YouTube will become the next new type of bank

Author: Caleb Shack

Translation: Jiahui, ChainCatcher

Every successful neobank follows the same initial path: identify areas where traditional banks charge excessive fees or provide poor service, use that as a foothold, and then expand into broader banking services.

SoFi found that for promising borrowers, FICO credit scores are a poor way to price student debt. Instead, they underwrite based on income trajectories and disposable cash flow, and the data they accumulate gradually becomes a true moat. When most banks charge a 3% fee on each overseas card transaction, Monzo, Revolut, and Starling started by offering zero foreign exchange fees. In the Brazilian market, where traditional banks impose punitive interest rates and millions are excluded from formal financial systems, Nubank gained market share with its no-annual-fee credit card.

This approach is always consistent: find a foothold, capture a vertical niche, then expand into comprehensive services.

Today, thanks to stablecoins, offering checking and savings accounts has become unprecedentedly simple. Infrastructure has become largely commoditized. This has led to a wave of stablecoin-based neobank startups, but most lack differentiation. The “frictionless” features that make it easy for them to launch also allow the next wave of competitors to enter easily. At the deposit level, there are no real moats.

The reason the first-generation fintech companies succeeded so greatly was because they built differentiated products on top of the just-commoditized distribution layer (the internet). This gave them an advantage over existing traditional banks. When commoditization occurs, it paves the way for bundling to create new products. The convenience of opening deposit accounts won’t spawn a thousand new independent neobanks; instead, neobanks become an embedded feature, integrated into platforms that already hold more valuable assets: sources of income.

If you’re a creator earning money on YouTube or Twitch, your relationship with those platforms is deeper and data-rich compared to your relationship with Chase Bank. The platform understands your cash flow in real time. It knows your growth trajectory. It masters algorithms. It can provide credit underwriting in ways 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 providers like Deel and Gusto.

Bundling creator income with financial products is straightforward. Payments to creators and gig workers, total GMV of market transactions, and wages paid to employees—all these values flow out of the platform via ACH transfers, losing value along the way. For example, 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 vertical expansion into crypto-friendly financial services. With just a few lines of code, platforms can now earn transfer fees and short-term Treasury yields during payments, making bundling these services within the platform a natural choice, ultimately enabling them to offer loans based on their understanding of users.

These companies don’t need to be true 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’ve already accumulated. The entry point is no longer product tricks or pricing arbitrage; it’s the revenue relationship itself.

YouTube will become the next neobank. Not because YouTube will apply for a banking license, but because money comes from somewhere, and financial services should be where the money is.