The origins of USBC | #344

Our newsletter covers news, industry perspectives, and updates from the USBC ecosystem. Check out our last report here.

This week:

1. The origins of USBC

2. Stuff happens

Many of you may think of USBC as a recent development (such as its debut in Las Vegas this past November), but its origins go back decades—beginning in little ol’ New Zealand.

In the latest from our conversation series, USBC co-founder and CEO Greg Kidd and chief architect Erik Westra reminisce over those early days—the insights they learned from check processing for banks, payments and messaging over text message, and ultimately the bottom up business model that would help bring bike messengers into the middle class.

What started with late nights in a small office above a nightclub would eventually expand to New York, London, and the biggest markets around the world—with Greg, Erik, and the rest of the team eventually taking that company public on the Nasdaq in the 90s bolstered by a headcount in the thousands and revenue in the hundreds of millions.

Those insights and principles—empowering individuals with messaging and payments, building platforms from the bottom up versus the bureaucracy of top down, and figuring out novel technological solutions to make it all possible—are still ingrained in USBC’s culture and platforms today.

And along the way, Greg and Erik would go on plenty of adventures both in business and in life (such as the one last September in the high altitudes of Tibet).

As they admit, they’ve had to save each others’ lives more than once.

The full conversation:

Before “fintech” had a name, this team was building real infrastructure in Wellington, New Zealand — first for courier networks, then for global systems.

This conversation follows the origin story: a bootstrapped, paperless dispatch platform designed around a bottom-up model where workers coordinated efficiently without top-down allocation. The technology had to be resilient because downtime meant the business stopped.

The outcomes were concrete: improved productivity, better service, and better economic mobility for workers — technology that raised capability at the edges.

That same philosophy now carries into USBC: identity-first design, proof of personhood, and systems that give everyone a seat at the table — with consumer protection and compliance built in.

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