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How Slash Grew From $10M to $300M Revenue in 2+ Years. Victor Cardenas, CEO & Co-Founder of Slash
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How Slash Grew From $10M to $300M Revenue in 2+ Years. Victor Cardenas, CEO & Co-Founder of Slash

Miguel Armaza interviews Victor Cardenas, Co-Founder and CEO of Slash, a $1.4Bn unicorn that went from $10 million to $300 million of annualized revenue in 2+ years.

This article is part of Fintech Leaders, a newsletter with 90,000+ builders, entrepreneurs, investors, regulators, and students of financial services. I invite you to share and sign up. If you enjoy this conversation, please consider leaving a review on Apple, Spotify, or Youtube.

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I sat down with Victor Cardenas, Co-Founder and CEO of Slash, one of the fastest growing fintechs in America, that went from $10 million to $300 million in annualized revenue in just over 24 months. Slash just crossed a $1.4 billion valuation after raising a $100 million Series C led by Ribbit Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Goodwater Capital. The company powers over $30 billion in annualized payment volume across wires, ACH, stablecoins, and card spend for over 5,000 businesses.

Victor is a Venezuelan immigrant who moved to the US at 18 to attend Stanford, dropped out two years later, and is also a Thiel Fellow. He started Slash at 19 to serve sneaker resellers, lost 60% of his revenue almost overnight when Kanye West’s Yeezy brand imploded, and rebuilt the company into a rocketship by betting on vertical banking.

We discussed the Kanye West moment that nearly killed the company and why it became the best thing that ever happened to it, why he rebuilt Slash to process directly with Visa instead of going through a banking-as-a-service layer, his contrarian approach to hiring missionaries over mercenaries, why he believes the next great bank will be built on an AI-native back office, and why he is bullish on Venezuela’s economic recovery.

The Kanye West Crash That Forced Slash to Re-found Itself

Slash and Kanye have a strong and unlikely connection. In fact, Kanye forced Victor to dream a lot bigger. To understand why, you have to go back to 2021. Slash launched as a neobank purpose-built for mainly young entrepreneurial sneaker resellers. By the time the company closed its Series A, 90% of its customers were sneaker resellers and 70% of all spend on Slash was driven by Yeezys (Kanye’s shoe brand). The business was profitable, the team was growing, and Slash had just raised millions of dollars to scale.

Then in late 2022, Kanye went on a series of antisemitic public outbursts. Adidas cut ties and Yeezy ceased to exist. Over the following months, Slash’s revenue cratered 60%. Cardenas had just raised his Series A. He had just scaled headcount. He shares it was the most grueling moment of his career as an entrepreneur.

What followed is what forged Slash’s current business model and definitely the more interesting part of the story. Instead of trying to find another way to sell to sneaker resellers, they spent late 2022 and 2023 calling every single one of their remaining customers for feedback and mainly to ask them a question: what would it take for these customers to keep using Slash now that they had moved on beyond sneaker reselling? Across the board, these customers needed wires, ACH, QuickBooks integrations, employee invites, credit cards instead of debit cards, and cash back on their ad spend. These young entrepreneurs were pivoting to Amazon FBA, affiliate marketing, and Shopify storefronts, and they wanted Slash to follow them.

Were it not for Kanye, Slash would probably have ended up as vertical SaaS for sneaker resellers, fighting StockX and GOAT for a corner of a small market. Instead, they decide to go after a much larger opportunity.

Slash Co-Founders Kevin Bai (CTO) and Victor Cardenas (CEO)

Vertical Banking as a Strategy

Victor’s thesis is that the only way to win against incumbents and against the horizontal generalists like Ramp, Brex, and Mercury is to go vertical, build the workflows nobody else will build, and let retention and referral flywheels do the rest.

He gave me two examples on how Slash is doing this:

  1. Stablecoins. For nearly two years, Slash was the only business banking platform in the US that let businesses send and receive USDC and USDT natively from their banking dashboard. You type in a wallet address, click send, Slash converts dollars to stablecoin, and the payment goes through. They launched this product not because their customers were crypto degens, but because they were serving importers who needed to pay overseas suppliers, agencies receiving international payments, and US businesses trying to skip SWIFT fees.

  2. Performance marketing agencies. Traditionally, a marketing agency running ads for 100 e-commerce clients had a single Chase bank account with $9 million flowing in and out every month and no native way to track which dollars belonged to which client. Slash built a vertical-specific accounts receivable product that lets agencies spin up virtual accounts per end customer, give visibility into prepayment balances, and automatically charge agency fees. As a result, Slash reports that over 1% of all Meta ad spend now flows through Slash cards.

Missionary vs Mercenary Cultures

Slash has a current team of roughly 70 people, and according to Victor, only two people have ever left Slash to join another company. Everyone else who has departed has either left to start their own company or has been let go. More interestingly, Slash has also never hired a single person from a direct competitor.

Cardenas treats anyone who would leave a Slash competitor as a probable mercenary, who would most likely be willing to leave again. So he prefers to hire people who have something to prove and, obviously, who want to work hard. The result is a team with “high willingness to do the next thing.” Inside Slash, every problem is either solvable or not solvable. If it is solvable, attack it now. If it is not solvable, move on.

This same operating principle extends into how Slash builds product. “You win when you do not write your own product roadmap. You win when your customers write it for you.” Slash has only one product manager across the entire company (and plans to keep it that way for as long as possible). For years, that was one of Victor’s roles. He believes it’s important to have a single PM so there’s a dictatorial approach where one person is the arbiter of what gets shipped, because they have a unique understanding of how all the features mesh together.

The Neo-Neo Bank Bet on AI

If you think about the next decade of fintech, Victor wants you to focus on a single structural argument. The big advantage of Neobanking of the 2010s (Nu, Chime, Revolut, Monzo, etc) was that it was digital, no branches, no real estate, lower cost base. In Victor’s future, the next great bank’s advantage will be that it has no back office. Every legacy bank spends a meaningful portion of its top line on line-level employees processing disputes, parsing applications, filing SARs with regulators, responding to bank partner inquiries, and dealing with fraud recalls. Slash wants to agentify all of it.

The strategic payoff is meaningfully better unit economics and better / cheaper products for customers. The way Victor puts it, if Slash has the lowest opex in business banking, it has the right to be the most aggressive on customer rates. The AI investment compounds into pricing power. Slash’s real AI investment is behind the curtain. “Let’s be the business banking platform with the lowest opex… If you have very low opex, that gives you the right to be more aggressive in the rates you provide your customers.”

Victor certainly agrees with Rob Heyvaert’s recent take that big banks could be run with 5% of their current headcount using today’s tools. But as most insiders know, banks will likely not pull this off for cultural and structural reasons. There is no executive at a $200 billion bank with the agency and the incentive to make those decisions.

Long Venezuela

I also had to ask Victor about the new state of Venezuela. He was in Caracas the week before our interview for his brother’s graduation and shared how hotel lobbies are currently full of US investors. He believes Venezuela has the potential to become the energy hub of the Americas and the second-largest economy in the region.

This could translate into a huge opportunity for the financial sector. The Gulf states have over a dozen banks that are worth $100+ billion each because they finance massive energy projects. For contrast, the largest banks by market cap in Latin America today are Itau ($90Bn) and Nubank ($60Bn) and Victor sees a path for a Venezuelan bank to one day cross that level of market cap, anchored to a recovering oil and gas sector.

He is not committing Slash to the Venezuelan opportunity yet, but he does encourage American investors to explore investment opportunities in Venezuela, because every sector of the economy will grow in lockstep with the recovery of the energy sector.

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Book Recommendations

Victor reads almost exclusively biographies. His three most recent picks: Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton, and Juan Vicente Gómez, the Venezuelan president who ruled from 1908 until his death in 1935. He loves reading bios because you learn an enormous amount about the present by understanding the past, and the best way to learn history is through people’s stories.

The Unfiltered Q&A with Victor Cardenas

Miguel Armaza: Are you a fan of Kanye West? Why yes or why no?

Victor Cardenas: I’m a huge fan of Kanye West, with a grain of salt, in that he forced me to dream a lot bigger. Some listening may or may not know, but Slash started out as a neobank purpose-built for sneaker resellers. After our first year in business, literally right after we raised our Series A, 90% of our customers were sneaker resellers, and 70% of all the spend on Slash was at Yeezy, Kanye West’s brand. At the beginning I was quite grateful to Kanye because he birthed this micro-economy of sneaker resellers that let me start my entire business. Then right after we raised our Series A, this very interesting thing happened, which is he went on these antisemitic rants, and for that reason I don’t like him very much. Adidas and Yeezy cut ties, his brand ceased to exist, and our revenue cratered 60% over the course of a few months. That was the most grueling time in my career as an entrepreneur. I thought I’d have to give money back. We had scaled headcount quite a bit, we had to let people go. A very tough moment for me, but in hindsight, the best thing that ever happened to our business, because it forced us to refound it. It forced my co-founder and I to ask ourselves, what can we do to serve businesses in much larger and more attractive industries? That’s when the thesis of building vertical-specific financial products was born. People would expect me to say I hate him because he made my business crater 70%, but it was a great forcing function for us to dream a lot bigger. Were it not for that, we would have ended up as some vertical SaaS for sneaker resellers, or tried to compete with StockX or GOAT, and the business could have gone in a completely different direction.

Miguel Armaza: Take us to those days. How did you manage your conversations internally with your co-founder, your employees, your board, your investors? What was the mood, and how were you confronting it?

Victor Cardenas: Our aspiration was never to build the biggest credit card for sneaker resellers. We always viewed that market as a springboard into something that got us to our first few million dollars of revenue that we could then use as a base to figure out how to serve businesses in other industries. The best analogy for product-market fit someone came up with is that pre-PMF it feels like you’re pushing a boulder up a hill, and post-PMF it feels like you’re chasing it down the hill, where there’s so much demand for your product that you can’t keep up. That’s the stage we were at when we raised our Series A. Then Kanye started going on podcasts, Yeezy and Adidas started clashing, the drops occurred with less frequency, and a lot of our customers started going out of business. Most of our customers were young teenagers saying, hey, I’m going to get a job, or I’m just going to focus on college. We had two valuable things going for us. The first is we actually had the infrastructure built out to offer banking services to businesses in any segment. The second is we had an extremely entrepreneurial customer base. If you’re 19 or 20 and making $20,000 a month reselling sneakers, odds are if you can no longer resell sneakers, you’re going to figure out what to do next. You’re going to start another business, you’re not going to get a nine-to-five job. So I started hitting up every single one of my customers one by one and asking them what I could do to get them to keep using my product. They told us two things. One, you need to offer me everything my bank account offers me, where before we had this very simple product, almost a prepaid version of privacy.com. They needed wires, ACH, QuickBooks integration, the ability to invite their employees, because now they were starting an e-commerce company or an Amazon FBA business. Two, I need you to offer me rewards. We used to issue debit cards and we weren’t giving our customers any rewards. They could now get the Capital One Spark, the Chase Ink, a Ramp card. They needed cash back on their ad spend or inventory spend. So 2023 was basically the year we did that. We built a full-fledged B2B banking platform, started issuing credit cards instead of debit cards, and made this big infrastructural change. My conversations with my co-founder and my board were always very practical: there is a way out. The overwhelming feedback was build the things I expect in a bank and figure out a way to offer me rewards. I knew if we did that, we’d be able to reacquire every single customer we’d lost, and they’d have equally large or larger businesses in some other segments. Most of them went and started doing Amazon FBA selling, affiliate marketing, or e-commerce on Shopify. Obviously it was very distracting seeing the number go down, but the focus was always on how we could do the next thing that would allow us to get on our footing again.

Miguel Armaza: How much of your pre-2023 stack was reusable versus how much did you have to build from scratch?

Victor Cardenas: We had built our code to be multi-vendor, so there was a period of time where we had two parallel stacks. We worked with our old bank partner, Piermont Bank, and with Column. The way we had written the code made it so we could run two different stacks in parallel. But we basically had to rebuild everything from scratch. It wasn’t integrate with a BaaS company that gives you a very nice, easy REST API. It was start processing directly with Visa. It was a huge engineering year. It was a year I was only focused on engineering, product, and infrastructure. That’s an investment that’s paid dividends in that we have the lowest cost basis possible. The only way we can get closer to the metal now is by actually getting our own charter. We realized that fintech, and financial services broadly, is rate sensitive. High-spend businesses want great rewards. If you want to have a business with meaningful gross profit and gross margin and compete at the same time, you need to have the least amount of intermediaries possible between you and the end customer. Before, our stack looked like us, then a banking-as-a-service company, then an issuer processor, then a network, then a bank underlying the whole thing. We said, we’re just going to process directly with Visa. No BaaS, no issuer processor. We’re integrating directly with Visa and directly with the bank. In the US, you can’t be a Visa principal member if you’re not a bank, so we started working directly with Column.

Miguel Armaza: When are you going to get your own bank charter?

Victor Cardenas: At some point in the history of Slash, Slash will have a charter. For the foreseeable future, we won’t, at least in the course of the next three to five years. In fintech, there are two directions you can innovate in. You can innovate up, which is on the product differentiation side, where I complement a bank and card product with value-additive software or workflow automation. Or you can innovate down, which is, I’m going to get regulatorily creative and find a way to serve a segment that other people are not willing to serve. We think the biggest opportunity exists in innovating up. If we start trying to get a charter, that’s going to consume a lot of my and the organization’s time, and our focus is very valuable. You see it in the strategies of different companies. Ramp, for example, has always been very focused on innovating up. They process with Marqeta and Stripe Issuing, and there are these people that abstract away the actual financial plumbing associated with their business. They’re constantly shipping product and finding a way to give time back to their end customers. That’s the same strategy we want, where getting a charter is this pretty Herculean effort. We have amazing partners in Column, who are quite flexible, and we feel pretty well covered there.

Miguel Armaza: Let’s talk about your growth. Maybe tell us about your numbers, and what’s driving that growth.

Victor Cardenas: High-level numbers: around $300 million in annualized revenue. We move $30 billion a year across all payment rails: wire, ACH, stablecoin, and card. That’s up from roughly $10 million in annualized revenue in January 2024. So in two and a half years we went from $10 million to $300 million. What’s driving the growth is that, in difference to all the B2B neobanks that came before us, or even legacy financial institutions, we are specialists, we are not generalists. Our mandate has never been let’s build a 20% better version of Chase, or a version of Chase with a nicer UI, and then run a bunch of Facebook ads and hope a lot of people sign up because we’re a slightly better digital alternative. It’s how do we build a hyper-differentiated product for businesses in one particular segment. So two things can happen. We get much more retentive customers, because if you provide much more to your customers, like some sort of software or localized payment rail they care about, they’re much more likely to retain with you for a very long time. And two, we get better referral flywheels. If you build a product that’s purpose-built for a particular segment, your customer’s willingness to refer is going to be much higher. For the longest time, almost two years, Slash was the only business banking platform in the US that let businesses send and receive USDC and USDT natively from their banking platform. You could just put in a wallet address, click send money, and we would convert your dollars into crypto and send it to whatever counterparty you wanted. That was vertical differentiation. There are lots of businesses that have part of their treasury in crypto or stables. There are lots of businesses making cross-border payments where their counterparties prefer to receive a stablecoin payment than a SWIFT transfer because they don’t have to pay an FX fee. Stablecoin payments is one version of that, but there’s a slightly different answer for every single vertical we have a presence in.

Miguel Armaza: I read that at some point about 1% of Meta ads were processed through the Slash card. Is that still the case? And do you fear a Yeezy 2.0 with Meta trying to crack down on ad spend by card?

Victor Cardenas: It’s more than that. I haven’t run the numbers recently, but it’s more than that still for sure. On the concentration risk, hopefully not. Already Meta is moving some of their advertisers away from card to ACH, so it’s something we have quite front and center. We learned our lesson from the Yeezy debacle a few years ago. A huge part of my personal time and the leadership’s personal time is spent on diversifying the business and finding a way to deliver value to businesses in lots of different segments. There definitely is a little concentration risk there, but it won’t be as catastrophic as it once was. If it was, we’ll just keep powering. There’s nothing you can do except keep moving forward and figure out a way. In the US, there are over 50 or 60 banks worth over $10 billion. Is there space for there to be three, four, five fintechs that enter into that pantheon of large financial institutions? 100%. It’s just a matter of figuring out where the deposits are, where the card spend is, and going out and getting it by being smart about go-to-market and product.

Miguel Armaza: Talk a bit about your international customer base.

Victor Cardenas: Slash works with mostly US companies, until very recently. In August of last year, we launched what we call our Global USD account. The vast majority of the money that Slash and its bank partners move is for US companies. A lot of these US companies are owned by people outside of the US, but the majority of the customers we work with are primarily US businesses that have, for example, large importers that pay suppliers abroad in stablecoins, or vice versa where they have customers paying them from abroad in stables instead of dollars. International is becoming increasingly important. A big company called Rain pioneered or basically invented this concept of a stablecoin-backed card, an instrument you could use to spend down a stablecoin balance. They’ve been extremely friendly to developers. Now Rain and Reap are the two big infrastructural players. Reap just got acquired by Kraken, processing $700 million a month in stablecoin card volume, which is super impressive, almost at the $10 billion mark. We’re a customer of Rain’s, and we’re leveraging their infrastructure to issue USD cards to businesses all over the world. That actually was one of our big promises that got investors very excited about Slash, which is this idea that the world is becoming an increasingly dollarized place. Anyone anywhere in the world can make money by vibe-coding a piece of software, and they’re likely going to sell that in dollars to businesses all over the world. The US consumer and US business is the best person to sell to. Right now, all these business owners all over the world are forced to interact with local banks that have subpar USD banking features, or they can’t even issue a card that doesn’t charge them an FX fee if they spend in the US. All these businesses are going to need high-quality dollar-based financial services. We want to be the dominant stablecoin-backed card and the dominant USD digital banking platform for businesses not only in America but abroad as well.

Miguel Armaza: What have you learned about hiring and building a team?

Victor Cardenas: When you’re first starting a company, you hear all these things from investors and other founders about culture. It was a very foreign concept to me for a very long time. I always thought of it as something that you had to impose on the organization, certain things you had to do, events you had to organize, rules you had to make. But I’ve come to the realization that it’s built the other way around. The people you hire and the example you give are what create culture. As hard as it may be to turn down people that are culturally inconsistent with the kind of organization you want to build, you have to do that. At Slash, we have a culture of high intensity, high ownership, and we’re a culture of missionaries. One fun fact about Slash is that only two people have ever left Slash to join another company. Everyone else has either left to start a company themselves, or they’ve been let go. We’ve also never hired somebody from our competitor, and no one from Slash has gone to another competitor. Because if you hire somebody that works at a competitor, it’s likely that person is more of a mercenary than a missionary, and they’ll be willing to leave your company to go to another one. Sam Altman tweeted the other day something like, it’s much better to let yourself get screwed over every once in a while than to be very cynical. So my approach is, I’m never cynical. I always assume good intentions from everyone. I try my absolute best to only let people in the door who I think are mission and vision aligned with us, and we treat our people very well. The biggest thing I’ve learned is hire people that are consistent with the kind of organization you want to build. In our case, it’s people that have something to prove and are excited to work very, very hard. Right around the time of the Yeezy debacle, we had to let some people go. The conversations I had with employees and the problems I had to deal with were completely different from the ones I deal with today, even though the organization was much smaller. They were about people talking about PTO and benefits and flexibility of where they wanted to work from. At the time, I thought, this is the reality of running a business. But now we’re a much larger company, around 70 people, and I never have to think about those things because I bias toward hiring people that want to work hard and are enthused about being at a high-intensity organization.

Miguel Armaza: What have you learned about building product?

Victor Cardenas: We only have one product manager at Slash, and for the longest time I was the product manager. This is a very Victor take, but it’s helpful for there to be almost a dictatorial approach where one person is the arbiter of what gets shipped and what doesn’t, because they have a unique understanding of how all the different features mesh well with each other. You win, or you have product-market fit, when you do not write your own product roadmap. You win when your customers write your product roadmap for you. Because we have this very vertical-by-vertical strategy, it’s almost like we’re starting a new business every single month. Every single time we say, hey, we want to start serving this new vertical, we ask ourselves the same kinds of questions I’d be asking myself if I were starting a business from scratch. Will this have product-market fit? Are we going to be pushing this boulder up the hill or chasing it down? How do we get to the point where we’re chasing the boulder down the hill in this vertical? What are the unique ways we’re going to do go-to-market and build a brand in this segment? I just have a deep desire to always ensure that we are shipping something that somebody is asking for, instead of shipping something that we think will be cool, or where we just have some abstract idea that it’s important for it to exist.

Miguel Armaza: As CEO, what KPIs do you track most closely?

Victor Cardenas: I actually think it’s important not to track that many. At the end of the day, what matters for us is card spend, the interchange revenues downstream from that, so that matters a lot. Assets under management that are interest bearing, because they generate revenue for us. And any other kind of payment volume that is fee generating for us, so in our case, stablecoin payment volume. Those are really the three things I look at. We have seven TVs here in the office tracking a bunch of different things, but there’s only really one chart that matters. It’s important every time you launch a smaller feature to track its actual success, so your evaluation of whether or not to keep investing in it is grounded in some sort of numbers. But it’s helpful to have a small number of KPIs you track toward to keep you and the organization focused. I track them multiple times a day. I just glance at the TVs. When I didn’t have TVs up, I would just always check. It’s not telling me anything new. I’ve literally been looking at trailing 30-day card spend for five years, every single day, multiple times a day, since May 2021, which is when we started the company. The one KPI I deemphasized is customer count. A lot of times people ask me, how many customers do you have? It’s not a very good question, because I could have a customer that makes me $2 million a year, and a customer that makes me $2 a year or loses me money. So we don’t really track the number of businesses on Slash. We track a segmented version: how many customers in this vertical of this particular size do we have. Total payment volume, like the $30 billion number, doesn’t really matter either, because a lot of that payment volume is non-revenue generating. It just sounds cool when you say it. It’s important that the things that sound cool to others on a podcast are not things you yourself pay attention to on a day-to-day basis.

Miguel Armaza: I know you’ve said Slash is going all in on AI and you’ve launched an AI Chief of Staff. What does going all in on AI mean for you?

Victor Cardenas: The biggest way we’ve gone all in on AI is on internal tooling. If you think of what the original promise of a neobank was, it was a bank where you could open a bank account digitally. But similarly importantly, it’s a bank with no bank branches. Nubank had a structural cost advantage over Itaú and all these other legacy banks in Brazil because it was all digital. They didn’t have to have all this real estate to acquire customers. They had a structurally better cost base than the legacy incumbents. Now there’s an opportunity to start a neo-neo bank, where there’s another very important cost base that legacy banks have that AI-native companies are well positioned to do away with, which is your entire back office. Every bank spends a meaningful portion of its top line on line-level people that perform repetitive tasks that just keep the bank running. Processing disputes, parsing documents when somebody applies for an application, submitting a SAR filing to a regulator, responding to a request for information from a bank partner, dealing with fraud recalls, performing manual account verification. So many of these processes have had headcount thrown at them by these legacy financial institutions. Our approach is, let’s agentify this whole thing. Let’s be the business banking platform with the lowest opex. That’s a structural differentiator because what’s our goal? We want to be the fintech with the highest EBITDA margins. If you have very low opex, that gives you the right to be more aggressive in the rates you provide your customers. That is the main way we’re going all in on AI. It’s creating this structurally leaner neobank. And then obviously we think a lot about how we can use AI to deliver a better product experience to our customers. Twin, the AI Chief of Staff we launched, is a product that lets you perform every action you can perform from the Slash dashboard but in natural language. It has gotten great usage. But really, the AI is mostly in the backend. That’s how we think about it.

Miguel Armaza: Let’s talk about Venezuela. You grew up there until 18 and then moved to Stanford. There’s been a huge change. How are you confronting this new reality?

Victor Cardenas: I’m extremely ecstatic about all the changes occurring in Venezuela. I would have never imagined I’d have gone back to Venezuela. I was just there last week for my brother’s graduation. You go to the lobby of any major hotel, and all you hear are Americans and hedge fund people and private equity people looking to invest in the country. I think Venezuela has the potential to be the energy hub of the Americas, probably the second largest economy in the Americas, provided rule of law gets established and we have many decades of reinvesting the productivity that comes out of oil proceeds into the country. I couldn’t be more bullish on Venezuela. One day in my life, definitely far away from now because I’m so dedicated to running Slash, I want to find a way to go back and contribute to my country in a meaningful way. Even in fintech, Airwallex right now has been in the news because they are going to be the correspondent bank in the US for Banco de Venezuela, the largest bank in Venezuela. There are other American banks very interested in getting into that correspondent business. That’s also something I’m thinking about as a fintech founder. What’s the largest bank in Latin America? It’s Nubank, a $70 billion market cap bank. But in the Gulf, in Qatar and Saudi and all those countries, there are over a dozen banks worth over $100 billion. Why is that? Because they’re the banks that support the massive oil sector and natural gas sector that exists in all those countries. So is there an opportunity for a large B2B financial services business to be built in Venezuela over the next decade? I 100% think so. Could that be Slash? Maybe, who knows. I haven’t lost touch with it. A lot of my friends that left haven’t been back. My family’s actually still there, so I’ve probably been back once or twice a year, every single year since I’ve left. I would encourage any American listening to this podcast to explore potential investment opportunities down there, just because every sector of the economy is going to grow in lockstep with the recovery of the oil sector.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Miguel Armaza is Co-Founder & General Partner of Gilgamesh Ventures, a fintech seed-stage investment fund focused. He also hosts and writes the Fintech Leaders podcast and newsletter.

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