In 1850, a small freight outfit called American Express started running crates up and down the northeastern seaboard. Trunks. Bank notes. Packages that few trusted to the U.S. Mail. It was, in every sense that mattered at the time, a shipping company.
Fifty years later, almost nobody thought of American Express as a shipping company anymore. They thought of it when they thought of money or credit. The traveler’s check, the money order, and eventually the card sitting in your wallet right now all grew out of a business that discovered, almost by accident, that the real value was in moving what was inside the box, not the box itself.
I think about that story every single time I look at Elon Musk’s X Money.
Here’s what I mean.
Everybody’s watching the storefront right now. The money-transmitter licenses. The Visa Inc. (V) partnership. The debit card. The headlines asking whether X, a 600-million-user platform formerly known as Twitter, can really become a bank. That’s a fair question, and it’s the one every financial reporter in the country is chasing this summer.
I’m chasing something else.
Because here’s the thing about a financial system as ambitious as the one Musk is building: it doesn’t run on vision. It runs on plumbing. Somebody has to verify that the person opening an account is actually a person, and not a bot running a fraud ring out of an apartment in Eastern Europe.
Somebody has to watch every transaction in real time and flag the ones that look like money laundering. Somebody has to keep the whole system standing up under a cyberattack. None of that work is glamorous. None of it will ever get a press release with Musk’s name in the headline.
And that is exactly why almost nobody in the market is paying attention to it yet.
I’ve spent the better part of this year mapping the companies that sit underneath the biggest fintech story of the decade, and I keep coming right back to the same conclusion…
The picks-and-shovels crowd already made the obvious plays. Visa is a $600 billion company. Everybody who reads a financial newspaper already owns it, or already knows they should. The stocks I actually get excited about are smaller and still mostly invisible to Wall Street. They’re the ones handling fraud, identity, and compliance so that a system built on top of a social media app doesn’t collapse in year one.
Today I want to walk you through five of them. Some of these are names I’ve already put real conviction behind in Innovation Investor, some of them have already started moving, and I think the move is just getting started. Consider this the first layer of the map. There’s a lot more underneath it, and I’ll continue to dig into the deeper layers, the parts of this story that touch X Money directly, in the weeks and months ahead in Hypergrowth Investing.
Let’s get into it.
The Boring Businesses That Get Rich
Every big financial technology shift in history has followed the same pattern. The company everyone talks about gets the headlines. The companies nobody talks about get the earnings.
When the credit card industry exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, the story in the newspapers was about Diners Club and BankAmericard and the new plastic in your wallet. The money, longer term, went to the clearinghouses and the data processors quietly built to move all that transaction volume behind the scenes, invisible operators that most people alive today still couldn’t name. When online payments took off in the late 1990s, the story was about the flashy new dot-com storefronts. The durable winners were the boring processors and fraud engines sitting behind the checkout button.
X Money is shaping up to be the same story, just faster and louder because Musk is the one telling it.
So here’s my framework, and it’s a simple one. Whatever the front-end app looks like, whatever the marketing calls it, a financial platform serving hundreds of millions of users needs four things underneath it that have nothing to do with the brand: it needs to know who its users actually are, it needs to catch fraud before it happens, it needs to satisfy regulators without a single gap in the paperwork, and it needs infrastructure strong enough that a single bad actor can’t take the whole system down.
Every company that owns a piece of that foundation gets paid whether X Money becomes the biggest fintech launch in history or merely a big one. That’s the setup I like. I don’t need to guess exactly how big X Money gets. I just need the rails underneath it to keep growing, and they will.
Now let’s talk stocks.
1. Nasdaq Inc. (NDAQ): The Company That Catches the Bad Stuff
Most people think of Nasdaq Inc. (NDAQ) as a stock exchange, and for most of its history, that’s exactly what it was. Over the past decade, though, Nasdaq has built a second business that I think matters more to its future than the exchange ever will.
That business is Verafin, a fraud and financial crime detection platform Nasdaq now sells directly to banks. Verafin sits inside the transaction flow of hundreds of financial institutions across North America, scanning for the patterns that suggest money laundering, sanctions violations, or plain old theft, and flagging them before they become a headline or a regulatory fine.
Here’s why that matters for a platform like X Money. Any company handling real money at scale isn’t just moving deposits and processing payments. It’s legally required to watch every single transaction, catch the suspicious ones, and report them to regulators in real time, with no gaps. You can’t do that with a spreadsheet and good intentions. You need software built specifically for it, and Verafin is exactly that software, already trusted and already deployed at scale.
The market still prices Nasdaq mostly off its exchange business. I think that’s a mistake. As financial platforms proliferate and the compliance requirements around them tighten, the demand for exactly what Verafin does only grows. This is the kind of recurring, regulator-mandated revenue stream I love owning.
2. Palo Alto Networks Inc. (PANW): Security at Bank Scale
There’s a meaningful difference between protecting a website and protecting a bank, and Palo Alto Networks Inc. (PANW) lives on the harder side of that divide.
Once a platform starts handling deposits, transactions, and personal financial data, the security standard changes completely. It’s no longer about blocking spam or keeping a server online. It’s about meeting the same bar that JPMorgan and Bank of America meet every single day, monitoring threats across an entire organization in real time and responding before a breach goes out of hand.
Palo Alto’s unified security platform is already the kind of enterprise-grade standard that large institutions love, and once a company builds its infrastructure around it, ripping it out is close to unthinkable. That kind of stickiness is exactly what I look for.
The stock touched an all-time high of $302.95 in early June, and its most recent quarterly revenue came in at $3.0 billion, up sharply from $2.29 billion a year earlier. In other words, this is a company already living in the world where digital platforms need bank-grade protection, with plenty of runway left as more of them get there.
3. Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN): The Digital Dollar Plumbing
Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN) isn’t just a place to trade Bitcoin (BTC/USD) anymore, and I think treating it like one is the biggest mistake investors make with this stock.
Over the past few years, Coinbase has quietly built the infrastructure layer that any large platform would need if it ever wanted to move money digitally at scale: institutional-grade custody, a widely used digital dollar in USDC, and the rails that transport value between users, apps, and financial institutions without touching the traditional banking system at every step.
That’s the kind of foundation a social platform racing to build a financial ecosystem needs, and needs badly. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people building the wallet experience for a next-generation financial app have backgrounds that trace directly back to Coinbase’s own products.
Coinbase had a rough spring, dragged down with the rest of crypto by geopolitical risk-off sentiment. I think that weakness is temporary. The platform transformation underneath it, from a trading venue into genuine financial infrastructure, hasn’t slowed down at all. When sentiment turns, and I believe it turns later this year, this is one of the names I expect to move fastest.
4. Cloudflare Inc. (NET): Defending the Edges
If you’ve spent any time online today, you’ve almost certainly passed through Cloudflare Inc. (NET) without knowing it. The company’s network spans more than 300 cities across over 100 countries, and at times more than 20% of all internet traffic runs through its systems.
Cloudflare’s business model works because once a company relies on it, that company almost never leaves. The platform learns how an organization’s traffic behaves, builds custom protections around it, and becomes so embedded in daily operations that switching away stops making sense.
Here’s the part I find most interesting. A social platform needs to guard against spam, bots, and outages. A financial platform needs to guard against theft. Those are two entirely different levels of stakes, and any company making that transition doesn’t typically look for a brand-new security vendor. It deepens the relationship with the one it already trusts. I think that dynamic, quietly expanding contracts rather than winning flashy new ones, is exactly the kind of unglamorous growth story the market consistently underprices.
5. Interactive Brokers Group Inc. (IBKR): The Engine Behind Somebody Else’s App
Interactive Brokers Group Inc. (IBKR) isn’t a household name, but behind the scenes, it’s one of the most powerful platforms in finance. The company runs a global brokerage infrastructure spanning more than 160 markets worldwide, and increasingly, it doesn’t just serve its own customers. It powers trading for other apps entirely.
Interactive Brokers provides the underlying systems, order execution, account management, and regulatory compliance, that let a consumer-facing app control the user experience while a specialized partner handles everything happening underneath it. It’s the engine behind somebody else’s interface, and that’s precisely the kind of arrangement a fast-moving consumer platform tends to reach for instead of building a brokerage from scratch.
If a major new financial platform ever needs a trading partner to sit behind its own branded experience, a company built exactly for that role, with decades of infrastructure and regulatory relationships already in place, becomes a natural fit. That possibility isn’t remotely priced into the stock today, and I like being early to things the market hasn’t started pricing yet.
Tying It All Together
Here’s what ties all five of these names together… Not one of them needs X Money to become the dominant financial platform on Earth for this thesis to work. They just need it to work at all, and even a modest version of Musk’s vision generates real, durable demand for fraud detection, security infrastructure, digital settlement rails, and trading execution.
That’s a very different risk profile than betting on a single app winning a popularity contest. These five companies get paid on transaction volume, threat surface, and compliance obligations, three things that grow steadily whether X Money becomes a footnote or the defining financial story of this decade.
I’ve owned versions of this thesis before, in the earliest days of the App Store, in the early buildout of cloud infrastructure, in the quiet years before online payments became the default way most of the world moves money. The pattern always rhymes. The company everyone’s watching gets the headlines. The companies quietly holding the whole system together get the returns.
Where We Go From Here
These five names are the surface layer, the businesses I’m comfortable naming today because the thesis behind each one stands on its own, with or without X Money ever launching a single feature.
But I’ve done a lot more work on this than what fits in one article. I’ve mapped the full supply chain behind X Money specifically, the payment rails Musk is building on top of, the AI infrastructure powering it, and a handful of names with a far more direct, far more immediate connection to what’s coming.
That’s the research I do inside Hypergrowth Investing, and it’s exactly where I’m taking this story next.
If today’s five names got your attention, stick around. The deeper we go into X Money’s actual rollout timeline, the more interesting this gets.
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