It’s time to read the meme leaves.

Doge, GameStop, AMC are but a few recent examples that have proven that the memeification of financial services is real.

Memes, in large part due to their representation of culture, have dramatically influenced how many people invest.

And financial services could do well to learn from powerful features of consumer social. Features that have enabled online communities to be born for people to interact, create online identities, and build trust.

There are features of online communities that make people more comfortable trusting strangers on the internet for everything from low-cost decisions like restaurant recommendations to high-cost decisions like what school to go to, neighborhood to live in, or how to invest your money.

In this episode of Community x Capital, we talk about how to people are finding, trusting, and learning from strangers on the internet.

Arguably, this bottom up approach to building trust through community has its own unique and distinct advantages. And traditional finance (and even FinTech) could do well to learn from communities that have direct and trusted relationships with their followers.

The time is now - we are in the midst of a land grab where the winners will be those who build community, aggregate millions of followers, and own the distribution.

It won’t be long before we see influencers or individuals valued as billion dollar enterprises, who have built a community where they own the distribution to millions of engaged fans and followers.

So how long will it be before a bank acquires a content creator?