any, isn't about being the cheapest here.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's about the software layer riding on top of the hardware and the switching costs that come with it.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Once a restaurant trains its whole staff on a system and integrates it with inventory and payroll, ripping it out is so painful.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: So the businesses to watch here are not the ones racing to the bottom on price.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: They're the ones building a platform good enough that switching becomes basically unthinkable.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: For now though, we'd call this a crowded field.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting opportunities will show up over time as winners separate from the pack, but we're not fully there yet.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Chapter 3 Digital Wallets A decade ago, if you wanted to pay online without typing your card number in, there was basically one option.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: The PayPal button.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Today, that world looks vastly different.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App, RefLut Pay, Amazon Pay, Shopify Pay.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: The list keeps growing, and the competitive dynamic has shifted into something much simpler.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Whoever removes the most friction wins.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: But there's something interesting here about the economics.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: You and the merchant pay nothing directly to use a digital wallet.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, the wallet takes a small fee from the banks and the car networks behind the transaction.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Something like 0.15%.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's a toll booth sitting on top of the existing payment rails.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the mode here is quite strong actually.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Network effects.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: The more people use a wallet, the more merchants feel they can't afford not to offer it.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because turning it away means turning away sales.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the more merchants that offer it, the more valuable it becomes to consumers.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: And as long as the fee stays reasonable, that flywheel just keeps on spinning, even if the wallet raises prices over time.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: The strongest players in this space are 100% Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: For Apple Pay, roughly 800 million people use it.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: For most businesses, offering it isn't optional anymore.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And at that scale, frankly, suggests Apple has pricing power where it hasn't even used it yet.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Not unlike what we've seen with the iPhone itself.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Chapter 4.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Payment Service Providers.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Now we get to what we think is the most interesting layer of the whole payment stack.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Payment service providers, or short for PSPs.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Think of PSPs as the user-facing bundle, payment methods for consumers on one side, fraud detection and higher authentication rates for merchants on the other side.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: You might recognize some names here.com, JP Morgan's Payments Arm.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the longer tail behind them.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's a clear trend shaping here in this segment.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Take rates are falling.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Payment processing itself is becoming more and more commoditized, which is forcing every single player to bold on value-added services.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Fraud protection, card issuing, lending, just to defend the margin.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Agen's own take rate tells the story.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: But it's down to 0.17% today.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's more than a 40% decline in what they earn per dollar processed.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: But Agen is thriving anyway, because volume has more than made up for the shrinking take rate.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's the business model, working as intended.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of several vendors handling your gateway, your fraud checks, and your acquiring separately, a company like Agen or Stripe does the whole thing on a single platform.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's Netflix PSP in Europe.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's the reason Stripe could help something like ChatGPT scale globally almost overnight.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's real value creation and not just fee extraction.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: The bigger picture in this segment is a battle between legacy and disruptors.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: On one side, you have incumbents like VIS, Pfizer V, Worldline, Global Payments, JP Morgan's Payment Tech.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: They have massive scale.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: 4.6 trillion, 2.6 trillion, 2.6 trillion in annual process volume, respectively.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: On the other side, the disruptors, still smaller in absolute volume, Stripe is around 1.9 trillion, but growing share year after year, not by being cheaper, but by being better.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: The total addressable market for PSPs is estimated globally to be around$35 trillion, growing 8 to 10% a year.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're looking for where to invest in payments, we think look at the disruptors.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: The incumbents can keep cash in for a while on inertia, but they're struggling to innovate, and that gap tends to compound over a decade, not shrink.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Chapter 5.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Issuing and Acquiring Banks Let's talk about the plumbing nobody really gets excited about.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Think ING in the Netherlands, Chase, City, American Express, Discover.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: They earn through interchange fees, interest income, and cardholder fees.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: An acquiring bank represents the merchant.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: It processes the card payment and deposits the funds.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Think JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PayPal, Agen.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: They all earn through service fees and a cut of chargeback penalties.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Both are heavily regulated.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: The FET in the US, the ECB in Europe, and both require a full banking license to operate, which means real supervision and no real flexibility.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: This segment is not really attractive to look at.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite mature, it grows quite slowly.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's a wall of local competitors, and there's no real moat to speak of.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: It comes down to brand trust and operational efficiency.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Important things to run a bank well, but not the kind of durable edge that makes for a great long-term compounder.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're hunting for compounding businesses in payments, this is probably not where we would spend our time.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Chapter 6.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now this is the favorite part of the map.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Card networks.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Just glance at the stock charts of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you already know something structural is going on here.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Limited competition and unbelievably powerful network effects.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: This segment has both of the ingredients you want as an investor at the same time.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Car networks are the actual payment rails, connecting issuing banks to acquiring banks worldwide, independently pricing the risk of every transaction and collecting a small scheme fee for the privilege.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And this space is, for all practical purposes, a close job in the Western world.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Visa holds over 50% market share in both the US and Europe.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: MasterCard sits around 25% in the US and 30% in Europe.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: American Express holds roughly 10% in the US and under 5% in Europe.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Smaller players like Discover, JCB, and Union Pay exist, but they don't come close to the scale or the mode these three have built.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want to go deeper on this specific segment, Bauke wrote a full deep dive on card networks last year, specifically Visa.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Available on the TDI terminal and definitely worth your time.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Chapter 7: Crypto and Stable Coins.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is a difficult chapter.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: We are no crypto or stable coins experts, and it's easy to dismiss everything as noise or just get swept up in the story, so let's separate the two first.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Bitcoin, as a payments rail, doesn't really work at scale.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: It processes around 7 transactions per second.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Visa processes up to 24,000 a second.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: There are workarounds here, Lightning Network and other layer 2 solutions, but there are patches on a foundation that wasn't built for this job.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Stable coins, however, are a different animal entirely.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the part worth paying attention to.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: These are digital currencies packed to something stable.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Usually the US dollar, but it could be something else.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Combining the speed of crypto with the price stability of a normal currency.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: USDC and USDT dominate this space, and the growth numbers are hard to ignore.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: According to Stripe's own 2025 annual letter, stablecoin payment volume doubled to around$400 billion, with roughly 60% of that is estimated to be B2B payments, it's not just speculation.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: But why is this catching on?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because stablecoins let you move money globally in seconds, without the volatility of holding actual crypto, and without leaning on the traditional banking rails that are, frankly, still slow and expensive for cross-border transfers.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: That said, and we want to be honest here, stablecoins aren't the only ones solving that problem.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Companies like WICE and Revolute are attacking the exact same pain points from a totally different angle.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: And WISE in particular has built its entire business around making cross-border payments cheaper and faster.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: Also, while Stripe isn't publicly listed, but through its acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin orchestration platform that saw 200% growth in volume last year, it's become a serious player to watch here.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Bridge has even partnered with Visa to let people spend stable coins with a normal-looking card.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: So our honest conclusion on this whole segment, this is a very interesting growth market.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: But who wins?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Stablecoin infrastructure or the Y-Style FinTech solving the same problem without crypto?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's very unclear right now, and it's definitely a risk.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: But time will tell, and we wouldn't bet the farm on picking any winners yet.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: We'll just have to see how this all plays out.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Chapter 8.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Where the growth actually is.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: So let's zoom out for a second and talk about where this industry is headed as a whole.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because not every layer of this stack is growing at the same speed.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Global digital payment volume is expected to grow from roughly 27 trillion in 2026 to over 36 trillion by 2030.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Cash keeps losing relevance as digital and mobile payments keep eating share year after year.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: But growth is very uneven across the stack.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Issuing and acquiring banks, the least exciting segment we talked about, is expected to grow just 1 to 5% a year.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Car networks, however, thanks to that duopoly, plus the American Express structure, should see around 7-12% growth.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Digital wallets are expected to grow 10 to 15% annually, although a lot of that value ultimately flows through the underlying infrastructure rather than staying with the wallets themselves.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the fastest growing segments of all, PSPs, expected to grow around 12-18% annually.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's the combination of payments plus software, riding the continued shift to e-commerce and actively stealing share from legacy players.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Companies like Achen, Stripe, and Shift 4 are positioned to grow revenue between 10 and 20% annually for the foreseeable future.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're building a payments thesis, that growth gradient tells you almost everything about where to spend your research time next.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Chapter 9 5 Companies So let us walk you through 5 names.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: The ones we at the Dutch investors currently find most interesting, and some of them we have most conviction on across the whole stack.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: First, Visa.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Visa is the most dominant payment network on the planet.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Only MasterCard comes close, and together they form about as clean as a duopoly as you'll ever find.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: New entrants simply don't have the network to compete, and when Visa raises prices, which it typically does twice a year, merchants have no real choice but to pass that cost along.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of power comes with baggage, of course.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Visa is in a constant target for regulators and has previously been fined for anti competitive practices, including restricting merchant choice and abusing its dominant position in certain markets.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the honest downside of being this dominant.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: But the numbers speak for themselves.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Next up, JP Morgan.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Not just another bank, but one of the oldest, largest, most powerful financial institutions in the world.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And also quietly a PSP for a huge number of US-based companies through its Chase Payment Tech Unit, which processes over$2.5 trillion annually.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: The company has around 150 million cards in circulation.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: Consumer credit is growing almost 10% annually, and its lending book is growing even faster.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: The mode is real but old-fashioned.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Brand trust, scale, and modest switching costs.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody changes banks casually.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: But it's built on legacy technology, and that shows in the product.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: JP Morgan can't compete on innovation with Stripe or Adgen.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: What it can do is undercut them on price, and for a huge swath of corporate America, that is more than enough.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Next, WICE.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Founded in 2011 by its current CEO, WICE runs one of the rarest competitive advantages a company can have.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Scale economy shared.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: And as the company grows, it passes savings back to the customers through lower prices, which then attracts more customers, which lowers costs further.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's an amazing flywheel.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Cross-border payments have historically been slow, expensive, and opaque.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: WISE now processes over$185 billion, and remarkably, that's still under the 1% of its total addressable market across individuals, SMBs, and enterprises.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: The enterprise side is worth watching.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: WISE Platform is a white-labeled infrastructure product already used by IBCar, Nubank, Google, Morgan Stanley, and Monzo.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful business and we have a full deep dive available on the TDI terminal.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Next, Block.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Block is the riskier company on this list.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: Alongside a strong proven product, Squares POS being the standout, Block holds nearly 9,000 bitcoins on its balance sheet as of early 2026.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: That is not a payments bet anymore.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's a crypto bet layered on top of a payments business.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: For us personally, owning Block would feel less like a pure payments investment and more like a hedge against any fiat currency, given how deep the company is already into crypto, both in its balance sheet and on its product roadmap.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Square gives Block the full stack, POS hardware and payments processing under one roof, which means more control and better margins.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: Cash App, meanwhile, is one of the most popular digital wallets in the US, evolving into an all-in-one financial platform for over 60 million users.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: Cards, investing, and sometimes lending.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Net margins currently sit around 5%, but we think they can stretch that towards maybe 10, if not 15%, through cost discipline, given how strong the underlying mode is for both Square and Cash App.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Lastly, Agen.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: The Dutch fintech processing payments for some of the largest enterprises on Earth.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Meta, Alphabet, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Apple.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: Agen runs on three pillars.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Digital, the payments powering companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Microsoft, Unified Commerce, combining online and in-store payments for companies like Nike and Starbucks, giving merchants a single view of the customer, and platforms, Agen's way of reaching small and medium businesses indirectly, through platforms like Lightspeed, Toast, Booking.com, and Uber that serve those businesses directly.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: While payments processing is still the bulk of AGEN's revenue, the company is increasingly leaning into value-added services.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Think of lending, loyalty, cart issuing.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: And unlike most of its PSP pairs, Agen rarely makes any acquisitions, although they just done two, which is very rare.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: They run a modern tech stack and holds a set of hard-to-obtain banking licenses that let it manage more of the value chain in-house rather than relying on partners.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: We also have a full deep dive on Agen on the TDI terminal.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: So where does that all leave us?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: The payments industry is one of the largest and most fragmented industries in the world.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: Also one of the hundreds of players, each holding a small piece of a massive value chain, and a surprising amount of that chain still runs on legacy infrastructure.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: That fragmentation is exactly why this sector rewards careful research.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: The winners and the value traps often look identical from a distance.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Stablecoins are trying to go around that legacy infrastructure entirely, and the growth they're reaching is real.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: But who actually wins that fight is so unclear to us right now.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: But if we had to leave you with one filter for evaluating anything in this space, look for the companies slowly and steadily taking market share from the incumbents.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Not by being the cheapest, the incumbents can usually still win that fight, but by offering something the old infrastructure can't match.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: And given enough time, if the mode is real, the share gain compounds.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's the whole game.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's the deep dive from the Dutch investors into the payments industry, and we hope this gave you a useful map of the ecosystem that's very easy to take for granted and very rewarding to understand.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, thank you for listening, and we'll see you in the next one!