BEAST BUYS BANK
Distribution Eats Execution
Mr. Beast Acquires Step: Distribution vs. Execution in Consumer Finance.
New Tenant or a New King?
I've been watching the fintech graveyard fill up for years. Synapse. Evolve. A hundred well-intentioned apps that couldn't figure out the one thing that actually matters in consumer finance: how do you get customers to come to you, trust you, and give you their money? It's not a technology problem. It never was.
So when the news broke that Mr. Beast had acquired Step, I actually stopped what I was doing. For the first time in a long time, someone with genuine distribution — not venture-funded fake distribution, not paid-acquisition-disguised-as-growth distribution, but actual hundreds-of-millions-of-eyeballs distribution — just walked into a space where distribution is the entire game.
This is either going to be one of the most interesting fintech stories of the decade or a spectacular cautionary tale. Let me explain why both are live possibilities.
THE CUSTOMER ACQUISITION PROBLEM
One of the great unsolved problems in fintech has been the cost of customer acquisition, especially for younger people. Why?
America is over-banked, with roughly one bank for every 80,000 Americans — and some of those Americans are children, so the number of people who actually need bank accounts is even smaller. JPMorgan Chase alone has over 80 million customers, which means a lot of banks are operating at sub-scale.
And young people, frankly, don't like banks. They're not going to walk into a community bank and fill out paperwork with a pen. They're also not falling for soulless mega-banks that feel, to borrow Matt Taibbi's framing, like vampire squids. What they will tolerate are companies that feel like them — over-exuberant, slightly nihilistic, or just plain weird. Robinhood, SoFi, Block. There's also a small cohort of earnest players trying to do financial education with a younger vibe. Betterment was an early attempt. Step was another.
Which makes it particularly interesting that Step was just acquired by Mr. Beast.
BEAST INDUSTRIES: A REAL MEDIA EMPIRE
For anyone in institutional finance who doesn't know who Mr. Beast is — and I say this with zero condescension — the man is an absolute powerhouse of marketing. He has the most subscribers on all of YouTube. Not a category. All of it. Roughly 469 million as of this writing, averaging 100 million views per day, with over 112 billion video views to date. He is, simply put, a content production machine.
His audience skews hard Gen Z. If you're reading this and you've never seen a Mr. Beast video, congratulations — you are officially old by some definition of old.
More importantly, he understands something that legacy media has completely failed to grasp: distribution is the most powerful thing in the modern attention economy. Do you own the customer relationship? Do they trust you? Will they come back?
In an age where AI is enabling a growing tsunami of slop on social media, in a time where legacy players are desperately scrambling to connect with Gen Z, Beast Industries is absolutely destroying Hollywood. Let that sink in. Mr. Beast has more audience than JPMorgan Chase — the largest bank in the world.
The media empire has already begun branching into products. Feastables started as chocolate bars and has expanded into broader snacks, generating approximately $250 million in revenue and $20 million in profit in 2024. As a new entrant into a brutally competitive category, that performance is essentially unheard of. It happens because his distribution is something most companies can only dream of.
FINTECH IS HARDER THAN IT LOOKS
I have some direct experience here, having had a window into Flourish when we were building it at Stone Ridge. Consumer fintech is hard for three reasons that compound on each other.
First: distribution. Finding customers and rolling them in is the hardest part. When you see platforms that failed to scale (Bluevine) relative to their capabilities, or had to spend fortunes on customer acquisition just to make headway in a crowded space (Step), you understand why valuations in that space have collapsed.
Second: you have to do two completely contradictory things simultaneously. You need the irrational optimism of a founder — seeing something that doesn't exist, creating it, betting everything on it. And you need the irrational pessimism of a professional risk manager — seeing what's going to break, saying no when everyone else says yes, staying patient while others are making money. Most financial institutions solve this by having different people do each job so they can fight it out and reach some kind of harmonious balance. Fintech founders usually have to do both, which is why so many of them break.
Third: regulatory survival. The "move fast and break things" ethos is a category error in financial services. Regulators exist to prevent things from breaking. Partners need to perform due diligence. If you're three 20-year-old college dropouts working out of a broom closet who answer "what's that?" when someone asks about your AML program, that creates friction. These things matter because problems in this space get big and ugly fast — just ask Synapse and Evolve, who are currently missing tens of millions in customer funds and heading toward bankruptcy.
The result: very few successful fintechs compared to the number of people who think they can build one. Some companies have independently cracked it — Mercury, Block, Stripe. But many others, with decent core offerings, have stagnated on the customer acquisition problem. Companies like, well, Step.
THE ACQUISITION
Step is a fintech app with relationships with banks and investing platforms, where Step acquires customers and white-labels services from underlying entities like Evolve Bank. Step has about 7 million customers, with above-average Gen Z penetration, but has struggled to monetize them or find a working business model. Their nearest competitors — Revolut and CashApp — have dramatically more scale and better starting positions. Step needed to grow to survive: growth brings better partners, better economics, and better ability to market.
This is where the acquisition is fascinating. Step is probably more valuable to Mr. Beast than to almost anyone else on the planet, because he has built-in distribution to tens to hundreds of millions of potential customers. Remember: Chase has less of an audience than Mr. Beast. Step has already focused on financial education, credit building, and financial literacy. The brand aligns with Beast Industries' stated goals.
But having distribution and executing on it are two different things. This pathway depends on two questions.
One: Can Mr. Beast get the right team in place to manage Step? They're going to face gnarly build-partner-buy decisions on the banking front, the investing front, the crypto front, and more. They'll need to manage risk with an iron fist because the fastest way to lose trust with your audience is to lose their money. If the candy bar sucks, they just don't buy another candy bar. If you zero their bank account, you will never get their business again. It is a categorically different kind of risk.
Two: How much of a priority will this be, and how much do they trust the team they put in place? With the right team and genuine commitment, you have the makings of something that could rapidly become one of the larger banks or fintechs in America — and perhaps globally, given Beast's scale. But Rome was not built in a day, and the final version of Step that banks tens of millions and offers best-in-class banking, FX, investing, and crypto services will not come easily. It will face stiff competition from Robinhood, Coinbase, Schwab, Chase, and more.
None of them have Mr. Beast's distribution. It's unlikely any of them could replicate it. A challenger with an attribute no incumbent can match has just stepped onto the field.
THE STABLECOIN PLAY
So what can Beast Industries do beyond just distributing Step to Americans?
There is a form of technology that is very good at bridging global markets and enabling money flows across borders — which could be ideal for someone with hundreds of millions of viewers across countries worldwide.
What if Mr. Beast launches a stablecoin?
The biggest problems in the stablecoin world are simple: distribution and UI/UX. With the GENIUS Act, the regulatory framework and reserve requirements are largely solved. Stablecoins cross borders — so even if Beast audience members can't onboard directly with Step, they could access a related Beast product to hold their funds in USD.
These are the kinds of disruptive moves that are available to Mr. Beast in a way that are simply not available to players without his distribution channel. They're also the kind of outside-the-box decisions that can transform the Step acquisition from a decent strategic move into an exceptional one that creates a genuine financial powerhouse.
After all, if this works, Mr. Beast will complete one of the biggest celebrity-to-business-mogul transformations in modern history.
If it doesn't work — well, history is replete with examples of spectacular bank failures.
