1. I don't think finding a qualified "business" person will be excessively difficult. From my experience, there is an under-supply of engineers and an over-supply of business people wanting to found. Thus, if you are an engineer from a FAANG company, there should be large demand for your skillset by business people looking to found. That being said, the main ways to find non-technical co-founders is via network (your FAANG friends are bound to know someone, ask them for an introduction) and events. Also, don't be afraid to cold reachout to someone who might be interesting.
2. Be sure you want a "business" person in your founding team. Many great companies made it without one. If you need very deep domain knowledge then yes, it can be beneficial to have such a person. However, that being said, if you don't have knowledge in that domain you should also not really be looking to found in that domain. However, that is besides the point. Many "business" skills like sales, marketing and fundraising can be learned to a good enough standard by most technical cofounders. I have always has bad experience taking on non-techincal co-founders to handle the "business" part.
Just to make this clear, I do not think "business" co-founders are useless. There are a lot of very good ones that bring a lot of value. All I am saying is that I have made bad experiences taking in "business" people to handle the "business" part of the startup. Most of the time you can (and should) learn the necessary skills yourself. Every startup needs technical co-founders, however most startups don't NEED non-technical co-founders.
This is interesting. Most of the time I have issues to discuss with colleagues I message them, which ends up in a 10-mins back-and-forth on-and-off message exchange and then the scheduling of a call. I will definitely give this a try.
It is extremely hard to get rid of the oligopoly and Visa and MasterCard make sure to keep their market position. My experience comes from trying to start a company in exactly what you are describing, using the OpenBanking APIs. So what I will say was just my experience and does not necessarily mean it is impossible.
1. Public APIs (I will be talking about the EU's public banking APIs following OpenBanking in the UK and PSD2 in Europe): if you think the public APIs will allow you to transact easily from one account to another, think again. In the EU a new concept called SCA (strong customer authentication) means that for every payment your user does, they will need to complete an SCA flow. These SCA flows involve a OTP sent via text, logging in to your online banking account to confirm the transaction, etc. Any form of SCA in itself is annoying and destroys the customer journey (imagine having to login to your online banking platform to confirm a payment every time you buy a coffee). However, what is more annoying is that banks control what sort of SCA they allow and since banks have a vested interest in other payment apps (that don't give them a cut) failing, they will make it as cumbersome as possible.
2. NFC Payment via Phone: even if you do end up solving the SCA problem, you will not be able to use the NFC capabilities on Apple's Core NFC platform. Why? Because Apple has decided that no financial application should be able to use the NFC capabilities because they are scared of a competitor to ApplePay (thanks Apple). As far as I know, you can use the Android NFC capabilities but don't quote me on that. Thus, you are stuck with QR codes, something western consumers tend to look down upon. Thus, that is your second barrier to creating a good solution on the consumer side.
3. Distribution: in order to distribute this, you must bring out new hardware. This is expensive to produce and integrating into merchant's POS systems is super expensive as well. Furthermore, merchants don't like having several payment devices standing around.
Long story short, merchants hate paying card fees. However, it is damn near impossible to build a solution that is convenient for the consumer who you are intending to convince, thus I do not see this Oligopoly being broken for a long time.
Just to make this clear, I do not think "business" co-founders are useless. There are a lot of very good ones that bring a lot of value. All I am saying is that I have made bad experiences taking in "business" people to handle the "business" part of the startup. Most of the time you can (and should) learn the necessary skills yourself. Every startup needs technical co-founders, however most startups don't NEED non-technical co-founders.