Simon Hu on wallets
From State of Fintech 2025: Everything You Need to Know - Rex & Simon Talk Fintech SPECIAL · · Rex Salisbury
“When Apple opened NFC access it changed the game: every iPhone effectively became a payment terminal and the wallet wars began — now it's open season for who gets to be your wallet.”
On , Simon Hu, Former CEO at Ant Group, spoke about wallets during State of Fintech 2025: Everything You Need to Know - Rex & Simon Talk Fintech SPECIAL on Rex Salisbury.
About Simon Hu
In a late 2024 appearance on the podcast "Rex & Simon Talk Fintech," Simon Hu discussed his 113-page report on the state of fintech in 2025. He described the current period as "the age of the fintech hyperscaler," stating that these companies can become larger than incumbents by playing on margin and growing faster. Hu said that fintech is "only 3% finished," having captured a small share of a $30 trillion services market. He commented that AI can push much of the work in financial services into software, making a large portion of that market addressable by software and AI agents. Hu also noted that Apple's opening of NFC access turned every iPhone into a payment terminal, beginning "the wallet wars." He described stablecoins as a "hottest category" that threatens legacy rails like SWIFT, and referred to a "'scam demic'" in which the industry lost over a trillion dollars to scams in 2023. Hu said that banks had a good year but that comfort should free up investment to transform, otherwise incumbents risk being overtaken by hyperscalers. He suggested that some fintech hyperscalers could be as big as Visa within five years and that AI agents on devices could materially shift market share by choosing which financial service to use.