Well, speaking from my experience of working with people on the "bottom of the pyramid" across the world, I can attest that there are various regulations which has led to the traditional banking system to not provide credit or opportunity to these entrepreneurs.

Prior to fintechs getting into the remittance space, fees were as much as 20% on average of transactions.

Prior to microfinance institutions and then true fintechs such as Tala, Branch, GoPay, Ant, etc. there were 10 of millions of merchants who could get no access to credit.

Prior to fintechs, you needed to physically go to a bank to become eligible for a loan and fill out paper forms. This may not seem like a high barrier to you.

Short of it is, heavy regulation leads to: * High compliance costs * Low appetite for risk * Slow to little innovation

There are regulations that don't make sense for small merchants: Anti-money laundering laws for instance which are generally good, but impose a completely undue burden on merchants that want to borrow $500.

Or a risk modeling team at a bank that has dozens of staff may make sense cost-wise for loans of $100k+, but they don't make sense for < $10k loans and their risk models also don't work at those levels.

This also isn't just Silicon Valley. It's a common problem in most countries of the world, speaking from experience.

> stripping fees off transactions with ZERO value add to the consumer...

The explosion of online shops made possible by companies like Stripe enabling secure credit card processing without imposing PCI DSS compliance on small businesses would disagree with you on whether there’s value to the consumer. If nothing else, greater variety of shops available means greater choice, which is generally considered good for the consumer.

Or PayPal, which allows the unbanked population to load funds to a widely-accepted online wallet and actually participate in online marketplaces, which they might otherwise be unable to do.

Or Affirm, which provides on-demand credit to consumers and lets them amortize large one-time costs over a few months, enabling them to afford, e.g., tuition when they otherwise might not be able to. (Tuition is maybe a bad example since most universities already offer tuition financing options; but online education services frequently don’t)

Are you asking what value Square and other transaction processing systems have added to the market? And is that a serious question, because if so I will explain.