The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Matthew Harris, Bain Capital Ventures

Until recently,Matthew Harrishated “fintech.” Before the term was embraced as representing a hot sectoral trend, it was merely shorthand for the universe of vendors selling technology to financial companies. “The next ten years are going to be characterized by a grinding down of the cost bases of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley,” says Harris, 42, who heads the New York office of Boston-based Bain Capital Ventures. “That’s not a good space to be a vendor.” For Harris, who early in his career worked on private equity deals for Mitt Romney at BCV parent Bain Capital, after graduating from Williams College in 1994 with a BA in political economy, the much more exciting opportunity is in what he calls finsurgents — companies like business lender OnDeck Capital that use technology to compete with incumbent institutions. Harris invested in New York–based OnDeck in 2006 through Village Ventures, an early-stage firm he had co-founded in 2000 with Williams classmate Bo Peabody. Harris’s more than a dozen investments there included TxVia, a mobile payments platform that Google acquired in 2012, and digital banking pioneer Simple, which Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria bought last year. “For me, at a small firm, even with a good personal brand, it was increasingly feeling like I was at a disadvantage, so I decided to come back to Bain [in 2012] and build the fintech practice within the venture arm,” Harris explains. BCV manages $3 billion of committed capital and has 24 investment professionals, five of them on the fintech team. Harris, who has invested $250 million over the past three years in companies like AvidXchange (commercial payments automation) and Digital Currency Group (seeBarry Silbert, No. 13), enjoys the flexibility he has at Bain: “I can get interested in and back the best entrepreneur, whether it’s a woman just starting or a guy who’s got a $100 million company.”