Teardown

Why fintech naming keeps arriving at the same six syllables

We read four hundred seed-stage names from the last eighteen months. The pattern is worse than you think.

8 min · Lisbon

Four hundred names, eighteen months, one spreadsheet. We coded each for structure, origin and sound, expecting a long tail. There is almost no tail at all.

Sixty-one per cent are two syllables ending in a vowel. A further fifteen per cent are a Latin root with the final consonant amputated. The remaining quarter contains every genuinely distinctive name in the set, which is to say the market has left three quarters of the naming space unoccupied out of caution.

Caution is rational at the trademark search and irrational everywhere after it. A name that clears in nine jurisdictions and disappears in a crowded feed has optimised for the wrong week.

The companies in our sample that raised a second round were not disproportionately the distinctive names. But they spent measurably less on paid acquisition per new account, which is the number the naming argument should actually be had over.

Reported by the CliqueTrees newsroom. Corrections run at the top of the following edition, set in the same size as the mistake.