upport for Mostly Metrics comes from Planful, the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software.

My wife says I don’t listen, but readers would beg to differ.

Just take it from reader Zane S. who encouraged me to add back in the FinTech sector. You’ll see it reflected in all the charts below.

Fintech is back baby!

The companies included within Fintech:

  • Affirm

  • Bill.com

  • Blend

  • Block

  • Clearwater Analytics

  • Coinbase

  • Flywire

  • Intuit

  • Lightspeed POS

  • Marqeta

  • Money Lion

  • PayPal

  • Remitly

  • Robinhood

  • Shopify

  • Zuora inc

I’m currently EXCLUDING

  • SoFi - they are also a bank, and the cash deposits throw off the metrics

  • NU, Adyen, and Wise - they are international and don’t report at the same frequency or at the same depth for comparability.

The P&L for Fintechs is in many ways inverse to traditional software models…

They have heavy COGS, which burdens their gross margins more than typical SaaS models (61% median gross margin for FinTechs vs 75% Median gross margin across the 109 tech co’s we track).

BUT they don’t require nearly as much OPEX. S&M and R&D are thinner on the P&L. In fact, once you get past the COGS line, Fintechs RIP at scale.

Fintech P&L: Jacked COGS, Skinny OPEX

There are heavy tolls paid in the form of bank, brokerage, licensing, origination, and payment processing fees, but they need less people to generate revenue once the core infrastructure is in place and network effects start to kick in.

How do I know? Revenue per head for FinTech’s is 1.5x that of the larger basket of companies we track, approaching $700k per employee, and their CAC Payback Period is under a year.

I guess skipping leg day can work out.

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