For years, a lot of my thinking on payments, banking and licensing went into Quora. Someone would ask a question, and I would sit down and answer it properly: how a correspondent bank actually moves the money, why your Stripe payout won't land in a certain country, whether a nonprofit really has to prove its 501(c)(3) status to a processor. Over time, that added up to thousands of questions.
I have now left Quora. I have deleted all my answers there.
Why? Because I didn't own any of it.
Building a house on rented land
Let's say you build a beautiful house. You pick every brick yourself, you paint every wall, and people start coming to visit. The only problem is that the land isn't yours. The landlord can change the rules whenever he likes. He can decide who sees your house, he can put signs on your front door, and he can make visitors walk past three other houses before they reach yours. You can't take the house with you when you leave.
That is what writing on someone else's platform is, so to speak.
The content was mine, the hours were mine, the thirty-odd years of sitting inside this industry were mine, and yet the platform decided everything about how it was shown, to whom, and next to what.
Your words should be yours.
So I took my answers out, and I've moved them to my own platform. It's called askmint.app.
What you'll find there
askmint.app is my attempt at a better place for answers, opinions and Q&A on fintech and everything around it: banking, payments, crypto, money, the economy, trade and finance. Here are a few of the old questions, now living in their new home:
What should someone know in order to build an e-commerce payment system in a developing country?
Can Stripe settle funds directly into international bank accounts?
How do countries repay debts worth millions, and is the money moved electronically or physically?
What is the reaction to JP Morgan Chase's patented Bitcoin-like rival system?
Must payment processors confirm an organization's 501(c)(3) nonprofit status?
Just a side note: some of these answers go back over a decade. A few have aged well, and a few have aged like milk. I'm leaving them up as they were, because the history is part of the lesson.
Where this is going
Right now I'm in the middle of porting my own answers over. That's the boring part, and it's taking a while.
Eventually, I'll open askmint.app to the public. Others will be able to ask, answer and argue, and that is where it gets interesting. I want to do it in a way where you own the content you put in. If you write something good, it's yours, not the platform's.
Truth be told, I haven't worked out all of it yet. I need to think hard about the rules, the regulations and how to run it, because the one thing I refuse to do is rebuild Quora with a different logo. Everything that made me unhappy there should not be repeated here.
That's the whole point of the exercise.
If you've followed my answers over the years, on Quora or anywhere else, this is where they live now. And if you have thoughts on how a Q&A platform should treat the people who write for it, tell me. I'd genuinely like to hear them.
Thank you for following along.
— Faisal Khan