Digging In on Airline, Data Center, and Fintech News

In this podcast, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Lou Whiteman discuss:

Delta's rosy outlook.

The changes in the airline industry.

Mastercard's bet to become a crypto payments company.

The wall between fintech and traditional finance crumbling.

Nvidia's $1 trillion projection.

Insuring data centers. To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy. Will AI create the world's first trillionaire? Our team just released a report on the one little-known company, called an "Indispensable Monopoly" providing the critical technology Nvidia and Intel both need. Continue » A full transcript is below. Don’t miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you’ll want to hear this. On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a “Double Down” stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you’re worried you’ve already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it’s too late. And the numbers speak for themselves: - Nvidia: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2009, you’d have $463,472! - Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you’d have $48,103! - Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you’d have $497,659! Right now, we’re issuing “Double Down” alerts for three incredible companies, available when you join Stock Advisor, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon. Stock Advisor returns as of March 23, 2026 This podcast was recorded on March 17, 2026. Tyler Crowe: A guidance raise in the most unexpected place. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors Matt Frankel and Lou Whiteman. On today's show, we're going to look at how the lines between the old guard of finance and fintech companies are getting blurrier by the day. We'll follow up that with some stories each of us are following as we conclude here. But first, Matt, Lou, I think it's fair to say that the market has reacted with a lot of volatility. But I think rather predictable results with every Iran Middle East news story coming out there, a ship goes through, prices go down, port gets blown up, prices go up. I'm pretty on track here. Lou? Lou Whiteman: I mean, look, I think it's as you'd expect, but I am surprised at the micro movement that we're not seeing the big picture here. We are just really up and down with every little thing. Matt Frankel: I would agree with that. It's been predictable. I thought that oil prices would spike a little bit quicker than they did toward the beginning of the conflict. Remember, it took a little while till it really started to go upward. But it's been pretty predictable. With that in mind and the predictability thing, Delta Airlines, issued guidance this morning. It was ahead of an industry conference, and it really stood out because it didn't follow the script of what we thought would be predictable in the place of rising fuel prices. I thought we would all say. Hey, fuel prices are going to be higher margins are going to get hit. We'd probably see some conservative guidance or maybe even an expectation of declines with, vibes and fear or whatever. But, this was like a record scratch moment. The company was guiding for higher revenue in the coming quarter, Matt, why don't you run through the numbers and give us your thoughts on what you saw? I mean, Delta announced far better guidance for the first quarter than investors had expected. When I say better guidance, it might sound a little odd when I tell you that they essentially said that EPS is going to be in the original guidance range they gave with their last earnings report. But this was surprising because that range that they gave it was 50 to $0.90 per share. A pretty wide range. It was prior to the fuel cost surge, and prior to this terrible winter storm season that we've had this year, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that demand has been great, and revenue growth, which was previously forecast to be up 7% year over year, could be even higher. It's also worth noting you mentioned it's an industry conference. American Airlines separately said that it expects first quarter revenue growth at the high end of its guidance range. It seems industry wide. Lou Whiteman: The funny thing about this industry, a little inside baseball, every quarter, last two weeks of the quarter, one of the big banks holds an investment conference giving everybody a chance to clear the deck, stay what's actually happened. That's why the airlines always seem to meet or beat estimates, but, neither here nor there. The interesting thing, like Matt said is that demand is holding up. Planes are full. Airlines can therefore pass on higher fuel costs, so far so good. The real interesting thing to me about Delta here is the it's the haves and have not economy and the way Delta really has positioned itself to take advantage of the people who can afford to fly, 90% of Delta revenue is now tied to either premium offerings or their loyalty programs. The top 40% of earners are driving demand. Look, there's other ways Delta can benefit from demand, too. This is a real diversified company now. Their maintenance business, MRO, they call it. Revenue is going to be up 150% year over year. That's because rivals are running their equipment just as much as they can, too. Delta does a lot of work doing tune ups and maintenance for other airlines other than Delta, so a lot of ways to win here, as long as demand holds up. Tyler Crowe: As nice as these numbers sound and, pointing out that Delta is clearly a different company, perhaps I'm being cynical here, but I feel like the airlines are perpetually in this. This time, it's different category, they always seem to run into some catastrophic event that we see demand destruction for one reason or other. We saw 911 was a great example of this. Then we had the great recession in 2008. The 2010 through 2020 period was probably the most calm market that we've seen for the airlines, and then 2020, and then COVID hits. Then we get Boeing. They can't deliver planes on time, so they're capacity constrained. Now we're talking about extraordinarily high gas prices and, hinting at a little bit of K-shaped economy stuff. With that in mind, is there any reason to think that as investments, the airlines, and we can narrow in on Delta and American in particular, them showing strength in the face of rising fuel prices, is this a sign that the industry's actually in a better place? Lou Whiteman: I mean, if you go back, Tyler, it used to be every downturn where some high profile bankruptcies, Eastern Branoff, so many of the, like, names that people grew up with just disappeared. It is different. I know it's dangerous to say this time it's different, but the industry post 2008 is different than it was prior to that. Why 2008, 2008 is when Delta bought Northwest, and it kicked off a wave of consolidation that has left us with more than 80% of domestic capacity, in the hands of four carriers. Those carriers are big enough and well-managed enough to survive cycles. It's still a cyclical industry. There are still haves and have nots. For me, Delta and United are running so far ahead of American and Southwest, and the smaller companies are still dangerous in the cycle. But the difference is, is that whether or not whether or not they can thrive in a downturn, they can survive a downturn, which is a very different industry than it had been. Matt Frankel: I agree that the consolidation we've seen makes the airlines more able to survive cycles and remain profitable or at least not suffer devastating losses when cycles turn. Lou mentioned this earlier. Airlines have done a much better job just in general, across the four major airlines that Lou just mentioned of better monetizing their product. Example, with first class seats, it used to be you either paid $2,000 for a first class seat or $400 for a coach seat, and they gave the unsold first class seats away to their loyalty members. Now they're doing upsell offers throughout the industry and getting people to pay for what they used to give away for free. Delta specifically cited strength in its premium cabin as one of the reasons for its strong guidance. You'll still never find an airline stock in my portfolio. I'll never say never, but at least not in the immediate future. I know Tyler, your Mexican airports might count, but it's a more solid industry as a whole than it was a couple of decades ago, for sure. Tyler Crowe: All I'm going to say is airports and airlines, two very different business lines. We could go down a deep rabbit hole there, perhaps for another time. After the break, we're going to talk about the blurred lines of Fintech. ADVERTISEMENT: When Johan Rah received the letter on Christmas Day, 17 76, he put it away to read later. Maybe he thought it was a season's greeting and wanted to save it for the fireside. But what it actually was, was a warning delivered to the Hessian colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the Delaware and would soon attack his forces. The next day when Raw lost the battle of Trenton and died from two colonial boxing day musket balls, the letter was found unopened in his vest pocket. As someone with 15,000 unread emails in his inbox, I feel like there's a lesson there. Well, this is the constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrysler. Every episode, we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at constant podcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tyler Crowe: Mastercard announced earlier today that it was acquiring a UK stable coin company, BVNK. I think it's just the acronym. I hope it's not bunk or something like that. The deal is for about $1.8 billion, and this is an effort for Mastercard to bring crypto and stablecoin-based payments into the Mastercard infrastructure, of payments. Now, this is the second largest announcement that Mastercard has made in the past month in relation to Crypto and stable coin-based companies and giving them access to Mastercard payment rails and trying to, I guess you could say bring Mastercard into the fold with digital currencies, tokenization and all these other things. What are you guys thinking about when you saw this as, like, your knee jerk reactions? Lou Whiteman: I wasn't surprised to see BVNK get scooped up. Coinbase had been pursuing an acquisition of the company last year for $2 billion, but it was called off toward the end of 2025. The company, they process over $30 billion of stable coin transactions annually already. They have an impressive clientele. For example, they're the ones who power the stable coin payments for world pay. They have a relationship with Visa through Visa Direct. It's interesting you mentioned bringing stable coins into Mastercard's payment rails BVNK is the payment rails for the stablecoin industry in a way.This gets Mastercard that established stablecoin infrastructure, not just the coins themselves, but it's the infrastructure that would take years and billions of dollars to replicate on its own. There's somewhat of a race to control the enterprise stablecoin infrastructure end of the market. Stripe acquired a major stablecoin infrastructure company for $1 billion last year, for example, I mean, this move it helps ensure that Mastercard won't get left behind. Tyler Crowe: The deal itself, perhaps I'm again, I'm the most cynical person as a Podcast host talking about investing or skeptical, whatever word you want to use here. To me, this wasn't the most noteworthy thing, $1.8 billion. Mastercard can pull that out of its couch cushions to make that sort of acquisition. This isn't like some groundbreaking thing for a company this size. What I want to focus on here, though, because it does set the stage for a story, a narrative that's been going on in the markets that I want to explore a little bit more. That's this convergence of the old garden finance and these payments and fintech companies, and they're all starting to blend into each other into a broader ecosystem of payments, where they're much more direct competitors with each other, rather than having this very separate place of Fintech is over here and the Visa and Mastercards of the world are over there. As Fintech companies mature, they're looking more and more like the old guard. For example, Matt, I think a couple of weeks ago, you've highlighted how By now petty later companies are getting into what looks like more conventional loan products. We've also seen lending platforms like SoFi become more and more like banks, and most stable coin companies now look like narrow banks with the way that they take deposits, give you a token, which has no deposit yield or anything like that. But then all of a sudden is, paying they're getting the net interest spread from basically buying treasuries with that. This particular news story about Mastercard, I feel like flips that idea on its head where now we're taking the old guard and they are going toward the Fintech side. This leads me to an interesting question, and I don't know how to answer it, but I'd love to get your thoughts. If all these companies are converging into direct competition with each other, does it make them less attractive or more attractive? Like, Fintech are leaning into proven business models, but now it's got to carve up a pie among more competitors. Similarly, companies like Mastercard might find new legs of growth. But they'll likely have to spend a lot to make them competitive in these spaces. Lou, I'll start with you. Where do you fall in the spectrum? Lou Whiteman: I would take a step back and say, if we're surprised we shouldn't be. As investors, we should learn a lesson here. The age old story of innovation and financial services, is that the innovation just gets swallowed up into the incumbents. We have gone from Blockchain wiping out Mastercard to now Mastercard using Blockchain to grow more efficient. This has happened over and over again. Just look at what Discover tried to be when it was launched versus what Discover was, by the time it went from disrupting credit cards to being one of the credit card companies. I think investors should keep this arc in mind as they're bidding up shares of Fintech darlings based on new paradigms and innovation. The nature of this industry is the house almost always wins. I think that yes, it's a rising tide for all boats, but I think, those that are overvalued, I think that the market might be putting too much stock into the idea that innovation can really change the rules. Inevitably, it is the Mastercards of the world that tend to benefit over ti