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In this episode, Chris continues telling the story of how he got involved in Banks.com. He takes a deep dive into the Fintech marketplace and explains its significance in the traditional financial services industry. Fintech is defined as new technology that seeks to improve and automate the delivery and use of financial services. Companies within this disruptor category include Credit Karma, Revolut and NerdWallet, among others. Chris breaks down the multiple sub-categories that make up the financial services category,including lending, crypto and block chain, personal finance, wealth management,capital markets, and insurance, to name a few. It is Chris’ opinion that traditional banks are not innovating fast enough to keep up with consumer needs. Thus,companies such as Amazon are entering the space to take advantage of this oversight. In closing, Chris talks about the importance he places on doing the right thing and his hope that Banks.com can do right by their customers now and in the future.
Listen to "The Banks Story: Part 1" if you missed the beginning of the story.
Chris is the President and partner at Juhll.com, a full-service digital marketing agency aimed at delivering superior results to help clients achieve their business goals. He's also the founder, operator and investor in Banks.com, a financial online market place aimed to become everyone’s trusted, go-to resource for all things financial on the web.
Chris is the founder of fintech online financial marketplace Banks.com, as well as the President of Juhll.com, an online marketing agency providing full digital services for industries like Banking and Fintechs, Software as a service (Saas) or E-Commerce.
“I thinks Banks.com can play in that baking and payment area and it can be B2B or B2C. I think it can certainly play in investments. I think that it can certainly play in any of the crypto or any of the block chain technology.” (07:33)
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“In my opinion, the banks are not innovating fast enough to keep up with what their customers wanted. And it’s allowed all these Fintechs to create a multi-billion dollar industry out of their lack of being responsive to customer need.” (10:28)
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“At the end of the day, as any business leader would know, if you’re gonna expand your footprint, you need to expand your services.” (14:04)
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“A lot of these companies can get incrementally better. But, I think what we really need is a full scale better.” (19:56)
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“We are gonna take as long as we want and spend a lot of our time focused on doing the right thing by the consumer.” (29:33)
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“I’m excited about it. This keeps me up every single night in a good way. It keeps me motivated every single day.” (38:14)
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Chris is the founder of fintech online financial marketplace Banks.com, as well as the President of Juhll.com, an online marketing agency providing full digital services for industries like Banking and Fintechs, Software as a service (Saas) or E-Commerce.
Chris Snyder: I remember the days when I could just go and go and go until 3: 00 or 4: 00 in the morning, wake up, drink a Mountain Dew and a cup of coffee, have a croissant, and just go again, right? Just go, go, go.
Audio: Welcome to Snyder Showdown, an original Juhll Agency Production. This is the show for unvarnished conversations about what's really happening in the world of digital advertising. It's stories from the trenches about what's working and what's not. With your host, president of Juhll Agency and owner of Banks.com, Chris Snyder.
Chris Snyder: One of the things I want to do today is share a bit of news, tell a little bit of a story about a business that you may or may not be familiar with. But for our session today, I want to dive into something I've been working on for the last 18 months. Harry, I know we didn't have our session last week. The reason why we didn't have our session last week is because I was thankfully involved in a transaction that allowed Juhll Agency and really the whole Snyder family I guess if you will to put ourselves in a situation where we could build something meaningful that we are now 100% in charge of.
As part of the introduction on this podcast, we've always talked about Chris Snyder is the president of Juhll. He's also an investor and an operator in Banks.com. There's also other things that I'm involved in. Mostly like 95% of it's all client related. Today I want to talk a little bit more about Banks.com because it's going to become an important part of our roadmap as an agency this year and as a focus of mine on top of the client responsibilities that I have. A lot of our clients are financial services related. They're lead gen related. A lot of the work that I do and a lot of the situations that I find myself in are from strategy to operations to execution related.
Banks.com was born out of a meeting ... I wouldn't call it a meeting. It was born out of an attendance at a Christmas party in New York City in December of 2016. I was on a client trip. I was meeting with one of our larger clients. They have offices in New York City and they also have offices in north of the city. I went to a Christmas Party to meet a buddy of mine who actually works in advertising. At the time, he was at Samsung. Prior to that he was at Xbox and Gatorade. He since moved on to Verizon and he had a place in New York City. I went to college with him and we've been friends for many years. I wound up staying around in the city after a bunch of client meetings.
I think you know me. I'm not typically a hang out kind of guy. I mean I'm not going to hang out in the city for an extra day and kind of forego that time with my family, right? Like oh, I'm going to stay an extra day spend an extra thousand dollars on hotels and drinks, right? Get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to catch the early flight all because I wanted to stay in the city and hang out until 4 AM, which generally happens anyway. Actually let me rephrase that. I kind of want to do that and I love to do that. Unfortunately, you got to be ready for the consequences of going to the city.
Harry: Our ability to sustain and recover from nights from like that-
Chris Snyder: Not good.
Harry: ... gets harder and harder.
Chris Snyder: Man. I remember the days when I could just go and go and go until 3: 00 or 4: 00 in the morning, wake up, drink a Mountain Dew and a cup of coffee, have a croissant, and just go again, right? Just go, go, go. Now, I'm a little bit more thoughtful about how I prioritize my 3: 00 AM engagements and usually those are at my own house in front of these four screens building a deck or doing something a little bit more meaningful. For me anyway. I mean when I was younger, that was super meaningful to go out until 4 AM and just do whatever it is that 25 year olds do, but it's not just as meaningful to me anymore. Anyway, I'm in the city. I'm at a Christmas party, which again I don't usually don't go to.
I don't like a lot of those types of functions, even though I am a relationship guy. Just don't usually go. I went with another buddy of mine who's also been in publishing and advertising for a long time. He said, "Hey, you should go to this thing. There's going to be a lot of people there. It'll be a good chance for you to network. Hey, at the end of the day, it's free drinks. We're going to hang out." I went and I wound up meeting the chief revenue officer of a publicly held company. Great guy. Just wound up hitting it off. He's also an advertising guy from many years ago, and again, we'll get him on the show and have him give his perspective. Had his own advertising business overseas.
Sold the business to a major advertising agency and just is a real kind of kindred spirit as it relates to advertising. We're hanging out. Of course, I start talking about the stuff that we talk about on the show. Hey, we're data driven. We do a lot of lead gen. Slapping a bunch of nasty banner ads on your website and hoping that you're going to make a million bucks is not kind of my perspective on how to do things, right? He was like, "Oh, that's all interesting." Of course, it's whatever time at night, 12 AM, 1 AM. Generally, I find, even over the course of my whole career, nothing ever comes out of this stuff. Nothing ever comes out of these meetings. He followed up.
He followed up maybe three or four days after we all got back. He said, "Hey. Of course, we're having a good time, having some drinks. We talked to a lot of people. We talked about a lot of stuff, but let's really sit down and figure out if there's a there there, right?" We're looking at the properties for this company and he's like, "Hey, can you help with this?" No, I can't help with that. "Can you help with this?" No, I can't help with that. We wound up kind of going through a lot of different things and I said, "Well, what are you doing with this?" It happened to be the URL, the domain name Banks.com. B-A-N-K-S, Banks.com.
Harry: Was that the one out of all of them that was the most attractive to you in terms of like you could see the wheels spinning in terms of possibilities?
Chris Snyder: Yeah. The reason why it was attractive to me is because and I'll get into this a little bit today into my presentation about who Juhll is and what we've done in the past. I may have talked about it a lot in prior episodes, but my business partner and I both worked at one of the largest bank at that time. One of the largest lead gen companies, financial services lead gen companies, on the planet until the 2008 bubble burst and everybody imploded. We were working at one of those top companies. The company was spending over a hundred million dollars a year online. We're generating hundreds of thousands of leads for refinance and home equity and credit cards.
There was a whole slew of things that kind of major lead gen company did. My business partner and I had front row seats to that whole game. We've talked about on one of the shows how I came home with my stuff in a box. It was also at that company that I was asked ... Since the mortgage implosion happened, I was asked to leave. But basically we took those skills, my business partner and I took those skills and that attention to the lead gen framework in detail and how this all works. Effectively that's one of the reasons why we've been able to have an agency services business that has grown the way it's grown over the last 10 years. I kind of knew already what I was doing and it just happened to be.
As we went through site after site, well, this one does eCommerce, and this one does show tickets, and this one does, right? It was just on and on and on things that I didn't know that much about. I think as you get older, you start to realize what you're good at and what you want to focus on because that's where your real value comes from. I was like, "What are you doing with this, Banks.com?" I literally went into Google and I typed in it and I looked at the website and it was bad. It was really bad what they had not been doing with this asset, right? That's not a criticism.
When you're a company that has stretched in a lot of different directions, and I found myself in the same situation even as an agency services provider, you get yourself into these situations and you kind of just keep saying yes. Before you know it, you wind up with a portfolio of businesses or domain names or services maybe in our case that are really nice things to have, but they don't really translate into immediate revenue unless they get focus. You got to get focused, right? I think it became quickly apparent that the group that I was in discussions with were not focused on financial services. Not focused at all on financial services in this country. Not at all focused on lead gen in any way or what have you.
Harry: Or they had so much stuff on their plate that it really goes unfocused for them at all.
Chris Snyder: Correct. By the way, their strategic focus in my opinion is where it should be. It's in an up and coming artificial intelligence sort of I don't want to call it a revolution, but it's one of those things that in my view it just takes a long time to get that stuff done and that's their focus. I don't think that building a business like Banks.com is something that unless you really know what you're doing, you don't want to get into that because it gets sticky really fast. I looked at it and I was like, "You know, what's going on with this?" He said, "Let me get back to you. Let me talk to the CEO and the CFO and let's see what they want to do with this thing because clearly there's nothing going on."
They got back to me and they said, "Look, a lot of companies have talked to us about this. I think the number was between 15 and 17 companies had actually pitched them to do something meaningful with this domain. They said no to all of them for one reason or another. It's difficult to do deals with publicly held companies. If the company on the other side of the transaction is also a publicly held company, you can only imagine the amount of rigamarole, right?
Being independent like we've been since our inception and profitable and bootstrapped and everything, it's really just when I go into give a presentation or we talk about what we're going to do with something, it truly is like they're dealing with the person that can make the decisions, right? I'll call a lawyer. I know those people. They'll advise us on the actual terms and conditions of legalities and contract. But at the end of the day, they're not dealing with an army of strategy people from another publicly held company. They're dealing with someone who knows what they're doing and passionate about this business. I came in and I pitched them on what I think should happen with this domain.
I flew out to their location, gave them the presentation. The chief revenue officer was there. The guy I'd met in December of 2016, I pitched him in February of 2017. They liked it and they said, "Look, the domain's not for sale, but we'll license it to you. We're a publicly held company, so it's tricky. But here's the deal, we're not going to invest a penny. Not a penny. You've created a forecast, a five year plan, that we think is feasible. We all like it. We're going to get ourselves into a situation as partners where there's some revenue sharing and some equity and whatever." It's complicated and I'm not going to get into the details because it's not important.
But at the end of the day, we walked into this arrangement. The initial discussions started at a Christmas party in 2016 and the actual agreement was signed in June or July of 2017. This was a long-term enterprise. A lot of like blood, sweat and tears putting together a full blown strategy. What kind of business are we going to build? How are we going to build it? How are we going to fund it? It was a bit of a long journey on the agency's part to put this whole thing together.
Harry: How long did it take to put that presentation together?
Chris Snyder: If I get to lock myself in a room, I can have something like this done in a couple days. Since I know labor and I understand where my own labor and my own time goes, it probably took me about 30 to 40 hours to really get it into a spot where I was comfortable enough to give it to an executive at a publicly held company and actually try to get this deal done.
Harry: Had you done anything similar or was this the first time you were putting a presentation like this together?
Chris Snyder: No. The interesting part about this is and I think this is one reason, if you want to learn fast and you want to learn a lot and you want to be put into situations that are going to be challenge you, be a digital agency. Say every single day you know what you're doing and then go and actually express to an executive in a very professional way, in a very thoughtful way, like you do know what you're doing, this is how you're going to communicate, you have a plan, you have a "strategy," and you're ready to fill on that promise, and here's how you communicate it, right? I've been doing that for a long time with executives. 10 years ago before I came to this agency, just certainly was terrible at it.
I would say that building PowerPoint presentations has not ever been something that I've just been like, "Oh yeah. I can't wait to build that PowerPoint presentation," right? The reason why I think is because a lot of times people over complicate that stuff. Like they put all kinds of bells and whistles and dings and dongs and sliders and viewers and stuff that pops and then goes away. Nobody cares about that stuff. They just care about what the primary message and the goal is. The canvass that you paint on, which is obviously PowerPoint or Google Docs or whatever you guys want to use, you really need to figure out what the content is with no design whatsoever, and you really need to tell your story.
For me, being in financial services, advertising, being in lead gen, understanding a lot of the players already, clearly there was a lot of stuff I didn't know too. Yeah, it probably took me between 30 and 40 hours to put that thing together and get it to a spot where I really felt like, "Wow. I kind of know what the hell is going on here."
Harry: For the benefit of the listener, when you talk about a licensing deal as opposed to an outright purchase, what was the main thing there?
Chris Snyder: I think back then an outright purchase was something that although maybe affordable at the time didn't make a lot of sense because I wanted to spend that money on investing and building infrastructure and actually executing on the plan that I spent my own time and my own money together to even give the presentation, right? Even to take a step back, I think your question's around have you ever done this before? To answer it very plainly, no. I don't think anyone goes into any of these situations unless you're the kind of person that's always looking to be challenged and you're always looking to be put in a situation where you're uncomfortable.
If you're going to go skiing, I mean I don't recommend that if you've never been skiing before that you get dropped off on the top of a double-black diamond at Jackson Hole and jump off Corbet's. There's a difference between being stupid and putting yourself in some uncomfortable situations where you're still capable, but it's going to press you, right? This was one of those situations. I'm not generally a fan of the hey, fake it until you make it crowd. I will say though that a lot of things that happened in today's world and maybe in yesterday's world in generations well before us, I don't know that we ever put a man on the moon before.
Harry: Yeah. To your point, it's obviously not on the scale. It's not suicidal, but it is continuously, especially entrepreneurs, have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone because there's people doing it everyday. If we're not doing it to our grow our business and to grow ourselves, then we're going to fall behind.
Chris Snyder: I agree with that. I also agree and I'm getting a lot more clear about who I am kind of as a professional and where my spot is this world of being an entrepreneur and all that stuff. I don't know. One of the things that I've been told is I've got this chip on my shoulder or whatever. I just don't think that the person sitting next to me, if I work hard enough and I do as much as I can ... Me, as a human being, as much as I can do, there's no one that is better than me at certain things. When I look at stuff like this, even when I was a really young sales and business development person, I was the youngest.
At 24 years old, I was the youngest business development person at another publicly held company selling IT consulting services. I would frequently walk in the room with like 50 year old CIOs. Back then they were called CIOs. Everybody changes their names, but you get yourself into these situations and you really have to think if you want to be challenged that way. Do you really want to hang that on your head, to go apply for jobs that you're probably unqualified for, that you probably don't have any business being in or have any experience doing? Are you willing to put yourself in a situation where you're going to potentially look really silly? We're back to the skiing thing.
Are you willing to put yourself in a situation where if you're not focused and you fail, there's going to be some serious consequences, right? I actually seek that stuff out. I feel like it kind of helps me stay alive and it keeps me just living and motivated to do something bigger and better. But I really don't believe there's anything out there that without the proper focus and attention on my part and especially with the ... Look, you've got books you can buy on Amazon. You've got websites you can subscribe to. You've got courses you can take. There's all kinds of stuff you can do nowadays that I never had access to 20 years ago to get yourself up to speed.
There's no substitute for practical experience, right? I think that it would be amazing if every young person that had the will and the desire and some of the calculated fearlessness that I had to hook themselves up with a mentor to get through properly so you don't have to struggle so much, right? But at the end of the day, you're in this world. It's up to you. It's not up to your mommy or your daddy or your mentor or your friend or your wife. It's not up to anyone really. When the rubber meets the road, you got to make this shit happen, right?
Harry: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: Anyway, nope. Never done it before. Tremendous amount of preparation. Tremendous amount of just thinking in advance of any single question that could be possibly be asked of me while I was in that meeting to make sure I had an answer for it. Really doing a good job of being an expert in my industry and in my business, which was very helpful, right? There's somethings I didn't have to prepare for. Leveraging my network. I'm good friends with a patent and IP lawyer. This was a 26 page agreement. Had to run it by him. We also had another firm that we use at the agency. I mean there was probably between 30 and $50,000 over six months that I personally spent on getting this deal done.
From the initial conversation until the deal was done, which was a license agreement which I had never done before to your point, it probably cost me between 30 and $50,000.
Harry: Can you talk a little bit about your mindset going into this because I don't know that most people would be willing to make that investment or see the bigger picture because they would freak out and they'd feel like this is not worth my time, this is not worth putting this much money into it. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your thought process going through that.
Chris Snyder: Yeah. I think it's interesting that since I never really have failed at anything ... And let's be clear. Failure for me has never been an option. There's never been a safety net. There's never been that point where you're like, "Look, I can just go all in. If it doesn't work out, I'll move back into mommy and daddy's basement." Come on. That never was an option. It's never been an option, and I actually haven't lived at home since my senior year in high school. At the end of the day, when I go into situations like this, trying to understand what happens if I fail is not something I ever think about because I've never failed.
You know, I don't know if it's being also having played on a national championship football team and doing my fair share of winning there and being involved in athletics my whole life and probably pushing my boundaries on skiing in Utah over five years and doing stuff that may have been ill-advised, from surfing, there's things that I do that I don't know how to do when I start and I know that I will figure it out. Going into this situation and wondering. At the end of the discussion, I give them my best and then they do, "You know what, Chris." By the way, this thought never crossed my mind and this never happened. I'm just saying hypothetically getting to your question.
"Hey, you know what, Chris? Your presentation is a piece of shit. I don't know why you dragged your sorry ass in here and wasted all your time and effort and money because clearly you're not qualified to do anything except for go home and feed your dog." Right? That would be an extreme case in my mind of really getting it handed to me and failing. That has never happened. Does that thought ever cross my mind? No. The thought never crosses my mind because it's never happened. The reason why it'll never happen is because I'm always coming to win.
Harry: When you say you've never failed, a lot of people listening may call BS on that. I think it may have something to do with-
Chris Snyder: I am.
Harry: ... how you're defining failure.
Chris Snyder: I was going to get to that too and I frequently ... Well, frequently is all relative, but I've asked people before when is the last time you truly, truly failed? Here's my definition of failure, living in your car with like trying to figure out how to feed your family. That is failure. You really think about that, right? I mean I live in Los Angeles. You drive around. There are people that I wouldn't define them as human beings as failure, but I would say I look at stuff like that around me and I go, "Wow. That would truly be failing." I live in a nice house. I have a nice car, right? My kids go to good schools. They don't want for anything.
Our checks don't bounce, whoever writes checks nowadays, but it's just not anything that it would ever cross my mind. Failure to me is the ultimate like just literally being without anything and literally wanting ...
Harry: Hitting rock bottom.
Chris Snyder: Yeah, rock bottom. Exactly. It's never happened. I hope it never happens. Who knows? If it does, I know I will figure a way out of that rapidly, rapidly.
Harry: The other part of that you talked about was envisioning what your worst case scenario would have been if you had gone into this room and you had been laughed out because they said, "You're not prepared or clearly you weren't ready or this." I imagine that you do that often. Imagine what's the worst that can happen and then it never happens, right? That, of course, never happens, but I think mentally I do this sometimes as well. If you're mentally prepared for that, then you'll be able to dial it back because the reality is somewhere in between.
Chris Snyder: You know what's interesting? Some of my friends call me a pessimist and I always kind of shoot back at them that I'm a realist. I'm an optimist in certain situations, but very few. Maybe it's because of growing up in a military family or maybe it's because I've been a salesperson my whole life. Now, I'm an entrepreneur and a business owner. I can tell you right now, I've had my doses of failure, speed bumps or whatever you want to call them, right? For me, it's like plan for the worst, absolutely, every single time. Plan for the worst craziest shit to happen in that meeting and hope for the best. Here's the other thing, if you do your best, then you can hold your head high.
If you're well-grounded and you're surrounded by peers or colleagues or friends that are genuinely supportive of you as a human being. Even if you did your best and your best wasn't good enough, I would challenge you as a human being to figure out what you're really, really good at and start doing that stuff. Because it would only take a few meetings for you to go to and fail like that and beat yourself up and waste all your emotional energy when maybe you're better at painting ponies. I don't know. Look, I don't know. All I'm saying is I've got the mentality that shit's going to hit the fan. Here it comes, right? That deal is going to go through. Nope. The day before the CEO got fire ...
Like all contracts are on hold. Also, I think I'm a product of the times. I came out of college in 1998 and by the time I had just gotten going, 2001 happened. Every single technology company on the planet crashed and burned. It was a bloodbath, right? I was a sales guy. I had to deal with however many years of that bullshit, and then 2008 happened. This was not very long after 2001 happened. I decided to get into advertising and work for one of the top online advertisers and they happen to be in financial services and they happen to have the majority of their business on mortgage refinance with a majority of their business on major players like Ameriquest and Countrywide and name your flavor of the subprime week, right?
Everybody's rolling in it and then bam, here we go, right? Here we go again. I came out of that and my business partner and I basically built an agency on the back of one of the greatest recessions of all time, right? Now, here we are. Now, I am full blown, full throttle. I know exactly what these cycles look like. I've made it before. We'll make it again. I'm preparing for a meeting. I've seen this book before. I know what the table of contents is. You go check all your boxes and then you just start to deal in what you're really good at and what you're passionate about.
You look at the raw numbers and you say, "Look, I just need at bats. If I had more at bats, I'm going to win," because statistically that's how it works. That's how life works.
Harry: Are you ready to dive into the presentation?
Chris Snyder: Yeah. I mean look, I want to talk about this stuff a little bit casually. The only reason I want to talk to you about it casually and I want the listeners to hear is because most of the people I talk to are sophisticated investors or they're sophisticated executives at very large companies. I don't have to describe to them what lead gen is. I don't have to describe to them what fintech is. I don't have to describe to them how Wells Fargo or Allied Bank or LendingTree or any of these ... Those guys know how they make money, right? I don't think the consuming public knows.
Not that this podcast is for them, but I also don't think a lot of people who may listen to this podcast know. I know certainly the company that I was in partnership with and that I did my initial license agreement with, they certainly don't know as much about this as I do. What I'd like to do is just talk about it. I think we might have a couple segments on this, maybe one, two or three, kind of break it up a little and then mix in hopefully some life experiences like we started to do just now. I think that would be good.
Harry: Okay.
Chris Snyder: What I'll talk about today is marketplaces in general and also fintech in general. Fintech in general, I'm not going to get on Wikipedia and actually define it because I don't have that much attention to detail nor do I care, but it's basically the revolution that you've seen in kind of new financial services being supported by technology. Back in the day, if you weren't walking into a bank branch and that bank branch wasn't located on a corner that was near your house or near your work and you weren't meeting with a banker, literally going to meet with a banker, a person that had a name, that had a keyboard with a green screen in front of them, you weren't getting any money, right?
You weren't getting a personal loan. You weren't getting an auto loan. You weren't anything.
Harry: I was one of those guys in previous life.
Chris Snyder: Yeah. Honestly, I had a painful experience at a bank branch last week as part of trying to get this transaction done. Now, of course, we're talking about the difference in moving a lot of money versus moving something from PayPal to someone that you have to chip in on a big pan pizza, right? I mean this is a little bit of a different transaction. But at the end of the day, it shouldn't be different because I had a relationship with that bank since college. I mean I've had a relationship with this bank since I left college literally. That was 20 years ago. Wait. Yeah, that was 20 years ago. At the end of the day, I'm like why is this taking so long? Why is this hard?
You know me. You know me. Take my fingerprint, right? BTSA. Do something. You know my identity. You know how much money is in our bank account. I'm trying to move this money. I'm trying to conduct the transaction. I'm trying to set up a thing and you guys are literally making it impossible for me to stay patient during this process, right? I think what I want to talk a little bit about today is just fintech in general as I see it, which is financial technology and how technology is supporting not only banking, but other financial transactions and how it might be enabling people to do things that they were unable to do before, borrow money for small businesses or get loans, right?
Refinance their mortgage or whatever, get better insurance, right? Get better health insurance or get better auto insurance or any kind of financial transaction that you can possibly think of that is a pain in the ass right now. I would really love for Banks.com to be the place where everybody gathers to get stuff done in a completely transparent and trustworthy way that is loaded with efficiency, and it allows you to really be confident about the decisions that you're making and get the best deal. At the same, get the best deal, right?
I'd like to introduce our listeners to the fintech space, a little bit of the landscape, how big the market is, some of the names that they might recognize in the space, maybe how they make money, right? Feel free to fire away. Fintech investment in the United States, and this is for the first half of 2018 which would have ended up in June, globally has seen $57 billion in investment in fintech companies. That's investment. That's not revenue. That's not margin. That's investment. During the same period, the United States fintech marketplace, companies received about $14 billion. That $14 billion has come across about 427 deals. I mean think about that. Put that in perspective.
You probably have seen commercials for Credit Karma. You've probably seen commercials for LendingTree. You've probably seen commercials for banks. SoFi Bank is considered a fintech bank, right?
Harry: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: Think about the size and the scale of the investment in this particular space, right? Then also, and this is what gets me up every morning and gets me up everyday is we are the proud owners of Banks.com, right? The opportunity is massive.
Harry: That's a great background on all things leading up to the purchase of Banks.com, Chris. Let's take a pause here and then we'll pick it up in the next episode with the overview of fintech and a deeper dive into the Banks.com strategy.
Audio: Thanks for listening to Snyder Showdown. Visit snydershowdown.com to see the full show notes for every episode, which includes a recap as well as any links mentioned in the show. Because it's Chris, we'll definitely have a few awesome quotes that you can share. There you'll also be able to sign up for our newsletter so you're notified when new episodes are ready. Tune in next week.
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