Fintech Growth Talk Podcast: Recent Episodes
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Contactless. Online banking. Crowdfunding. Cryptocurrency. Budgeting apps. Fintech has completely changed what finance means and how we use it - for everyday business and personal uses as well.
In a world where fintech is increasingly becoming an important part of our everyday lives, information is key, and how platforms out there are truly dedicated to giving us the vital information that we need?
What platforms out there genuinely understand the challenges faced by society relating to fintech and can deliver simple yet critical advice and insight to overcome those challenges?
From enlightening you to innovations in the space to informing you about the news financial institutions, to discussing the needs and peculiarities of the market - Fintech Growth Talk is the number one podcast you need to listen to when it comes to fintech.
Hosted by Christina Trampota, this informative podcast aims to help you navigate the complex world of fintech and bring it to life like never before through exciting, engaging and passionate dialogues with experts and industry leaders alike.
Each episode addresses different areas of fintech and gives you practical new solutions which you can take away. You will not find a podcast out there that can deliver the level of insight, depth and practical knowledge that Fintech Growth Talk provides you.
We are all about fintech and we trust you will enjoy listening just as much as we do discussing it.
Vijay Mehta is the Chief Innovation Officer for Experian’s Consumer Information Services business in North America and is the Managing Director of Global Solutions. His team’s focus is to provide solution architecture, advanced data science, and consulting along with incubation, co-creation, and acceleration of new products. He and his team work in close collaboration with Experian’s customers to innovate, and drive new market changing developments.
Prior to his role in Consumer Information Services, Mehta managed Experian’s Decision Analytics technology group, driving revenue growth and cost savings across several areas. He also has over twenty years of experience in financial services, with prior leadership roles at Sallie Mae, CIT Group, and was the Chief Architect of a SaaS (startup) company acquired by Experian. Mehta holds degrees in both Computer Science and Business, is a nationally published author, and holds multiple patents on advanced technology.
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Ryan Rasmussen is a researcher at Bitwise Asset Management, the world's first and largest cryptocurrency index fund. Prior to Bitwise, he held a variety of corporate finance roles at Cetera Financial Group, an asset manager with over $300 billion in assets under administration. Before Cetera, Ryan was a business analyst at Oakley and spent time as a research associate at UK Trade & Investment in Sydney, Australia. He is a graduate of the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University, with a B.S. in finance and a secondary focus in graphic and web design.
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Ryan Rasmussen is a researcher at Bitwise Asset Management, the world's first and largest cryptocurrency index fund. Prior to Bitwise, he held a variety of corporate finance roles at Cetera Financial Group, an asset manager with over $300 billion in assets under administration. Before Cetera, Ryan was a business analyst at Oakley and spent time as a research associate at UK Trade & Investment in Sydney, Australia. He is a graduate of the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University, with a B.S. in finance and a secondary focus in graphic and web design.
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Richard got his start working in brand strategy, but left his role and became an Uber driver to save for coding boot camp. Less than 12 months after learning to code, he got a job working at Facebook as a software engineer. 4 years and 3 promotions later, Richard was planning for his wedding and came up with the budgeting concept that later became Mooch. He left FB shortly after to work on Mooch full time as the main founder and CEO. Fast forward two years to today, Mooch has raised $2 million dollars (soon to be even more), employs 12 people and has been featured in the likes of BBC, US News, Marketwatch and more! So far this year, Mooch was awarded "Most Innovative Personal Finance & Budgeting App 2022" by Wealth & Finance and "10 Best Budget Apps" by US News.
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Jeff leads Upstart's efforts in strategic partnerships and new initiatives - and is the host of Upstart's weekly podcast Leaders in Lending. Jeff joined Upstart in 2012 after spending 6 years at Google. He launched and built the Google Apps for Education business, growing market share from zero to almost 70% in its first four years. Jeff spearheaded marketing efforts for Google Apps in Global 2000 accounts and led sales, business development, and go-to-market strategy for the launch of Chrome devices in the education and enterprise sectors. He spent several years in direct sales at IBM, always exceeding quota, and was a founding engineer and lead UI developer at SSB Technologies. Jeff holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford University.
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Anthony is VP and Head of Product Marketing at Socure. Previously, he was at Raise, the world's largest marketplace for retail currency. Prior to that, Anthony was a co-founder at Slide, a gift card wallet app on iOS and Android, that was acquired by Raise in 2016. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Anthony worked in business and product development at American Express.
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Jaideep Singh is the CEO and Co-Founder of FlyFin, a new AI-powered mobile tax engine for freelancers, creators, self-employed and gig workers. Prior to FlyFin, he was an early adopter of AI as he built Spock, the industry’s first and largest people search engine indexing over 1 billion people representing 1.5 trillion data records. As both a VC and entrepreneur, Jaideep has been focused on finding disruptive industry startups to invest in, creating more than $3B in value for companies. These disruptive companies have ranged from wireless LAN/Wi-Fi to AI Robotics for mining, construction and farming, to reinventing the electronic components supply chain marketplace.
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Kevin leads global business development for the financial services industry at NVIDIA. He focuses on global trends in accelerated computing and AI for consumer finance – including fintech, retail banking, credit card and insurance. Previously, Kevin led sales and business development organizations at two fintechs: Credit Karma and Roostify. He also helped comScore, a digital measurement and analytics firm, grow into a publicly traded, multinational organization, where he served as senior vice president of the financial services practice. Kevin holds a B.A. from American University in Washington and an M.B.A. from the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.
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Sheila D. Collins is a groundbreaking strategic advisor in the innovation space. She has over 15 years of experience in marketing, eCommerce and innovation. Her big-picture views coupled with her forward-thinking planning, and skilled execution has fueled her success.
Sheila serves as the Senior Advisor for Startup Programming at AARP Innovation Labs, this accelerator works with start-ups, investors, and industry leaders to bring forth disruptive technology to fulfill the organization’s mission of empowering people to choose how they live as they age. She has also spun up several entrepreneurial ventures and programs. Earlier in her career, Sheila spun up a program called Piggy Bank, teaching youth about financial literacy. She is an angel investor and advocate for FemTech solutions and wealth building opportunities for BIPOC founders. Her accolades include – Money 20/20 Amplify “Ones to Watch,”, The Network Journal 40 Under 40 and the Ben and Jerry’s” Citizen Cool” Award.
Sheila is a native of Brooklyn, NY and now resides in Washington, DC with her husband and daughter. Sheila earned her MBA from the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business and achieved her BA from Long Island University. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
As a citizen of the world and avid traveler, acquiring passport stamps is one of her favorite pastimes. Sheila has lived, studied, and worked overseas and traveled to over 40 countries. Sheila is a Broadway musical, live concert and hot Pilates enthusiast.
Charlene Jolly is FinTech Apps Partnership Manager at Google for AppDev. Her work includes leading FinTech apps in EMEA on their strategies ranging from banking, investment, trading, insuretech, payment, billing, taxing, and more. She also leads a number of FinTech initiatives (or projects?) for Google, including events, materials, trainings, researches etc. Prior to Google, she worked in marketing, event and communications for HubSpot, The Financial Times Hong Kong, Schneider Electric France, Gameloft South-East Asia and Airbnb Vietnam and completed her Master's degree at Grenoble Ecole de Management.
Richie Serna is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Finix. Finix is on a mission to create the most accessible financial services ecosystem in history by building the global operating system for fintech, starting with payments. Prior to Finix, Richie was an early employee and engineer at Balanced, the first developer-friendly payments API for online marketplaces.
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Chief Revenue Officer Seth McGuire is responsible for expanding Galileo’s client relationships and scaling marketing, partnerships and business development functions for additional growth.
Prior to joining Galileo, Seth was president and chief operating officer at Backbone PLM, where he managed the company’s revenue, operations and overall company performance. Earlier, he spent nearly six years at Twitter in senior and management positions, including managing Twitter’s data and enterprise solutions business to support companies and developers using Twitter’s API platform to build new products and services.
Seth holds an MBA from University of Virginia Darden School of Business and is a graduate of Georgetown University.
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Francesca Rossi is an IBM fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader. She is an AI scientist with over 30 years of experience in AI research, from which she has published more than 200 articles in top AI journals and conferences. She co-leads the IBM AI ethics board and actively participates in many global multi-stakeholder initiatives on AI ethics. She is a member of the board of directors of the Partnership on AI and is the industry representative in the steering committee of the Global Partnership on AI. She is a fellow of both the worldwide association of AI (AAAI) and of the European one (EurAI), and she will be the next president of AAAI.
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Dave Glaser, President and COO of Dwolla. Dave is an industry veteran with a breadth of experience, and he is focused on enterprise growth strategies, customer onboarding, services and more. Prior to Dwolla, he served as Senior Vice President at Mastercard, after previous executive roles at Worldpay through the IPO and merger with Vantiv, and Cybersource driving growth that resulted in the acquisition by Visa.
I'm the President of Money20/20 and have been with Ascential since 2008. Prior to Money20/20 I was the MD of Retail Week. I am a passionate campaigner for the progression of women into more senior roles and founded Rise Up in 2018 to champion diversity in Financial services. I am one of Fintech magazines Top 100 women in Fintech. Outside work, one of my life's missions is to speak Italian - still very much work in progress.
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Karen S. Puah is the President of the Fintech Association of Malaysia. An active advocate for women’s involvement in entrepreneurship and technology, she is also the Ambassador and Head of Malaysia for She Loves Tech, the world’s largest startup competition and accelerator program for women-led and women-impact tech startups.
Puah co-founded CS Tech Solutions, which focuses on digital transformation for corporations, small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), and seed investment on startups. She has an active presence in the Malaysia startup community and is a mentor for several accelerators and universities.
Uri Pomerantz is a Venture Partner at Jackson Square Ventures (jsv.com), investing in Series A software companies. He is an engineer by training and has founded multiple fintech startups, including a wealthtech company acquired by a Fortune 500 insurance company. Additionally, he has spent time working, venture investing and running companies across the developing world.
Rohini is the Product Lead at Square and spent a number of years as the Senior Product Manager at PubNub, a startup providing a global Data Stream Network for developers. In her free time, she also advises tech startups in the Bay Area. Her previous experiences have been in building new products with entrepreneurs, developing and marketing existingproduct lines for startups, and creating innovation strategies for larger corporations. Rohini is from the Midwest and studied Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) and completed her MBA from the University of Chicago.
Nick is the Global Head of Policy at Wise, a new kind of financial company for people and businesses that travel, live and work internationally.
At Wise, he leads interactions with governments and coordinates grassroots consumer education campaigns to modernize and make international payments more transparent. Nick frequently speaks publicly on the intersection of finance, technology, and policy, including at events like Money 20/20 and the Payments Canada SUMMIT, on finance-related podcasts, and has been quoted in media outlets such as Politico, Bloomberg and many others.
Prior to Wise, he spent a decade specializing in financial services policy for three members of Congress. While Staff Director of the US Senate Banking Subcommittee on International Finance, he was a lead negotiator for the first major banking legislation in a decade, authored several other laws, and influenced countless regulatory actions.
Adam Hadi is the VP of Marketing at Current, a leading U.S. challenger bank serving Americans overlooked by traditional banks. Prior to leading marketing at Current, he was VP of Marketing at Quidd (acquired by Animoca), head of marketing at DRAFT (acquired by Paddy Power Betfair) and led user acquisition at Topps Digital after spending several years as an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Victoria Huang is Sr. Director of Strategic Initiatives at LendingClub where she led deal diligence and integration efforts for the recently completed acquisition of Radius Bank. With this transformational merger, LendingClub officially becomes a digital marketplace bank. Prior to LendingClub, Vicky held various advisory roles at early stage startups in Silicon Valley. She started her career in investment banking, covering Asia capital markets with Citigroup and Credit Suisse. As a seasoned fintech operator, she also built and scaled the China operations for Copal Partners, a financial research and analytics provider, that was acquired by Moody's. Vicky holds an MBA from Chicago Booth and dual degrees in Business and Economics from UC Berkeley.
Iñigo is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Arcus, the leading fintech as a service platform making fintech possible for everyone. Arcus helps any business launch a fintech business across the Americas including BBVA, Santander, Walmart, 7-Eleven and Rappi. Iñigo is responsible for generating, managing and ensuring the growth of Arcus' business as a whole, and as a founding member, he has served in several roles at the company, including Vice President and CFO. Prior to Arcus, Iñigo worked at Morgan Stanley and also worked as Managing Director of Rumayor Genetics, his family business, managing all aspects of the operations and expansion of the company.
Naré Vardanyan is the CEO and co-founder at Ntropy, a data platform to enable the next generation of financial services, focused on decoding payments first. She was born and raised in Armenia, a small country in the Southern Caucasus, torn by territorial conflict and war. After obtaining her degree in International Relations at age 15, she has been working for the UN on the development programme focused on financial inclusion and poverty reduction. She's continued her career in Geneva, Switzerland and London, UK, where she has started and invested in businesses in Machine Learning/A.I. space in the last few years, before founding Ntropy. Naré is fluent in 11 languages, and is a firm believer in data being the biggest equalizer for the 21st century. Her work at Ntropy is inspired by and devoted to making data a power to bridge gaps in the society, instead of playing a divisive role that it has often done in the last decade.
Aditi Shekar has been obsessing about personal finance ever since she got her first paycheck. She has spent 12+ years at the ground floor of two venture-backed startups (General Assembly, Guild Education) and served as Executive Director at Ashoka, a leading social entrepreneurship organization. She's also a family finance expert at publications like Refinery29, Business Insider & Real Simple. Aditi has a BS/BA in Business & Psychology from UNC Chapel Hill.
Brian is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at One, a digital challenger bank focused on restoring financial health for middle class families through innovative credit and savings products. Prior to One, Brian was the Founder & CEO at Azlo, one of the largest challenger banks for freelancers and small businesses owners in the U.S.
Jason is a 10+ year veteran in the consumer financial services industry. He has held leadership roles in marketing, product management, and customer acquisition at startups like LendUp and Future Finance and was part of the team that built and launched Goldman Sachs's retail franchise, Marcus. He currently leads marketing for Merlon, an adverse media platform for AML/KYC, and advises a number of fintech startups. You can find him writing for his newsletter, Fintech Business Weekly, or on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Ramona Ortega is the CEO & Founder of My Money My Future. MMMF is a fintech marketplace helping Black and Latinx millennials save, invest, and build wealth with automated financial guidance and personalized product recommendations. Previously she helped launch Azlo, a small business banking platform as Entrepreneur-In-Residence. Prior to founding MMMF, Ramona was a Wall Street attorney and worked on complex securities litigation and corporate matters in private practice and at the SEC and U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Early in her career, Ramona is a serial social entrepreneur and policy wonk. Ortega is a contributor to TechCrunch and HuffPost and is a sought after speaker and thought leader in Fintech. She has a B.A. from UCLA and a J.D. from Fordham School of Law. She is on the board of Village Capital, Camino Financial and Community Health Council.
My Money My Future is an all-in-one personal finance platform that helps multicultural millennials make better financial decisions by combining education and unique content with personalized product recommendations and financial advice in a seamless experience. MMMF dashboard provides personalized financial action plans to guide users through a range of decisions, including investing, budgeting, saving, and credit.
Abhinav Anand joined Goldman Sachs in 2015 as a managing director in the Consumer division. He has 16 years of experience across the Consumer sector including in risk management, product management and data analytics. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, he worked at Discover Financial Services for several years, most recently as chief model risk officer and head of operational risk. He is passionate about creating customer-centric digital products and experiences that are simple and transparent to use.
Abhinav earned a Bachelor of Technology in Industrial Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, an MS in Industrial Engineering from Iowa State University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Roxana is Chief Strategy Officer and Board Member at Blend Network, UK-based FinTech company selected as one of the UK's top-ten FinTech by the Mayor of London's TechInvest. She is responsible for the platform’s growth and strategic partnership alliances. Roxana is also member of the Advisory Board of Women In Finance UK and a member of Innovate Finance. She was selected to the Women In FinTech Powerlist in 2019 and 2020. Prior to joining Blend Network, Roxana was vice president of commodities at Morgan Stanley and before that at Barclays, where she was responsible for the design and implementation of fundamental and tactical trade ideas advising institutional investors and pension funds. Most recently, Roxana founded leading BeautyTech platform Zeebba, dubbed the ‘Uber of Beauty’ which she successfully sold to Urban Massage. Roxana holds an MSc in Financial Economics and Econometrics and a BSc in Quantitative Economics.
Patrick Sells, an award-winning entrepreneur recognized for digital innovation in banking, is on a mission to transform financial services through the fusion of Bitcoin and banking. A deeply held belief of Patrick’s is that the two should be symbiotic in order to create maximum financial security for all. As the Head of NYDIG's Bank Solutions business, Patrick will build upon the momentum from NYDIG's efforts to bring the needed technological infrastructure for banks to be able to offer Bitcoin products and services such as custody, rewards programs and lending opportunities. Prior to joining NYDIG, Patrick served as Chief Innovation Officer at Quontic Bank, where he evolved the firm into a leading adaptive digital bank in the U.S. through a focus on technology and innovation. Prior to Quontic, he built and ran several technology, data and digital marketing companies, and has advised banks and fintech companies on regulatory compliance.
Originally from Egypt, Hussein came to the US to study for a PhD in Computer Science at Virginia Tech in 2005. After graduating he went on to a few roles leading Engineering teams, most recently at Amazon, but felt the Entrepreneurship itch and went on to found and head Transpose Technologies, a holistic information management platform that had users spanning 169 countries and 100,000MAU. After a successful exit, Hussein decided to embark on an MBA at UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business, taking part time freelancing roles as an engineer in the interim, figuring it would give him time to come up with his next idea. It was as a freelancer where he realized how broken the financial services sector was for this segment, and it was then where Oxygen was born. Fast forward two plus years, an incubation at Y Combinator, hyper growth and a realization that there are more problems to solve within the traditional finance sector, Oxygen is well positioned to disrupt traditional financial services.
Ron Shevlin is the Managing Director of Fintech Research at Cornerstone Advisors. Author of the book Smarter Bank and the Fintech Snark Tank on Forbes, Ron is ranked among the top fintech influencers globally, and is a frequent keynote speaker at banking and fintech industry events.
Ahmed Siddiqui is VP, Product at Branch, and previously VP, Product at Marqeta, a payments technology Unicorn valued at over $4.3 Billion. When he’s not making stick figure drawings to grasp the concepts of card based payments, he's building the next wave of fintech startups. Author of The Anatomy of the Swipe: Making Money Move.
Rich Turrin is the international best-selling author of “Innovation Lab Excellence: Digital Transformation from Within” and an award-winning executive with more than 20 years of experience in fintech innovation.