Background

Questions

1. Could you start off by talking a little bit about Highnote and the problem you’ve set out to solve?
2. Can you talk about Highnote's customer profile and the core use cases that drive adoption?
3. How does the Highnote product deliver better optionality for developers around how to build fintech or their embedded finance product? Why is that optionality important?
4. With Highnote, a customer brings and manages their own sponsor bank relationship, with BaaS that relationship is often intermediated by the provider. Can you talk about the relative merits of each approach?
5. Marqeta takes a relatively low percentage of interchange, zero to 30%, sharing the majority with the fintechs they work with. How do you think about the economics of the interchange at Highnote, and how do they change as the volume scales? How might they change over time?
6. Marqeta allows customers to internalize a greater share of interchange, but they have high upfront costs around $25-$35,000. As a company's card volume grows, however, those upfront costs become less impactful. What are the main offerings that would make it worthwhile for bigger customers to stick around, say functionality, product, service, economics, etc?
7. With a big issuer like Marqeta, I2C, etc., the product roadmap might be planned out years in advance. At Highnote, how do you think about being flexible while not yielding too much control to your customers over your roadmap?
8. Is there any difference between how you think about selling to fintechs versus selling to embedded finance companies? If a difference exists between those, does one provide a longer or better growth runway?
9. What are some key factors around when it makes sense for a company to sign up with a card issuer like Highnote versus a BaaS platform?
10. Cash App represents a massive percentage of Marqeta's revenue; I think something like 80%. How do you think about customer concentration risk in card issuing? Is it a concern?
11. Part of how Marqeta mitigates concentration risk fear is by signing long multi-year enterprise contracts. How do you think about balancing a self-serve go to market that's aimed at bringing the individual developers or teams with creating predictable cash flow through bigger, higher ACV deals with larger enterprise customers?
12. There are incumbent players like FIS and Fiserv in this market, and then there are some other card issuing point solutions out there, from Marqeta to newer competitors like Lithic and Apto Payments. How do you think about Highnote's positioning here?
13. When it comes to luring enterprise customers, companies like Fiserv and Marqeta have proved that they can operate at scale, while startups lack the type of track record over time. What do you think prospects should look for from card-issuing providers to understand whether they can scale as partners?
14. What’s difficult about building a company in this space product-wise? What makes your team or any team particularly positioned to succeed with incumbents and just market dynamics in general?
15. Looking towards the future addressable market expansion, could you categorize Highnote's customer base as being both fintechs, neobanks, and other core finance companies and embedded finance companies? Where do you see the biggest growth runway?
16. If one of your good friends were to join Highnote in the next month, what advice would you give them to succeed at the company?