E256: What Fintech Will Look Like in 5 Years - Steve McLaughlin (FT Partners)

What does it take to build the most dominant FinTech investment bank in the world—starting from a $99 incorporation and a used laptop? In this episode, I speak with Steve McLaughlin, Founder, CEO, and Managing Partner of FT Partners, widely regarded as the leading investment bank in FinTech. Steve has personally closed hundreds of the biggest M&A, capital raise, and IPO advisory transactions in the industry—while pioneering a completely different approach to value creation in investment banking. We cover everything from the humble beginnings of FT Partners, to Steve’s philosophy of “never die,” to his groundbreaking thesis on AI, tokenization, defensibility in FinTech, and why he believes we’re entering a new era of trillion-dollar global financial technology companies. We also dive into the incentives model Steve built that has generated some of the largest fees in the history of investment banking—and why clients keep coming back.