In April 2022, Patrick Mrozowski’s San Francisco debit-card startup Point seemed destined for failure. The three-year-old fintech, which offered cash-back rewards on everyday purchases, had a small, shrinking user base and was preparing to overhaul its product. It faced a ballooning set of competitors bolstered by the 2021 fintech funding frenzy.

Then it received dire news from its most important business partner, Column, an FDIC-insured bank owned by billionaire William Hockey that provided the infrastructure for Point to issue debit cards. Column was pulling the plug on their agreement amid rising regulatory scrutiny of bank-fintech partnerships, which meant every active consumer account Point had created would be closed.

“We lost every single customer we had,” the 30-year-old CEO says today, speaking from a Greenwich Village coffee shop near his startup’s New York office. It was the second time Mrozowski had lost a bank partner in a year, and it meant he would have to delay his upcoming product revamp indefinitely. In February 2023, Point made Forbes’ list of 25 struggling, zombie fintechs, indicating that its survival was in question. Mrozowski says he tries not to think too much about that era of his life, and some of the details are hazy. “It's almost like PTSD, where traumatic parts of your memory are erased.”

But he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. A Point data scientist had found that 90% of its card transactions came from 15% of its customers. The analysis showed that Mrozowski had been wasting money marketing to and serving a mass audience that wasn’t particularly valuable to his business.

He realized few startups were focusing on the uppermost echelon of the consumer finance market, and he knew he needed a different hook to attract the ultrawealthy. These customers didn’t care much about cash back or points. “What they care about is access to the best restaurants. They care about service. They just care........

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