The withdrawals came in over about a week, and I read them the way you read a group text where everyone suddenly remembers a prior commitment. PayPal first. Then Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, eBay, Mercado Pago. Six of the biggest names attached to Facebook's currency project, gone before the association had even signed its charter in Geneva.
Every statement said roughly the same thing. Focusing on our core business. Regulatory clarity. Continued interest in the future of digital payments. Nobody said the actual sentence.
The actual sentence is that they did not want their logo next to that logo.
What looks like a compliance decision is almost always a brand risk decision wearing a compliance decision's clothes, because compliance is the only reason a public company is allowed to give.
Think about what these companies were being asked to contribute. Not money, really. The commitment was small against their balance sheets. They were being asked to lend trust, which for a payments company is the entire product. Visa does not sell plastic. It sells the belief that the number will be right and someone will answer the phone if it is not.
Now put that next to the partner. This is the year Facebook settled with the FTC for five billion dollars over privacy. The Cambridge Analytica hearings are eighteen months old. Two senators wrote directly to these companies asking what exactly they thought they were signing up for. When a regulator writes you a letter about your association with a partner, the association has already cost you more than it can return.
Visa does not sell plastic. It sells the belief that the number will be right and someone will answer the phone if it is not.
Here is the part worth taking to your own work. Co branding is not additive. When you put two marks on the same page, the weaker trust profile sets the ceiling for both, and the partner with the most to lose is the one who leaves first. Every partnership deck I have sat through assumes reach and audience overlap are the variables that matter. They are not. The variable that matters is what happens to your credibility on the worst day your partner has, because you will be answering for it whether or not you were in the room.
Zuckerberg went to Congress in late October and made the geopolitical argument, which is the argument you make when the commercial one has stopped working. It may even be right. It just is not a reason for anyone else to stand next to him.
Meanwhile I split a check at a food cart pod on Division on Sunday, badly, four ways, using an app that already works and that nobody has ever asked me to trust more than I do. That is the actual bar. It is higher than it looks.