1/ Excited about this partnership between @PrivacyHQ and @1Password for lots of reasons.

One of them is that I've joined http://Privacy.com  as its General Counsel. https://twitter.com/PrivacyHQ/status/1308407234926383105

2/ After I left Stripe, I began to get pings and requests from friends about neobanks and card programs. One of the most frequent was whether I knew anyone at Stripe that could help them get their consumer card offering onto Stripe's Issuing APIs.

3/ At Stripe I worked with the issuing team, and their only offering was commercial credit BINs for commercial use cases. Based on these conversations with friends, it seems that this is still the case for Stripe.

All of them eventually got deactivated for consumer use cases.

4/ From these conversations an interesting goldilocks pattern emerged.

Lots of pre-seed teams, looking for consumer card issuing API support, but no one to serve them.

5/ Co's like Galileo or Marqeta were charging large upfront fees. Banks didn't want them as program managers due to lack of compliance or legal chops. Stripe was commercial only and limited in what it could provide in its Issuing APIs.

6/ I had some conversations with folks about starting a FinTech to fill the space. But the interesting thing is everyone I spoke with said I should just keep watching @bolingj and his co-founders @PrivacyHQ

7/ About a week later, @PrivacyHQ had its APIs emerge from stealth, where they were being used by a handful of really great card-focused companies. It was basically the same product I had been carrying around in my head, and it perfectly filled the need my startup friends had.

8/ I'm grateful to Bo, Jason, David, Such and all the others that chatted with me and eventually asked if I wanted to join them as they built one of the next great FinTech infrastructure companies.

9/ Card acceptance is a massive space, with legacy players like WorldPay and Fiserv, plus "newer" entrants in Square, Stripe, PayPal, Adyen and the likes of Yapstone. Large banks also play a huge role.

I strongly believe card issuance will look similarly in the next 10 years.

10/ Today, you see card issuance volume locked up on TSYS, Jack Henry and Fiserv. "Newer" companies like I2C, Marqeta and Galileo have barely scratched the surface. And plenty of space for new entrants like Stripe, Apto and (already live -- not just a press release) Privacy.

11/ I'm excited to join the Privacy team on its journey forward. If you're in the card issuance space and want to join as a customer, or are in FinTech and want to join as an employee -- my DMs should be open. You can also find us at http://www.privacy.com 

12/ I'm still going to tweet FinTech, regulatory, NBA and Bay Area housing screeds here. But I'll also be using @privacymatt1 for company responses and anything that may need a more official touch. Feel free to give it a follow (but note that it'll be quiet for a while).