I came of age in finance in investment banking in the U.S. during the boom and bust of dotcom era. I continued in finance by shifting into private equity, working for a multibillion-dollar fund, and it was a tough time, a really tough time.
I was in London, which in the year 2000 was the new frontier, doing debt-to-equity conversions of high yield bonds for telcos, basically telling founders and shareholders that they now owned 1% of these formerly highly valued companies that they used to own and here was their new option plan and me and my debt owned the rest and also, by the way, I need to fire a third of your employees.
It was rough, and I matured quickly — too quickly, really. I looked up after three years and I realised that I was 250 pounds and I hadn’t seen my family in longer than I care to admit. So I did the only thing I could do: I retired. I moved to Gibraltar/Sotogrande, the de facto British enclave in southern Spain, and I became a resident there. Although the sunshine that I hadn’t seen in years was lovely, but I got bored very quickly.
It was the early days of digital finance, I met some new friends that were having a similar experience to me and wanted to do something interesting. We applied for — and got — one of the first E-money licenses ever issued in Europe and passported it to more than 20 countries over a few years. We were soon offering card services, virtual bank accounts through cards programs, P2P transactions, remittance and convincing paper hungry southern European corporations to stop using cheques and leverage digital banking and card solutions. We grew and grew fast, and after another four years we sold the company to The Bancorp (TBBK), where I had to move to the northeast US again and I ran Institutional Banking in the snow instead of the sun.
Then a call came in from the West Coast. There was a small team looking to buy a bank or banks — and one of their investors had recommended me.
I flew out and found this young, upstart bank sitting in California — the fourth or fifth largest economy on the planet — with less than a hundred employees, a minimal market cap, and roughly less than $1 billion in quality assets. On the traditional banking front, it was going precisely nowhere.
My job was to bring in the people and the products around Institutional Banking, deposit aggregation, get Principal Member relationships with Visa/MasterCard and create global payments solutions that the bank simply didn’t have. Also, my role included finding other banks to acquire that were in a similar position. Our shared problem was blunt. How does a little bank in California compete with Wells Fargo and Citi or some of the super regionals?
You can’t out-muscle them. You have to out-think them. So we got creative, we connected with customers the giants ignored, and we built products the big banks either couldn’t or wouldn’t. We leaned into the EB-5 immigrant investor program, building products that made it genuinely useful for international investors to bring capital into the US through the bank. We used esoteric mortgage products to derive cash gains after selling them to Wall Street.
We created institutional banking products for trading and financial management firms to enhance thor liquidity. The afore-mentioned although not valuable from a valuation perspective allowed us to build the rest of the banking infrastructure. This same cash flow allowed us to enter the acquisition game.
It was the kind of thing that didn’t fit the standard playbook — which was exactly why it worked. That was the Banc of California (BANC) story. From its beginnings, Banc of California grew from about 60 employees to 2,000, from $600 million in assets to $17 billion and from a $60 million market cap to $1.7 billion — the fastest-growing bank in America for three consecutive years.
When I left Banc of California, I tried to retire, again. I went out to Las Vegas, I hung out, but I got bored again. I wanted to get back in, but not in an operational role.
I had noticed something: The corporate money that used to flow to television networks and glossy magazines was quietly re-routing to individuals: creators, founders, freelancers, people building real global businesses out of a laptop and an audience. I saw the marketing spend shifting from the famous people, the athletes, to these creators.
And every one of them was being served by financial products designed for somebody who has a single employer and a paycheck every two weeks.
Most banks want the doctor, the lawyer, the salaried journalist. They look at someone earning across five platforms, three currencies, and a dozen countries and they see a problem they don’t know how to price and also compliance and risk department that are not educated or prepared for these entrepreneurs, not employees. It is the same problem that the world had with the underbanked between 2005 and 2009.
I ran the numbers and landed on a sub-market worth somewhere between $40 billion and $60 billion of the now $400 billion Creator Economy. I like markets like that — the ones where even a few percentage points of penetration mean something real. So I did what I always do: I called the same people I’d built things with before, at Transact, at TheBancorp, at Banc of California, and we went into stealth for two years. That work eventually became MAKE.
We built a banking platform for the way people actually earn today: creators, influencers, freelancers, digital entrepreneurs, remote workers, and internationally minded SMBs that live in several currencies at once, move it across borders quickly, and manage it through technology built for this life rather than retrofitted from the last one.
We have put most of our effort into the unglamorous half — the compliance, the risk, the banking infrastructure — because that’s the part that earns trust, and trust is the whole game. If you think of how a bank works: Whatever assets you have under management, if you make 1% ROA, that’s success. But the more time you spend on compliance and risk and back office and treasury and did this come from Spain, Singapore or Japan and in what currency, and this from the United States, that decreases ROI.
We leveraged technology to make sure that we could trace and understand and ensure that those funds were legitimate and through innovative and very compliant AML, KYC, KYB, Global Transaction monitoring, that we could facilitate people with income streams on a global basis or people that were getting money from platforms across the world.
That was that genesis to have the patience to understand that they were underserved and it wasn’t really that hard to focus on them.
We funded it ourselves, to the tune of around $5 million, precisely so we could build the right thing before we built the fundable thing. Outside capital will come when the product deserves it, not before.
My message to the big players, and I say it with respect, because I’ve sat in those buildings, is that the opportunity in front of you is not to digitize the products you already sell.
The way human beings earn a living is changing at the foundations, and any institution that keeps designing for a workforce that no longer exists is going to miss one of the fastest-growing customer bases in the global economy. You have something we spent decades earning and can’t buy overnight — trust. Use it to build for the world as it is, not the one you were built for.
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