Moving money, moving goods: The parallel evolution of FinTech and FreightTech

Fast Company

05-06-2025

On a typical day in logistics operations across America, the choreography of moving goods remains stubbornly analog. Emails ping back and forth, phones ring constantly, and printers churn out documents that will be manually entered into yet another system. Meanwhile, in the world of payments, a silent revolution has already transformed how money moves—invisibly, instantly, and with minimal human intervention.
The global supply chain ecosystem is now poised for a similar metamorphosis, with FreightTech emerging as the next frontier of digital transformation. This stark contrast between how we move money and how we move goods reveals striking parallels between two technological revolutions—one largely complete, the other just beginning.
THE API REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED FINANCE
When Stripe launched in 2011, it transformed payments by introducing a simple premise: replacing complex banking infrastructure with a few lines of code. This API-first approach allowed developers to implement payments without understanding the labyrinthine complexities of financial systems.
Today, FreightTech faces remarkably similar challenges. While money moves at the speed of light, goods still move at the speed of paperwork.
1. LEGACY INFRASTRUCTURE AND MANUAL WORKFLOWS
For decades, financial services operated on aging infrastructure requiring extensive manual intervention. Transactions took days to settle, paper checks needed physical processing, and reconciliation demanded significant human resources.
The logistics sector today resembles the pre-digital transformation era of the financial industry, with workflows still largely reliant on manual processes. Booking a shipment often requires multiple phone calls, extensive email chains, and physical documents passing between parties. This reliance on manual touchpoints creates friction across the supply chain. Industry research highlights that delays in these workflows can trigger cascading disruptions for manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, and end consumers alike.
FreightTech must eliminate manual workflows in favor of automated digital processes. Companies like Parade demonstrate this by automating 30% of freight broker workflows through AI-driven capacity management.
2. VENDOR API LIMITATIONS: BANKS VS. TMS SYSTEMS
Banks lacked modern, standardized APIs, forcing companies like Stripe to develop complex workarounds for technical requirements like idempotency, rate limiting, and error handling.
Similarly, transportation management systems (TMS) and carrier APIs lack standardization across the industry, implementing proprietary interfaces with severe rate limits and unclear error recovery mechanisms.
FreightTech must develop resilient systems that can operate despite these API limitations. This requires building sophisticated technical solutions like queueing systems, implementing chaos testing to identify failure points, establishing contract testing protocols, and creating auto-recovery mechanisms.
3. THE HIGH-STAKES NATURE OF TRANSACTIONS: RESILIENCY AND AUTO-RECOVERY
Payment systems needed to be resilient, recover automatically, and prevent fraud in real-time since a single API call could move millions of dollars.
Similarly, a single shipment can be worth millions, and delays or incorrect bookings can cost companies millions in penalties. FreightTech needs real-time tracking, automated recovery, and high-speed processing—just like payments.
FreightTech must treat each shipment like a high-value transaction with auto-recovery mechanisms and fraud detection. Hybrid models like Freight Hero's integrate AI automation with human oversight for critical tasks.
4. THE NEED FOR ALWAYS-ON INFRASTRUCTURE AND OBSERVABILITY
Stripe built its own high-availability load balancers and event-processing infrastructure to achieve 99.999% uptime —ensuring payments never go offline
Meanwhile, freight still operates in batch-processing mode—systems are not built for real-time tracking or dynamic rerouting
FreightTech must invest in observability tools for real-time monitoring and failover systems to ensure logistics operations are as reliable as financial transactions.
5. THE NEXT EVOLUTION: APPLYING LLMS TO FREIGHTTECH
The financial sector has integrated AI for fraud detection, underwriting decisions, and transaction monitoring through systems like Stripe Radar.
However, the freight industry remains in early stages of AI adoption, with companies beginning to harness large language models to analyze shipping data, optimize routes, and automate communications.
The algorithmic future of freight is approaching rapidly. Large language models will become essential tools for enhancing decision-making and optimizing freight movements at unprecedented scales. Bessemer Venture Partners' analysis indicates that vertical AI applications will unlock markets that legacy SaaS systems couldn't effectively serve.
The logistics industry today parallels payments before Stripe's emergence. Stripe transformed payments by creating standardized APIs that reduced integration complexity, cutting implementation time from weeks to days.
FreightTech stands at a similar inflection point, requiring an API transformation that replaces manual processes with standardized interfaces and automation-first infrastructure. The next generation of FreightTech must abstract away complexity behind well-designed APIs that make freight movements as reliable and transparent as financial transactions.
Several contenders are making progress: Parade is building capacity management tools, Cartage is developing autonomous freight coordination, and Freight Hero is creating hybrid automation models combining AI with human expertise.
The future of freight logistics depends on fundamental technological reinvention rather than incremental improvements. Companies that successfully implement these transformative technologies will make moving physical goods as efficient and transparent as digital payments, critical for an industry that forms the backbone of global commerce.