“For cities aspiring to build a meaningful startup ecosystem, it’s not about attracting any entrepreneurs—it’s about anchoring to an industry, like North Texas has with finance.”

Paul O’Brien
CEO
MediaTech Ventures
.…on why North Texas is “the world’s fintech hub,” via his post on LinkedIn.

Paul O’Brien

North Texas grabbed the world’s financial attention again this week with updates from the Dallas-based Texas Stock Exchange, which introduced its expansive leadership team and board and said it had raised over $135 million to date. But as Austin-based Paul O’Brien noted in his LinkedIn Startup Studio post last month, the TXSE is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to North Texas’ sprawling fintech and financial universe.

“You’re really seeing a whole new North Texas ecosystem,” O’Brien quotes H. Ross Perot Jr. as saying, before offering insights on 14 financial giants—from Charles Schwab to JPMorgan Chase to Goldman Sachs to Comerica Bank and more—that have been turning DFW into “Y’all Street” for years. 

“Wall Street remains the center of the investment universe, but Y’all Street is gaining rapidly,”he quotes Ray Perryman as saying, 

O’Brien goes on to list an array of decentralized fintech and cryptocurrency companies that have a significant presence or connections to North Texas, from Hedera to TMGCore to GigWage to Blockmetrix.

“Texas is taking what Silicon Valley built and applying that model within specific industries that are critical to the state’s economy, driving innovation and growth in ways that are reshaping the global landscape,” O’Brien writes.

He adds that North Texas’ place in this landscape is clear.

“North Texas has quietly become the epicenter of FinTech innovation, driven by a confluence of major financial institutions, a booming startup culture, and a regulatory environment tailored to foster growth,” he says. 

Which makes the Texas Stock Exchange, he writes, simply “the newest development to the region,” adding that its founders “believe that Texas is a prime location for the exchange due to the state’s economic growth and increasing prominence in innovation and finance; one of TXSE’s key goals is to address frustrations from companies regarding high compliance costs and regulations associated with other exchanges.”

You can read O’Brien’s post by going here.

For more of who said what about all things North Texas, check out Every Last Word.

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