Episode description

Lex chats with Siddharth Batra, Co-founder at X1 Card, about his experience in technology and software development. X1 is a FinTech company that has created a smart credit card and has become one of the top 100 credit cards in the US with a waitlist of 600,000 people. Together, they discuss how Sid has articulated his consumer product building learnings from his experience as head of engineering at Twitter to revolutionise the traditional credit card into a B2C financial super app. Touching on X1's growth strategy and how it is focused on a consumer product approach rather than traditional marketing techniques. This has allowed them to have a 10x better referral rate than traditional credit cards.

MENTIONED IN THE CONVERSATION

X1's website: https://bit.ly/3J9w404

Sid's Linkedin profile: https://bit.ly/3ywr6Wh

Topics: Fintech, paytech, artificial intelligence, consumer, credit, b2c, pfm

Companies: X1, Twitter,  Venmo, Apple, Robinhood

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TIMESTAMPS

1’36”: Sid’s foundational experiences in technology & what laid the groundwork for his career

8’49”: Using Stanford and network thereof as the launchpad to becoming a startup founder  

11’52”: Joining Twitter and learning about consumer behaviour and consumer’s relationship with social media content

15’43”: How building consumer products at Twitter formed the basis for the articulation towards Fintech

17’13”: X1 - what it is, how it started, what is a smart card, what is the software that differentiates it from competitors and the volume growth since its inception

25’38”: X1’s feature set, issuing bank, its underlying regulatory structure, and the underwriting credit policy for users

29’02”: X1’s economics and the crucial component to X1’s success vs the likes of Apple Card  

33’21”: The winning formula - creating a step function better product for X1’s prime audience and then offering rich feature sets  

37’10”: X1’s long term ambitions and why they are positioned better relative to other Fintechs in the market

42’13”: Channels to use to connect with Sid & learn more about X1

Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.

Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella

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