🧠 Mr Beast Just Bought A Bank*

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Weekly Rant 📣

🧠 Mr Beast Just Bought A Bank*

Well, not quite. 

He bought Step — a 5-year-old fintech for teens with 7m customers, built on the rent-a-charter model (and yes, on that Evolve). But what he’s really doing is applying the playbook that turned chocolate bars into a $250m revenue business: take a commoditized product, wrap it in 1.4 billion unique viewers, and own the relationship.

If it works, he’s not building a teen banking app. He’s building the primary financial institution for the next generation.

As a content creator with some entrepreneurial aspirations myself, I’ve always watched Mr Beast and taken notes.

Now he’s coming to Fintech, you should too.

(*Yes the choice of “bank” was intentional ragebait)

The Obsessive who created a new business model

Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, is by his own admission, a kid who should have studied harder but just wanted to make YouTube videos.

Starting in 2012 as MrBeast6000, he spent five years in the digital wilderness. For every video he made, he dissected hundreds. Jimmy famously dropped out of college after two weeks to spend 15 hours a day in a "mastermind" group with other creators, obsessively reverse-engineering the YouTube algorithm. They studied thumbnails, retention curves, and pacing with the rigor of hedge fund analysts.

That last detail matters. This isn’t a celebrity lending his name to a product. This is someone who spent a decade treating attention as a science — measuring what works, discarding what doesn’t, and reinvesting every dollar of output back into the system.

Once he secured his first $10,000 brand deal, he didn’t buy a car; he gave the cash to a homeless man and filmed it. This birthed the "MrBeast Flywheel." Every dollar earned from a video was immediately reinvested into a bigger, more expensive video. By the time he recreated Squid Game in real life (2021), he had shifted from a "content creator" to a media conglomerate.

Today, Jimmy is the first creator to cross 1.4 billion subscribers. But the important number isn’t subscribers. It’s Feastables.

Mr Beast makes more money from his chocolate bars than he does from his content business. In 2024, Feastables generated $250m in revenue and a $20m net, with distribution in Walmart, Target and 7-Eleven.

He spent a year on product formulation to ensure it beat Hershey’s in blind taste tests because, as he puts it:

The Feastables playbook is simple: take a commoditized product (chocolate), wrap it in distribution nobody else can match (460m subs), and obsess over quality so the second purchase happens without a video. Now he’s applying the same logic to banking. If he can sell $250M of chocolate, how much can he make by owning the very wallet his fans use to buy it?

Who’s Step?

Step is unapologetically the finance app for teens. Not for parents and teens, but for the teens themselves.  Launched with the mission to give the "unbanked" youth a head start, it bypasses traditional barriers with no-fee accounts and a unique credit-building Visa card that works like a debit card but reports to credit bureaus.

The strategy was high-growth, high-burn: they raised $175M in equity and $300M in debt in 2021, peaking at a $1B valuation. Their cap table reads like a "Who’s Who" of the creator economy, featuring Stephen Curry and Charli D'Amelio.

At a glance

• Step runs on Evolve Bank & Trust who hold the deposits and provide the FDIC insurance (up to $250k). (Yes, that Evolve)

• Step’s "killer app" is its Secured Card program. To a teen, it looks and acts like a debit card—you can only spend what you have. But technically, it’s a secured credit card. Every transaction is reported to credit bureaus as a "paid-on-time" credit payment. So teens start college with a 700+ credit score

• It’s increasingly gamifying and expanding its offering, with a $4.99/mo subscription (with more cashback) and perks, “play to earn” giving rewards for playing video games, and early pay which gives cash advances between allowances.

That credit score is the stickiness mechanism. It’s not just a spending account — it’s a financial identity that compounds over time. The longer you stay, the more valuable your credit history becomes. This makes Step fundamentally stickier than a branded debit card.

Step hasn’t published revenue numbers. Teen debit economics are thin — limited by interchange on low-balance accounts. Most providers layer subscriptions and premium features to make the math work. 

With blended interchange of roughly 100-240 bps of transaction value and a typical BaaS split of 70/30 (fintech/bank partner), Step’s revenue per user is modest. That’s precisely why MrBeast’s distribution is the missing piece — it eases the pressure on paid marketing and pricing by making customer acquisition nearly free.

The Attention Arbitrage

Attention is MrBeast’s superpower. Beast Industries controls a marketing funnel that most banks would have to spend billions to build. He has an audience nearly 4x larger than the Super Bowl and he speaks to them at least once per week.

To understand the scale of this vertical integration, look at what each side brings. This isn’t a marketing deal; it’s a merger of attention and infrastructure.

Mr Beast can bring customers without high ad spend, gives them a unique brand as a moat, and new routes to revenue through new products. Most banks would kill for the kind of distribution he brings. 

The pattern should look familiar.

Unlike a chocolate bar, which is a one-off transaction at Walmart, a bank account is "sticky." By owning the wallet, Jimmy moves from being a content creator to a utility provider. Most people stay with their first bank for decades. By capturing 13-year-olds today, Beast Industries is building a 50-year customer relationship.

MrBeast has unique ways to acquire, engage and activate his audience. When most brands struggle for attention, MrBeast has all of it and can turn that into unique experiences and make more from the data. Imagine:

• Beast mode savings - where every transaction rounded up to $1 forms a part of the philanthropic giving in a video

• Spending insights - knowing where teenagers are spending money to inform the next CPG brand for Beast Industries

• Brand partnerships - Imagine the discounts brands would give to Step users in return for being aligned to a Mr Beast video

There’s a flywheel here.

Couldn’t he have licensed his brand to others? Probably yes, but his playbook is to monetize the audience directly, capturing the most value. Licensing would provide a royalty cut, but owning the business — like Feastables and now Step — allows him to capture the entire LTV of his 460M+ subscribers. His goal is vertical integration: turning attention into equity by owning the consumer’s wallet and consumption.

The New Topology (and economics) of Trust

Why is MrBeast’s distribution different from, say, a bank buying Super Bowl ads? It’s not just reach. It’s the kind of trust.

Traditional bank marketing asks for trust at the point of sale. Creator distribution arrives with trust pre-loaded. That’s why the CAC math is different — MrBeast isn’t paying to build trust, he’s monetizing trust that already exists.

In 2026, Customer Acquisition Cost for neobanks has skyrocketed past $150–$300 due to ad-market saturation. Teen banking is a "low-balance" game with thin margins. If Step spends $200 to acquire a teen who keeps $50 in their account, the LTV won’t break even for years. MrBeast likely displaces 90% or more of the ad spend singlehandedly.

Creator trust is harder to build (it takes years of consistent content) but cheaper to convert (near-zero CAC at point of sale). 

That’s the attention arbitrage. 

What challenges will they face?

The "MrBeast Bank" sounds like an unstoppable juggernaut, but in fintech, the higher you fly, the harder the regulatory floor hits. Jimmy won’t only after to fight for attention; Step (like almost everyone in Fintech) is fighting the "Ghost of Synapse" and a market that is rapidly moving past the rent-a-charter model.

1. Step runs on Evolve Bank & Trust. As Jason Mikula has relentlessly documented, Evolve was the primary partner bank caught in the Synapse bankruptcy—a disaster that saw $265M in customer funds vanish into a "reconciliation black hole." Evolve is under a Federal Reserve Consent Order. For MrBeast, this means his "growth engine" is tethered to a bank that regulators are watching with a microscope

2. Competitors are getting charters: The "BaaS" (Banking-as-a-Service) model is becoming a middle-man trap. Rivals like SoFi, Varo, and Monzo have secured their own banking charters. This allows them to keep 100% of the interest and interchange revenue.

3. Money is a brand promise you can’t break: Can a brand known for "I Blew Up My House" convince parents to let their teenagers store their life savings there? One technical glitch or frozen account—like those seen during the Synapse collapse—could spark a PR crisis that a "sorry" video can't fix.

I think these are solvable problems. 

The combination of MrBeast's influence and Step's existing infrastructure creates a unique, digitally native banking ecosystem. 

The question is how quickly "Beast Bank" can leverage this advantage to not just capture teens, but to evolve into a full-service financial institution that appeals to the entire generation.

The Primacy Play

Obviously not. JPMorgan Chase isn't losing sleep over a YouTuber buying a teen app. Most "Tier 1" banks don't even try to serve teenagers directly—the unit economics are too small and the regulatory "know your customer" (KYC) requirements for minors are too high-touch.

But play the tape forward.

• A decade is a long time: In a decade, a 13-year-old "Beast Bank" user becomes a 23-year-old entering the workforce. If Step hits its projected growth of 15 million users by 2030

• To win primacy: If that works it will be the primary financial hub for a massive cohort of high-earning young professionals.

• Global ambition: In February 2026, industry reports suggest Beast Industries is already eyeing "Super-App" status in Southeast Asia and India. That moves from 10s of millions to 100s of millions. 

So maybe JP Morgan isn’t panicking, but what about Cash App or SoFi?

• Vs Cash App. Their sweet spot is younger Gen Z and lower-income users who value peer-to-peer (P2P) speed. Jimmy can out-market Block’s "Cash App Fridays" with a single video.

• Vs SoFi. SoFi targets the "HENRYs" (High Earners, Not Rich Yet), typically college-aged and up. By the time a student reaches college, they may already be so deep in the Step/Beast ecosystem

By 2035 Step customers will enter their  peak earning years. The age when they need mortgages, car loans, investment accounts, and insurance. Boosting customer retention by just 5% increases bank profits by 25-95%. The teen debit interchange isn’t the prize. The lifetime value of owning the first financial relationship for an entire generation is.

Ultimately, the threat to banks isn't that MrBeast is a better banker. It's that he's a better onramp. While banks are busy buying stadium naming rights, Jimmy is buying the very first financial experience of the next generation

Virality gets the first purchase. Quality gets the second.

That’s the test. 

If Step can deliver a genuinely good banking product — not a branded debit card, but real credit building, real savings tools, real financial health — then 460 million subscribers become 460 million potential customers.

The scariest part for incumbents? They won’t see it coming.

Because they’ll be too busy looking at the balance sheet.

When the competition is for who owns the first financial relationship of a generation.

ST.

4 Fintech Companies 💸

1. Pace - AI Operations partner for insurance

Pace helps (as the name suggest) speed up workflows in insurance like submission in take, policy serving (e.g. renewals or audits), and preparing claims files. Pace is designed to replace business process outsourcing (BPO) offshore providers, with faster, more accurate operations.  

🧠 The Harvey for Insurance? Their marqee customer is Prudential, a major insurance company, and now they’re looking to expand. In 2023 (three years ago) I wrote a piece called “From outsourcing to AI sourcing” and now its incredible seeing that play out. Amazon just announced they’re cutting 16,000 jobs. The AI job losses are here. Debate over. If you’re an insurance company you can’t not adopt this stuff.

2. Venre -  Wealth Creation for HENRYs

Venre sells private market funds to high income consumers in Europe. It offers a range of strategies and funds in real estate, credit, private equity and venture capital. To date the company has done $1bn of deals with a 62% ROE. It packages this in a simple mobile app with 1:1 financial coaches available virtually. 

🧠 This service is registered in the UK and Saudi Arabia and is Sharia compliant. It’s exceptionally well targeted at the emerging upper middle class in MENA. That dual licencing structure gives it access to a growing diaspora as more first and second generation british citizens of the muslim faith look for sharia compliant investments and seek growth opportunities across the middle east.

3. Guardrail - Real-time security for onchain finance

Guardrail is a continuous monitoring solution for DeFi protocols and projects to present and detect possible exploits. With $4.5bn lost to crypto exploits in 2024, protocols are switching from in-house solutions and its protecting more than $5bn of value today.

🧠Real-time, 24/7 finance is great until someone exploits it. While there are solutions to protect your funds, the protocols often sit out in the open leaving them vulnerable to detection. As the onchain finance industry is maturing, so is the tooling. 

4. All Scale - Self custody Neobank for micro SMBs

All scale offers a global bank account in seconds with “no bank applications and no seed phrases.” Businesses can create invoices with a single link, can sell via social channels and manage payroll from the app. 

🧠 If you were building Square for the global south it would look like this. This type of service is now so simple and cheap to build it brings tens of millions of SMBs into profitability. But I worry about three things when I look a little deeper. Firstly, APTOS is a major investor. Aptos is a payments-first chain that’s considered well-engineered but has low volume compared to others. So is this only using Aptos because it got incentives to do so? Secondly, if that’s the case what’s this apps right to win? How will they get distribution as a real business? Finally, we’ve just seen with Kontigo that stablecoins are much riskier than they appear to be. What’s the AML and sanctions screening like here? And the legal nexus. 

Things to know 👀

1. Robinhood’s full-year earnings boosted by Prediction Markets.

Robinhood reported total revenue of $4.5 billion, up 52% year over year, but the quarter at $1.27bn was below Wall St estimates at $1.34bn. Quarterly transaction-based revenue rose 15% to $776 million, but Cryptocurrency revenue declined 38% to $221 million. Net income for the quarter was $605 million. With Robinhood Gold and Prediction markets driving significant growth in “other revenue.”

🧠 Robinhood’s plan to be the everything app is working. Robinhood Gold (the card) passed 4.5m users, and total platform assets reached $324bn, and their net deposits continue to grow. And everything now includes predictions.

🧠 CEO of Robinhood: "We're in a prediction markets supercycle" - I agree. But it troubles me🫤. By the numbers he's right but there's a lot going on here we need to analyze. They had 12 billion event contracts traded in 2025 with a $300M+ revenue run rate. That’s in the first full year of the product.

🧠 Robinhood is betting big (or predicting?) that events contracts will be a huge business. They closed Rothera, a JV with Susquehanna to run its own CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse. This changes their economics. Right now Robinhood splits $0.02/contract with Kalshi's exchange. With Rothera, they capture full unit economics. On 12 billion contracts, that math matters.

🧠 Prediction markets’ revenue is filling a hole left by crypto, another very speculative asset. Crypto revenue fell 38% in Q4. So prediction markets are the new engagement hook to get people in the app. Come for the speculation, stay for the 401 (k) and Robinhood Gold. It might be effective at getting people into the app, but is it good for long-term financial health?

🧠 Just like crypto. Prediction markets could have a rocky regulatory path in their future. 20+ lawsuits and cease-and-desist orders from state regulators and tribal groups, and the Massachusetts AG argues 75% of contract volume is sports. The NCAA called it "potentially catastrophic."

🧠 Are event contracts CFTC-regulated derivatives or unlicensed gambling? The CFTC has said it has jurisdiction, and the new CFTC chair just withdrew the 2024 rule that would have restricted sports contracts. Federal regulators are giving them a tailwind not a headwind. Long term we have to answer whether federal preemption holds against state gambling law. That question may end up at the Supreme Court.

🧠 Tenev says prediction markets will reach "trillions in annual volume over time." In an interview with TBPN, he then also says he wants the whole family, including kids, using Robinhood moments later.

🧠 We already have an affordability crisis. We already have a generation speculating instead of saving. I worry this makes the trend worse, not better. And yet Robinhood itself has some of the VERY BEST products for long-term savings and finances. Such a dichotomy of a business.

2. BlackRock buys $UNI tokens and lists BUIDL on Uniswap

BUIDL — their $180B tokenized Treasury fund is now on Uniswap, with Securitize handling institutional whitelisting and Wintermute providing liquidity. It will be tradeable on UniswapX, a marketplace where professional traders bid to provide users with the best possible price.BlackRock also bought the protocol token.

🧠 This is the “Bitcoin ETF moment” for DeFi. Three years ago when BlackRock launched a Bitcoin ETF it signalled a massive shift in institutional credibility for digital assets. It’s absolutely clear, BlackRock is all in on Tokenization for the long term.

🧠 This is a massive, massive turnaround in fortunes for Uniswap. The same Uniswap token that was under investigation by the previous SEC.

🧠 Right now this is small. Qualified purchasers only. $5M+ in assets, and a handful of whitelisted market makers.

🧠 But the Securitize CEO said something most people will skip past: "The infrastructure we're announcing will work equally with retail products." They're testing with institutions, but long-term, they’re building for everyone.

🧠 BUIDL on Uniswap means tokenized treasuries that are composable with stablecoins on decentralized infrastructure. And that is a model for the future of all markets. 24/7 settlement, yield-bearing collateral moving on-chain, and treasury management on DeFi rails.

Good Reads 📚

1. The Agentic Commerce Tracker

Flagship has a neat set of definitions and tracking methodology of large e-commerce merchants usage of agentic anything. 

• Generative AI is a shopping experience assisted by AI, nearly all large merchants have something along these lines. 

• Agentic commerce assists the buying journey but doesn’t complete payment. Travel and B2B software is starting to help build carts or itinerary. 

• Agentic payments is where AI agents can initiate and complete checkout with tokens. Amazon, Microsoft and Shopify have started this but volumes are low. 

Tweets of the week 🕊

That's all, folks. 👋

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(1) All content and views expressed here are the authors' personal opinions and do not reflect the views of any of their employers or employees.

(2) All companies or assets mentioned by the author in which the author has a personal and/or financial interest are denoted with a *. None of the above constitutes investment advice, and you should seek independent advice before making any investment decisions.

(3) Any companies mentioned are top of mind and used for illustrative purposes only.

(4) A team of researchers has not rigorously fact-checked this. Please don't take it as gospel—strong opinions weakly held

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