Where to read about fintech, if you invest in it

Fintech is well covered and badly covered at the same time. There's a lot of writing, most of it recycling the same funding news, and then a handful of people who actually understand how money moves and write about it.

The infrastructure people

Fintech Brainfood by Simon Taylor is the weekly most people in the industry read. He's a former banker, which shows in the parts about compliance and rails that other writers skip.

Patrick McKenzie's Bits about Money publishes irregularly and explains one mechanism at a time: how card networks price, what a bank actually does with your deposit, why a particular fraud works. It's the best thing written about payments.

Net Interest by Marc Rubinstein covers financial companies as businesses, which is rarer than it sounds. If you want to understand a lender's economics rather than its narrative, start there.

The investors

a16z's fintech team and USV both write about the sector with actual positions behind the arguments. QED's team writes about international markets, which most US fintech writing ignores entirely.

For market structure and multiples, Clouded Judgement isn't fintech-specific but covers the public comps that every private fintech is eventually priced against.

Insurance, which nobody covers

Insurance is the part of fintech with the most dysfunction and the least writing. Coverager is the trade publication worth following, and a few investors write seriously about distribution and underwriting economics. If you know of more, we'd genuinely like to hear about it, because our insurance topic page is thinner than it should be.

How we'd use this list

Subscribe to two, not ten. The failure mode with sector newsletters is a full inbox you stop opening, at which point you're worse off than before.

If you want the filtered version, we read all of these and the other 800-odd sources in our index, and send one email on Sunday with what survived. You can also follow the sector directly: fintech, banking and capital markets, and insurance each have their own page that updates as posts come in.