Another reason the Thiel model simply makes no sense for retail finance is that it is structurally impossible to build the kind of “moat” that can, at the very least, keep a crappy business like Uber limping along. A huge element of finance, certainly for retail depositors but also more generally, is that you want your deposits to be as liquid as possible. To attract deposits in the first place, customers must be convinced it will be easy to withdraw … and potentially deposit their money elsewhere. This makes banking a fundamentally very, very tough business to monopolize in even a marginally free market.
