YouTube will become the next new type of bank

Author: Caleb Shack

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

Every successful neobank follows the same starting path: identifying areas where traditional banks charge excessively or provide poor service, using this as a foothold to penetrate broader banking operations.

SoFi found that the FICO credit score is a poor pricing method for student debt for borrowers with growth potential. Instead, they underwrite based on income trajectory and disposable cash flow, and the data they accumulate gradually becomes a real moat. While most banks charge a 3% fee for every overseas transaction, Monzo, Revolut, and Starling started by offering zero foreign exchange fees. In the Brazilian market, where traditional banks charge punitive rates and millions are excluded from the formal financial system, Nubank won the market with no annual fee credit cards.

This approach remains consistent: find a foothold, capture vertical niche scenarios, and then expand to full-service offerings.

Today, thanks to stablecoins, providing checking and savings accounts has become unprecedentedly simple. The infrastructure has essentially been commoditized. This has spawned a wave of neobank startups based on stablecoins, but most of them lack differentiation. The "frictionless" characteristics that allow them to launch easily will also enable the next batch of competitors to follow suit effortlessly. At the deposit level alone, there is no moat.

The first generation of fintech companies succeeded primarily because they built differentiated products on top of the newly commoditized distribution layer (the internet). This gave them an advantage over existing traditional banks. When commoditization occurs, it paves the way for new products to emerge through bundling. The convenience of opening deposit accounts will not spawn a thousand new independent neobanks; rather, it will make neobanks a built-in feature, embedded into platforms that already have more valuable assets: sources of income.

If you are a creator making money on YouTube or Twitch, your relationship with the platform is deeper and richer in data than your relationship with Chase. The platform understands your cash flow in real-time. It knows your growth trajectory. It understands algorithms deeply. It can provide credit underwriting in ways that traditional banks never could. The same logic applies to gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft, social commerce platforms like Whop and TikTok, and modern payroll service providers like Deel and Gusto.

The logic of bundling creator income with financial products is simple. The income paid to creators and gig workers, the gross merchandise volume (GMV) generated by the market, and the wages paid to employees, once transferred out via ACH, lose value from the platform. Just YouTube alone has paid creators over $100 billion since 2021 and launched stablecoin payments in December. Whop has generated over $4 billion in GMV and has begun to vertically expand into the cryptocurrency-supporting financial services sector. With just a few lines of code, the platform can now earn transfer fees and short-term treasury yields during the payment process, making it a natural choice to bundle these services within the platform and ultimately offer loan services based on their understanding of users.

These companies do not need to become real banks in a regulatory sense. They only need to provide banking as a service (BaaS), including accounts, debit cards, and loans, driven by the platform data they have already generated. The foothold here is no longer product gimmicks or pricing arbitrage; the foothold is the income relationship itself.

YouTube will become the next neobank. Not because YouTube will apply for a banking license, but because wherever the money comes from, financial services should be there.