The Railroads of The Internet

Once a week I take a train to visit my 86-year-old bubbie. It’s my favorite part of the week. We play golf, eat Ben & Jerry’s and I tell her about my MBA classes.

As I was finishing school, she asked me a question I didn’t expect:

“What class surprised you the most?”

One came to mind right away: Fintech Solutions.

It was a weekend intensive course taught by Professor Peggy Hamm Kingsley, with a lineup of industry veterans. In one session, Todd Aronoff, a Customer Success leader at Stripe, said something that stayed with me:

“We’re trying to increase the GDP of the internet.”

At first, I didn’t fully understand what that meant. But over time, it reframed how I think about fintech entirely.

The Invisible Layer

Fintech is the invisible infrastructure that moves and verifies money on the internet.

When you buy something online, get paid through an app, or subscribe to a service, there’s a complex system working behind the scenes to make sure the transaction is safe, accurate, and completed correctly.

Most people never see it. They just click “pay,” and it works.

Building the Tracks

A long time ago, railroads changed the world by making it easy to move goods between cities.

Before trains, trade was slow and expensive. After railroads, commerce expanded rapidly.

Fintech is similar — but instead of moving goods, it moves money on the internet.

The Intelligent Rail

But there’s one important difference. 

With railroads, once the tracks were built, things mostly just ran.

With money on the internet, every transaction has to be evaluated in real time:Is this a real person? Is this payment safe? Is someone trying to commit fraud?

So it’s not just moving money from point A to point B.

It’s moving money while continuously verifying that everything is legitimate.

That’s what makes fintech fundamentally different from physical infrastructure. It has to move money and make decisions at the same time.

Engineering Trust

Fintech is the invisible system that makes money move safely on the internet — even between people who don’t know each other.

And the better it works, the less anyone notices it’s there.

The Paradox

Which leaves me with the question:

How do you market something whose success is defined by being invisible?