Trust, stablecoins, and the AI margin squeeze:What McKinsey and QED's fintech report means for banks

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast, where we explore financial services together with an eye on technology, innovation, emerging models, and changing expectations. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. Fintech just lived through four distinct ages — pioneers, growth-at-all-costs, the 2021-22 hype cycle, and the brutal reset that followed. Now we're in a fifth: bigger, more profitable, and more disciplined than any version that came before it. Stripe's reportedly eyeing a six-figure-billion IPO. Fintech listings tripled investor appetite this year. And yet talk to anyone who lived through 2021 and they'll tell you this doesn't feel anything like that boom. To make sense of that contradiction, I sat down with the authors of a new joint report from McKinsey and QED Investors — two firms that sit on opposite sides of the table from the fintechs they study. Max Flötotto is a senior partner at McKinsey, where he leads the firm's global retail banking practice and coordinates its fintech work across Europe. Mike Packer is a partner at QED, leading growth-stage investing globally for a firm that's been backing fintech since its earliest days, nearly two decades now. We dig into the report's biggest findings: why the simplest version of banking — collecting deposits, making loans — is structurally at risk if customers start letting their own AI agents shop for the best rate; why fintechs have, for the first time, actually overtaken incumbents on trust in Europe, even as banks have closed much of the product gap; and the massive spread in how seriously banks are actually taking AI, from "talking about thinking about it" to rebuilding their entire operating model around it. We close with each of them picking the one trend, out of six in the report, they think matters most for the next decade. Max, Mike, welcome to the show.