Fintech One•On•One

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Mike de Vere runs Zest AI, a company that has been applying machine learning to credit underwriting for over two decades, starting with some of the largest banks on the planet and now serving a large share of the credit union market. Since his last appearance on the show three years ago, Zest has expanded well past underwriting into fraud detection and portfolio management, tied together by an intelligence layer and a generative AI companion called LuLu. Mike makes a specific argument in this conversation: machine learning still makes the credit decision, generative AI makes the feedback loop faster, and the real advantage available to community financial institutions is a willingness to pool what they know.

What We Covered

Zest today, from underwriting to fraud to portfolio management
Why the intelligence layer is what makes an ecosystem
Starting with Discover, Citi and Freddie Mac, then moving down market
LuLu, named after a corgi, and what she actually does
Safety and soundness as the first use case for most institutions
Replacing quarterly reports that used to take weeks
Peer benchmarking versus building your own data lake
Collective intelligence across 2,000 credit models in production
Why generative AI has no role in making the credit decision
Shrinking model refit cycles from 18 months to daily evaluation
Zest customers versus non-customers on growth, delinquency and efficiency
Cash flow underwriting, and why generic national models fail
Zest Protect and fighting AI-powered fraud with AI
The two objections that come up most in sales conversations
Takeaways from the IQ AI Lending Forum in Santa Fe

Key Takeaways

The performance gap is measurable. Comparing Zest customers to non-customers across 2024 and 2025, Mike says his customers grew 16 times faster, ran roughly 20 points lower on delinquency, and were 501 basis points better on efficiency ratio.
Generative AI belongs around the credit decision, not inside it. Zest still uses supervised, locked-down machine learning models for underwriting, because a regulator will ask you to explain the decision. What generative AI changes is the speed of evaluation, from an 18-month refit cycle to daily.
Comparison is where the value sits. A lender looking only at its own data lake has visibility on itself and nothing else. LuLu is built to normalize performance data across institutions so a chief lending officer's instinct can be checked against thousands of real policy instances rather than one career's worth of experience.
Community lenders have a structural advantage they underuse. The credit union industry holds roughly $2.4 trillion in assets. If it acted as one institution, it would be bigger than Wells Fargo, and unlike the big banks these institutions are actually willing to share.

About Mike de Vere

Mike de Vere is the CEO of Zest AI, the AI lending technology company that has been doing machine learning in credit since well before AI became a standard fintech conference track. He came to Zest from a career in data and consumer insights, with leadership roles at J.D. Power, The Harris Poll and Nielsen. Zest now touches $5.6 trillion in assets under management, and by the end of this year expects one in three credit union members to have their consumer loans decisioned with its technology.

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Nandan Sheth has spent 25 years in payments, building three growth companies along the way, including Harbor Payments (sold to American Express) and Acculynk (sold to First Data/Fiserv). He now runs Splitit, which takes a different path than most buy now, pay later providers: instead of originating a new loan, it turns the credit a consumer already has on their existing card into an installment plan, with no underwriting, no social security number, and no new debit card for repayments. With agentic commerce infrastructure being built in real time, Nandan argues that a frictionless installment option is exactly what merchants need to avoid being commoditized on price inside an LLM shopping platform.

What We Covered

Three growth companies across 25 years in payments
What attracted Nandan to Splitit from Fiserv
Card-linked installments with no underwriting or new loan
The card loyalist versus the credit needy
$3.5 trillion of unused credit sitting on US cards
Merchant-funded 0% economics and where the budget comes from
A $1,300 average order value versus $250 to $300 for standard BNPL
Point of sale through the Samsung Wallet integration
Backing Google's Universal Commerce Protocol
The overlooked small business to large supplier B2B use case
Chargebacks, repudiation, and who carries the risk in agent-led purchases
Splitit Go for the face-to-face services economy

Key Takeaways

BNPL is really two markets, not one. Card loyalists want rewards, protections, and habit, while the credit needy want a new line of credit. Nandan thinks both get served, but by different products.
The economics work because the merchant treats it as marketing spend. About 98% of Splitit's volume is a merchant-funded 0% plan, priced comparably to a percentage-off promotion, and it lifts average order value roughly four times over standard BNPL.
In agentic commerce, price and delivery speed are the easiest things for an LLM to compare. A 0% installment option gives merchants a third lever that is not pure price competition.
The B2B version may be the stronger use case. Small business owners face both a time problem and a working capital problem, which is a sharper reason to hand off buying to an agent than a consumer shopping for a polo shirt.

About Nandan Sheth

Nandan Sheth is the CEO of Splitit, the card-linked installments platform. He moved to the US from the UK 25 years ago and has spent his entire career in payments and fintech, including running e-commerce and omni-channel commerce at Fiserv. He previously built Harbor Payments, acquired by American Express, and Acculynk, acquired by First Data/Fiserv.

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Escheatment is a $70 billion problem hiding in plain sight: every state, territory, and dozens of countries have laws that hand dormant and unclaimed accounts over to the government after three to five years of inactivity. Allen Osgood, co-founder and CEO of Eisen, left a five-and-a-half-year run as a payments product manager at Coinbase to build the compliance infrastructure that helps banks, brokerages, and crypto platforms reunite customers with their money before the states ever claim it. In this conversation, Allen makes the case that crypto is about to collide with escheatment rules written in the 1960s, and that most institutions have no idea how large their own dormant balances really are.

What We Covered

What escheatment actually is and how the state-by-state rules work
The $70 billion states are holding for more than one in seven Americans
Missingmoney.com and what happens after money is remitted
Ohio's fight over using unclaimed property to fund a football stadium
The Walter story: an E-Trade Amazon account liquidated to Delaware
What counts as a "dormant" account and why logins matter
Where Eisen plugs into the escheatment process
Why reactivation beats remittance, and the Binance.US 48% case study
Why institutions are blind to their largest dormant balances
The 12-to-24-month gap where accounts just age untouched
Displacing big-four spreadsheets with a single pane of glass, forecasting, and access controls
Data volume as the hardest engineering problem, and where AI earns its keep
The Claims Portal and QR-code reactivation
Why crypto makes escheatment far more painful, from volatility to dust
The coming wave of crypto liquidations and the tax problem
Channel strategy with the cores like Fiserv, and the road to 1099 and tax reporting

Key Takeaways

The best escheatment outcome is no escheatment at all. Eisen's real value is retention: keeping customers, deposits, and assets in the institution rather than shipping them to the state.
Institutions routinely underestimate their exposure. One prospect thought it had 10,000 accounts about to escheat, the real number was 100,000. The disconnect sits between the compliance team and the data on the ground.
Crypto changes the stakes. States generally require liquidation, so a dormant token gets sold, creating an unwanted taxable event and, if the market rips afterward, another Walter waiting to happen.
Stale data is the enemy. The information that comes due for escheatment is by definition three to five years old, so address enrichment (LexisNexis, Socure, USPS NCOA) and early engagement are what actually move the reactivation numbers.

About Allen Osgood

Allen Osgood is the co-founder and CEO of Eisen, a compliance operations platform that automates escheatment and account offboarding for financial institutions. Before founding Eisen, he spent about five and a half years as a payments product manager at Coinbase, where he first ran into the strange world of unclaimed property and stayed through the company's IPO.

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Accounts payable has produced multiple billion-dollar companies, yet its mirror image, accounts receivable, remains almost entirely manual at most enterprises despite decades of software spend. In this episode, Caitlin Leksana, co-founder and CEO of Fazeshift, explains why AR has remained unsolved and how her company's AI agents are changing that. A mechanical engineer turned BCG consultant turned founder, Caitlin came to the problem the hard way, doing her own AR by hand at a previous startup, and her outsider's view of a stubborn back-office chore is exactly what makes the conversation worth your time.

What We Covered

A million AR analysts doing manual work in the US
Why accounts payable got solved and AR did not
The leverage imbalance between AP and AR departments
The swivel chair problem and fragmented data
$200 million in unapplied cash on one balance sheet
Fazeshift as a context layer, not a rip-and-replace
Why traditional SaaS and if-then logic could never scale AR
The collections, cash application, and AR inbox modules
Human in the loop and building trust when AI touches money
Training agents on historical data and tribal knowledge
From Y Combinator to a Series A led by F-Prime
The vision for the context layer and autonomous finance

Key Takeaways

AR is the inverse of AP, and every bill is someone else's invoice, so the market is at least as large and mostly uncaptured.
The real unlock is not the AI model but unifying fragmented data across the ERP, bank, CRM, and inbox into a single context layer.
Human in the loop with full auditability is what earns risk-averse finance teams' trust, and it is how agents move toward full automation over time.
Some of the best unsolved startup problems are the ones furthest removed from an engineer, because no one with the tools to fix them ever felt the pain.

About Caitlin Leksana

Caitlin Leksana is the co-founder and CEO of Fazeshift, a San Francisco startup building AI agents for accounts receivable. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, advised Fortune 500 companies at BCG, and earned her MBA at Harvard Business School before founding a crypto marketing startup and then Fazeshift. The company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, raised a $4M seed led by Gradient Ventures, and announced a Series A led by F-Prime in 2026.

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Sahej Suri is the founder of Blue Dot Investors, a late-stage growth equity firm that invests exclusively in fintech across both primaries and secondaries. Before Blue Dot, he built his career at J.P. Morgan, TPG, and as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors. In this conversation, Sahej explains the scrappy origin story of the firm, the overlooked opportunity in fintech secondaries, and his new report with FT Partners on the coming fintech liquidity supercycle, including the finding that the top 100 private fintechs now out-earn the top 100 public ones.

What We Covered

Sahej's path from J.P. Morgan to TPG to QED
The 2008 recession and why access to financial services stuck with him
The happenstance origin story of Blue Dot
Why fintech is closer to biotech than to generalist tech
The gap in the market for late-stage fintech specialists
Why the top 10 names dominate secondary market activity
Finding undervalued companies outside the marquee names
The "Liquidity Supercycle" report with FT Partners and how it came together
Why the top 100 private fintechs out-earn the top 100 public ones
The state of the IPO window and the SpaceX bellwether
Why the 2025 IPO cohort cleared a much higher bar
The have versus have-nots dynamic in fintech fundraising
The Blue Dot dinner series and building community
His AI thesis and where the value creation will land
A 10-year view on fintech as an asset class

Key Takeaways

The best fintech companies are now private, and on the top 100 they out-earn their public peers on revenue, a finding Sahej says had never been put on paper before.
Fintech rewards specialists. Banking, payments, capital markets, and insurance are almost different worlds, and most investors who piled in during 2021 without that depth are no longer around.
The IPO window is real but conditional. The 2025 cohort was roughly three times the size on revenue and more profitable than historical norms, and the near-term window hinges on how bellwether listings perform.
Sahej's bet on AI value creation is not the startups or the large AI labs, but the scaled fintechs that already own distribution and customer trust.

About Sahej Suri

Sahej Suri is the founder and Managing Partner of Blue Dot Investors, a New York-based late-stage growth equity firm investing exclusively in fintech across primaries and secondaries. He previously worked at J.P. Morgan in the financial institutions group, at TPG in growth equity and buyouts, and as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors. Blue Dot came out of stealth in early 2026 and manages roughly $100M in assets, with a team of six and around 30 advisors. Peter is an advisor to Blue Dot Investors.

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Dimitri Masin was one of the first 30 employees at Monzo, where he led AI and data science as the bank grew from 30 to 4,000 people. That vantage point showed him where the real work in financial services still lives: the manual, repetitive customer operations running behind the app. In 2023, he co-founded Gradient Labs to automate that work with fully autonomous AI agents, and the company now serves more than 30 fintech and financial services customers. In this conversation, we get into why co-pilots can quietly degrade quality and compliance, why Dimitri believes full autonomy is the safer path, and the story behind what may be the largest known AI agent deployment in banking.

What We Covered

From Google to one of the first 30 people at Monzo
The second half of the fintech transformation
Why customer operations never got reinvented
What GPT-4 unlocked at the start of 2023
Putting banks on autopilot
Sitting as an orchestration layer over existing systems
The 15% customer experience uplift over human teams
Why cost savings are more nuanced than people expect
How bank implementations and bake-offs actually work
Why co-pilots can degrade quality and compliance
The case for full autonomy over a human in the loop
Benchmarking agents against the human team, not perfection
Redeploying staff instead of cutting headcount
The largest known AI agent deployment in banking
Why banks aren't seeing productivity gains yet
The build-it-ourselves mindset shift
A five to ten year view of the transformation
How the US bake-off culture plays to a specialist's advantage

Key Takeaways

The overlooked opportunity in banking is not the app experience but the manual operational work behind it: customer support, AML, fraud, KYC, onboarding, and screening.
Co-pilots can backfire. When suggestions are right 90% of the time, people start accepting them blindly, which degrades quality and compliance in the other 10%.
No agent is correct 100% of the time, and that is the wrong bar. The right question is whether the system beats the human team it replaces, which becomes the benchmark.
Automation has not meant layoffs at any of Gradient Labs' customers. Teams get redeployed to complex, higher-empathy work like vulnerability and financial difficulty cases.
The bottleneck on transformation is not the technology, which has existed since GPT-4, but how slowly organizations diffuse and adopt it. Dimitri's horizon is five to ten years.

About Dimitri Masin

Dimitri Masin is the CEO and co-founder of Gradient Labs, a London-based startup building autonomous AI agents that run customer operations for regulated financial services companies. Before founding the company in 2023 with two former Monzo colleagues, he was among the first 30 employees at Monzo, where he led AI, data science, financial crime, and fraud as the bank scaled to roughly 4,000 people. He started his career at Google.

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Yuval Refua is the Chief Product Officer at Navan, the global travel and expense platform he joined seven years ago when it was still just a travel booking service. Since then, he has built out its payments and expense products from the ground up, turning the company policy that used to live in a PDF into code that runs on the card itself. This conversation matters because T&E is one of the most universally disliked workflows in business, and Navan is rethinking it from scratch just as AI and agentic commerce start to reshape how companies spend.

What We Covered

Falling in love with credit cards at American Express
Why Navan started as a travel-only booking service
The reconciliation pain that led to launching a card
Coding company policy directly onto the card
Real-time approval the moment you swipe
Why travel-first beats procurement-first
Context as the key to managing distributed spend
Going global with VAT, GST, per diems and mileage
The e-invoicing wave hitting more countries
The GTA model for revealing complexity gradually
The Expense Admin Companion and recommended actions
From single approvals to bulk to full automation
The Visa partnership and the Connect product
Waymo for travelers, Formula One for finance

Key Takeaways

The expense report exists to answer a question that company policy already settled. Coding that policy onto the card removes the work instead of automating it.
Starting from travel gives Navan context (where the employee is, why they are there, who they are visiting) that procurement-first tools lack, which makes per-employee limits far smarter.
Going global is less about features and more about mastering country-by-country tax, e-invoicing, per diem and mileage rules.
The path to full automation runs through trust. Navan moves finance teams from a single recommended action, to bulk approvals, to hands-off automation, which is also how it intends to handle agentic spend.

About Yuval Refua

Yuval Refua is Chief Product Officer at Navan. He started two companies of his own early in his career before moving into fintech and product management at Thomson Reuters, then American Express, where he developed a deep love for credit cards and the rails behind them. He joined Navan around seven years ago and has built out its payments and expense products from the ground up.

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This episode is part of our occasional Fintech Revealed series, where we do an extended deep dive into one topic with two industry experts. The topic today is vertical fintech, and I am joined by Matt Hennessy, the Business Lead at Increase, the modern banking infrastructure company, and Jamie Fox, the General Manager of Fintech at Tekion, the AI-native cloud platform that runs the entire business for auto dealerships across the US, Canada, and the UK.

Tekion built its embedded banking on Increase, so the two of them give us both sides of the same story: the platform that lives inside the dealership and the infrastructure that connects it to the banking system. We get into the surprisingly large money flows inside a single dealership, why paper checks still beat instant rails for many operators, how compliance and trust get engineered into the product, and just how big this embedded banking opportunity gets.

What We Covered

What vertical fintech is and why it matters now
The money flows hiding inside a single car dealership
Why outbound dealer spend is roughly 2x inbound
Operating account vs. ledgering account adoption paths
Dealer-to-dealer payments as a ledger change with zero rail fees
Instant rails: RTP, FedNow, and Request for Payment
The persistence of paper checks and the cost to operationalize them
Direct Fed access vs. layers of middleware
Compliance as code, codified into the product
Building trust in building blocks
Where agentic payments and "know your agent" fit in
How large the embedded banking opportunity ultimately gets

Key Takeaways

Owning the financial system of record inside core operating software is the defensible position in an age when light "systems of engagement" can be replicated with AI.
Outbound payments, not inbound, are the bigger prize: US auto dealerships pushed out roughly $1.3 trillion in 2024, about 2x what they took in.
The barrier to instant rails is education, not technology. Many dealers do not know RTP or FedNow exists, or that they can pay a vendor any day of the week.
Trust cannot be launched all at once. Holding a dealer's operating cash is a different level of trust than processing a payment they can fall back on, and it is earned in building blocks.

For the founding story and more about Increase, check out my conversation with CEO and Founder Darragh Buckley from last year.

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Elliott Lorenz took an unusual path into consumer lending, moving from applied mathematics and high-frequency trading into the business of pricing credit risk. Today he is the CEO and co-founder of Edge Focus, a technology-enabled private credit firm that sits between consumer lending platforms and the institutional investors who want to deploy capital into the asset class. In this episode, Elliott explains how the firm's credit engine works, why speed is its biggest edge, and how he reads the recent wave of criticism aimed at private credit.

What We Covered

From engineering and applied math to high-frequency trading
What Michael Lewis's Flash Boys got right and wrong about HFT
Spotting an edge in LendingClub's public loan data
Turning a data-science hobby into Edge Focus
The Origin credit engine and how it makes decisions
Expanding a lender's credit box with an orthogonal view of credit
Modeling with a single month of payment history
Updating a credit model within a day
The Lens portfolio analytics tool
Where alpha comes from beyond the underwriting model
Fraud and asset liability mismatch in private credit
Building the EDGEX ABS shelf and partnering with Fortress
Proving ML models are free from bias
Where consumer lending goes over the next few years

Key Takeaways

Edge Focus competes less on having a single better model and more on combining technology, capital, and platform relationships in one package, which Elliott calls the firm's "big unlock."
The firm can incorporate even a single month of payment history into its models and push an update within a day, letting it react to macro shifts faster than firms that wait 12 to 24 months for data.
Most of the recent private credit criticism falls into two buckets, fraud and asset liability mismatch, and Elliott sees the fraud cases as largely idiosyncratic and the redemption problems as a function of investors misjudging illiquid assets.
Because Edge Focus invests its own capital alongside partners rather than acting as a pure technology vendor, its incentives are tied directly to loan performance.

About Elliott Lorenz

Elliott Lorenz is the CEO and co-founder of Edge Focus, a technology-enabled private credit firm focused on consumer lending. He trained as an engineer and applied mathematician, earned a master's in finance from Princeton, and spent several years in high-frequency trading before bringing those modeling techniques into consumer credit in 2013.

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Andrew Davies has spent more than three decades fighting financial crime, starting with sanctions screening tools for central banks in the mid-1990s and arriving at ComplyAdvantage after nearly 16 years at Fiserv. He sits at the center of one of the most consequential questions in financial services: can we finally move the needle on financial crime detection after decades of catching less than 2% of what's laundered globally?

ComplyAdvantage serves more than 3,000 enterprises across 75 countries with its AI-native Mesh platform. If you want to learn more about the founding story and their early days, check out my podcast with founder Charlie Delingpole from 2019.

What We Covered

Why the industry has historically caught less than 2% of money laundered globally
How the money laundering economy ranks as the world's third largest at an estimated $5.6 trillion
The evolution from sanctions screening to FRAML to multi-dimensional financial crime risk
The Mesh platform and what a unified financial crime system means for compliance teams
Cassie, the agentic AI analyst automating customer screening investigations
How 90% of compliance work was historically spent chasing false positives
Real-time payments compliance and the risk-based approach to payment screening
The SEPA Instant Payments challenge and batch screening against the EU journal
Stablecoins, unhosted wallets, and the compliance infrastructure gap
FATF's finding that stablecoins represent 84% of illicit crypto transaction volume
Data sharing consortiums as the next inflection point in fighting financial crime
The network problem at the heart of money laundering and terrorist financing

Key Takeaways

The money laundering economy is estimated at $5.6 trillion, making it the third largest in the world, above Germany, yet we detect less than 2%. Agentic AI tools like Cassie are designed to eliminate false positives so human analysts only work cases that genuinely warrant their expertise. Data sharing consortiums, where organizations contribute to shared detection models, represent the most promising path to materially improving financial crime outcomes. Stablecoins create real compliance risk at the unhosted wallet layer, the Bank of England has floated a ban, while the US is unlikely to go that route, leaving a gap.

About Andrew Davies

Andrew Davies is the Global Head of Financial Crime Compliance Strategy at ComplyAdvantage. He began his career in the mid-1990s building sanctions screening tools for central banks and large financial institutions, and spent nearly 16 years at Fiserv in their financial crime division before joining ComplyAdvantage.

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Joshua Silver has spent two decades in embedded payments. Before co-founding Rainforest, he built Patient Co, a healthcare payments business scaled to billions in processing volume and tens of millions of patients, then spent several years consulting with software founders on building their payments programs. Rainforest is payments as a service, purpose-built for vertical SaaS — and in this conversation Joshua makes a compelling case that embedded payments is not just a revenue opportunity but a competitive moat.

What We Covered

Why vertical SaaS companies are still leaving money on the table with embedded payments
The gap in the market Rainforest was built to fill
How payfac as a service works and who it is designed for
Why the number of registered payfacs is shrinking, not growing
The $5 billion volume threshold for when becoming a full payfac makes economic sense
How Rainforest differentiates from Stripe and Adyen for vertical SaaS platforms
Vertical-specific risk models versus general-purpose tools
Rainforest's real-time ledger and what it unlocks for complex payment structures
Adding PayPal and Venmo for untapped vertical SaaS markets
Expanding into Canada and building the playbook for international growth
How AI is being used across the business and the rising threat of AI-driven fraud
What success looks like for Rainforest in the next five years

Key Takeaways

Embedded payments builds a moat. Joshua's closing point is the sharpest: once merchants are running their money through your software platform, competitors face a much harder job dislodging you. Payments isn't just a revenue line — it's a retention strategy.

Vertical-specific risk models matter enormously. Stripe and Adyen have to serve everyone, so their risk tooling is built for the lowest common denominator. Rainforest has built models tuned to individual verticals — lawn care looks different from HVAC, which looks different from nonprofit donations — and it takes the fraud liability rather than passing it to the platform.

The $5 billion payfac threshold is the new reality. A decade ago the rule of thumb was around $1 billion in card volume. Regulatory and compliance burdens have risen so sharply that Joshua now puts the threshold at $5 billion with line of sight to $10 billion before it makes economic sense to go full payfac.

A real-time ledger is a competitive differentiator. Most legacy processors are batch-based, settled overnight on mainframes. Rainforest's ledger is real-time, enabling split payments, franchise fee hierarchies, and complex billing structures that batch systems simply cannot support.

About Joshua Silver

Joshua Silver is co-founder and CEO of Rainforest, a payments-as-a-service company purpose-built for vertical SaaS platforms. Before Rainforest, he co-founded Patient Co, scaling it to billions in healthcare payments volume before a sale, and subsequently consulted with software founders on building their payments businesses. He has been working in embedded payments for twenty years.

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Michael Tannenbaum became CEO of Figure in early 2024, taking over from founder Mike Cagney and leading the company through its September 2025 IPO. In this conversation, we get into the mechanics of how Figure's blockchain-based platform competes with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, what it actually takes to cut mortgage origination costs from $12,000 to $1,000, and where the real opportunities in tokenization lie.

What We Covered

Taking over as CEO from Mike Cagney and the Big Rocks framework
How Figure describes itself: building the future of capital markets on blockchain
The B2B partner network and how it compares to Fannie Mae's function
Cutting mortgage origination costs from $12,000 to $1,000 and 45 days to five
Why Figure competes directly with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
How blockchain eliminates third-party diligence and prevents loan double-pledging
The Figure Connect marketplace and its rapid growth since June 2024
Where tokenization adds real value — and where it doesn't
YLDS: Figure's SEC-registered yield-bearing stablecoin and its role in capital markets
The timing and mechanics of Figure's September 2025 IPO
Building a rate-agnostic business across different macro environments
Three growth areas: consumer mortgages, Democratized Prime, and on-chain equities

Key Takeaways

Figure's origination platform and its capital market are the same system — you can't separate them, and that's the competitive moat. Tokenization only creates liquidity when the underlying assets are standardized and fungible; putting unique assets on a blockchain doesn't conjure buyers. The recent fraud cases involving double-pledged loans (Tricolor, First Brands, MFS) have turned blockchain's immutability from a skeptic's objection into a selling point. And Figure is running at what Michael calls the rule of 150 — 100% year-over-year growth at 50% margins — in one of the most rate-sensitive and entrenched markets on earth.

About Michael Tannenbaum

Michael Tannenbaum is the CEO of Figure, a blockchain-based capital markets company he took public on Nasdaq in September 2025. Before Figure, he was an early executive at both SoFi (Chief Revenue Officer) and Brex (COO), and sat on the Brex board when it was acquired by Capital One. He began his career in investment banking at J.P. Morgan.

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Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr, an AI-driven valuation platform for asset-backed lending. He spent his early career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA, where he grew comfortable with the challenge of pricing hard-to-value assets. That thread ran through every role he held until it crystallized into a company built around a simple but structural problem: in asset-backed lending, appraisers give you a price and then spend the rest of their report telling you they're not responsible for it. Barkr is built to change that.

What We Covered

Thomas's background in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA
How a common thread across luxury assets led to founding Barkr
Starting with fine art and private jets before expanding to other asset classes
The two-part failure in traditional appraisals: accuracy and absence of liability
How Barkr pairs an AI valuation with a contractual performance warranty
The progression from Lloyd's of London to AXA to Munich Re
$2 billion in covered valuations and what patience actually means in this business
GPUs as a surprisingly durable and long-lived collateral asset class
How Barkr finds clients, from pavement pounding to Nvidia referrals
Monthly mark-to-market on hard assets throughout a loan's life
Building a domain-specific LLM with human review in the loop
Plans to build an in-house insurance vehicle to unlock capacity

Key Takeaways

Traditional appraisal firms hedge their liability by design. Page one is the price; the rest of the report is the disclaimer. Barkr's contractual warranty flips that model by standing behind the number.

Barkr's data on GPU durability challenges the conventional narrative. Chips five and seven years old are still generating revenue and still have meaningful resale value, which changes the risk calculus for lenders considering AI infrastructure as collateral.

Augmenting, not replacing, is the right positioning for valuation technology. Barkr actively encourages clients to keep using their existing appraisers and treats third-party appraisals as additional data inputs that improve their own accuracy.

Building a reinsurance relationship takes years. Barkr worked through Lloyd's, then AXA, before landing Munich Re, and each step required demonstrating proof of concept at the prior level first.

About Thomas Galbraith

Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr. He began his career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA before founding Barkr to bring accountability and AI-driven accuracy to asset valuation in the lending market. Barkr has covered approximately $2 billion in valuations across art, private jets, vehicles, and GPUs.

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Patricia Montesi didn't start her career in payments, she started it in car rental. After nine years at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car, she was recruited into fintech with zero industry experience. That outsider perspective became her edge, and she never let go of it. Today, she's the CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure platform that combines card issuing, money movement, and a bank-grade ledger on a single API-first stack.

What We Covered

How nine years in car rental shaped Patricia's outsider approach to payments
Getting recruited into Wild Card Systems with no payments background, and why that fresh lens became an advantage
The fragmentation problem at the heart of payments infrastructure and why point products create hidden complexity
Qolo's three-product suite: Quantum Ledger, Qascade money movement, and Qinetic card issuing
Why Qolo isn't quite a side core, it overlays and integrates with existing bank cores rather than running in parallel
Rail agnosticism and why Qolo still supports checks in 2026
The dual go-to-market: commercial banks and B2B fintechs, same platform, different vernacular
How the Synapse collapse changed the ledger conversation for banks and fintechs alike
Winning KeyBank in a competitive RFP against much larger players, and launching virtual account management in nine months
How banks are using Qolo to protect commercial deposits from modern non-bank competitors
AI inside Qolo: from Glean to Claude, and their internal "Turning Hours into Minutes" program
130% year-over-year growth and 142% net revenue retention

Key Takeaways

The moat problem: Patricia set out to build a company where customers stay because of the value delivered, not because switching is too painful. That philosophy shaped every product decision at Qolo.

Ledger first: Most point-product fintechs have basic ledgers that only support one rail. Qolo's bank-grade dual-entry forward-posting ledger underpins every rail, making reconciliation and real-time money visibility a solved problem rather than a vendor management challenge.

Synapse's legacy: The debacle forced banks and fintechs alike to ask harder questions about who actually owns the ledger and where money sits at any given moment. Qolo had been making that argument for years before the market was ready to hear it.

Bank as distribution: KeyBank and Huntington aren't just clients — they're strategic investors using Qolo to defend their commercial deposit base against modern non-bank alternatives.

About Patricia Montesi

Patricia Montesi is CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure company she built from the ground up after more than 20 years in the industry. She started her career at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car before being recruited into fintech with zero payments background — an outsider perspective she has held onto ever since. At Qolo, she and her team built the ledger, money movement, and card issuing stack as first-party infrastructure, without relying on third-party processors underneath.

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Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, one of the largest financial software companies in the world, serving over 7,000 banks globally including 45 of the world's top 50. He joined the company a little over a year ago, bringing an unusually broad background spanning consulting, Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and several other technology businesses. This is a wide-ranging conversation about where Finastra is headed and why the conventional narrative around AI and software disruption misses something important.

What We Covered

Chris's path from consulting to Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and beyond
What attracted him to Finastra and the perception versus reality gap he set out to close
How he spent his first 90 days listening to customers and internal teams before deciding direction
The portfolio narrowing strategy, including divestitures of Treasury, Capital Markets, and student lending
Finastra's core focus areas: lending, payments, and universal banking
Growth vectors within an existing base of 7,000+ banks, including geography expansion, cross-sell, and data
The AI center of excellence and why dedicated ownership changes the pace of deployment
Internal AI use cases: an HR chatbot and automated sales approvals
Operator Assist, a new product that uses AI to surface and resolve failed payments
Agentic AI in mortgage origination, targeting documentation discrepancies
Why Finastra views AI as a growth accelerant, not a cost-cutting tool, and why not all software faces the same disruption risk
Community bank caution around modernization and why the economics will eventually force full core replacements

Key Takeaways

Companies that are systems of record with long-duration enterprise agreements are far less exposed to AI disruption than the public markets currently assume. The distinction matters, and Chris makes a clear case for why Finastra sits in the less-exposed category.

Dedicated AI ownership changes everything. Spreading AI enthusiasm across everyone's partial attention generates ideas but not scalable execution. The center of excellence model exists precisely to fix that.

Community bank core modernization is inevitable but slow. The banks most likely to win that market are those that can make transitions nearly frictionless, not those with the most advanced technology.

At $7 trillion in daily payments routed through Finastra's systems, the probabilistic nature of LLMs is not a minor technical detail. Chris's post-recording observation about where AI fits and where it doesn't is one of the more clear-eyed takes you'll hear from a CEO in this space.

About Chris Walters

Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, which he joined a little over a year ago. Before Finastra, he held CEO and COO roles at a range of public and private technology companies, including The Weather Company and a public wealth management and software business. He also spent seven years in consulting and held senior roles at Bloomberg.

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Ali Niknam is one of fintech's most unconventional founders. He built multiple unicorns before turning his attention to banking, then self-funded Bunq with nearly €100 million of his own money before taking a single outside investor. That conviction paid off: Bunq posted €85 million in profit in 2024, putting it in rare company among European neobanks. Now, having applied for a US national bank charter, Ali is setting his sights on the most competitive banking market in the world.

What We Covered

Ali's background as a three-time unicorn founder
Self-funding Bunq with nearly €100M before taking outside investment
Pursuing a greenfield banking license, the first granted in the Netherlands in 35 years
Why Bunq launched with a paid subscription model when everyone else was going free
Bunq's core user base: digital nomads and cross-border travelers
International expansion across the European Union
Applying for a US national bank charter and dealing with three regulators
The philosophy behind building a bank people actually trust for day-to-day use
How AI powers transaction monitoring, real-time translation, and marketing at Bunq
Why Bunq describes itself as the first Gen AI-powered bank
The personal CFO vision for the future of banking
What an AI-native bank looks like five years from now

Key Takeaways

Starting with a paid subscription meant Bunq only attracted users who genuinely valued the product, building real engagement rather than vanity metrics — and better unit economics from the outset.

Pursuing a full greenfield banking license from the start, while far harder than working around incumbents, lets Bunq compete directly with the largest banks on equal regulatory footing.

AI at Bunq isn't a marketing term. It powers transaction monitoring, real-time multilingual customer support, and marketing automation in ways that materially reduce costs and improve security.

The vision for the AI-native bank is a personal CFO that makes abstract financial goals tangible — connecting daily spending habits to the things users actually want in their lives.

About Ali Niknam

Ali Niknam is the founder and CEO of Bunq, the Dutch neobank. A serial entrepreneur with three unicorns to his name, Ali was born in Canada to Iranian parents and has been based in the Netherlands for most of his life. Before Bunq, he founded TransIP, now rebranded as Team Blue, the world's third-largest domain name and web hosting provider. He is also the author of a book on entrepreneurship.

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Timothy Li, CEO and Co-Founder of LendAPI, has spent nearly a decade trying to solve the same problem: launching a lending product takes too long and costs too much. With LendAPI, he's built a no-code platform that lets banks, credit unions, fintechs, and retailers go from idea to live lending product in weeks, not months or years. Think of it as a GoDaddy-style experience for financial services. Timothy joined me again on the show (he was last on in 2017) to talk about what's under the hood, what the Sunglass Hut deal reveals about embedded finance, and where he thinks AI is actually useful in lending today.

What We Covered

Timothy's path from the Fluid college credit app to building LendAPI
How the drag-and-drop product builder works for non-technical users
Python model deployment for credit risk officers inside the same platform
Winning Best in Show at Finovate
The Sunglass Hut deal and how it came together in three months
Why retailers are moving away from pure-play BNPL providers
Integration options: bank cores, side cores, and direct e-commerce embed
The 300-plus partner marketplace and the SEO strategy behind it
Doc AI and single-task AI agents for document processing and underwriting
Timothy's experience in the CURQL accelerator and how credit unions differ
Teaching FinTech Fundamentals at USC
The five consumer verticals with the most opportunity in fintech

Key Takeaways

The build vs. buy debate is essentially over. When Timothy talks to bank CTOs today, the conversation is "can you launch this next week?" not "should we build this ourselves?" Speed to market has become the dominant concern.

Pure-play BNPL approval rates are outside a retailer's control and can swing 10 points overnight. Private label embedded finance, built on infrastructure like LendAPI, lets retailers and banks own the underwriting criteria and the customer experience, which matters especially for high-ticket items where the financing decision happens in-store.

Single-task AI agents are the near-term opportunity in lending, not fully automated credit decisions. Automating document verification, data extraction, and intake workflows saves minutes per application, and at scale, that compounds quickly.

The five consumer fintech verticals worth building in: mortgages, auto, credit cards and personal loans, payments, and bank accounts. If it's in someone's wallet, there's still work to do.

About Timothy Li

Timothy Li is the CEO and co-founder of LendAPI, a no-code lending platform that launched in 2024 and won Best in Show at Finovate. He previously built Fluid, a credit-building app for college students, and has been building lending infrastructure across multiple ventures over the past decade. He also taught FinTech Fundamentals at the University of Southern California.

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Kareem Saleh is the CEO and co-founder of FairPlay, an AI enablement platform helping financial institutions test, tune, and monitor AI systems in production. Four years after his first appearance on the show, Kareem returns to discuss how FairPlay has evolved from credit model fairness into a full AI enablement infrastructure layer and why the rise of generative and agentic AI has made that work more consequential than ever.

What We Covered

How generative AI changes the definition of fairness in financial services
The shift from model validation to continuous, system-level testing
FairPlay's three core capabilities: testing, optimizing, and validating AI systems
How one customer added one day to their model development cycle but saved 60–90 days in compliance review
The 25–33% of declined applicants who would have performed as well as the riskiest approvals
Why the question for legacy institutions has flipped, from "is AI safe enough to try?" to "is it riskier not to adopt AI?"
The political environment and how fairness demand reconfigures, not disappears, across administrations
State-level regulatory frameworks filling the federal enforcement gap
Kareem's Congressional testimony on AI and algorithmic bias
The agentic AI opportunity in KYC, BSA, and AML workflows
Regulatory look-back risk and why today's decisions can become 2029's consent orders
Cash flow underwriting risks and climate risk as underappreciated threats to credit portfolios

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Most of us assume that major hotel brands have sophisticated financial systems running behind the scenes. In this episode, Jess Conroy, CEO and co-founder of ROH, explains just how wrong that assumption is — and why she's spent the last several years building the financial core that hospitality never had.

What We Covered:

The manual payments problem hiding in plain sight
Why the biggest hotel brands have the biggest challenges
The hidden complexity of every hotel transaction
Why the hospitality industry was overlooked by fintech
How ROH got its start in meetings and events
What "AI-first" actually means at ROH
How ROH fits into the existing hotel software stack
The go-to-market reality of a franchise-heavy industry
A transaction-based model that aligns incentives
Scale and growth: managing over $1 billion across the portfolio
The stale data problem driving bad hotel decisions
The vision: a financial foundation for every hotel dollar

Key Takeaways

Hotel payments are a solved problem almost everywhere except hospitality itself — the industry's bias toward "human solves" left it behind.
The complexity of hotel transactions (variable pricing, upgrades, OTAs, group contracts) makes automation far more valuable here than in simpler retail or restaurant contexts.
Building something that didn't exist before is the hardest sales motion — you're not replacing a known tool, you're educating a market about a problem they've learned to live with.
Year-over-year expansion within existing hotels is the clearest signal of product-market fit — customers keep expanding their use once they're on the platform.

About Jess Conroy

Jess Conroy is the CEO and co-founder of ROH, a financial infrastructure platform for hotels. A second-time founder, she has spent nearly 15 years building in and around the hospitality industry. ROH is currently managing over $1 billion in hotel transactions across its growing portfolio.

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My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Leif Abraham, the co-CEO of Public.com. Public has been carving out a really interesting niche in the brokerage space. They're not trying to be another discount broker competing on free stock giveaways. Instead, they're building what Leif calls the first truly agentic brokerage, where AI agents can actually help you construct and manage your portfolio.

In this episode, we discuss Public's decision to move away from payment for order flow and why trust and transparency are so central to their strategy. We also talk about their fascinating Generated Assets product that lets you essentially prompt your own personalized ETF, their nuanced take on prediction markets and why they're drawing a clear line between portfolio tools and sports betting, and how AI agents are starting to take on work that has traditionally been done by financial advisors.

In this podcast you will learn:

The opportunity that Leif saw when he started Public.
How the dynamic works between Leif and his co-CEO, Jannick Malling.
How he describes Public today.
How their Generated Assets offering allows investors to create custom ETFs.
Why their decided to move away from Payment for Order Flow.
How they are marketing themselves directly to the consumer.
What Leif thinks about prediction markets and how Public will offer them.
What they are planning when it comes to AI agents for wealth management.
How Leif views the rollover market for retirement accounts.
Their plans for the Crypto market.
What success will look like for Public over the next five years.

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My guest today is Denada Ramnishta, the Chief Revenue Officer at Efficient Capital Labs. I've known Denada for over a decade, having first met her during her time at American Express where she was part of the early team building out merchant financing. She's been a consistent champion for democratizing capital access for small and medium-sized businesses, and now she's doing that at ECL, which provides non-dilutive funding and cross-border payment infrastructure for AI and SaaS companies.

In this episode, we dig into how ECL approaches revenue-based financing differently from others in the space, their AI-driven underwriting system called Aura, the fascinating origin story behind their cross-border payments product ECL Flow, why VCs are actually their top referral source, and how they're adapting their underwriting as SaaS pricing models shift from recurring revenue to usage-based models. We also discuss the so-called SaaS apocalypse and what Denada is actually seeing on the ground from the founders she works with every day.

In this podcast you will learn:

Her journey from American Express to Efficient Capital Labs.
What her time at Amex taught her about building responsible lending products.
What ECL does exactly.
What has been learned from the high profile stumbles in revenue based financing.
How debt funding has been misunderstood by founders.
Why VCs are the number one deal source for ECL.
Their underwriting system called Aura and why it is unique.
How Aura has allowed them to evolve their underwriting process.
Why they decided to expand to underwriting companies that operate cross border.
Why they created ECL Flow and expand into cross border money movement.
Where they will be expanding this new infrastructure.
Denada’s thoughts on the SaaS apocalypse.
As pricing models change for SaaS, how they are adapting their underwriting models.
How they are able to grow fast with very low charge off rates.
What is next for ECL.

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Payment declines happen millions of times a day, but how a financial institution handles that moment of failure can define the entire customer relationship. My guest on this episode is Amir Wain, the Founder and CEO of i2c, a global payments and banking infrastructure company he has been building for more than 25 years. Amir is a serial entrepreneur who made a foundational architectural bet early on: that a single, customer-centric, composable platform built for all products and all geographies would ultimately win over the industry's prevailing approach of stitching acquisitions together.

That bet has paid off. Today, i2c powers card and banking programs across 200-plus countries for financial institutions, fintechs, and governments alike. In our conversation, we dig into how modern unified payments infrastructure enables real-time contextual decisioning, why the moment of a payment decline is actually an opportunity to build customer trust, how i2c thinks about balancing fraud prevention with false positives, and what the rise of agentic AI means for the authorization process, and for keeping the human customer at the center of it all.

In this podcast, you will learn:

The evolution in Amir’s thinking that led to the founding of i2c.
When he realized that architecture will determine the destiny of the business.
How i2c has evolved over the last 25 years.
How contextual decisioning in the authorization process has become a differentiator for i2c.
Where traditional infrastructure falls short in authorization decisions today.
What fraud signals are the most important when balancing friction and user experience?
How the industry can balance personalization and data privacy.
The three segments of the market that i2c is focused on.
How they are thinking about moving beyond payments.
How they are planning for the world of autonomous AI agents making transactions.
How far away we are from agentic commerce having significant scale.
What keeps Amir excited today about the future.

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In banking, we often talk about the "front end" customer experience or the "back end" systems of record. But according to S.P. “Wije” Wijegoonaratna, the founder of Aliya, the real revolution is happening right in the middle. From his early days in the UK to his time in the high-stakes world of New York hedge funds and his role as an early investor at SoFi, Wije has consistently found himself at the intersection of financial data and decision-making.

At its core, Aliya is an operational intelligence layer that sits between a bank's customer-facing front end and its core system of record, what Wije calls "the middle." It combines transaction categorization trained on 1.5 trillion transactions from nearly 1,500 banks, dynamic risk segmentation, and real-time post-origination monitoring into a single microservices platform.

In our conversation, we discuss why Aliya went after the largest banks first, how their approach to post-origination risk management drives charge-off rates as low as 2.5%, why Wije believes Nubank poses an existential threat to regional and community banks, and why he thinks the biggest opportunity in banking today lies in transforming that middle layer.

In this podcast, you will learn:

How meeting Mike Cagney and the founders of Palantir was the catalyst for the birth of Aliya.
Why they decided to start with helping banks with lending.
The two core offerings Aliya has today.
Why the cumulative losses on their portfolio is far better than most lenders.
How they decide when to take action on a consumer that may be having problems.
Why they chose to focus on selling to the large banks first.
What they are providing to the large banks exactly.
Why Aliya doesn’t fit into any fintech category.
Where the biggest opportunity for Aliya is today.
Why Wije believes Nubank is going to be successful in the US.
What is next for Aliya.

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My latest guest is Chris Black, CEO of Thread Bank, a Nashville-based community bank that has been purpose-built around embedded banking. Chris came to banking by way of a career as an Air Force pilot, followed by time on Wall Street analyzing banks during the financial crisis, before eventually making his way into community banking in Nashville. He partnered with fintech investor Joe Maxwell of Fintop Capital to recapitalize a small Tennessee bank and transform it into an embedded banking platform focused on vertical software companies serving small businesses.

In our conversation, Chris talks about how Thread navigated the BaaS regulatory storm of 2023 and 2024, what they look for in fintech partners, and how their fiduciary-first philosophy was already in place long before regulators came calling. We also discuss the wave of fintechs now seeking bank charters, the future of community banking in America, and what Thread has on the horizon with the launch of embedded lending and merchant acquiring.

In this podcast you will learn:

Lessons Chris learned during his time in the Air Force.
How the idea for Thread Bank came together.
How they took the acquired bank and made it ready for embedded banking.
When they took on their first fintech partner.
What they are looking for in a fintech partner.
Where Chris sees the biggest opportunity for Thread.
How Thread navigated the BaaS regulatory hurricane of 2023 and 2024.
Why the shift in regulatory focus with the Trump Administration has not changed their thinking.
What Chris thinks about all the fintechs that are now acquiring bank charters.
What it takes for a new fintech to be onboarded with Thread.
The process when a fintech wants to do something that Thread does not think is reasonable.
The key to a thriving community bank sector over the next decade.
What exciting developments are coming down the pipe.

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Open banking in the United States has been on a long and winding road, and the journey is far from over. In this episode, I sit down with Steve Boms, Executive Director of FDATA North America, the trade association representing the fintech companies at the heart of the open banking ecosystem. Steve has been one of the most active voices in shaping U.S. open banking policy for over a decade, and he brings a uniquely informed perspective to where things stand today.

We dig into the current state of the 1033 rule and what amendments are likely coming, FDATA's firm stance that banks should not be permitted to charge fees for consumer-directed data access, and the growing complexity created by a patchwork of state-level regulations on data privacy, AI, and fintech products. We close with a fascinating discussion on how agentic AI, with its need for clear consent frameworks, robust APIs, and defined liability rules, could become the next major catalyst that finally forces meaningful open banking progress in this country.

In this podcast you will learn:

The origin story of FDATA in the UK and how it came to the US.
How Steve has been involved with CFPB and Section 1033 since 2015.
Over the next 10+ years, how FDATA has been engaged in open banking policy.
How open banking and open finance has evolved in the UK.
Who their members are and what FDATA does for them.
Where we are at today when it comes to the 1033 rule.
The FDATA view on banks charging fees for access to their data.
Why this is not really a bank versus fintech fight.
Why it may be many years before we have a final rule for open banking.
Why data access negotiations have been put on pause for now.
What else Steve is working on beyond open banking.
Why he is increasing concerned about the Balkanization of financial services regulation (see his recent Open Banker column).
How they coordinate with the other fintech trade associations.
How they think about the standardization of API and other data standards.
Why Steve is optimistic about the future of open banking in the U.S.
Why AI agents could be a catalyzing force for clear open banking rules.

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What happens when all the world's money moves on chain? That's not a hypothetical for Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, it's the company's mission. In this episode, Marc explains how Polygon is evolving from its roots as an Ethereum layer two into the blockchain for global payments, detailing two recent acquisitions that form the foundation of what he calls the "open money stack" - a single API combining on-ramps, wallets, and cross-chain interoperability.

With over $2.5 trillion in transaction volume already processed and partnerships with Revolut, Stripe, Nubank, and dozens of fintechs across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Marc makes the case that stablecoins are just the beginning. He shares why tokenized bank deposits will be the real game-changer, how banks are already positioning to profit from this shift, and why in 10 years he believes every dollar, whether paying a merchant down the street or sending a remittance across the globe, will move on a blockchain without anyone even thinking about it.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Marc first got interested in blockchain and crypto technology.
Why he decided to make the move to Polygon Labs.
Why Polygon decided to focus on payments.
All the components you need to move money around the world on blockchain.
The idea behind the open money stack.
How Polygon is working with the likes of Revolut and Stripe.
How they differentiate themselves from the other payments blockchains.
What they are doing in AML and sanctions policy.
The scale that Polygon is at today when it comes to transaction volume.
What will the financial system look like when more money stays on chain.
The two things banks ask in their initial conversations with Polygon.
How money will transform in the next 10 years and why most people will not notice.

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Aaron Schumm, CEO and Founder of Vestwell, knows firsthand how broken America's savings system is. When he tried to set up a 401k for his previous 30-person company back in 2010, the process was so difficult, expensive, and confusing that he decided to build a better solution. Today, Vestwell serves 2 million savers with $50 billion in assets, has reduced 401k setup times from 40-70 hours down to just minutes, and runs 14 state-sponsored auto IRA programs including New York's Secure Choice.

In this episode, Aaron explains why fintech has largely failed to move the needle on financial health, too many point solutions that put the onus back on individuals to figure out what to do and then implement it across multiple accounts. His solution? AI agents that will automatically route money from your paycheck to the optimal savings vehicle based on your income, location, tax rates, existing savings, and life circumstances. And he says we're less than a year away from making that a reality.

In this podcast you will learn:

What is broken with the current savings system in America.
The problem at his previous business that was the a-ha moment for Vestwell.
Their initial use case and how they got going.
How their product works exactly.
The three channels they work with.
How they are working with New York State and other government programs.
The conversations they are having with the Federal government around savings programs.
The percentage of employees who typically sign up for an auto-enroll program.
The scale that Vestwell is at today.
What their technology stack looks like.
How much easier it is to set up a workplace savings plan through Vestwell than traditional companies.
The different revenue lines for Vestwell.
How they are working with Amazon.
Why we are not further along in helping Americans with their financial health.
How autonomous AI agents are going to optimize our financial lives in the future.

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The financial system has run on basically the same payments rails for the past several decades. But there is new infrastructure being built today that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of stablecoins. In some ways, the future is already here as Visa has processed several billion dollars in transactions that have been settled in stablecoins. But who will build the infrastructure needed for credit when we move to this new system?

Today’s guest is Rhett Roberts, the CEO and Founder of LoanPro. I last had Rhett on the show back in 2021, and needless to say, a lot has changed since then. Part of Rhett’s thesis is that this talk around interest rate caps could actually be a catalyst to hasten a movement away from the traditional credit rails. And his company is already working on the systems and protocols to create a new credit infrastructure that runs on stablecoins.

In this podcast you will learn:

How LoanPro has evolved over the past five years.
Why most fintechs are now moving into credit products.
Why both banks and fintechs are using LoanPro to launch new credit products.
Why the idea of an interest rate cap on credit cards is resonating today.
What would happen if a 10% rate cap went into effect.
Why this could be great news for BNPL and the other alternative lending products.
Rhett’s thesis around stablecoins and the value proposition.
The elephant in the room for a stablecoin payments network.
How a line of credit backed by stablecoins could work in reality.
Where the card networks will sit within this new system.
How LoanPro is helping to create these processes and protocols.
Where we will be in five years time with this new infrastructure.

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Ryan Christiansen has had one of the more unusual career trajectories in fintech, from managing credit portfolios during the 2008 financial crisis to leading bank integrations at Finicity during the early days of open banking, helping launch the Financial Data Exchange, and then making an unexpected leap into academia as Executive Director of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.

In this conversation, Ryan explains why the Center takes a unique multidisciplinary approach spanning business, engineering, and law schools, and shares details about their new master's degree program launching this fall. We also dig into why Utah has quietly become one of the country's most important fintech hubs, with over $1 billion in fintech wages and $7 billion in economic impact. We also discuss the upcoming Fintech Xchange conference on February 4-6 in Salt Lake City, which has become a must-attend gathering for fintech and banking executives looking for substantive content and genuine networking opportunities.

In this podcast you will learn:

Ryan’s background building Finicity’s open banking platform.
How and why he went from the corporate world to academia.
The mission of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.
The programs the university offers in fintech for its students.
Details of their Masters in Financial Technology program launching in the fall.
Why the fintech scene in Utah is so robust.
Why they decided to create their own event called Fintech Xchange.
What makes Fintech Xchange different.
What attendees can expect at Fintech Xchange this year.
What is most exciting about the work he is doing at the Fintech Center.

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I don’t know anyone who enjoys filing their taxes. It is something we begrudgingly do every April, or earlier for the well-organized, and it is usually a somewhat painful exercise. What if filing your taxes was easy, taking less than 30 minutes? What if tax planning wasn't a once-a-year chore but an embedded feature in your banking app, payroll platform, or investment account?

In this episode, I sit down with Ben Borodach, founder and CEO of april, the first company to build a nationally licensed tax engine in over 15 years. Ben shares how april is transforming tax from an annual burden into real-time financial intelligence, partnering with banks, fintechs, and payroll platforms to embed tax services directly into the financial tools Americans already use. We discuss the massive technical challenge of building tax infrastructure from scratch, why embedded tax makes sense for financial institutions, and how bringing tax decisions to the point of transaction, whether selling stock, adjusting payroll withholding, or buying a home, can fundamentally change how people manage their financial lives.

In this podcast you will learn:

How he came to the idea of building a fintech company focused on tax.
How april was incubated inside Team8.
Why they decided to create an embedded tax solution rather than go direct to consumer.
What their product offering does.
How they are helping consumers to think about taxes beyond once a year.
The three categories of companies they are focused on.
Why banks should be offering tax services to their customers.
Why being integrated into the banking cores is not a high priority right now.
How april is different to the big tax providers, TurboTax and H&R Block.
How their customers present the tax offerings.
What it means to be a nationally licensed e-file provider.
How they integrate with the IRS and the state tax agencies.
How they are leveraging the growth of embedded finance.
What is involved from a technology perspective to integrate with april.
How he thinks about tax policy, as a tax infrastructure company.
Ben’s vision for april.

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Today, I sit down with Daren Guo, co-founder of Reap, the stablecoin infrastructure company and the world's largest stablecoin card enabler, processing over $6 billion annually. Daren shares his journey from being employee #90 at Stripe to building the next generation of financial rails based on stablecoin infrastructure, serving everyone from neobanks in Brazil and Africa to traditional financial institutions expanding globally.

The conversation explores why stablecoins represent more than just faster cross-border payments, they are the foundation for a fully tokenized economy where FX, bonds, equities, and real estate all move on-chain. Daren discusses Reap's recent MPI license in Singapore, their expansion into the US market, and how programmable money enables entirely new financial products like payroll streaming and on-chain escrow that simply weren't possible with legacy infrastructure.

In this podcast you will learn:

Daren’s background setting up Stripe’s Asia business.
Why he decided to leave Stripe to start his own company.
Their initial product vision.
His thesis around stablecoins and why they represent the future of payments.
Why they decided to start with stablecoin-powered credit card infrastructure.
Where they are a Visa Principal member and the markets they serve.
The types of companies that Reap is working with today.
How the flow of funds work for users of Reap’s credit card.
Who is providing the stablecoin collateral.
Reap’s expansion plans for the US market.
Why they applied for a Major Payment Institution (MPI) license in Singapore.
The product suite that they are working on right now.
The scale that Reap is at today.
How they are serving traditional firms as well as crypto-native companies.
Daren’s vision for the next generation of money movement.

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Today I'm talking with Darragh Buckley, the CEO and co-founder of Increase. If you've been following fintech for a while, you probably know Darragh as employee number one at Stripe, where he built the team responsible for moving money at a massive scale. At Stripe, he learned a crucial lesson about infrastructure: when you're stuck solving business, technical, and risk problems all at once, you need to drop down a layer. That insight led to Increase, which does something quite novel, instead of connecting to banks one by one, they connect directly to the Federal Reserve itself, operating their own banking core that exposes all this functionality through APIs. With a team of less than 20 people, they're now processing over $100 billion annually.

In this conversation, we dig into the lessons Darragh learned scaling Stripe, why he believes compliance and accounting should be built into engineering from day one rather than bolted on later, his vision for a future where community banks serve specific communities like dentists or families managing elderly parents' finances, and why he's personally investing in community banks across the Pacific Northwest. We also get into real-time payments infrastructure, including a great story about buying a car on a Saturday. Now let's get on with the show.

In the podcast, you will learn:

How Increase was born out of early challenges at Stripe.
What he learned about scaling fintech companies at Stripe.
The advantage of dropping down a layer when building fintech infrastructure.
How Increase is able to connect directly to the Federal Reserve.
The concept of a side core and how it integrates with banking cores.
The different types of companies they work with.
A fun story about paying a car dealer with a real time payment on a Saturday.
The scale that Increase is at today.
Why they decided that now is the time to spread with word about Increase.
Why it matters to build compliance into your product very early.
What lessons compliance can learn from software engineering.
How they are managing real time risk.
Why Darragh has personally invested in several community banks.
What will have changed in financial services if Increase is successful.

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Today's guest is Jason Lee, a fintech veteran who has been at the forefront of employee financial wellness innovation for nearly a decade. After co-founding and scaling DailyPay into one of the pioneering companies in earned wage access, Jason went on to launch Salt Labs, an innovative employee rewards platform that Chime acquired just 18 months after its founding. Now, as the leader of Chime Enterprise, Jason is on a mission to make financial health benefits as ubiquitous in the workplace as health insurance.

In this conversation, we explore why he believes every employer will eventually offer these programs, not out of altruism, but because it makes compelling business sense. Jason shares fascinating insights about how financial stress undermines productivity, why employees value Salt's non-dollar rewards even more than cash, and his ambitious vision for building an employer-focused financial health platform that could parallel what Fidelity achieved in retirement. It's a conversation about the intersection of fintech, HR technology, and the future of work – and why the employer may be the most powerful catalyst for improving Americans' financial lives.

In this podcast you will learn:

Jason’s high profile background in fintech.
The origins of Salt Labs and how they became part of Chime.
The premise for Chime Workplace.
Why they are fundamentally in the productivity business.
How they are able to measure financial wellness outcomes.
Why employers are caring more about the financial health of their employees today.
Jason’s prediction for employers and financial wellness.
The target market for Chime Workplace.
What they hear when they first go into a new employer.
Why they don’t charge employers for Chime Workplace.
How their SALT rewards work.
Jason's vision for the future of employer-driven financial wellness.

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Today I'm delighted to be joined by Clive Kinross, CEO and co-founder of Propel Holdings. Propel is one of the most successful fintech lenders serving underbanked consumers, and what makes their story particularly compelling is how they've achieved it: profitably, almost from day one.

Since founding the company 14 years ago with just $4 million in capital, Clive and his three co-founders, who are all still with the company, have built a business that now serves a market of 100 million consumers across the US, Canada, and the UK. The company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2021 and has been the best-performing stock in its vintage.

In our conversation, Clive shares how his background as a chartered accountant shaped his disciplined, unit economics-focused approach to building a lending business, how Propel uses AI to analyze over 80,000 applications daily and make credit decisions in six seconds, and why he believes the opportunity to serve underbanked consumers in developed economies has never been stronger.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why Clive decided to tackle credit for his second major business.
How the company has evolved since its founding 14 years ago.
The different brands they have in the US, Canada and UK markets.
How their credit graduation programs work.
The typical consumer coming to Propel for credit.
How they differentiate themselves from others in the market.
How their AI models work and the data they are feeding into these models.
How Clive views the potential of AI throughout Propel’s business.
Why he decided to take Propel public in 2021.
How they were able to become a profitable fintech lender quickly and sustainably.
What Clive is most excited about for the future of Propel.

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Nubank co-founder Cristina Junquiera joins the podcast to discuss one of fintech's most remarkable success stories, from a Brazilian startup that had customers begging to get off the waitlist to a publicly traded company serving 127 million customers and reaching 60% of Brazilian adults.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Cristina shares the origin story of how three founders from different countries came together to fight complexity in financial services, the challenges of conducting simultaneous IPOs in New York and Sao Paulo to give their customers access, and lessons from expanding into Mexico and Colombia. Most notably, she reveals why Nubank chose the massive US market as their fourth country, detailing their de novo bank charter application with the OCC and her relocation to Miami to lead the charge. Cristina also discusses Nubank's approach to digital assets, their partnership with OpenAI, and why she believes there's far more ahead for the company than behind it.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Cristina’s time at Brazil’s largest bank prepared her for Nubank.
How she met David Velez, the CEO and co-founder.
What she saw was missing in the Brazilian market.
When they realized that they were on to something special with Nubank.
What they had to change when they expanded into Brazil.
How consumers use credit cards different from Brazil to Mexico and Colombia.
Why they took on the added complexity and cost of allowing their retail customers to participate in their IPO.
How becoming a public company has impacted their mission.
With 60% of adults in Brazil, how Nubank can still grow in their home market.
When they decided that the U.S. was going to be in their expansion plans.
What they see as the opportunity for Nubank in the U.S.
Why they decided to file a de novo bank charter application rather than acquire a bank.
Nubank’s approach to digital assets.
How they are partnering with OpenAI and their approach to AI in general.
What Cris is most excited about for this new chapter for Nubank.

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In this special episode recorded live at Money2020 in Las Vegas, we dive deep into what I think is the most transformative development in lending over the past decade: cash flow underwriting. I welcome back to the show Jason Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Prism Data (I last had Jason on the show back in 2019 when he was with Petal), to explore how real-time bank account data is revolutionizing credit assessment in ways that traditional credit scores simply can't match.

Jason explains why the financial disruptions of 2020, from pandemic relief to widespread job changes, exposed critical gaps in conventional credit reporting, and how cash flow underwriting is filling that void. The conversation covers the breakthrough adoption of this technology by major traditional banks, the limitations of FICO scores in capturing a complete financial picture, and why cash flow underwriting represents a once-in-a-century shift in how creditworthiness is measured.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Jason first got interested in cash flow underwriting.
The origin story of Prism Data and how it was incubated inside Petal.
How he describes Prism Data today.
What goes into building their unique credit models.
How their CashScore is created.
What matters most in how they distill all the semi-structured data into a score.
Why credit decisions are more intuitive when being made with cash flow underwriting.
The lending categories where they are seeing the most rapid adoption.
How smaller financial institutions can avoid being left behind.
Jason’s view on why traditional credit models have become less predictive.
How lenders are using cash flow underwriting in their application flow.
How the friction in connecting a bank account is being reduced rapidly.
The impact of the Chase-Plaid deal on cash flow underwriting.
What sets Prism Data apart from the others in the cash flow underwriting space.

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In this episode, I sit down with Davi Strazza, who leads Adyen's business in North America. Davi brings a fascinating global perspective on payments, having spent over a decade at Adyen working across Brazil and now the US market. We dive into how Adyen's banking license, which they've held since 2021, fundamentally changes what they can offer to marketplaces, digital businesses, and SaaS companies that need to embed payments and finance into their platforms.

Our conversation explores the competitive dynamics of the payments landscape, the future of stablecoins as a payment rail, and the five critical boxes that payment companies need to check to scale successfully. We also examine what American fintech can learn from Brazil's Pix system, discuss whether pay by bank will gain meaningful traction in the US, and look at how AI is transforming everything from personalized customer experiences to fraud prevention. For anyone interested in the infrastructure powering modern commerce, this is a must-listen conversation about what may be the most exciting time to be in payments.

In this podcast you will learn:

Davi’s journey in fintech from Brazil to here in North America.
How he describes Adyen today.
Why they decided to get their own banking licenses in the US, UK and EU.
How the banking license helps make their payments business more attractive.
What is driving their momentum in the US.
What brands get by working with Adyen over the legacy payments platforms.
Why they talk about “unified commerce” and what it means exactly.
How Adyen is preparing for a world where agentic commerce is commonplace.
Davi’s view on the future of stablecoins as a payment mechanism.
Whether pay-by-bank has a future in this country.
What the US can learn from the rapid adoption of Pix in Brazil.
What he is most excited about for the future of payments.

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In this episode, I sit down with Rich Clow, Head of Innovation and Strategy, Global Payments Solutions at Bank of America, to explore how one of the world's largest financial institutions is approaching payments innovation, such as instant payments and digital wallet technology. Rich shares insights into Bank of America's unique perspective, given their scale of serving tens of millions of consumers and small businesses alongside 40,000 global corporates operating across 140+ currencies.

The conversation delves into the bank's approach to the Paze digital wallet, why instant payments adoption is lagging behind other markets, and the critical importance of accessing real-time payment data to better serve clients. Rich also discusses the challenges and opportunities of driving innovation at scale as well as partnering with fintechs while ensuring the scalability and resiliency needed to support their massive transaction volumes.

In this podcast you will learn:

Rich’s background and what his role entails at BofA.
What consumers, small businesses, wealth management and global corporates have in common when it comes to payments.
BofA’s global footprint outside this country.
Why instant payments has not taken off here as it has in other countries.
What use cases for instant payments have the most potential.
The gap in the market that the Paze digital wallet is addressing.
How they are measuring success with Paze.
How their enterprise clients are using Cash Pro, their corporate digital solution.
What BofA is looking for when partnering with fintechs.
How they decide whether to build, buy, or partner.
What Rich is hearing from their clients about use cases for stablecoins.
What it is going to take for more payments to occur on the new payments rails.
How their corporate clients are able to work with fintechs through BofA.
What Rich is most excited about for the future of payments.

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When it comes to paying for a place to live, the economic benefits have always skewed towards homeowners, with renters getting no credit for all their on-time rent payments. But that is changing today. Piñata is helping millions of renters across America build their credit score and earn rewards with their rent payments.

In this episode, CEO and Co-Founder Lily Liu reveals how her company is transforming rent payments into a powerful credit-building tool by reporting on-time payments to all three credit bureaus, while renters earn tangible rewards at everyday brands. Born during the chaos of the pandemic, Piñata has evolved from a two-sided marketplace into a fintech powerhouse now partnering with giants like Freddie Mac to make credit building a standard benefit for renters nationwide. Lily shares the strategic pivots, the regulatory complexities of consumer credit reporting, and why solving this problem required rethinking rent as more than just an expense.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Piñata.
Why launching the company at the height of the pandemic was good timing.
How they were able to get landlords on board.
Why they use a carrot, rather than a stick, to encourage renters to pay on time.
How the Piñata rewards program works for renters.
The two different ways renters can join Piñata.
The average increase in credit score for a typical Piñata customer.
How Piñata is very different to Bilt.
How they differentiate themselves from others in the credit building space.
The demographic that is most attracted to Piñata.
What their partnership with Freddie Mac means.
Why some renters are opting out of the home ownership dream.
How Piñata Pay, launching in 2026, will work.
How they are going to scale Piñata so the majority of people can get credit for rent payments.
Lily’s vision for the future of Piñata.

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Today, I sit down with Bill Capuzzi, CEO of Apex Fintech Solutions, to explore the critical infrastructure powering modern fintech investing. Bill shares the fascinating journey of Apex from its roots as a pioneer in API-enabled clearing to fractional share trading and becoming the clearing firm behind investment accounts for close to 25 million people across household names like Robinhood, SoFi, and Betterment.

The conversation dives deep into what it takes to be a reliable infrastructure player in fintech, from opening accounts in seconds, to enabling investment globally, to Apex's bold expansion plans with State Street and their strategic embrace of stablecoins. Bill also pulls back the curtain on how Apex uses AI inside the company and shares his perspective on the complex plumbing that makes seamless, modern fintech experiences possible. It's a rare inside look at the unsexy but essential backbone of the fintech revolution.

In this podcast, you will learn:

Bill’s interesting journey from environmental scientist to fintech entreprenuer.
Why he decided to join Apex ten years ago.
How their capabilities were so different to the traditional custodians.
What a clearing broker does exactly.
How the idea for fractional share trading came about.
How they have built their brand in the fintech space.
Why they are seeing interest from banks and traditional wealth providers today.
The only two firms that have left Apex and why they left.
How they are working with the digital assets/stablecoins space today.
Why they sold Apex Crypto to Bakkt in 2022.
How they are growing internationally.
What their partnership with State Street means for Apex.
What Apex is doing to prepare for the AI-enabled future.
What Bill is most excited about for the future of Apex.

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In this episode, I sit down with Jon Fry, CEO and co-founder of Lendflow, to explore how AI is transforming the embedded lending landscape. Jon shares his unconventional journey from building websites in college to becoming a key player in embedded lending, including the challenge of launching LendFlow in early 2020—just as COVID shut down the lending market.

The conversation dives deep into how LendFlow's AI-powered platform is making lending more efficient and accessible, why the small business lending space hasn't advanced as quickly as many expected, and what survival through multiple market cycles has taught the industry's most resilient players. Jon paints a compelling vision of the next five to ten years, where AI will create truly magical lending experiences and finally deliver on the promise of embedded finance for small businesses.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Jon went from building website in college to starting Lendflow.
What is was like launching a lending software business in early 2020.
What Lendflow does exactly.
Who is their core customer.
What has changed in embedded lending in the last five years.
How brands can customize their loan offerings with Lendflow’s platform.
Why Lendflow encourages brands to connect directly with lenders.
What a neutral embedded lending network is.
How Lendflow uses AI and what problems it is solving.
Why we are not quite ready for a fully agentic workflow yet.
What a fully agentic workflow could look like in the future.
Why Jon thinks lending software hasn’t developed that quickly in the past decade.
What he thinks the next five to ten years holds for lending.

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What if you could settle card transactions on weekends and holidays, reduce working capital requirements by orders of magnitude, and give fintechs global reach without the traditional banking infrastructure headaches? In this episode, I sit down with Farooq Malik, CEO and co-founder of Rain, a company that's quietly rewriting the rules of payment infrastructure by bridging traditional fintech and stablecoin technology.

Farooq isn't a crypto evangelist, he comes from traditional banking and international development, but when he saw his first stablecoin transaction settle instantaneously, he had an "aha moment" about the future of money movement. Now Rain is a Visa Principal Member (a status typically reserved for banks), enabling companies to sponsor card programs directly, settle 24/7 using stablecoins, and serve customers across multiple continents from a single API. We dive deep into how this actually works, why traditional fintechs are ditching their BaaS partners for Rain's infrastructure, and why this isn't about crypto replacing fintech, it's about the next evolution of financial infrastructure that solves real operational problems.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Farooq first got interested in stablecoins.
How he describes Rain to a fintech audience.
Why they chose to start with stablecoins for card transactions.
How they were able to become a Visa Principal Member.
Where they can issue cards globally.
How they can help their clients launch internationally.
Why most new customers they are signing up are tradfi programs.
Why a company like Rain is a good alternative to BaaS banks.
How the flow of funds work for a Rain-powered card transaction.
How Rain is able to work with capital providers directly on the blockchain.
What is involved in getting a new program up and running with Rain.
Why Rain is agnostic to the number of new stablecoin issuers.
How they work with banks looking to offer tokenized deposits.
The biggest opportunity in the future of financial infrastructure.

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Today we are focusing on financial crime and fraud management with the CEO and co-founder of Feedzai, one of the world's largest independent risk management platforms serving banks and fintechs. Nuno shares his fascinating journey from being the first Portuguese engineer at the European Space Agency to building a global fintech powerhouse with over 700 employees across four continents.

The conversation explores how the fraud landscape has fundamentally shifted, where bad actors no longer target technical infrastructure but instead exploit people as the "weakest link in the chain" through AI-powered scams and social engineering. Nuno discusses Feedzai's evolution from transaction fraud monitoring to a comprehensive risk management platform, emphasizing the critical need to move from detecting fraudulent activity to understanding customer intent. He also delves into the company's TRUST framework for responsible AI, explaining why explainability is essential in financial services and much more.

In this podcast you will learn:

Nuno’s transition from the European Space Agency to founding Feedzai.
How he Feedzai has evolved since its early days and what it does today.
What an AI-generated scam looks like.
Why the weakest link is us.
How you can protect the less sophisticated consumers.
Why detecting fraud is no longer enough.
How they are able to understand the intent of the customer.
How can you be proactive, combining risk management and cyber security.
What their TRUST Framework for responsible AI innovation is all about.
What it means to be a critically systemic vendor for banks.
What Nuno learned by interviewing the likes of Richard Branson, Stephan Hawking and Steve Wozniak.
Feedzai’s geographic footprint and their distributed leadership team.
The scale Feedzai is at today.

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Welcome back to the occasional series on the podcast called Fintech Revealed. This is a sponsored show where we take a deep dive into one topic with a couple of industry experts.

Today, we are focusing on small business credit with Levi King, the CEO of Nav and Gerri Detweiler, a credit expert and educational consultant. We provide listeners with a clear understanding of how small business credit reporting works and why it is so different to consumer credit. We talk about open banking and how cash flow underwriting helps more small businesses get approved for credit and at a lower rate.

Levi traces Nav's evolution from a credit data tracking platform to a comprehensive financial health solution that now facilitates embedded lending through partners like Fundbox, while Gerri emphasizes the educational mission of helping business owners understand their business credit profile and why scores that can vary wildly between bureaus.

Both express optimism about the future of small business lending, particularly the rise of embedded financing that leverages diverse data sources from vertical SaaS platforms and the shift in lender attitudes from "extracting a pound of flesh" to genuinely advocating for small business success.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Nav has evolved since I last had Levi on the show in 2017.
The types of small businesses that are coming to Nav.
The main differences between a business and personal credit report.
How Nav works with partners today.
What they are doing to help small business owners get educated.
What it takes to become a Nav partner today.
How they integrate the huge number of small business data sources.
What it is like convincing small business owners to connect their bank data.
How cash flow underwriting is change the game for small business lending.
How they are using AI to analyze the myriad data sources.
Some of the surprising insights they have gleaned from this data.
What trends they are seeing that contradict conventional wisdom.
What needs to happen next to move the industry forward.
Why they are optimistic about where the industry is headed.

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There are not many fintechs that can say they work with nine of the top ten banks in the United States. Or that they are working directly on deep integrations with the likes of Apple and Amazon. Meet Jordan Wright, CEO and Co-Founder of Atomic, who can say all those things.

While Atomic started in direct deposit switching, a now relatively mature fintech product, what they have been working on recently is truly groundbreaking technology. They have built what they call a “Payments Hub” and have implementations happening at large banks now. This will make it much easier for consumers not just to manage their recurring payments but to take action, which has been a crucial missing piece.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Atomic.
What they mean by building a “framework for connected banking.”
What Jordan is most proud of that they have built at Atomic.
What their offering looks like inside a banking app.
Why they are reaching out to merchants and connect them one by one.
What happens behind the scenes for their TrueAuth product.
Why they have focused their technology on the mobile-centric experience.
How they were able to work directly with the likes of Apple and Amazon.
How they are engaging differently with the large banks than the fintechs.
What the flow is like when you are opening a bank account powered by Atomic.
How they are working with the large credit card companies.
Why they are focused on taking action rather than just information.
How they are using Generative AI in their products and within the company.
How Jordan thinks this new technology will impact financial health.
When we will start seeing payments hubs at large banks.
What Atomic is working on in the near term future.

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It is something of a mystery that virtually no fintech entrepreneurs have tackled one of the biggest markets there is: senior citizens collecting social security. Well, until now.

In this episode, I sit down with Kevin Nazemi, CEO and co-founder of Charlie, to explore serving this large market. With over 60 million Americans in this demographic, Kevin explains why traditional banks and fintechs have largely ignored this population despite their significant needs. The conversation dives deep into Charlie's innovative approach to serving customers 62 and above, including their groundbreaking fraud prevention tools like "Speed Bump" that have already documented a significant amount of prevented fraud, and how they're building trust in a market where respect and security are paramount.

In this podcast you will learn:

His formative interview with a sitting president at the age of 11.
How he became convinced that seniors needed better financial services.
Why senior citizens are generally ignored by banks and fintechs.
How Kevin realized he could build a real business serving this population.
How they communicated that Charlie works with a partner bank.
Why it was so important to have their partner bank front and center.
How Charlie makes money and how it compares to other fintech leaders.
The obvious product they could expand into.
What they are doing to protect their customers from fraud.
How they are combating the rise in AI-driven fraud.
Kevin’s vision for the future of Charlie.

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Today, I welcome back to the show Arad Levertov, CEO and co-founder of Sunbit (I last had him on the show in 2019), one of the leaders in offline buy-now-pay-later. From 2,000 retail locations in 2019 to nearly 30,000 across verticals like auto repair, dental, and veterinary services, Sunbit has achieved tremendous growth. But what I found most impressive is this: a 90% approval rate combined with low single-digit default rates.

Arad reveals the secret behind these remarkable metrics lies not just in sophisticated AI-powered underwriting, but in their holistic approach that includes strategic merchant selection, gamified associate training, personalized offers, and a customer-first philosophy with zero fees. Now serving over 4.5 million customers and approaching $400 million in revenue while reaching GAAP profitability, Sunbit demonstrates how the right blend of technology and human elements can revolutionize offline lending.

In this podcast you will learn:

The highlights for Sunbit over the last six years.
Why they have remained focused on the offline space.
The different verticals they have targeted.
How their lending process works.
How they are able to approve 90% of their borrowers.
Why the key to their success is the associates in the physical stores.
Attributes of the 10% of borrowers they decline.
Their average default rate.
How they decide which merchants to bring on their platform.
How Sunbit makes money.
How they are growing their merchant base.
What their partnership with Stripe looks like.
How they are partnering with Checkout.com.
How Arad views the competitive moat he has built at Sunbit.
What they are doing differently when it comes to collections.
Their expansion plans for the future.

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Today, I sit down with Joe Breeden, CEO and founder of Deep Future Analytics (DFA), for what is, in effect, a two-part conversation. First we do a deep dive into credit risk management and where it is falling short today and then we discuss AI monitoring and governance and how it is going to revolutionize software.

The conversation covers why traditional machine learning models are missing critical components for accurate risk assessment and how adverse selection has dramatically impacted loan quality in recent vintages. Then Joe makes a bold prediction that software user interfaces are on the verge of a transformation that will render them unrecognizable from previous versions Curious? All is revealed in this fascinating conversation.

In this podcast you will learn:

How he got started with Deep Future Analytics
The state of credit risk management in banking today.
What is missing, even with fintech lenders, who are using machine learning.
What lenders get wrong when they focus on credit score.
Why loans booked since 2022 are lower quality than even 2006-07.
What kind of lift lenders or investors can see with DFA’s models.
What Joe sees in the pool of borrowers today.
Why DFA moved into AI monitoring and governance.
Who is using these new AI models they have developed.
Why a “human in the loop” is not an effective monitoring method.
What their new Strategic Recommendation Agent (SyRA) does.
How they incorporate Large Language Models to ensure zero hallucinations.
Why the future of software is dashboards on demand and analytics on demand.
How Deep Future Analytics is different to others in the market.
What it is going to take before software moves to a chat-based interface.

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Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) has transformed how consumers approach purchasing, yet adoption in the US still trails markets like Australia and Europe. In this episode, we sit down with Joe Heck, US CEO of Zip, who brings somewhat of a contrarian perspective to the industry. Joe argues that BNPL isn't just another credit product, it's a financial tool designed for what he calls "underestimated Americans," the paycheck-to-paycheck consumers often underserved by traditional banks.

With Zip achieving a 98% payback rate and growing over 40% year-over-year, Joe shares insights on why the credit system is too judgmental, how BNPL provides working capital flexibility, and his vision for autonomous finance powered by AI. Whether you're curious about the future of payments or want to understand how fintech is serving overlooked consumer segments, this conversation offers fresh insights into one of the fastest-growing areas of financial services.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Joe to take the CEO role at Zip.
Why BNPL has not taken off as fast in the U.S. as it has in Australia and Europe.
How Zip’s BNPL product works.
What Zip’s customers are spending their money on.
What kind of checks they do for new customers.
Joe’s view on reporting BNPL transactions to credit bureaus.
What is driving the growth at Zip over the last year.
How Joe responds to media criticisms of BNPL and mounting consumer debt.
How they help their customers smooth out their payments.
How they partner with Stripe and what it means for Zip’s growth.
Where Zip is looking to expand.
How Joe sees the the BNPL sector evolving and the role of AI.

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In this episode, I sit down with Jason Guss, CEO and co-founder of Octane Lending, to discuss how the company became the #1 powersports lender in the country. The conversation covers Octane's early pivot from lender aggregator to direct lender, their dominance in niche markets, and strategies for thriving in challenging interest rate environments.

Jason talked about how their early focus on good unit economics and then profitability put them in a great position during the challenging times of 2022 and 2023, enabling them to gain market share and rebound quicker than their competitors. He also has some interesting things to say about the banks in the market and strong thoughts on the importance of capital markets.

In this podcast you will learn:

The A-B test that led to the founding of Octane Lending.
Why they built a loan origination system right off the bat.
The “burn the ships” moment when they decided to pivot the business.
How they were able to last sixteen months with very little revenue.
The different niches within powersports where they provide financing.
Their typical loan terms.
The total size of the powersports market and the percentage Octane has.
The advantages that Octane has competing with banks in this market.
How their loan application works at the point of sale.
How their customers are navigating a higher interest rate environment.
Why an efficient capital markets function is so important.

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Violet Abtahi is the CEO and Founder of Platonic, a company developing blockchain infrastructure to solve counterparty risk and privacy challenges in financial markets. With over a decade of experience in both traditional finance and blockchain technology, Violet transitioned from a mathematics background on Wall Street to building next-generation financial infrastructure.

Violet argues that counterparty risk is the fundamental bottleneck preventing widespread adoption of blockchain-based financial systems. By combining private blockchain technology with automated smart contracts, Platonic aims to create the infrastructure needed for a more efficient, automated, and less risky financial future.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why she made the move from traditional finance into the blockchain world.
The founding story of Platonic and the two major challenges she wanted to solve.
How finance can be autonomous, intelligent, and borderless.
Who they are targeting with their solutions.
How instant settlement with smart contracts can remove the counterparty risk.
The pilot they did with Vanguard, State Street, Citi and Ford.
What it will take for all real world assets to be tokenized.
Why automated regulation is a key component for this to happen.
What asset class will lead the way in tokenization.
Violet’s priorities for the next 12 months.

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In this episode, I sit down with Tomás Campos, CEO and Co-Founder of Spinwheel, a fintech infrastructure company that's revolutionizing how lenders and financial platforms access consumer credit data. With over 20 years in fintech, Tomás explains how Spinwheel can authenticate users and connect to all their liability accounts—credit cards, loans, mortgages, and more—using just a phone number and date of birth, achieving 95-99% coverage across different debt types.

The conversation explores how this technology is solving critical pain points in debt consolidation lending and how their AI-powered infrastructure orchestrates multiple data sources behind the scenes. Tomás also discusses their Optimize product, which saves users an average of $150 per month by creating personalized debt management plans, and shares his vision for using technology to transform consumer debt from an anchor into a lever for achieving financial goals.

In this podcast you will learn:

What Tomás saw that led to the founding of Spinwheel.
Why there is so much friction in connecting liability accounts.
The different use cases for Spinwheel.
What is so special about the phone number and date of birth data fields.
Why passwords are a very bad way to verify a user.
The coverage of the entire U.S. population that Spinwheel has achieved.
The data sources that they are still working on connecting with.
The type of data they are extracting from these data sources.
Where Spinwheel fits into the flow of a loan application process.
How they using AI agents and AI in general.
How Spinwheel Optimize is saving end users $150 per month.
The long-term vision for Spinwheel.

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In this episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast, we talk with Paulette Rowe, CEO of Stax, a payments technology company that's making waves in the embedded payments space by taking a fundamentally different approach than many competitors. Rather than simply reselling services from payment processing giants, Stax has built and acquired the technology to own their entire stack, from gateway to clearing and settlement. This strategic decision allows them to move faster, provide better data, and offer more flexibility to their clients, particularly in the vertical SaaS and ISV market where they are seeing rapid growth.

Paulette, who brings a unique perspective from her extensive payments experience across both the UK and US markets, discusses how Stax differentiates itself in the competitive embedded payments landscape, their innovative Stax Connect Plus offering that helps ISVs dramatically improve payment attachment rates, and how AI is already transforming their customer support operations. The conversation also explores the future of payments innovation, including the potential for agentic AI in e-commerce and Stax's international expansion plans.

In this podcast you will learn:

Paulette’s career arc and the journey to the CEO job at Stax.
How the US payments landscape differs from the UK and Europe.
The comprehensive payments solutions provided by Stax.
How they work with ISVs (independent software providers).
The two acquisitions they have made in the past two years.
Why they developed Stax Connect Plus.
How Stax differentiates itself in the ISV embedded payments market.
How they compete with the Stripes and Squares of the world.
What markets Stax operates in today.
Paulette’s thoughts on the new payments rails being developed.
How they have been using AI internally and then, Benji for customer support.
How they are preparing for Agentic AI for e-commerce.
The biggest opportunities in the future for Stax.

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As long-time listeners will know, I love the consumer lending space. So, I am delighted to welcome back to the podcast Matt Potere, the CEO of Happy Money, a position he has held since September 2024. Previously, Matt served as CEO of Sunlight Financial, which he took public via SPAC in 2021. With decades of experience in consumer finance across multiple asset classes, Matt brings deep expertise in credit cycles, risk management, and building successful lending platforms.

In this episode, we discuss what differentiates Happy Money, their focus on credit unions, how they approach technology and underwriting, their big new forward flow agreement, the state of the consumer today, their use of AI, why culture is so important and much more.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Matt to the opportunity at Happy Money.
How he describes Happy Money today.
What he learned leading Sunlight Financial that helps at Happy Money.
Why they have focused on partnering with credit unions.
Who is the typical customer coming to Happy Money.
How their origination process works with their credit union partners.
How they are using automation and AI/ML in their underwriting.
Matt’s perspective on the state of the US consumers.
The primary use cases for a Happy Money loan.
How they differentiate themselves from other fintech lenders.
Matt’s approach to scaling a lending business.
How they are using AI tools in their operation.
How the $500 million deal with Fortress and Edge Focus came together.
What are his thoughts on an IPO.
Matt thoughts about adding new products to personal loans.
What they are focused on for the next 12 months.

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In this episode, we are talking personal financial management, but with a human twist. Sam Lewis is the CEO and Founder of Fruitful, a fintech company reimagining financial advice for millennials and Gen Z. Fruitful offers a $98 monthly membership that combines certified financial planners (actual humans) with AI-powered technology to create personalized "money systems" that automatically allocate incoming funds across bills, spending, and goals. Lewis discusses his background at Mastercard and how he witnessed traditional banks underserving younger customers, leading him to launch Fruitful in 2023.

The conversation explores Fruitful's unique approach of maintaining human advisors rather than going fully AI-driven, their focus on "income allocation" over "asset allocation," and their transparent pricing model that forgoes hidden fees and even interchange revenue. Lewis explains how the platform serves mass affluent members who want to automate their financial lives while maintaining the human touch for trust and emotional connection in money management decisions.

In this podcast you will learn:

The big gap that Sam saw when it came to financial advice.
The core product offering of Fruitful and what people get for $98/month.
How their Certified Financial Planners (CFP) help their members build a money system.
The suite of financial products that is included.
Who they are working with on the banking side and why it is such an important relationship.
Why they decided to have a human in the loop to help guide people through this.
How Sam thinks about AI and its role in helping their members.
What happens after the money system is set up.
Who comes to Fruitful for help and what they are looking for.
How they are getting new customers in the door.
How they help their members with their investments.
Why they have decided not pursue any other revenue streams beyond the monthly fee.
How Sam is thinking about adding complementary financial products.
What they are focused on for the next 12-18 months.

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One of the fintech investing pioneers is Arjan Schütte, the founder and managing partner of Core Innovation Capital. He has been around fintech for more than two decades and has been an active investor for most of that time. I am way overdue in getting him on the show.

In this conversation, we explore why 50% of Americans still live paycheck to paycheck despite fintech's growth, the dramatic transformation AI will bring to financial services (moving from advice to actionable help), and emerging opportunities in small business enablement, healthcare-finance intersections, and retirement solutions. Arjan also reflects on early investment wins like NerdWallet and Ripple, lessons learned from setbacks like Synapse, and how his recent year-long family journey around the world opened his eyes to innovative financial models like Australia's superannuation system that could revolutionize wealth creation for America's middle class.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Core is different from other VC firms.
How fintech has improved the underbanked population in this country.
Why fintech hasn’t made a bigger difference for financially fragile people.
Some of the business models that work for serving this population.
A look at some of his successful early investments.
What he missed when he decided to invest in Synapse.
What is different in the fintech space today than a decade ago.
How he views AI when looking at early stage companies today.
The different verticals within fintech where there is most interest today.
Arjan’s perspective on the fintech IPO window.
What he would do if he had a magic wand to help lower and middle income consumers.
What he learned traveling around the world with his family for a year.

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In this episode, I'm joined by Tim Newell, CEO and founder of GreenFi, a climate-focused fintech that emerged from the ashes of Aspiration's consumer banking business. Tim brings a fascinating fintech and climate tech pedigree, having previously sold a solar financing company to SolarCity, run financial products at both SolarCity and Tesla, and even survived five years working for Elon Musk. When Aspiration decided to pivot away from consumer banking to focus on global carbon markets in 2022, Tim saw an opportunity to acquire and restructure their consumer business. Through a complex licensing deal, he successfully transitioned over 98% of Aspiration's customers to his new platform while radically downsizing from 400 employees to just 40.

GreenFi targets the 100 million Americans who cite climate as a significant worry, about 40% of U.S. adults, offering them banking products that guarantee their deposits won't support fossil fuels, automatically offset carbon from gas purchases, and enable tree planting through everyday transactions. We dive into how Tim thinks about the intersection of fintech and climate action, the challenges of building a sustainable business model in today's capital environment, and his ambitious vision to become "Patagonia for your bank account.”

In this podcast you will learn:

Tim’s deep background in financial technology and climate tech.
What was involved in Aspiration’s pivot away from consumer fintech to the carbon markets.
How Tim was able to spin out the consumer fintech business from Aspiration.
How GreenFi grew out of that business.
The product set for GreenFi and near term product roadmap.
The huge percentage of deposits that moved over from Aspiration to GreenFi.
The specific ways they are making their financial offerings carbon-friendly.
Who makes up their target market.
How the swing in Washington against climate initiatives is impacting GreenFi.
How they restructured the business to a radically different cost base.
How they are offsetting their own carbon footprint.
The process for raising their $17 million seed round.
Their different revenue streams.
The scale that GreenFi is at today.
Tim’s vision for GreenFi.

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In today's episode, we have Carol Hamilton, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Provenird. She discusses how AI-powered decisioning platforms are transforming risk management across financial services. She explores the critical balance financial institutions must strike between managing evolving risk threats and maintaining seamless customer experiences, a challenge that has become increasingly complex in today's uncertain macroeconomic environment. She explains how Provenir's platform helps organizations make intelligent decisions across the entire customer lifecycle, from onboarding and fraud prevention to collections, by orchestrating real-time data and AI to provide contextual insights that enable both risk mitigation and opportunity optimization.

The conversation delves into key findings from Provenir's 2025 Global Risk Decisioning Survey, revealing that over half of respondents struggle with data integration, while 60% find it difficult to deploy and maintain risk models. Hamilton emphasizes how generative AI is being leveraged not just as a trend but to drive tangible outcomes, speeding up decision-making processes, enhancing model explainability, and analyzing unstructured data. Looking ahead, she describes 2025 as "the year of intelligent decisioning," where organizations can move beyond traditional rules-based systems to achieve the perfect contextual understanding needed for hyper-personalized customer interactions that unlock value while effectively managing risk.

In this podcast you will learn:

What Provenir does exactly.
The types of risk decisions they help their customers make.
The biggest pain points in risk management for financial institutions today.
The different geographies where Provenir operates.
Why they have focused on enterprise businesses.
How they approach the tension between preventing fraud and seamless customer experiences.
How their clients are managing risks in today’s uncertain environment.
The different types of simulations they can run inside their platform.
How they are using generative AI in their decisioning engine.
How their approach differs from others in the market.
The purpose of their 2025 Global Risk Decisioning Survey.
Some the of the core findings from the survey.
How they help their clients deploy their risk decisioning models.
How they are working with lenders with credit risk and detecting fraud.
What they mean by calling 2025 the “year of intelligent decisioning.”
How they approach product development given the different needs of their customers.
What is next for Provenir.

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To say it has been a busy year for fintech policy folks would be a gross understatement. With the change in administration to Trump 2.0, we have a 180-degree different perspective on most fintech issues than the previous administration. And there have already been many actions taken by the Trump White House that will have far-reaching implications for fintech.

To help us unpack all these issues, I invited back to the show, Penny Lee, the CEO of the Financial Technology Association (FTA) and one of the leading voices in Washington for our industry. In addition to navigating all the complex regulatory changes, the FTA is also putting on their annual CEO Summit this month and, as of this writing, tickets are still available.

In this podcast you will learn:

The state of play in Washington today and its implications for fintech.
Why rescinding the 1033 rule would be such a big deal.
How they will be fighting this in court.
Why this will be in the court system for a while, whoever wins the initial decision.
Where the FTA stands on payments modernization.
Penny’s thoughts on the remittance tax provision of the Big Beautiful Bill.
The BNPL bill that was passed in New York and its impact on the industry.
What the FTA is doing with Earned Wage Access initiatives in the states.
The state of play for AI regulation in the states as well as the federal level.
The prospect for a federal AI bill this year.
Details of the annual FTA CEO Summit in Washington happening on June 25.
Who is going to be on stage from industry and government.
What else FTA members are doing while they are in DC.

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Africa is quietly becoming one of the hottest areas for fintech investment. I am overdue to focus on Africa here on the podcast, so when the chance to interview the CEO of the largest African fintech presented itself, I jumped at the opportunity. In a similar way to Latin America, Africa has leapfrogged from offline financial infrastructure to mobile-centric and the one company that has made much of this leapfrog possible, at least when it comes to payments, is Flutterwave.

My next guest on the Fintech One on One podcast is Olugbenga Agboola, who goes by GB, the CEO and Founder of Flutterwave, the most valuable fintech in Africa. I think of Flutterwave as a cross between Stripe, Shopify and Wise, and the technology they have built has revolutionized cross-border payments in Africa. It is hard to overstate how important this one company has been to the growth of fintech in Africa.

In this podcast you will learn:

What drove GB to found Flutterwave.
A short history of fintech innovation in Africa.
How he describes Flutterwave today.
The geographic footprint of Flutterwave.
How they enable African small businesses to accept cross border payments.
The evolving payment behaviors for both consumers and small businesses.
What they are ultimately solving for in Africa.
What GB means when he says “payment is partnership”.
How the money moves internationally.
Why they decided to rebuild the entire stack of their API suite.
How they are ensuring compliance across their wide network.
How they incorporate financial inclusion into their company goals.
Why they are an inaugural partner of the Circle Payments Network.
How they are investing in cybersecurity and anti-fraud tools.
How they are supporting the next generation of African fintech leaders.
GB’s vision for the future of payments in Africa and for Flutterwave.

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Streamlining international B2B payments is a complex undertaking. TreviPay has been taking the complexity out of this process for several decades now. In my conversation with CEO Brandon Spear, we explore TreviPay's transformation from MSTS, its rebranding inspiration, and its global reach across 30 countries.

Our discussion highlights TreviPay's various services, including trade credit management and cross-border payment infrastructure, and its partnerships, such as with HSBC, to expand into complex markets like China and India. Our conversation also delves into the role of AI in enhancing productivity and customer experience, as well as the challenges and opportunities in the B2B payments landscape.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Brandon describes TreviPay today.
What companies need to think about when they look to expand across borders.
How TreviPay takes the complexity out of cross border invoices.
What TreviPay has done well that banks have not been able to do.
Some of the big brands they are serving today.
The different geographies they serve.
Why B2B payments is 5-10 years behind the consumer space.
How they are staying ahead of the new payments innovators.
How TreviPay is using AI both internally and in a customer facing way.
What they are doing in their partnership with HSBC.
The impact that the new tariff uncertainty is having on their business.
Why they did the rebrand from MSTS to TreviPay.
Brandon’s vision for TreviPay.

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In this episode, Anthony Soohoo, CEO of MoneyGram, shares his vision for transforming one of the world's largest global payments networks through what he calls a "refounder mindset." Drawing from his experience leading digital transformations at major companies like Walmart and CBS, Soohoo discusses how MoneyGram is modernizing its platform while leveraging its incredible assets: a network of 450,000 retail locations spanning over 200 countries and 20,000 payment corridors.

He explores the company's strategic partnerships with Plaid for seamless bank connectivity, collaborations with Visa and Mastercard, and their thoughtful approach to cryptocurrency through stablecoin partnerships with Stellar Foundation and Circle. Perhaps most ambitiously, Soohoo outlines his five-year goal of positioning MoneyGram not just as a remittance company, but as a global payments powerhouse with the scale and recognition of Visa or Mastercard, all while maintaining the company's core mission of democratizing finance for consumers worldwide.

In this podcast you will learn:

The three things that attracted Anthony to the opportunity at MoneyGram.
How he describes MoneyGram today.
The most popular remittance corridors for US consumers.
The attributes of a typical MoneyGram customer.
Anthony’s concept of re-founding and how he is bringing that mindset to MoneyGram.
The lessons he has learned in his first six months as CEO.
How the money actually moves internationally.
How they are partnering with Plaid, as well as Visa and Mastercard.
Why MoneyGram believes the future of finance is crypto.
How Anthony views the alternative payments rails being developed.
The biggest challenge for MoneyGram today.
His vision for the next five years.

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When it comes to fintechs getting bank charters we are entering a golden age. With zero fintech-oriented bank applications approved in the Biden administration we already have several fintechs with shiny new bank charters just a few months into the new administration. So, if you are a fintech and are thinking about bank charters now is the time.

To break all this down, I was delighted to chat recently with Michele Alt, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Klaros Group. She was last on the show in 2021 and certainly a lot has changed since then. Michele takes us through the different types of charters and explains the different options for fintech companies seeking charters.

On this podcast you will learn:

The fundamental change in attitude for bank charters with the new administration in DC.
The two paths that fintechs can take to get a bank charter.
The pros and cons for each of these paths.
Michele’s thoughts on the SmartBiz acquisition of Centrust Bank.
Why she thinks the timelines for bank acquisitions will be shorter from now on.
The difference between an ILC charter and a regular bank charter.
Why most ILC banks are located in Utah.
Why some of the big names in fintech are applying for the MALPB charter in Georgia.
Why Wyoming created the SPDI charter.
How the Federal Reserve is reacting to this change in the new bank formation environment.
Why some of the crypto companies are looking for federal bank charters.
Michele’s perspective on the big tech companies getting bank charters.
What she would say if Amazon came calling looking to explore an ILC charter.
What the fintech banking landscape might look like at the end of the Trump administration.

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Moving money internationally is mission-critical for many businesses in the world, particularly those outside the U.S. But, today, for businesses using traditional banks, moving money across borders is often expensive, slow and a terrible user experience. Wherever you have that combination you can be sure a fintech company is attacking the problem aggressively, which is certainly the case here.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Ravi Adusumilli, the President and GM of the Americas for Airwallex. They have built their own payments rails, as an alternative to SWIFT, to serve businesses who want to move money and accept payments internationally. How they have done that makes for a fascinating conversation.

In this podcast you will learn:

The target market for Airwallex in the Americas.
How they help businesses expand internationally.
Why they decided to build their own payments rails as an alternative to SWIFT.
How the money moves exactly.
The percentage of their payments that move in real time.
What was behind their acquisition of MexPage in Mexico.
Why they decided to build a business themselves in Brazil.
How they are working with Brex.
How Airwallex is able to serve smaller businesses.
How they help tech companies offer embedded global payments as a profit center.
How their multi-currency wallets work.
Ravi’s perspective on stablecoins and other alternative payments rails.
His view on the future of embedded finance and global payments.

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One of the big challenges for community banks and credit unions is that they often have a very concentrated base of customers. The vast majority of their accounts could be with people and businesses within a 100-mile radius. While setting up digital tools can allow these banks and credit unions to expand beyond their home base, this comes with a lot of expense and complexity. When it comes to lending programs there is a much simpler alternative.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Vince Passione, the CEO and C0-Founder of LendKey. I last had Vince on the show all the way back in 2016, so a lot has changed since then. They have created this new technology they call network lending which solves for the problem of customer concentration for credit unions and banks, at least when it comes to the lending side of the balance sheet.

In this podcast you will learn:

The highlights of LendKey's evolution over the last nine years.
Their long partnership with Navy Credit Union.
How they have expanded into the home improvement market.
The impact of the CARES Act on their education financing business.
How the needs of credit unions have been evolving.
The changes that will impact the ParentPLUS and GradPLUS lending programs.
What differentiates those credit unions that can go after the younger generation and those that can't.
Why private student loans will have to take up the slack, particularly for graduate student loans.
How their network lending programs work.
Why network lending is a great way for credit unions to diversify their portfolio.
How they decide who becomes the lender of record for these loans.
Why they launched ALIRO in 2021 to allow others to set up their own lending networks.
What the next five to ten years look like for LendKey.

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Most fintech companies, and increasingly banks, rely on API integrations to run their business. Yet, building and maintaining these integrations can be time consuming and complex, particularly when it is only a part of what an engineering team does. Today, you can outsource these integrations to companies that specialize in this type of connectivity with a unified API platform.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Shensi Ding, the CEO and Co-Founder of Merge. She saw the challenges of API integrations in a previous role and decided this was a problem worth solving. She has built Merge to specialize in helping companies with their API integrations, leveraging one API to add hundreds of integrations.

In this podcast you will learn:

The problem she saw that led to the founding of Merge.
What a unified API is and how Merge offers this.
The core categories where they are focused.
Why AI is such an important category for Merge.
Why large banks and fintechs trust Merge to manage their API integrations.
The number of integrations they are working with today.
What is involved in adding a new integration.
How they make sure these integrations don't break.
How they work with custom integration requests.
What is needed to get these integrations up and running.
How Merge is helping Ramp for their HR integrations.
Their experience working with banks.
Why they like working with companies that are having challenges with integrations.
How they work with the non-technical customer success teams.
Why the human element is so critical for Merge's success.
The process in adding a new integration into the system.
How they are using AI internally.
How they work with companies that don't have a robust API yet.

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Welcome back to the occasional series on the podcast called Fintech Revealed. This is a sponsored show where we take a deep dive on one topic with a couple of industry experts.

Today, we have Nico Simko, CEO and Co-Founder of Clair and Dan Loomis, the General Manager and Head of Product for the Money Group at Gusto. The topic we are doing a deep dive in today is Earned Wage Access (EWA) - one of my favorite fintech innovations of the last decade. We cover a great deal of territory on this show as we delve into embedded finance and the evolution of EWA (for reference I interviewed Nico on the show last year).

In this podcast you will learn:

Why Clair focuses on being embedded with HR and payroll companies instead of going direct to consumer or direct to employers.
What piqued the interest of Gusto to offer EWA.
What was involved in getting Clair up and running at Gusto.
The two pieces that had to be in place at Clair to be able to embed their tech at Gusto.
What employees are using EWA for at Gusto.
How EWA is presented to employees in the Gusto app.
How Clair worked with Gusto to determine how exactly to integrate EWA into their wallet.
How the roll out has been going.
What Gusto users are telling them about EWA.
How fast a user can get money to their card if they have never used EWA before.
Why Clair took the regulatory approach of treating EWA as a loan.
What resistance, if any, employers have to offering EWA.
What is stopping more payroll companies from signing up for EWA.
Some of the limitations of the direct to consumer EWA model.
What it is going to take for EWA to become ubiquitous.

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There are not many US-based fintech companies that are global from day one. Nearly every company starts in the domestic market, gets established and after a few years starts looking at overseas markets. That was not the case for today's podcast guest.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is John Mitchell, the CEO and Co-Founder of Episode Six. John started the company, which is based in Austin, in Hong Kong in 2015 and they are global-first, currently operating in 40 countries around the world. What they do is provide next generation payments infrastructure to large banks and non-finance brands.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Episode Six.
Why they decided to start the company in Hong Kong.
The financial infrastructure that they provide today.
How they built their technology to work in any region of the world.
Why it was so important to build their systems to evolve.
How their infrastructure is able to interface with legacy banking cores.
Why, in ten years time, legacy banking cores will still be in production in most places.
The number of countries where Episode Six is working today.
How easy it is to embed card issuance today.
Why applying for a credit card form a large bank is still basically the same as it was 20 years ago.
Why Episode Six mostly works on new programs when working with traditional banks.
How they are working with Japan Airlines and why the airline invested in Episode Six.
What John thinks about the new payments rails that are developing.
Why he is bullish on programmable money.
The work they are doing in instant payments.
What he has learned from other countries that could be implemented in this country.

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Most of us have heard the term "AI agent" but it is only the minority of banks and fintechs that have done any kind of implementation. This is partly because it is not a trivial task and there are real risks to getting this wrong. What is needed is some kind of framework that helps reduce these risks and provides best practices for implementing AI agents in financial services.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Simon Taylor, the Head of Strategy and Content for Sardine and the author of the Fintech Brainfood newsletter. Today, Sardine has released a white paper, titled The Agentic Oversight Framework - Procedures, Accountability, and Best Practices for Agentic AI Use in Regulated Financial Services. It is a how-to document for implementing AI Agents into your bank, credit union or fintech. We unpack the white paper in this podcast, with as little jargon as possible, making it approachable for any risk or compliance executive.

In this podcast you will learn:

Simon's background and why he joined Sardine in 2022.
How banks are approaching BSA/AML compliance today.
What Sardine is trying to achieve with this new white paper.
What concerns people in financial services have about hiring an AI agent.
How AI agents interact with humans in compliance departments.
How much more effective AI agents can be.
The six different processes in the Agentic Oversight Framework (AOF).
How you manage the risk of hallucination in your LLMs.
How you can scale the AOF beyond BSA/AML into other areas.
Some examples of the AOF in action.
If you are starting at zero how you start working with AI agents.
Why you should jump in now even though the models will continue to get better.
Why data security is such a critical component of the implementation of AI agents.

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Many of us have used virtual credit or debit cards and haven't given them a second thought. In today's world of contactless payments, there is no difference between a virtual and physical card. But a virtual card is actually a piece of software and as such it can be programmed to act in very specific ways.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Andrew Jamison, the CEO and Co-Founder of Extend, the spend management platform that works with your existing credit card. They use the virtual card concept to extend an existing card with new functionality to manage and control spending for middle-market businesses.

In this podcast:

How a sabbatical helped form the idea for Extend.
The history of virtual cards and the two companies that pioneered their use.
Why Andrew started using virtual cards while at American Express.
Why we won't be running out of virtual card numbers any time soon.
Extend's core virtual card offering and how it works.
Why they decided not to offer their own card and use existing cards instead.
How they go to market with their bank partners.
The customer experience with Extend's technology for the end user .
Some of the use cases for their virtual cards.
The size of business that is the sweet spot for Extend.
How they are able to interface with the digital wallets from Apple and Google.
How they work with the main accounting software platforms.
How Andrew sees the impact of AI on spend management.
What is next for Extend.

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Every bank and fintech company has a suite of anti-fraud tools that they use to keep the bad guys out. Few tools are 100% effective, however, and often the implementation of these tools, along with their interfaces with other system leave gaps. And the fraudsters will exploit these gaps. So, how do you get a holistic view of your anti-fraud arsenal and discover where these gaps are?

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Jerry Tylman, the co-founder and partner at Greenway Solutions and the founder of their Fraud Red Team. The Fraud Red Team is all about discovering the gaps, where the weaknesses in the anti-fraud systems are. They are 100% focused on financial services, working with many of the largest banks in the country as well as several fintech companies.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Greenway Solutions became focused on financial services.
What a pen test is and the groundbreaking work they do with fraud controls.
The different attack vectors that fraudsters use.
Why banks and fintechs need the services of the Fraud Red Team.
How successful they are in penetrating the fraud detection systems.
How they interact with the anti-fraud providers to banks and fintechs.
An example of a recent test they have done that penetrated anti-fraud systems.
How they tackle the challenge of account onboarding.
Why behavioral technology is a key piece of the puzzle.
How deepfake video and audio are being used by fraudsters.
The fascinating way that the Fraud Red Team works with deepfakes.
Why companies have to completely rethink their internal authentication today.
Some of the fintechs they have worked with recently.
How they work with check fraud and why it is a growing problem.
Why all financial institutions cannot stop investing in anti-fraud tools.

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Everyone in fintech knows about the Starbucks reloadable wallet. It has become wildly successful for Starbucks, to the extent that they now have over $1.6 billion in balances on these wallets. Now, Starbucks has unique scale that made this kind of tech investment feasible. But I have been wondering for many years why so few corporations have copied Starbucks' lead here. Enter Ansa.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Sophia Goldberg, the CEO and Co-Founder of Ansa. They call themselves the "modern stored value platform" and they have created the technology to allow any mid-market or enterprise chain to offer their own branded wallet to their customers. They have the capability to create a wallet that can work in app or online and they have recently rolled out the technology to use their wallets in-store.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why Sophia decided to write a book on payments.
The founding story of Ansa.
What a branded stored-value wallet is exactly.
The core value proposition for Ansa's closed-loop payments as a service.
Why the Starbucks wallet hasn't been copied by others.
The conditions that had to happen for Ansa's offerings to gain traction.
How they decided what verticals they wanted to focus on.
What is involved in bringing Ansa's tech live for merchants.
What it looks like from the consumer side.
How Ansa helps drive loyalty for their merchants.
How they solved for in-person wallet adoption with Ansa Anywhere.
What they learned by having to switch bank partners.
How they are driving revenue.
What they are doing to get the word out about Ansa.
What success will look like.
The feedback they are receiving from the end consumers.
The ultimate goal for Ansa.

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Every bank that decides to get into the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) space already has an existing legacy business. Most of those legacy businesses have very little crossover with fintech and BaaS, so internally at the bank, there is a completely new skill set that needs to be developed. But then there are those banks that were born digital and for which BaaS is a natural extension of their existing business.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Mike Butler, the CEO of Grasshopper Bank. I first had Mike on the show back in 2019, when he was the CEO of Radius Bank - that was the bank that LendingClub acquired in 2021. So, Mike is back at the helm of another digital bank, bringing his deep experience in BaaS and digital banking. And he has big plans for Grasshopper.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Mike went from selling Radius Bank to becoming CEO of Grasshopper.
The core offerings of Grasshopper.
Why Grasshopper has a "work from away" culture.
How much they focus on BaaS versus serving customers directly.
The core learnings he brought from Radius Bank to Grasshopper.
Who Mike thinks of as his main competitors.
How the BaaS challenges of 2024 impacted Grasshopper.
Why you can't dip your toe in the water when it comes to BaaS.
How the expectations of fintechs have changed.
The types of fintechs they work with today.
Why they decided to acquire Auto Club Trust, an insurance company.
Where Mike sees the future growth for Grasshopper.

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If you have ever tried to rollover a 401(k) from a previous job you know what a painful process that can be. Another big problem with 401(k)s is that many people will move jobs and ultimately forget about their old 401(k). Both of these problems are hurting people trying to maximize their wealth in retirement. Enter Capitalize.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Gaurav Sharma, the CEO and Founder of Capitalize. His company solves both problems: they make it much easier to do a rollover and they help find any old 401(k)s that have been forgotten about. And in doing so, they are helping Americans have a more prosperous retirement.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Gaurav came to be in this country.
Why he became fascinated by the retirement market.
The total number and amount of forgotten 401k accounts.
How Capitalize helps individuals transfer retirement accounts.
The regulatory hurdles that Capitalize has to deal with.
How and why they pivoted from direct-to-consumer to B2B.
What the consumer experience looks like at Capitalize's partners.
How they manage the different points of friction in this rollover process.
How working with the legacy asset managers is different than the fintechs.
The typical amount of money they move in a rollover.
How they are going to be working with RIAs.
How Capitalize makes money.
The scale they are at today.
How Gaurav thinks about the retirement landscape and the role Capitalize can play.

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In the last year I don't think there is any area of fintech that has received more attention than the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) space. And it is not just the Synapse debacle, it is all the consent orders that have come out of the bank regulators. We have a banking system that pretty much demands that fintech companies partner with banks and we are still yet to figure out what the optimal business model is here.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Jason Mikula, the publisher of Fintech Business Weekly and the Head of Industry, Strategy, Banking and Fintech at the risk decisioning platform Taktile. He has become one of the leading authorities on BaaS and has recently authored a book on this topic. It is the most comprehensive look at BaaS and the many challenges it has faced and we delve into these challenges in this episode.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Jason ended up living in the Netherlands.
His impetus for starting the Fintech Business Weekly newsletter.
What attracted Jason to focus so much on Banking-as-a-Service.
Why he decided to write a book on BaaS.
How he frames the difference between BaaS and embedded finance.
Why fintech companies have been attracted to omnibus or FBO accounts at banks.
The interview that Jason did with founder and former CEO of Synapse, Sankaet Pathak.
Where we are with the Synapse saga (as of mid-February, 2025).
What Jason thinks the likelihood the impacted consumers will get their funds back.
Whether we will ever learn what happened to missing 90-odd million dollars.
His thoughts on the middleware model that was core to the development of BaaS.
How he views the BaaS model evolving long term in the U.S.

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While text is a big part of our daily communications most corporations, particularly those in financial services, use it sparingly. Why is that when texting gets many times the engagement of email? We explain why in this interview. But this is all changing, in large part due to the work of my next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast.

Dave Baxter is the CEO of Solutions by Text (SBT), a text and payments platform focused on financial services. Their compliance-first approach to texting has resulted in the adoption of integrated text payments by many fintechs and banks as these companies realize they need to meet their customers where they are at. And that is via text message on their phone.

In this podcast you will learn:

The big names in tech and finance where Dave cut his teeth.
How and why he came to be CEO of SBT.
Why SBT is focused on the consumer finance vertical.
Why many companies in financial services have been hesitant to use texting.
How SBT is able to assuage their concerns around using text as a channel.
The most popular use case where SBT clients start.
How they onboard a client and integrate into existing systems.
What happens when someone clicks on a text payment link.
How texting effectiveness cuts across demographics.
How SBT is using AI in their text messaging systems.
What they learned in their recent study with Datos Insights.
The potential for text messaging in consumer finance.

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The co-branded credit card space is a mature market. Chase and American Express have large deals with airlines and hotels as well as the likes of Amazon and Disney. These are typically huge programs with not just millions but tens of millions of customers. But what about those Fortune 500 companies that are not big enough for Chase or Amex but still want to do their own co-branded credit card? That is where Imprint comes in.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Daragh Murphy, the CEO and Founder of Imprint. Daragh realized that the bank technology being used to power the co-branded card space was decades old and inflexible. He saw the opportunity to build a new tech stack to provide a much better experience for large brands. And they didn't take any shortcuts to get there.

In this podcast you will learn:

What first brought Daragh from Ireland to the U.S. and why he stayed here.
How he landed on the idea of co-branded credit cards.
The hardest part about building a credit card company.
How granular they can get with their rewards program.
Why Chase and Amex only have a limited number of co-branded programs.
The size of company that Imprint is looking to partner with.
Why they do no outbound marketing whatsoever.
Why a typical billion dollar company shouldn't do a co-branded card program.
How they were able to get started when dealing with large enterprises as a startup.
How they embed the Imprint technology into their clients' app.
The thought process we went through when choosing their bank partner.
How long it took them to build their own credit card platform.
How they are getting their card to the top of wallet.
Why they decided to build a call center themselves.
How they have deployed AI into their customer support.
What is next for Imprint.

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Despite the challenges and the obvious risk of failure, Americans are starting small businesses in record numbers. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well but the difference today is that the tools have become so much better. And they are going to continue to improve, particularly as small business owners start taking advantage of the latest AI tools.

My guest today on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Karen G. Mills. She is a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, and she was the head of the Small Business Administration under President Obama from 2009 until 2013. She was first on the show back in 2015 and again when she wrote the first edition of her book, Fintech Small Business and the American Dream, back in 2019. She has now published a second edition that includes a deep analysis of the changes that the pandemic and the PPP had on the American small business landscape. She is very optimistic on American small business and thinks we are on the cusp of reaching small business utopia.

In this podcast you will learn:

What has changed since Karen wrote the first edition of her book in 2019.
The three layers of complexity that prevented the predicted changes from happening as fast as expected.
Why she decided to write a second edition.
Why the narrative about PPP fraud was not accurate.
What fintech lenders did that traditional banks would not do during that time.
The analysis they did to demonstrate the success of PPP.
How the SBA performed in administering the PPP.
Karen's take on the state of community banks and small business lending.
Why she thinks big tech is not going to dominate small business lending.
Who the winners are going to be.
Why small business lending is one of the biggest opportunities out there.
Her vision for smart regulation of small business lending.
What it will take to get to small business utopia.
Why she is optimistic about the future of U.S. small business.

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In an article last year, the International Monetary Fund said that the global private credit market topped $2.1 trillion globally in 2023, with 75% of that in the U.S. That number has been rising rapidly for many years as more companies look beyond banks and the public debt markets to raise capital. Along with this rise in private credit, some fintech companies have taken advantage of this growth, bringing new opportunities to investors.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Nelson Chu, the CEO and Co-Founder of Percent. They have created a marketplace where private credit deals get underwritten and presented to a wide range of investors, including individual accredited investors. They have provided access to this fast-growing asset class to many investors for the first time. Full disclosure, I have been an active investor on the Percent platform since 2019.

In this podcast you will learn:

What Nelson saw in the market that led to the founding of Percent.
Why they decided to focus on retail accredited investors.
Why private credit has boomed the last two to three years.
How investor interest has changed over time.
How they can graduate their borrowers to much larger amounts.
How their platform works.
The geographies where they have borrowers.
How they decide what deals make it onto their platform.
How they work with credit funds that bring asset-based deals.
The different revenue streams they have.
The huge range of deal sizes that come on their platform.
The performance they have provided to investors.
How their technology stack has improved over time.
How they manage balancing their multi-sided marketplace.
The blend of retail and institutional money on their platform.
The scale they are at today.
Nelson's vision for the future of Percent.

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The earned wage access (EWA) space is maturing and now has some players that are getting real scale. In many industries, it has gone from a curiosity to a must-have for employers. As the space scales, there are bigger questions in play. How can we ensure that all salaried workers have access to this innovative product, so they don't need to provide an interest-free loan to their employers every pay period?

My guest today on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Alex Bradford, the CEO and founder of Rain. Rain is part of the new breed of EWA providers that learned from the lessons of the early movers in the space when building their product. They now have over a million employees on their app and they see the real financial benefit that EWA is providing their users, particularly those living paycheck to paycheck.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why Alex got so excited when he discovered the EWA space.
Why he thought the timing was great to start his company in 2019.
How their system works for both the employer and employee.
The different types of users of Rain.
How they know Rain is being beneficial for their users' financial health.
How using Rain has changed their users' behavior.
The impact that Rain has on employee retention.
What they are doing with the large HR software companies.
How Rain is engaging with state and federal regulators.
What they have on their product roadmap.
What it will take to make EWA ubiquitous.

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Technology has impacted so many areas of lending but one niche that has remained a manual, human-powered process is middle market lending, where deals are typically $5 million to $100 million. These deals have been consummated on the golf course or at expensive dinners after often months of analysis and negotiation. That is not an efficient way to do business in 2025. Enter Arc.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Don Muir, the CEO and Co-Founder of Arc. Arc is first and foremost a technology company, providing startups and lenders the tools they need to manage their finances. Where Arc shines is in helping companies raise debt capital, they have built one of the most sophisticated systems on the market today to bring borrowers and lenders together to get deals done quickly and easily, even deals in the tens of millions of dollars.

In this podcast you will learn:

The aha moment that led to the founding of Arc.
Why banks are not interested in serving the lower middle market.
Why they launched with a direct lending model.
How their two-sided debt marketplace works.
Details of their commercial banking offering.
How they make lenders decisions easier.
The range of deal sizes they are doing today.
What they offer in their cash management platform.
How the SVB collapse has impacted their business.
How Arc Intelligence uses AI to helps lenders make decisions more efficiently.
Why they have decided to focus exclusively on debt and not do equity.
Why demand has been so strong for the last year or more.
How Don is thinking about Arc long term.

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If there is one thing that the last decade of fintech innovation has achieved, it is more awareness around consumer credit scores. The majority of the population know their approximate score and even teenagers are talking about it. For better or worse (I think it almost uniformly positive) consumers look at the score as a measure, maybe even the measure, of their financial health.

My next guest on the Fintech One on One podcast is Adrian Nazari, the CEO and Founder of Credit Sesame. It is companies like Credit Sesame that have been at the forefront of the increased awareness of credit scores. Now, with a new B2B offering they are poised to reach even more consumers than ever before.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why he decided to start Credit Sesame.
What is still missing to help consumers manage their credit.
What Credit Sesame offers for consumers today.
The various ways they are using AI at Credit Sesame.
Why they are exclusively focused on credit for financial wellness.
Why they decided to start a B2B offering.
Who they are focused on with this product.
How Adrian is managing both a direct to consumer and a B2B offering.
Why he thinks the B2B side will be the growth driver moving forward.
How they are working with lenders to improve the borrower experience.
How they are different to Credit Karma.
The state of the US consumer today when it comes to their credit score.
His vision for Credit Sesame.

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Small business data is very different to consumer data. When a person is born, they don't need to go and open a bank account, obtain a line of credit or apply for some kind of permit. But a business may be three days old and want all those things. This creates a data challenge. This new business has little to no digital footprint and so the available data may be negligible. Which makes it hard and risky for banks and fintechs to work with them. Enter Middesk.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One is Kyle Mack, the CEO and Co-Founder of Middesk. They are focused on business identity data and have spent a great deal of time and effort making it easier for banks and fintech to verify any business, including those that might only be a few days old. How they are able to do that makes for a very interesting discussion.

In this podcast you will learn:

The idea that led to the founding of Middesk.
Why solving for business identity is so difficult.
Middesk's three core product offerings.
How they moved from fintechs to banks, to the mega-banks.
The shockingly low percentage of new business bank accounts that are approved automatically at banks.
The details of the report they send to their customers for each business.
How they work with the business data they receive from state and local governments.
The huge challenges of obtaining and working with this data.
How they interact with those companies helping to create new business entities.
Why they created their Address Risk Insights Tool and why it is important.
How one address in Wyoming has 375,000 businesses "operating" there.
How Middesk is working with lenders today.
The scale they are at today.
Why the incumbents have not created an offering like Middesk.
Kyle's vision for the future of Middesk.

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[Editor's note: This is our last podcast of 2024. We are taking two weeks off and will be back on January 9. Happy Holidays everyone!]

The 20 million college students in the US today, while a vast market that is somewhat homogenous, has not been a focus for many banks or fintechs. Since the Card Act in 2010, credit card issuers have not been able to set up shop on campus trolling their wares. That has left a wide open market that no company has dominated, at least not yet.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Carlo Kobe, the CEO and Co-Founder of Fizz. Carlo is a Gen-Z founder with a financial app focused squarely on Gen-Z consumers, specifically college students. He maybe the youngest founder I have ever had on the show, but don't let his youth fool you. He is a deep thinker and quick learner and his thoughtful approach to the market has Fizz well positioned for success.

In this podcast you will learn:

The formative experience as an international student that sparked the idea for Fizz.
How prepared college students are for adult financial responsibilities.
The attitude of college student towards credit cards.
How Carlo describes Fizz today.
How they created a debit card that helps build credit.
How they are underwriting these college students for their line of credit.
How they are able to empower college students to manage money.
Where most budgeting tool fall short and how Fizz is different.
How they calculate their "Available to Spend" number.
Why they decided to build their own tech stack.
The two partner banks they are working with today.
How they were able to raise $14 million from Kleiner Perkins.
How they are marketing to college students.
Why they intend to let their customers go after they age out past 25.

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When it comes to embedded lending, point of sale is really where the action is at. We have seen the explosion of BNPL volume over the last decade, but not every point-of-sale transaction is suitable for those platforms. Then we have banks, who have missed out on the credit card volume that has been lost to BNPL. Ideally, they would like to embed a lending solution into the point of sale that they control. This is where our guest today comes in.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Yaacov Martin, the CEO and Co-Founder of Jifiti. Based in Israel, but doing business globally, Jifiti works with large banks to customize embedded lending solutions at the point of sale that they can control. How this technology works and what it means for the future of lending is the focus of this conversation.

In this podcast you will learn:

The roots of Jifiti and how it began in the gifting business.
Why IKEA encouraged them to move into lending.
What they have created in embedded lending that is unique.
How their technology works on the backend.
How they work with the credit box of the lender.
Why they chose to focus on banks in their go to market strategy.
How they work with Citizens Bank as an example.
The range of order sizes that they are working with today.
What Yaacov has learned from working with large banks.
Why the bank-fintech partnership challenges of 2024 hasn't impacted Jifiti.
How their recently launched Tap Now Pay Later technology works.
The beauty of working with digital wallets today.
How they can power an installment loan through a wallet transaction.
How they adapted their technology to work in different global markets.
The scale that Jifiti is at today.
His vision for the future of embedded finance.

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There is a looming retirement crisis in the US and in many other countries for that matter. A large portion of the population has no retirement savings at all and will have to rely primarily on social security for their retirement income, and the future of that program is shaky at best.

In fintech, not a lot of attention has been paid to this huge sector of financial services: retirement savings. And yet, there is so much room for digital innovation as much of it is still antiquated and paper-based.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Romi Savova, the CEO and Founder of PensionBee. An established fintech in the UK with a history going back 10 years that included an IPO in 2021, PensionBee is focused on bringing innovation to retirement savings. They have recently launched in the US market.

In this podcast you will learn:

The frustration that Romi experienced that led to the founding of PensionBee.
The average number of times people switch jobs in their lifetime.
How PensionBee helps workers simplify their retirement savings.
The state of retirement in the UK.
The traction that PensionBee has made in the UK.
Why they decided to become a public company in 2021.
What was behind their decision to expand to the US now.
How their partnership with State Street works.
Where they are at with their US rollout.
The different investment options available for US investors.
How many workplace retirement accounts have been abandoned in the US.
The difference between the US and UK when it comes to retirement savings.
How the PensionBee onboarding process works.
How Romi views the future of retirement in the US.
Her goals for PensionBee in the US.

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Welcome to a new occasional series we are doing on the podcast called Fintech Revealed. This is where we take a deep dive into one specific topic with a couple of industry experts.

In our first episode we are focused on one of my favorite topics: cash flow underwriting. I invited two of the leading credit experts, Kevin Moss and Alex Johnson, to provide a well-rounded discussion on this topic highlighting both the benefits and challenges of cash flow underwriting. We covered so much territory in this conversation, so whether you are curious about cash flow underwriting or are a seasoned veteran, I am confident you will learn a great deal.

This episode was sponsored by Prism Data, the modern cash flow underwriting solution.

In this podcast you will learn:

What cash flow underwriting is exactly.
Why cash flow underwriting is not captured in the FICO score.
How Kevin was using transaction data at Wells Fargo in the early 2000s.
What has happened that has accelerated the use of cash flow data in underwriting.
Why banks haven't moved more quickly to implement cash flow underwriting.
How subprime and prime consumers have been segregated in the current credit system.
How cash flow data is different from alternative data.
Why cash flow underwriting gets us back to the traditional way we used to be approved for credit.
The real mission of cash flow underwriting.
How well cash flow data predicts default risk and where it has the most value.
What tokenization for connecting bank accounts will look like for borrowers.
How streamlining the authorization process will supercharge cash flow underwriting.
The types of lenders and products that are using cash flow underwriting today.
The most promising use case for cash flow underwriting.
How it can help the mortgage lending process.
Kevin's view on how cash flow underwriting will replace debt-to-income.
Why regulators such as the CFPB like cash flow underwriting so much.
How cash flow data creates a lending market with more fairness.

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[Editor's note: This interview was recorded on November 13 and in the fast-moving transition to a new administration, some items discussed here as possible or unlikely have already come to pass.]

The new Trump Administration is going to have a dramatic impact on leadership at Federal banking regulators as well as on the new rules impacting fintech. So, I thought it would be useful to bring on an expert to tease out this impact and how fintechs can adapt to the changing of the guard.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Armen Meyer, the Co-Founder of the American Fintech Council, the former head of public policy at LendingClub and a public policy expert. We cover a lot of territory on this show as Armen prognosticates on what the change of administration could mean for fintech.

In this podcast you will learn:

Armen's history with fintech and forming the American Fintech Council.
What changes we are likely to see at the top of the regulatory agencies.
Why the Federal Reserve will see a lot of noise under Trump.
Why the CFPB will not focus their attention on Section 1033.
What might happen with the new BNPL rules.
The future of the credit card late fee rules.
What might happen with EWA, overdraft rules and regulating big tech.
The impact on BaaS bank consent orders.
How the state regulators may react to the changes at Federal agencies.
How the pendulum swing back and forth between Democrats and Republicans impacts banking and fintech.
What the end of the Chevron Doctrine might mean for fintech.
Whether we will see some kind of new limited fintech or payments charter.
Why Armen is optimistic for the new Trump Administration.

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The consumer lending space has seen a great deal of innovation in the past decade or more. But the number of completely new lending concepts that cross my desk has reduced to a trickle in the past couple of years. That is why I was excited to see an idea that was completely original and compelling.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Veetahl Eilat-Raichel, the CEO and Co-Founder of Sorbet. While you could think about Sorbet as an unsecured consumer lender, because that broadly defines them, they have discovered a completely untapped niche: PTO (Paid Time Off). Most employees accrue PTO that has real value and Sorbet has figured out how to tap into that value to create a lending product.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Sorbet.
The size of the unused PTO marked in this country.
The percentage of employees that accrue PTO.
How their PTO advances work.
How they integrate with payroll systems.
When the issued their first loan.
Their unique capabilities to underwrite PTO.
What they consider to be their technological moat.
What happens if someone uses all their PTO and then leaves their job.
The two types of personas that uses Sorbet.
The average loan size and the range of interest rates charged.
What they have learned in the data so far.
How they are going to market.
How they are educating the market on the concept.
What they learned from the earned wage access space.
The three revenue streams they have.
Their biggest challenge in growing the business today.
How they are funding their loans.
The early pivot they made that transformed the company.

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When you have been covering fintech as long as I have you get to know others in the space doing similar things. Zack Miller, the founder and managing editor of Tearsheet, was writing about fintech and interviewing people as I was getting serious about fintech lending back in 2012.

Since I no longer own a fintech media company, we are no longer competitors so I wanted to get him on the show to talk about Tearsheet. He has done a great job building it up into one of the leading media companies in the industry today.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Tearsheet went from a passion project to a fintech media business.
How they started doing small-scale high-end events.
What they found out in their Gen-Z working group.
The different components of Tearsheet and how they make money.
How they decide what goes into their content.
How to build trust with the largest financial institutions.
The trends that Zack is looking at most closely.
What banks have learned from their fintech partnerships.
Why he is still a big fan of blockchain.
What the future holds for Tearsheet.

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Account payable automation software is one of those areas of fintech that doesn't get as much coverage as it should. Creating an efficient accounts payable system is a pain point for pretty much every company, but particularly for those businesses occupying the middle market. This is the opportunity that our guest today seized upon when starting his company nearly 25 years ago.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Michael Praeger, the CEO, Chairman and Co-Founder of AvidXchange. Mike founded his company all the way back in April 2000 and it is been through several phases in its growth to where it is today. It took them 10 years to get to $10 million in revenue but in the following decade they went from $10 million to $400 million. And then he took the company public. How he was able to do this makes for a really interesting discussion.

In this podcast you will learn:

The catalyst that led to the founding of AvidXchange in 2000.
How they were able to grow over 30% a year for 12 years in a row.
What excites Mike is the business today.
Why they decided to raise a large amount of money in 2015.
How he describes the different components of their business.
The huge number of accounting systems they integrate with.
Why they focused on the middle market and have not gone after small businesses.
The core benefit they are bringing to the table.
How Avid Pay Direct is able to enhance a standard ACH payment.
Why cross border payments is not a major part of their business.
Why middle market companies are not focused on speed of the payment.
Examples of how they are using AI in their systems today.
How being a public company has changed AvidXchange.
Why he decided to start his own podcast and what it is about.

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While there are tens of millions of Americans still struggling with their financial health the reality is that fintech is starting to have a significant impact here. Some companies are reaching scale and are helping those people living paycheck to paycheck save huge amounts of money in aggregate particularly when it comes to punitive bank fees.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Zuben Mathews, the CEO and Co-Founder of Brigit. As a college student, he lived the challenges of not having enough money and was motivated to do something about it. Today, Brigit is helping over one million people become more financially healthy, and in the process saving them over $1 billion in overdraft fees.

In this podcast you will learn:

The problem Zuben had in college that led to the founding of Brigit.
How he got the company off the ground.
His thoughts on the impact of overdrafts and NSF fees.
What Brigit's app provides and how it helps consumers.
Why they decided to make subscriptions their primary revenue stream.
The top use cases for their wage advances.
How they are measuring their impact on the financial health of their users.
The mechanics of how their advances work.
The data they look at in their underwriting process.
How their users are becoming more educated about financial health.
How their credit building system works and why it is different.
How they help people earn more income.
The astounding amount of revenue they are earning per employee.
Why they decided to call the company Brigit.
Zuben's vision for Brigit.

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Imagine serving unsecured consumer loans to a population that has no credit file and no banking activity whatsoever. This population primarily uses cash and operates outside of the traditional financial system. Is it even possible to serve this population with short-term loans profitably?

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Roberto Salcedo, the CEO and Co-Founder of Baubap. Roberto and his team have done exactly that, building the technology and the underwriting models themselves to serve Mexico with small dollar loans. How he has been to do that makes for a fascinating story.

In this podcast you will learn:

How he was able to leverage his knowledge as a banker to start Baubap.
Why Mexico has lagged the rest of Latin America in adoption of financial services.
Why the cash economy in Mexico makes it harder for banks.
Baubap's core lending product and how quickly it is delivered.
How they created their hypothesis for their unique approach to underwriting.
The types of data they feed into their underwriting algorithms.
How they started using AI in their initial models.
Why they created all the fraud, identity verification and KYC features themselves.
How they have been able to improve their approval rates over time.
Some of the signals they use to indicate creditworthiness.
The typical borrowers they are working with.
Their lucrative referral program.
How they are finding their borrowers.
Their track record of profitability.
How they were able to close a $120m debt facility from a US investor.
Roberto's expansion plans for Baubap.

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Despite all the advances in fintech lending, the way data has been furnished to the credit bureaus has remained largely unchanged for several decades. We still operate on a 30-day payment cycle with no allowance for real time data. Not to mention all the recent credit innovations such as BNPL and short-term cash advances. This is about to change.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Christian Widhalm, the CEO of Bloom Credit. They have created a system that can work with cash flow data, can work with BNPL, can work with real time payment data, all while staying within the legacy confines of the Metro 2 data format of the credit bureaus.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Christian helped the founder of Bloom Credit get things going.
Why Bloom Credit pivoted from B2C to B2B.
What convinced him to join as CEO in 2021.
The problems with Metro 2, the 26-year-old credit bureau data format.
How their solution works as the intermediary between the bureaus and lenders.
How Bloom Credit works with real time payment data.
Why they store the payment data themselves.
The types of FIs using Bloom Credit today.
How Bloom Plus works and how it is different from Experian Boost.
How Bloom Plus can help people build credit without taking on debt.
The key trade lines from a checking account that are reportable to the bureaus.
How new immigrants and new adults can enter the credit system.
Why this is such a great opportunity for community banks and credit unions.
How winning Finovate Best in Show in May has helped Bloom Credit over the last few months.
Christian's vision for Bloom Credit.

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When you think about it, most, if not all, fintech innovation comes via the analysis and application of data. And financial services is more data-dependent now than at any time in its history. But this creates a challenge for brand new startups. How do you get access to data when all you have is an idea? Enter Fintech Sandbox.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Sarah Biller, the co-founder of Fintech Sandbox. This industry non-profit provides free access to financial services data that can be critical for startups as they develop their initial products. As the need for large datasets accelerates an organization like Fintech Sandbox provides ever more critical for the growth of the startup ecosystem.

In this podcast you will learn:

The driving force in starting Fintech Sandbox.
How they persuaded their first data providers to provide free access to data.
Some of the companies providing data for them today.
How they go about finding new data sources.
What their Data Access Residency program is and who it is for.
How the types of companies they see have evolved over the last decade.
The impact of AI on the demand for data from their new cohorts.
Some of the companies that have been through their program.
How open banking is going to impact fintech once the new rules are implemented.
What is happening at Boston Fintech Week (Oct 14-18) this year.
Why it is important for Fintech Sandbox to be a non-profit.
How they are funded.
How Sarah is thinking about the next 10 years of Fintech Sandbox.

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"AI is probably the most talked about and least understood topic within financial services today," said John Sun, the CEO and Co-Founder of Spring Labs (previously, I had another co-founder of Spring Labs, Adam Jiwan, on the show back in 2020). The company is at the cutting edge of AI innovation in financial services with several interesting use cases in production today.

The Spring Labs team decided that what the industry needed was a new event focused on AI applications beyond just the use of chatbots. So, they created the AI-Native Banking and Fintech Conference, happening in Utah on October 7. Tickets will be available here right up until the show kicks off.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Spring Labs has evolved since its founding in 2018.
Where they are focused today.
What Gen AI applications they have in market today.
The key markets they are focused on.
The first use cases they deployed for their Gen AI product.
How they are inserting AI tools into existing workflows.
The outputs that come from these tools.
Why they decided to start an AI-focused fintech conference.
Why they chose Salt Lake City as the location for this first event.
Who is attending the event.
The AI topics they will be covering.
What John is personally looking forward to on the agenda.
How people can get tickets to the event.
John's vision for Spring Labs.

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There is no faster-moving space in finance right now than the anti-fraud space. With all the advances in Generative AI, the fraudsters are more difficult to catch than ever. But there is one place where fintechs and banks can focus that has real promise: authenticating the mobile phone.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Rodger Desai, the CEO and Founder of Prove. They have developed sophisticated tools to verify identity through a mobile phone that can help banks and fintechs across a variety of touchpoints. We explain why the phone may hold the key (literally) to the future of ID verification and authentication.

In this podcast you will learn:

What led to the founding of Prove.
Why they decided to focus on financial services.
The different types of services Prove offers today.
ID verification best practices and why you need to add authentication.
Rodger's thoughts on the ready availability of PII due to data breaches.
What data they are returning back to their clients around authentication.
How they work with transactions that happen on a desktop rather than a phone.
How we should be thinking about sophisticated fraud rings today.
How to combat Gen-AI deep fakes.
Why key management is the answer to how you authenticate.
The role of visual cues when it comes to verification.
What the popular attack vectors are for criminals.
Who is winning in the arms race between the criminals and the good guys.

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Today's show is our special 500th episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast. Rather than do a retrospective or a look back at some highlights from the last 11 years of interviews what I decided was to do my regular interview but with a fintech pioneer. I wanted a big name so I was delighted when the CEO and Founder of Cross River Bank, Gilles Gade, decided to join me.

I first interviewed Gilles (along with Adam Goller) on the show way back in Episode 32 in March 2015. A lot has changed since then as Cross River Bank has become a market leader in Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and they have expanded way beyond their initial focus on marketplace lending.

A lot has happened in the BaaS space over the last year and we discuss this in depth as Gilles shares his thoughts on the past, present and future of bank-fintech partnerships. And much more.

Enjoy episode 500!

In this podcast you will learn:

The origin story of Cross River Bank.
How Cross River has been able to stay as a leader in the fintech lending space for over a decade.
The staggering numbers of loans that have flowed through Cross River.
How they expanded beyond the lending space.
How they developed their payments capabilities.
Why they moved away from the core providers to develop their own banking core.
The points he was making in his recent American Banker op-ed.
The lessons learned from the recent challenges in the BaaS space.
Gilles' thoughts on the higher bar now required to work with a BaaS bank.
What was behind their decision to start an investment bank earlier this year.
The scale that Cross River Bank is at today.

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An e-commerce merchant is a unique type of business. They are built on top of a platform like Amazon, eBay or Shopify and as such there is a great deal of empirical data about their business. Which means that there is rich data available for lenders to feed into their underwriting models.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Ricardo Pero, the CEO and Founder of SellersFi. He saw the opportunity for a lender focused on e-commerce when a friend of his with an Amazon store was looking for a reliable source of working capital. He realized that lenders were not serving this market segment well.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Ricardo got the idea to start SellersFi.
Why he started with Amazon and how they have evolved since then.
The number of e-commerce platforms they work with today.
The suite of working capital solutions they offer.
Why they created a digital wallet for multiple currencies.
How they gather the data to make an underwriting decision.
When they use accounting data.
The reasons they decline loan applications.
The impact of Amazon closing down its own lending program.
The different sizes of merchants that are connecting to their platform.
The scale that SellersFi is at today.
How demand is trending from e-commerce merchants.
Ricardo's vision for SellersFi.

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Today, the back office for many lenders and originators is still very manual and human-intensive. We are talking lots of emails, reading contracts and processing Excel files. In some cases these processes have been in place, pretty much unchanged since the 1990s. That is because there has never been a comprehensive solution available to automate the capital markets process for originators and lenders.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Stu Wall, the CEO and Co-Founder of Setpoint. They call themselves "the operating system for capital markets" because their system can replace the manual processes that have been in place with state of the art technology that takes advantage of automation and standardization. While they started in the real estate space they are now making real inroads into other lending verticals.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of SetPoint.
The mission and vision of the company.
What they mean when they talk about the "operating system for asset-backed lending".
How they replace the existing processes based on Excel and email.
How SetPoint has earned the trust of the market.
Their response to the build-buy-partner conversation.
The biggest challenges in capital markets for asset-backed lenders and originators today.
Why they started in the real estate space.
The different lending verticals where they operate.
Some of the originators they are working with today.
Why this will likely be a winner take most market.
How they were able to get Citi and Wells Fargo to back their company.
Their biggest challenge in getting deeper market penetration.
Some of the features that are on their product road map.
What is involved in onboarding a new lender or originator.
Stu's vision for the future of SetPoint and the automation of capital markets.

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People often say that technology in insurance is just five years behind other areas of finance. But the reality is the technology rails that have been built for payments, lending and deposits have taken decades of evolution. Insurance is different. There is no Plaid, Stripe or even ACH for insurance, and so we have a product that still relies on a human for the vast majority of transactions. But that is going to change.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Wayne Slavin, the CEO and Founder of Sure. His company is building the infrastructure needed to bring insurance fully into the digital age where people can buy insurance and make a claim all without needing to speak to a human. Today, their insurance products are being embedded into the offerings of fintech companies but Sure's goals go way beyond embedded insurance.

In this podcast you will learn:

The interesting a-ha moment that led to the founding of Sure.
What was missing in the insurance industry before Sure.
Why the digitization of insurance has lagged other areas of finance.
How Sure's embedded insurance product works.
The really big difference between fintech and insurtech.
The different types of insurance products they can offer today.
What is involved for a fintech working with Sure to offer insurance.
How they work with the insurance carriers.
Some of the fintech companies they are working with today.
How claims work with Sure.
Why it has been important to connect the insurance and payment transaction.
Why they launched Anywhere Insurance to speed up new insurance programs.
What the future holds for embedded insurance.

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The humble credit score has come a long way. Consumers, particularly younger consumers, are more aware of their credit score today than ever before. Historically, banks and credit unions have been the gatekeepers of our financial lives so it makes sense that they would want to provide information and context around credit scores. At the same time drive their customers to relevant products based on this information. Enter SavvyMoney.

My guest today on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is JB Orecchia, the CEO and Founder of SavvyMoney. His team has created a sophisticated platform for banks and credit unions to provide credit score information as well as personalized education and product recommendations. So, a bank's customer doesn't have to go to Credit Karma to learn about their credit score, they can do it right within the banking app.

In this podcast you will learn:

How his background in lending informed the creation of SavvyMoney.
Why consumers are more aware of their credit score today.
The types of financial institutions that use SavvyMoney.
The ROI for the typical bank or credit union.
Why this is most powerful as a retention product.
The integrations they have with the major digital banking platforms.
What is involved for a new financial institution to onboard SavvyMoney.
The tiny fraction of consumers who opt out.
The primary product categories their FIs are focused on.
How banks can compete with fintechs in customer acquisition.
Why their Get My Rate product is such a big deal for FIs.
How they are thinking about Generative AI for SavvyMoney.
JB's vision for the future of SavvyMoney.

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The financial system has become so much more complex over the last couple of decades that it is difficult to know what current trends will have staying power. How will the future financial system organize itself and will it look that much different to what we have today? I put these questions to one of the global thought leaders in fintech.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Emmanuel Daniel, the founder of The Asian Banker (now part of TAB Global) and one of the most interesting people in fintech today. He talks about the Great Transition, the title of his recent book, and details what is going to be important for the success of the financial institution of the future.

In this podcast you will learn:

How starting The Asian Banker launched a global platform.
A short history on the rise of fintech in China.
Why the Chinese regulators found the rise of fintech so challenging.
Why China will struggle to be leaders in the AI revolution.
Why Emmanuel decided to write a book on the personalization of finance.
What the U.S. needs to do to ensure the dollar remains the reserve currency of the world.
What is to become of platforms and the whole of idea of intermediation.
Emmanuel's advice to innovators when it comes to regulation.
How the next banking crisis will unfold.
What could precipitate a change away from the dominance of the large banks.
What is needed for the safety and soundness of the financial system of the future.
Why the most important thing in the future is to be networked rather than large.

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The core of the card payments system as we know it today has been around for many decades. This system has a number of major shortcomings, not least of which is the 45-character limited established by the ISO 8583 standard. That may have been enough characters back in the 1980s but it is severely limiting in today's complex world. But problems like these create opportunities for creative minds.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Oban MacTavish, the CEO and Co-Founder of Spade. They have built a system for real-time intelligence of card merchants which is impressive in and of itself. But what I found most fascinating is they have built one of the richest data sets in country on credit card merchants. With coverage that is second to none.

In this podcast you will learn:

The realization about archaic card payments that led to the founding of Spade.
How the card payments value chain works today.
The main thing that really needs to improve with card payments.
How Spade is able to add more context to card payments.
The disparate data sources they use to feed their system.
How they update their merchant data.
Who buys their data.
The enriched data they send back to their clients.
The main use cases for their data.
Why they are not working with personal financial management tools.
How they are working with Corpay, the corporate payments company.
How they can help merchant acquirers.
Oban's vision for Spade.

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The Generative AI hype is not dying down. But where are the use cases in fintech beyond the basic chatbot? Particularly in fintech lending where AI has been used in underwriting for more than a decade. But not Generative AI. That is why I was very interested to chat with today's guest who has created a patent-pending Gen AI use case.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Ryan Rosset, the Co-CEO and Founder of Credibly. They are a small business lender that has been around since 2010, but today they call themselves a "data science driven lender". We find out what this means and much more in this episode.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Credibly.
Why they decided very early on to take on a bank partnership.
How they have changed as the industry has evolved over the last 14 years.
The suite of financing products they offer today.
How much progress has been made when it comes to access to capital for small business.
The speed of their underwriting process.
What they mean when they say they are a "data science driven lender."
How they are using their patent-pending Generative AI system in underwriting.
The data they are feeding into this Gen AI-system.
Other places where they are looking to leverage Gen AI.
Why they decided to launch their own business banking product last year.
Ryan's perspective on banking-as-a-service and the current challenges.
The scale they are at today.
What is next for Credibly.

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It is the big challenge for fintech: making the financial lives better for the those who are underserved. We have come a long way in the past decade but there is still so much more that has to be done. And one of the people who has been at the center of this fintech transformation is Arjuna Costa, Managing Partner at Flourish Ventures.

He is someone I have wanted to get on the show for many years, so I am fortunate that the stars aligned and we were able to sit down for the engaging discussion (I had another Flourish partner, Emmalyn Shaw, on the show back in 2019). We cover a lot of territory here, including a topic I have never before covered on the podcast.

In this podcast you will learn:

The journey Arjuna took from microfinance to venture capital.
The early days of the Omidyar Network and how they thought about financial inclusion.
How Flourish Ventures grew out of the Omidyar Network.
The five principles they believe that underlie a fair financial system.
The advantages of having a single funding source.
How Flourish measures success.
What is different today from investing 10 years ago.
The change in the quality of entrepreneurs and business models.
How much better financially people are doing today in emerging markets.
What else needs to happen to really make a difference.
How Flourish is helping to address the challenges of the mental health of fintech founders.
The state of fintech venture capital in 2024.

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While BNPL has gathered all the attention these past few years, there is another point-of-sale financing category that has been around for decades: lease-to-own, sometimes called rent-to-own. It has historically been full of unscrupulous actors charging excessive fees and it is not an area that has received much attention from fintech companies.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Neal Desai, the CEO and Founder of Kafene. After a thorough analysis of different opportunities he landed on lease-to-own as an area that could use some fintech innovation. He is doing things very differently to the legacy players in the field and is building a sizable business.

In this podcast you will learn:

The detailed research that Neal did before founding Kafene.
Why he decided to focus on lease-to-own financing as a category.
How his time as a trader on Wall Street helps him run Kafene.
How the Kafene offering works.
The types of companies they partner with.
Their average approval amount.
How they underwrite these subprime consumers.
Their unique approach to helping consumers who are experiencing difficulties.
The regulatory structure they use with their lease-to-own agreements.
Their approach to adding merchants into their ecosystem.
How the rise of BNPL has impacted the growth of Kafene.
The breakdown of early buyouts, returns and charge-offs.
How Kafene is building trust in a space not known for good actors.
How they make money.
The big challenges today when it comes to growing their business.
The scale they are at today.
Neal's vision for the future of Kafene.

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The resources that consumer lenders have to work with today are better than ever before. Gone are the days when risk officers could just pull a bureau file and have access to the best data about a potential borrower. The credit infrastructure tools today are more sophisticated and predictive, allowing lenders to serve more borrowers without expanding their credit box.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Misha Esipov, the CEO and Co-Founder of Nova Credit. They are at the forefront of this movement to bring more and better data to lenders and have become one of the leading credit infrastructure companies. I last had Misha on the show back in 2017 when they were just a startup, so a lot has obviously changed since then.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Misha describes Nova Credit today.
Why they decided to move beyond the Credit Passport product.
The performance of the Credit Passport borrowers with American Express and others.
How the Credit Passport works.
The history of Cash Atlas and why they got into cash flow underwriting.
The challenges of building a cash flow underwriting engine.
What Income Navigator is and how it works.
The different types of income they work with.
Why they launched the Nova Credit back in March and why it is significant.
The types of financial institutions they are focused on today.
What is driving the new attention paid to alternative data.
What they learned from their State of Alternative Data in Lending 2024 report.
Some of the best practices in implementing cash flow underwriting.
How lenders are using cash flow underwriting today.
Why they decided to create the Cash Flow Underwriting Summit.
What is on their roadmap for the next 12-18 months.

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There is a shift that is beginning to happen in financial services: using purchase history to provide more personalized offers from merchants. There is no richer data for advertisers than knowing how we actually spend our money. This is one of the reasons behind the huge growth of BNPL but today, there are some credit unions that are on the cutting edge of this trend.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is David Metz, the CEO and Founder or Prizeout. His company started in the gaming space as a way to give people bonuses for cashing out their money. But today, he is focused on financial services, particularly credit unions, where there are a number of use cases that is helping put real money back in people's pockets. This is a completely new application of ad tech for fintech but one that I see growing fast.

In this podcast you will learn:

The unusual founding story of Prizeout.
How a potential bank acquisition led to their movement from gaming to fintech.
How they are blending adtech and fintech.
Why they decided to focus on credit unions.
How JPMorgan has validated their data science thesis.
The challenge of building a credit union or bank loyalty program.
How their digital gift card program works.
How sophisticated their technology is behind the scenes.
Why they created a CUSO and how it has helped Prizeout.
How they have expanded their cash back program with Cash Back Plus.
The advantage that credit unions have in motivating their members to take action.
How they are working with ZayZoon to supercharge earned wage access.
How their expansion from gaming to financial services has helped with their purpose.
David's vision for the future of Prizeout.

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The journey of the small business owner is often a lonely one. For many people, particularly first-time entrepreneurs, starting a small business can be overwhelming. But today, with the tools available, there has never been a better time to start a business. Having said that, most new small businesses don't make it to five years. What we need is a better support system for small business owners.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Carolyn Rodz, the CEO and Co-Founder of Hello Alice. She has thought deeply about the multifaceted challenges facing small business owners and has built a business around it. They now have a community of 1.5 million small businesses they support in a number of different ways.

In this podcast you will learn:

The frustration that led to the founding of Hello Alice.
How they help small businesses improve the health of their business.
What the 1.5 million small businesses they work with have in common.
How their business credit cards, loans and grants programs work.
Details of their enterprise partnerships and how that is helping business owners.
What data goes in to determine their proprietary business health score.
The primary concerns for small business owners today.
How Hello Alice makes money.
How they are riding the small business creation wave.
What more we could be doing as a country to encourage small businesses.
Why they decided to name their company Hello Alice.
Her vision for Hello Alice.

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It is a simple problem that every card issuer has. You have issued a credit or debit card to a new customer, so how do you get them to actually use it? More than that, how do you encourage this customer to make this new card their primary payment card.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Rory O'Reilly, the CEO and Co-Founder of Knot. He wrestled with that problem himself and decided to do something about it. His company has built API connectivity into most of the major merchants in this country, in a similar way Plaid built API connectivity into major banks. With this connectivity, any card issuer now has the capability to bring their card to the top of wallet.

In this podcast you will learn:

The a-ha moment that led to the idea for Knot.
Their target market.
How their technology works.
How the card issuers decide what merchants to feature on Knot.
Why card issuers are so excited about this.
How card issuers implement Knot.
The benefits for merchants to work with Knot.
How they are working with BaaS platforms.
The key to their go to market strategy.
How they charge the issuers for their service.
How Rory thinks about digital wallets and how they can work with Knot.
Why they have not put much effort into pay by bank.
Where they are today in terms of scale.
Their scale goal for the next four years.
The types of new products they are working on.
Rory's vision for Knot.

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I have made no secret of my affection for earned wage access (EWA) as a product. It has been growing rapidly, particularly the last couple of years, as more consumers realize what a great tool it is. There have been several different approaches to implementing EWA from the major players in the space but no one has approached it the same way as Clair.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Nico Simko, the CEO and Founder of Clair. While operating in a space without regulatory clarity, Clair has taken the most conservative approach. It also happens to be the approach with the most regulatory work to implement. It is somewhat controversial in EWA circles: considering these advances to be a loan.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Uber Money gave Nico the idea for the founding of Clair.
The wedge he built that differentiated Clair from the start.
How their product works from an employee experience.
How they are able to get the workforce management apps involved.
The maximum that employees are able to advance each pay period.
Clair’s approach towards the regulatory uncertainty in the EWA space.
Why they decided to create the legal structure to make their product a loan.
Nico’s thoughts on the EWA bill that is working through Congress right now.
Why they chose Pathward as their partner bank.
What it will look like in ten years time for workers’ access to their wages.
Some simple ideas that Nico is thinking about for better products for workers.
What Clair is focused on the next 12-18 months.

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The largest payments network, by volume, is the ACH network. A dollar value of several times US GDP flows through the network each quarter. It is a 50-year-old network that is reliable, ubiquitous, and still growing. While several shiny new payment rails have been developed, the workhorse of the economy remains ACH and will remain so for some time.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Jane Larimer, the President and CEO of Nacha, the organization that governs the ACH network. While I often feature people on this show to talk about cool and emerging technology, I also think it is critical that we understand the infrastructure that is in place today. And the ACH network is how the vast majority of payments are made.

In this podcast you will learn:

The origin story of the ACH network.
The first use case for the network.
How they moved from paper checks to electronic payments.
The mission of Nacha.
Why some banks become direct members of Nacha.
The staggering scale of the payments flowing through the ACH network.
How the timing works for payments on the ACH network.
Why the ACH network is unable to process payments on weekends (but that may be changing)
Jane's perspective on instant payments and why she believes it is complementary to ACH.
The cost difference between Same Day ACH and standard ACH.
The big barrier to the adoption of any alternative payment rails.
How fraud has changed in the past decade.
Details of the education available on their website.
How Jane see the future of payments playing out over the next decade.

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[Editor's note: This interview was recorded on April 16, six days before the news of the Synapse bankruptcy and several weeks before any of the major problems that came to light at fintechs that were working with Synapse.]

To say the banking-as-a-service space is having a moment is an understatement. But many banks have been doing this successfully for a number of years and have thriving partnerships with fintechs. One such bank is Pathward, formerly known as MetaBank.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Anthony Sharett. He is the President at Pathward, a position he has held since 2021. Pathward is one of the largest and most important banks in the fintech space, so I wanted to get him on the show at this critical time for the industry.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Anthony came to be at Pathward.
The history of the company and the rebrand from Metabank to Pathward.
Anthony's take on the state of banking-as-a-service today.
Why the concept of middleware may not be dead yet.
The services they offer and some of the fintechs they are working with.
How they co-create new products with their fintech partners.
How they have built their risk and compliance framework.
How they manage the balance between creativity and compliance.
Their status as far as taking on new fintech clients.
What they are looking for in a new fintech.
Anthony's advice to a startup fintech CEO today.
What he thinks of the state of fintech innovation today.
What the BaaS landscape will look like in 3-5 years.

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When I think about the hottest areas in fintech these days identity verification is right at the top of the list. It impacts anyone doing business online so whether you are a bank or a fintech you need to stay on top of this fast-moving space.

My next guest on the Fintech One on One podcast is Joel Sequeira, the Director of Product Management at IDology. Joel is an identity expert with a long history in the space and he talks about the new attack vectors that are in play today, particularly with Generative AI, and more importantly, what fintechs and banks can do to curtail fraud today.

In this podcast you will learn:

What Joel does exactly at IDology.
The challenges for fintechs and banks in automating customer onboarding.
How to incorporate automation and AI into your strategy.
The role of human-supervised AI and how to maintain compliance.
What he means by onboarding with inclusive customer journeys.
How they define advanced identity verification.
The different data sources that IDology works with.
Why it is important to have deep data in different sectors.
Some of the differences between KYC and KYB (Know Your Business).
Examples of how Generative AI is being used to commit fraud.
The trends that Joel is paying closest attention to.
How fintechs and banks can future-proof their identity verification.

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In the early days of the online lending space, when it came to institutional capital, one name seemed to be in more deals than any other: Victory Park Capital. And while the industry has matured a great deal since then, in no small part thanks to the capital invested by Victory Park, their thesis remains the same: lend money where banks won't.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Brendan Carroll, Co-Founder and Senior Partner of Victory Park. I am so pleased to finally get Brendan on the show after first inviting him many years ago. They have a great story to tell and they continue to fuel the growth of private credit, providing capital to a wide variety of different lenders.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Victory Park Capital.
Their fortunate timing of the closing of their first institutional fund.
What they saw as the opportunity in the early days of the online lending space.
Why they pulled out of the peer-to-peer lending platforms fairly quickly.
How they are able to get comfortable investing with new lending platforms.
What types of lenders they are working with today and the regions they operate.
Why businesses are staying with Victory Park a bit longer today.
Why their check sizes are higher today than five years ago.
The niche of consumer finance they are most bullish on today.
How the equity funding pullback has impacted their business.
How lenders can set themselves for success and get a deal with Victory Park done.
Brendan's views on the future of asset-back private credit.

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The payments processing space has seen a huge amount of innovation in the past decade, maybe more than any other area of fintech. This innovation has presented opportunities for non-fintech companies to earn a new revenue stream via payments processing, which in turn has created a new sub-niche for fintech companies.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Caleb Avery, the CEO and Founder of Tilled. They provide PayFac-as-a-Service to software companies looking to process payments for their customers. Basically, it is a simpler and quicker way for these software companies (called ISVs) to get set up as master merchants and generate payments revenue. Unsure how this all works? We explain in great detail in this interview.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Caleb to the payments processing space very early on.
The founding story of Tilled.
The difference between a card-issuing bank and a merchant-acquiring bank.
The definition of a payments processor.
What an ISO (Independent Sales Organization) does.
What an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) is.
The definition of a payments facilitator (PayFac).
Who the major PayFacs are today.
What PayFac-as-a-Service is and why Tilled went all in on this idea.
The scale of ISV that is the sweet spot for Tilled.
Why ISOs work with Tilled rather than going direct to ISVs.
The three key components of Tilled's software.
How they are able to compete head to head with Stripe Connect.
The different types of support they can provide for the ISVs.
How their pricing model works.
How the typical credit card fees are broken up between all parties.
Caleb's views on the recent ruling between Visa and Mastercard and the Department of Justice.
Where embedded payments is going and his vision for Tilled.

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Latin America continues to be, in my opinion, the most dynamic and interesting region in the world when it comes to fintech innovation. And there are now significant billion dollar deals getting done as some of the biggest financial institutions on the planet are looking to make their mark in the region.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Daniela Binatti, she is the Co-Founder and CTO of Pismo. Pismo has created modern financial infrastructure to help banks move away from their legacy technology. Visa saw the potential of Pismo and announced last year that it was acquiring the company for $1 billion in cash. That deal was consummated in January of this year.

In this podcast you will learn:

The family affair that was the founding story of Pismo.
The opportunity they saw in the Brazilian market.
How they were able to start getting traction.
Pismo's core offerings today.
How they were able to sign the largest bank in Brazil very early on.
What these large banks are using Pismo for.
Some of the other big names that are using Pismo today.
How Daniela views what is happening in the US and other developed markets.
The impact that Pix has had on their business.
Her personal take on what Pix has meant for Brazil.
How they decided to take on international markets.
How the acquisition conversation with Visa began.
What they can do with Visa now that they couldn't do alone.
What this acquisition means for Latin American fintech.
What new innovations are they thinking about for the future.

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Have you ever stopped to consider the data behind a debit or credit card transaction? I have not given it much thought, but there is a real treasure trove of information that, for the most part, is still not being used effectively.

My next guest on the Fintech One on One podcast is Mitch Jacobs, the CEO and founder of Plink. You may recognize Mitch's name as he was the founder, CEO and Chairman of OnDeck for its first seven years. Back to Plink. It may well be the most important fintech company that you have never heard of. The work they are doing around transaction personalization is truly groundbreaking.

In this podcast you will learn:

Mitch's first entrepreneurial endeavor while in college.
The other companies he has started.
The idea that led to the founding of Plink.
Why card transaction data is not used effectively today.
How Plink has solved this problem.
Why they focused on community banks and credit unions.
How they enrich the raw card spending data.
An example of how a Florida credit union is using Plink's data.
How they are able to determine the relationships between cardholders and local businesses.
Why the card data problem has its roots in copper wires in the 1980s.
Why large card issuing banks have not solved this problem yet.
The scale that Plink is already at today as far as number of merchants.
The definition of a Plink.
The opportunity for financial institutions to shape how cardholders are using their cards.
What can happen you open up transaction personalization.
The endgame for Plink.

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One of the many challenges for low and middle income (LMI) consumers is building wealth. If you are living paycheck to paycheck with no savings you are more focused on financial survival and likely don't feel you have the capacity to build wealth. This is where Stash comes in.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Liza Landsman, the CEO of Stash, a position she has held for around a year now. They are laser-focused on the LMI consumer and have built a suite of tools to help these people save and build wealth. Their Stock-Back Card is truly innovative and is often the first time their customers have ever owned public equities.

In this podcast you will learn:

What drew her to the CEO role at Stash.
How Liza describes Stash and its mission.
Who the typical Stash customer is and how they are using the app.
Some of the changes she has made at Stash since becoming CEO.
How their Stock-Back technology works and why it has been groundbreaking.
The Stash 100 and their approach to financial education.
What their customer base is focused on when it comes to learning.
Why they created Stash Core, their back-end infrastructure platform.
The thinking behind launching a B2B platform.
What they learned in their Hardworking Americans Survey.
The scale they are at today.
How sticky their customers are and what they are doing to reduce churn.
Liza's vision for the future of Stash.

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The anti-fraud space has really heated up this past 12 months as fraud attempts have been on the rise and bad actors have become more sophisticated. Often, it can feel like an increasingly difficult battle to win, but there is reason for optimism.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Tommy Nicholas, the CEO and Co-Founder of Alloy. Tommy lays out in exceptional detail and with great passion why there is reason for optimism today. He also provides a blueprint for how banks and fintechs should be approaching their anti-fraud efforts. This is the third and final interview in the series I conducted at Fintech Meetup.

In this podcast you will learn:

The inspiration and motivation for the founding of Alloy.
A description of their product offerings.
Why it was so difficult to build their products.
How fraud attacks have changed over the last 12-18 months.
How new fintechs develop their fraud protocols.
How to avoid the death spiral to zero good customers.
The role social media has had in increasing first-party fraud.
What is leading to an increase in fraud attempts recently.
The types of fraud he is seeing today and how it is preventable.
Details of the newly announced Alloy for Embedded Finance.
How it will transform bank-fintech partnerships.
The luck they have had in the timing of this launch.

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I don't think any fintech company has done more for small business than Square. They started with payment acceptance and have since expanded into many different areas of fintech. In fact, their lending business is now the largest in all of fintech. But it was the addition of Square Banking that has allowed this fintech pioneer to bring it all together.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Christina Riechers, the General Manager of Square Banking. She has been at Square nine years and was one of the architects of Square's push into banking. This is the second podcast in the series that I recorded live at Fintech Meetup in early March.

In this podcast you will learn:

What first attracted Christina to Square.
Block's mission and how that resonated with her.
The origins of Square Banking and Christina's role in it.
How they built out their banking capabilities.
The different starting points for small businesses in joining their ecosystem.
Why established small business switch to Square Banking.
The scale they are at today for Square Lending.
How they are underwriting these loans.
How they are able to see a holistic view of the small business's finances.
How their customers are using the proceeds from their Square loans.
The astounding percentage of women-owned business they are serving.
What is top of mind for Square sellers today.
How their payroll service works.
What integration opportunities there are between Cash App, Afterpay and Square Banking.
What they doing around Generative AI.
The fintech trends that Christina is paying closest attention to right now.

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The area of fintech that has been in the news most so far this year is, without doubt, banking as a service (BaaS). We have seen consent orders, layoffs, banks ending fintech programs, ongoing disputes between BaaS companies and fintechs and there have been pivots from some of the BaaS providers.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Chris Dean, the CEO and Co-Founder of Treasury Prime. They were one of the original BaaS providers and have recently announced a pivot to working directly with banks. This resulted in the layoff of around half of the company. We do a deep dive into this pivot during our conversation, which took place live at the recent Fintech Meetup in Las Vegas.

In this podcast you will learn:

How his experience at Silicon Valley Bank led to the founding of Treasury Prime.
Their original three lines of business.
The driving force behind their pivot to dealing with banks directly.
The reaction they have received from their fintech clients.
How their direct service works for banks.
Why banks will continue to want to partner with fintechs.
Details of the process they go through when onboarding a new bank.
The different ways that are working with banks today.
Why Chris thinks the original banking as a service model is dead.
Why banks have been universally positive on their recent pivot.
How involved they are with the fintech sales process at the bank.
The impact on the fintech startup scene of banks only wanting to work with established fintechs.
Their approach to compliance automation.
Why he never sees the alternative core banking providers.
How Chris sees the bank-fintech partnerships evolving in the long term.
How he defines success going forward.

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Until fintech came along, there was a serious catch-22 when it came to establishing credit. There was no easy way to establish your own credit score without first obtaining credit. This became a real problem with Gen-Z and even younger millennials who have avoided credit cards. But for most people, successfully establishing a good credit score opens doors that are otherwise unavailable. Fintech has come up with some creative solutions to help both establish a credit score or reestablish one that has dropped significantly.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Julie Szudarek, the CEO of Self. She has been in this role for almost six months, taking over from founder James Garvey (listen to the episode with James here). Self was the inventor of the credit builder account and the space has grown a lot in the last few years as consumers are more aware than ever of the importance of a good credit score.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Julie to the CEO role at Self.
How she describes Self today.
The different types of people who are coming to Self.
How their credit builder account works.
What people do once they have been through their 12-month program.
What their customers like most about Self.
How much on average the typical Self customer increases their credit score.
Details of their new rent and bills reporting product.
How they approach financial literacy with their customers.
How she responds to the criticism of credit builder products.
Why they decided to partner with SpringFour.
What they do to help their customers when they get into financial difficulty.
Why they decided to sponsor the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA.
Where is Self going in the short to medium term.

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The secondary loan market has played an important role in the history of fintech lending. It was important for those early loan buyers to know that there was a robust market in place if they needed to sell a loan portfolio. And sometimes platforms would hold the loans on their own balance sheet for a few months before offloading in a secondary loan sale. It was an essential ingredient in the growth of the space.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Dan Arlotta, Senior Vice President at Garnet Capital Advisors. He has been around the fintech lending space almost from the beginning and has been putting together loan portfolio sales across the industry. There are few people who know the ins and outs of the loan buying space better than Dan.

In this podcast you will learn:

How loan buying in the fintech space has evolved over the past decade.
How fintech loans compare to banks and credit unions today.
What Dan he being seen in activity in non-performing loans.
How tightened credit boxes will impact secondary transactions.
How high interest rates have impacted buyer activity.
The types of buyers that Garnet works with on secondary sales.
What lending platforms they are working with on the fintech side.
How it was different working with Figure.
The best practices for lenders looking to do secondary loan transactions.

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AI is making its way into many areas of banking and fintech but one area where it already has a strong foothold is detecting financial crime. And there are some companies doing new and innovative things with this AI technology here.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Adam Famularo, the CEO of WorkFusion. His company has created these AI digital workers that are integrated into the workforce of a bank or fintech. These are real digital assistants that have been brought to life by WorkFusion.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Adam to the CEO role at WorkFusion.
How he describes the company today.
How their AI Digital Workers operate and the different job roles they have.
An explanation of the use cases for these digital workers.
How they have trained the digital workers.
How banks are augmenting these digital workers with their workforce.
What kind of feedback they have received by humanizing their AI models.
What is involved in the onboarding process.
Where the AI digital workers fit within their core software.
The typical organizations using WorkFusion today.
A couple of case studies from banks using their software.
How much they are reliant on LLMs and Gen AI.
How they reduce the risk of errors or hallucinations.
What this will all look like in five years.
How this will impact the human workers interacting with the AI workers.

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When FedNow launched last July there was a lot of excitement in the financial community about the first new payments rail from the Fed in fifty years. There was also some trepidation. What would the rollout look like? Would banks take a wait-and-see approach? And how would the presence of RTP affect adoption?

Now, almost eight months later we have answers to many of these questions. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Mark Gould, the Chief Payments Executive at the Federal Reserve Financial Services. He is the head of FedNow and has steered the Fed through its successful launch and now into its growth stage.

In this podcast you will learn:

The many different roles Mark has held at the Fed.
What the Fed's role is exactly in the payments system.
The number of banks that are now on board with FedNow.
How the FedNow system actually works.
What Mark's pitch is when talking to prospective banks.
The difference between signing up for send and receive.
How fintech companies should think about FedNow.
The primary use cases that are flowing through FedNow right now.
How Mark thinks about RTP from The Clearing House.
The idea of interoperability between RTP and FedNow.
How Mark expects the mix of payment types to evolve over the next decade.
The tools that the Fed has in place to prevent fraud.
The transaction limits that are in place today.
The short term product roadmap for FedNow.
When Mark thinks there will be ubiquitous availability of instant payments.
What it will take for consumers to have an expectation that payments will be instant.

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When it comes to financial health there is still much work to be done. While fintech has certainly made an impact here the average consumer is no more financially healthy than they were a decade ago. This is a problem that fascinates me and I love it when I talk to companies that are making a real difference in this area.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Ana Mahony, the CEO and founder of Addition Wealth. Their financial health platform is targeted at employers to offer as a benefit to their employees but what makes them unique is the human interaction. While they have a lot of digital tools for employees they also offer free one-on-one sessions with CPA and Certified Financial Planners.

In this podcast you will learn:

How the idea for Addition Wealth first germinated.
How the program at First Round Capital really helped launch the company.
The breadth of their product offerings to enhance financial health.
Why the human interaction is such a differentiator for Addition.
How they can scale with a human plus digital approach.
How they vet these financial advisors and ensure they are providing quality advice.
How Ana's experience at Uber has helped develop their platform.
What is involved in implementing Addition Wealth with a new employer.
Details of their go-to-market strategy.
The scale they are at today.
What people care about most when it comes to their financial health.
The average percentage of employees that engage with their offering.
Her vision for the future of Addition Wealth.

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Consider the humble email address. Most of us don't give this part of our identity a second thought but there is a wealth of information that can be gleaned from this one piece of data. And when it comes to fraud the email address is the most consistent predictor, more than any other data point.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Diarmuid Thoma, the head of fraud and data strategy at AtData. He has spent most of his 23-year career focused on fraud prevention and today he leads a team that has built the most extensive email database in the industry.

In this podcast you will learn:

The history of TowerData and the merger that resulted in the creation of AtData.
The two areas of the company that Diarmuid leads.
Why banks and fintech should care about email data.
Why email is the most consistent fraud predictor.
What other data points they take into consideration in their fraud models.
The staggering percentage of every email in existence that are in their database.
The number of new high risk domains that are being created every day.
What is returned to the client when they provide an email address to AtData's API.
How banks and fintechs are using this data today.
Why they are included very early in the funnel for lenders.
How the AtData quality score works and what it can tell their clients.
How they have incorporated AI/ML into their fraud models.
Details of their recent white paper on balance customer experience and fraud prevention.
The trends that banks and fintechs should be paying attention to when it comes to email data.

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Small business lending is still not a solved problem in this country, or anywhere around the world for that matter, despite a decade or more attacking the problem. But today, we are seeing some new business models and new go-to-market approaches that have the potential to make a huge difference.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Luke Voiles, the CEO of Pipe. Luke has been around fintech for many years and he became CEO of Pipe about a year ago now. He has a different perspective on small business lending and how to make it work best for the lender which he goes into in some depth in this episode.

In this podcast you will learn:

Some of the big names in fintech where Luke has had leadership roles.
Why he decided to take on the CEO role at Pipe.
What he did in his first weeks as CEO to fully understand the state of the company.
How he describes Pipe today.
How their working capital product works and where they sit in the payments flow.
The size of the small business they will lend to.
Why it is so important to get the payments data for their underwriting.
How they inject themselves into the payments flow so they are paid first.
Why vertical SaaS companies are the new community banks (see Luke's article here).
Luke's thoughts on Section 1071 of Dodd-Frank and why it is a good thing for fintech.
How Pipe is accessing the capital they need to lend.
Why we haven't yet solved the small business access to capital problem.
Why they are not concerned with the expense side of a business.
The vision for Pipe for the next five years.

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Embedded finance is a term that has only been around for a relatively short time. But some fintech companies have created services that could be embedded in non-financial firms for many years. It really began in the payments space and became a part of lending and we often called it lending-as-a-service before embedded lending was a thing. One of the pioneers of embedded lending is LiftForward.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Jeffrey Rogers, the CEO and founder of LiftForward, an embedded lending fintech that has been around since 2013. They have a fascinating story and might hold the record for the youngest fintech to partner with one of the tech behemoths.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of LiftForward.
How a small fintech company was able to land Microsoft.
How their multi-faceted relationship with Microsoft works.
How lenders are involved in this process.
Details of how all the different parties come together.
The demographic changes that are driving their business.
The different types of payments plans and subscriptions they do.
What the Mastercard Engage partner network is and how LiftForward is involved.
What brands want to see when it comes to embedded lending.
How LiftForward makes money.
The changes they needed to make to become an international company very early on.
The scale that LiftForward is at today.
Where they are focusing this year when it comes to new markets.
Jeffrey's vision for the future of LiftForward.

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Even though banks have been going through digital transformation now for a decade or more there is obviously so much work still to be done. Big banks need help with this process, particularly when it comes to personalization as banks have historically provided products that were more in the one-size-fits-all category.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Amalia Avramov, she is the president of financial services at Amdocs. Now, Amdocs is a large global company that got its start in telecommunications but has expanded into financial services. I have been hearing their name around more and more so I wanted to get Amalia on the show to learn more.

In this podcast you will learn:

Amalia's long history at Amdocs.
The core industries where Amdocs operates.
Why they decided to expand into financial services.
The services they provide for the banking industry.
What banks are getting wrong in digital transformation.
What successful personalization in banking looks like.
Some examples of banks that Amdocs are working with today.
What they working on with large banks around AI.
The work Amalia is doing to promote diversity and inclusion.
How the war in Israel is impacting Amdocs and their workers there.
What is Amdocs' vision for the future of the bank experience.

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When you think of cutting edge fintech you probably don't think about the Caribbean. But some interesting developments are happening there that we should all be paying attention to.

On this episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast, I talk with Curt Persaud, the Co-founder and CTO of Fintech Islands and Andrew B. Morris, the Chief Content Officer at Fintech Islands. This is the biggest fintech event in the Caribbean and it is happening next week (January 24-26) in Barbados. I will be there along with many other U.S. and Caribbean fintech leaders.

The Caribbean is an under-appreciated region, it is in our backyard with more people (45 million) than Canada. There is a strong entrepreneurial spirit and a thriving fintech industry there already, that is poised to grow significantly in the near future.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Fintech Islands.
Why Americans should care about Caribbean fintech.
The important fintech trends in the region.
Details about the Fintech Islands event.
The different topics being covered on their agenda.
How their startup competition will work.
How people can engage with Caribbean fintech beyond the event.

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The small business lending space has seen a lot of innovation over the last decade with fintech leading the way. But there is still much more work to do as many small business still lack the access to capital that they deserve.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Steve Allocca, the head of Funding Circle USA. He has worked at some of the biggest names in fintech (PayPal, LendingClub, Bluevine and now Funding Circle) working on this challenge of helping small business access capital. Funding Circle is a pioneer in this space and recently they received the news that they have been approved for a new SBA 7(a) lending license.

In this podcast you will learn:

Steve's deep and varied history in the fintech space.
Some of the lessons he has brought to Finding Circle.
What attracted him to the role at Funding Circle.
The typical terms of their core term loan product.
Their approach to underwriting small businesses.
The impact on demand of the increase in interest rates.
What it means for Funding Circle to be approved to be an SBA 7(a) lender.
The timetable for when they will be able to start making SBA loans.
How they are building their lending as a service offering.
How they interact with the Funding Circle head office in the UK.
Some of the new hires they have made to the leadership team.
How they can get a clearer picture of small business data.
What is top of mind for Funding Circle for 2024.

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When we think about embedded finance one of the biggest opportunities is bringing financial services to vertical software companies. These software companies already have the relationship within their vertical and it often makes logical sense for them to add financial services as an add-on offering, as long as it is simple and easy to implement.

My first guest of 2024 on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Tom Bell, the CEO and co-founder of Maast (as in Money-as-a-service plus). They are a wholly owned subsidiary of Synovus Bank and have been in business for two years. They are bringing embedded payments acceptance and embedded banking to vertical software companies but doing it with the backing of a 130-year-old regional bank.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why Tom decided to come to Synovus and start Maast.
The founding story of Maast.
Why they decided to create a new brand rather than do it under Synovus.
The suite of services that Maast provides today
Who they are working with today and their target market.
Why software providers are a perfect match for embedded finance (see Tom's article here).
The most interesting innovations in payments today.
What is involved in integrating Maast into a software provider.
How Maast stands out from other embedded finance providers.
How they approach compliance requirements.
Tom's view on the main trends in embedded finance that will be in play in 2024.
How he thinks embedded finance is going to play out long term.

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Around the world, several digital banks have achieved impressive scale. But most of these fintech companies have been focused just on their home market. It is difficult to scale a global digital bank because regulations and compliance requirements differ so much between countries. But we have seen some traditional banks achieve scale in multiple countries so there is no reason why we shouldn't see the same in fintech.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Sid Jajodia, the Chief Banking Officer for Revolut and the CEO of Revolut US. There is no other fintech company that is as focused on becoming a global fintech leader than Revolut. They already have 35 million customers in more than 30 countries around the world and they continue to open operations in new countries multiple times a year.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Sid to the role at Revolut.
How he describes Revolut today.
What he means when he says it is a financial super app.
The number of customers Revolut has globally.
How Revolut is differentiated from other digital banking offerings in the US.
The typical Revolut customer in the U.S. and globally.
How they are getting the word out.
Their ambition to be a bank in different markets.
What Revolut 10 is and why it is important.
Their approach to user experience.
What CEO and founder Nik Storonsky is like to work with.
What it is going to take for Revolut to reach scale in the US.
Revolut's vision for the future of financial services.

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The Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) have been part of the financial landscape in this country since 1932. They were created (before the New Deal) in response to the housing crisis during the Great Depression. But their role has changed from a focus on housing to becoming a liquidity provider for large banks. And this has had a major impact on our financial system, including the fintech space.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Cornelius (Con) Hurley. He is a professor at the Boston University School of Law and was a founding member of the Online Lending Policy Institute that was folded into the American Fintech Council in 2021. Most importantly for this conversation, Professor Hurley was an independent director of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston for 14 years. He has become an outspoken critic of FHLBs in recent years and is a co-founder of the Coalition for FHLB Reform.

Professor Hurley provides a detailed history and the current state of play for FHLBs but also focuses on the role fintech companies can play here.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why everyone should be interested in what Federal Home Loan Banks are doing.
The origins of the Federal Home Loan Banks and why they were started.
How the FHLBs are regulated.
How the FHLBs can claim they have never made a loan that has defaulted.
The governance culture of the FHLBs.
Why FHLB loans to banks should be made public.
How the mission of the FHLBs moved away from housing and community development.
Why banks go to an FHLB for liquidity instead of the Federal Reserve.
How the FHLBs are funded and what subsidies they receive.
The recommendations for reform from the recent FHLB report.
Why FHLB members will need to beef up their mortgage exposure.
The potential role for fintech companies here.
What comes next for FHLBs.

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While most of us would agree that we have seen significant innovation in fintech and banking over the last decade, we still don't really have a new framework for how we look at banking.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One is someone who has thought deeply about innovation in banking and he has lived it as a co-founder of some of the biggest names in fintech. Jason Bates is currently the co-founder and Deputy CEO at consulting firm 11:FS but he is also a co-founder of both Starling Bank and Monzo, two of the big three in UK fintech.

His framework of four layers for retail financial services provides an interesting perspective and a possible foundation for future innovation.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Jason first got involved in fintech.
What it was like in the early days of Starling Bank and Monzo.
The founding story of 11:FS.
How he described 11:FS today.
The difference between digital banking and digitized banking.
The four different layers of retail banking.
What we still need to work on in digital banking.
An explanation of the "Jobs to be Done" innovation philosophy.
The best ways to apply AI to banking.
The state of fintech in the UK today.
Comparing the US and UK fintech landscapes today.
What Jason is looking at as far as 2024 fintech trends.
What he is most excited about for the next three to five years.

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There are many options for raising growth capital for established startups. With all the attention paid to venture capital, we sometimes forget that the vast majority of companies are not funded that way. Revenue-based financing has been around for more than a decade and it is a good alternative for certain types of companies.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Melissa Widner, the CEO of Lighter Capital, a pioneer in the revenue-based financing space. We learn all about how this space works, what types of companies it works best for and how Lighter Capital has become one of the market leaders.

In this podcast you will learn:

How she first got involved with Lighter Capital.
What attracted her to the CEO role.
What it is like running a fintech company from Australia.
The different countries where they are set up to lend.
How revenue-based financing works (that was pioneered by Lighter).
The types of companies that are in their sweet spot.
The size and terms of their financing.
How their underwriting works.
Why most revenue-based financing lenders are not really doing revenue-based finance.
The impact of the venture capital downturn on Lighter Capital.
How the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank impacted demand for capital.
Their historical loss rate.
How loan demand has been overall in 2023.
What it was like renewing their credit facility in the summer.
Melissa's vision for the future of Lighter Capital.

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The use of machine learning models in underwriting for consumer loans has been around for more than a decade. While fintech clearly took the lead here it has really only been the last couple of years where traditional lenders are engaging with this technology. While these AI/ML models are different from the Generative AI craze that has embraced the business world in the past year, this phenomenon has certainly helped with awareness.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Laura Kornhauser, the CEO and Co-Founder of Stratyfy. Her company is on a mission to enable greater financial inclusion for people while also helping financial institutions better manage and mitigate risk. They do that by implementing their advanced AI models and, of course, through the dedication of their people.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Stratyfy.
The company's mission and how it has evolved?
The different types of financial institutions they work with today.
How they differentiate themselves from others in the space.
How their UnBias product works.
What being transparent means for adverse action notices.
What is top of mind for most banks and fintechs today.
The types of data their clients are using that are most important.
What is involved in implementing Stratyfy into a lender's system.
How their AI models have improved over time.
How the popularity of AI through ChatGPT has impacted Stratyfy.
What it was like raising an equity round in 2023.
The biggest challenge Stratyfy is facing today.
How AI will continue to improve when it comes to credit and risk decisions.

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There has been endless talk in fintech over the past year and a half about the pullback from equity investors and how difficult it is to raise money in this environment. Less is being talked about the debt investment landscape.

So, I wanted to bring Jacob Haar, Founder and Managing Partner of Community Investment Management (CIM), back on the show (he was previously a guest in 2015 and 2020). He has been a debt investor in fintech for almost a decade now and he has deep experience with fintech lending not just in the United States but increasingly around the world.

In this podcast you will learn:

How he describes CIM today.
How the pandemic played out for them.
What areas of fintech he finds most interesting today.
What countries he is focused on.
Examples of some recent deals CIM has closed.
The size of the typical debt facilities they provide.
The factors CIM considers today when making an investment decision.
Why they decided to move outside small business lending.
How their investors view impact versus a financial return.
How the deal between Camino Financial (podcast here) and Fundation (podcast here) came together.
Jacob's thoughts on transparency in small business lending and the regulatory movement there.
Some of the key milestones that fintech lending has reached in the past 10 years.
Why he is optimistic about the next decade.

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Trillions of dollars is spent on credit and debit cards every year in the US. These payments are all processed on one of the most expensive card processing networks in the world, costing merchants tens of billions of dollars. Account-to-account payments, otherwise known as pay-by-bank, is yet to take off in this country but it does have the potential to put some of these card processing dollars back in merchants' pockets.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Eric Shoykhet, the founder and CEO of Link Money. His company has built the infrastructure needed to bring scale to pay-by-bank in this country. After we recorded this conversation there were several big announcements in this space, so it looks like 2024 could be a big year for pay-by-bank.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Link Money.
Why the US has the highest card processing costs in the world.
How Link Money's pay-by-bank offering works.
The data access partners they are using.
Why this is not an established payment option in the US yet?
The different components that Link Money needed to develop.
The coverage they have of the total number of deposit accounts.
How you get consumers to adopt this new payment method.
Where this makes the most sense for potential merchants.
How Eric looks at the competitive payments rails in the U.S.
Why pay-by-bank will be part of digital wallets.
The challenges Link Money needs to overcome to be successful.
His vision for the future of retail payments.

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There is no technology that has generated more buzz this year than generative AI. We have all played around with ChatGPT and marveled at its capabilities. But what is really happening with this technology in financial services? Or more importantly, what is going to happen?

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Anu Sachdeva, Global Business and Service Line Leader at Genpact. She has deep knowledge of banking and fintech and has become an expert on generative AI and how it will impact financial services. This is our first deep dive into generative AI on the podcast, but it will certainly not be the last.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Genpact works with banks and fintechs.
How Anu first became interested in generative AI.
What Genpact is doing with generative AI internally.
How financial services can help unlock the potential of generative AI.
The use case of using generative AI in anti-money laundering.
The fundamental principles that Genpact employs when engaging with banking partners.
How we should be thinking about generative AI.
The impact of generative AI on the employee makeup of banks and fintechs.
Will fintechs or banks take the lead with incorporating generative AI.
How we should think about compliance risk when it comes to generative AI.
The opportunity for better personalization.
A look to the future of where generative AI is going.

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There are tens of millions of Americans who have limited access to credit. Those with thin files or FICO scores below 650 often have difficulty accessing credit. Many have to resort to payday loans or pawn shops when they incur an unexpected expense. But there are fintech companies whose sole focus is serving this population with affordable credit access.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Todd Schwartz, the CEO and Founder of OppFi. OppFi has been around since 2011 (they have a fascinating founding story) and are now a public company that has helped more than 1.3 million people with affordable loans. I did have the previous CEO, Jared Kaplan, on the show in 2020, but this is the first time I have had the founder on.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of OppFi.
Why he started the company with a physical store front.
How the pandemic really turbo charged the business.
Why they decided to go public.
How being public has changed their business.
For underwriting, why understanding the primary bank account is critical.
Details of their Turn Up program.
The impact of the entry of banks into the small dollar loan space.
What the consumer advocate don't understand about small-dollar lending.
What happens when states, such as Illinois, ban higher APR small-dollar lending.
Why they are focused on the states when it comes to engaging with regulators.
How they make sure that OppFi customers end up better off financially.

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Medical debt is the number one reason people go bankrupt in the United States. So, you would think there would be a plethora of fintech companies attacking this problem from many angles. And while there are certainly lenders willing to finance medical procedures there are few companies taking a holistic approach to patient financial health.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Itzik Cohen, the CEO and Co-Founder of PayZen. He saw the problems medical debt has created firsthand when working in the debt settlement space and he decided to do something about it. PayZen is the first company that looks at all the options available for patients as they try to afford their healthcare.

In this podcast you will learn:

The idea that led to the founding of PayZen.
The state of medical debt in the United States today.
What the "operating system for healthcare affordability" means.
Their north star at PayZen.
The different types of products they offer.
How they are finding and analyzing all this medical and financial data.
What kinds of providers they are working with.
How they are able to integrate their technology so quickly.
Itzik's thoughts on removing medical bills from their credit report.
His vision for PayZen.

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The people who lead the national banking regulatory agencies typically come from long careers in banking and law with a traditional view of the banking world. But there has been one exception to this rule.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Brian Brooks, the former acting head of the OCC and a current partner at O'Melveny & Myers. Now, don't get me wrong, Brian has had a long career in banking and law but he has also spent time outside of traditional finance, thinking deeply about financial innovation.

He came to the OCC from Coinbase and he has been an advisor or board member to several other companies in crypto and fintech. So, his perspective on the banking industry, as you will hear in this interview, is very different from your typical banking regulator.

In this podcast you will learn:

How the financial crisis shaped his career.
The three dimensions of finance he is trying to knit together.
How he came to join the OCC from Coinbase.
How Brian was able to gain the trust of the big bank CEOs.
The most important idea that he had while leading the OCC.
How he looks back at his 10 months as OCC head.
How we could have easily avoided the FTX blowup.
Why the regulators were reluctant to make these simple changes.
The core ideological debate that Republicans and Democrats have over crypto.
Why the failures of Silvergate and Signature were more about concentration risk than specifically crypto.
What he says to people who want to ban crypto.
How decentralized finance can get scale and not run afoul of US regulators.
How US-dollar stablecoins could help mitigate the risk of de-dollarization.
What regulatory changes need to happen to take advantage of new financial technology.

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As recently as six or seven years ago modern payments infrastructure in Latin America didn't really exist. Most countries had a monopoly when it came to payments processing and these monopolies sit on old technology that is difficult and expensive to maintain.

A lot has changed today. Digital payments infrastructure has been built and while those old monopoly companies still exist there is now digital payments infrastructure throughout the region.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Aron Schwarzkopf, the CEO and Co-Founder of Kushki. The mission of the company is "connecting Latin America through payments" and they are doing this by building new technology that others can build on to provide a comprehensive digital payments experience.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why Aron decided to head back to Latin America after some time in the US.
The three big problems he encountered there.
How the payments landscape has evolved in Latin America.
What Kushki does exactly.
The two types of clients they serve.
How easy it is to accept international payments online.
The countries they operate in today.
Why the prevalence of cash means a green field opportunity for Kushki.
Why the growth of real-time payments is helping grow the market.
What it meant when the government of Ecuador named Kushki as the first payment aggregator.
Why they acquired BillPocket in Mexico.
The key takeaways from the recent report they published with Statista.
Why Kushki experiences less fraud than others in Latin America.
Aron's vision for the future of digital payments in Latin America.

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In the consumer lending space, fintech lenders have been using AI in their underwriting models for many years. But there are still many consumers who slip through the cracks and get declined for credit when they should have been approved.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Gal Krubiner, the CEO and Co-Founder of Pagaya. They work with a large number of both traditional and fintech lenders and apply their sophisticated modeling to find consumers who have been mispriced. Their two-sided marketplace then works with investors to fund these consumer loans.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Pagaya.
Why they decided to focus on consumer credit.
How they are partnering with both fintech and traditional lenders today.
Who they are working with on the investor side of the marketplace.
The types of data they are using in their underwriting.
How their underwriting models have evolved over time.
How investor demand for their ABS deals is trending.
How the US consumer is holding up when it comes to loan repayments.
Trends in credit availability for consumers.
Why the lack of credit availability is a good thing for Pagaya.
The impact of rising interest rates on consumer credit.
Why all the attention that AI is getting is helping Pagaya.
What happened when they invited ChatGPT to their earnings call.
How being a public company has changed Pagaya.
How he is thinking about the macro environment in 2024.

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When you stop and think about it, it is kind of crazy that we don't have a global network for moving money instantly and cheaply. The internet is more than 30 years old now and it seems to me that this should be a solved problem by now. But it isn't, at least not yet.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is David Marcus, the CEO and Co-Founder of Lightspark. If David's name sounds familiar that is because he was the leader of the now-defunct Libra/Diem project at Facebook a few years ago. He is passionate about creating a real-time global network for money movement which is why he founded Lightspark.

In this podcast you will learn:

His fascinating background in tech.
The thought process that went into the Libra/Diem project at Facebook.
Why he decided to start Lightspark.
An explanation of the Lightning Network that sits on top of Bitcoin.
Why they chose to build their technology for the Lightning Network.
What Lightspark actually does and who they are working with.
Who is using their technology today.
The potential throughput for number of transactions per second.
How he thinks about solving micro-payments.
The regulatory challenges that might come with reaching scale.
Why we should think of what Lightspark is doing as an alternative payments rail.
Why this is a technology play and nothing really to do with crypto.
The potential use cases that can be developed.
How he thinks about programmable money.
Why it is important that payments systems behave just like the internet (open, real-time and interoperable).
The different goegraphies where they have clients today.
How their business model works.
Why the combination of real-time payments and Lightning is so powerful for the last mile.
What a future with real-time global payments could mean for commerce.

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One of the richest areas of fintech innovation right now is in instant payments. The launch over the summer of FedNow has brought heightened awareness to instant payments but there have been other offerings available in this country for some time.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is David Watson, the President and CEO of The Clearing House. They are the creator of the first instant payments network in the USA called Real Time Payments, a network that has been operating for over five years now. We talk about the mechanics behind instant payments and the benefits for both consumers and businesses.

In this podcast you will learn:

What David saw at The Clearing House that was really attractive to him.
A short history of the 170-year-old company.
The total volume of payments flowing through the US payments system.
Who The Clearing House serves.
How the ACH payments system works.
The enhancements The Clearing House provides for wires.
How they work with physical checks today.
The technology behind their Real Time Payments system.
Who is using RTP today.
The different use cases that are flowing through RTP.
What happens when you send a real time payment to a bank that is not in the network.
The difference between RTP and FedNow.
How David feels about competing with FedNow.
His thoughts on the card network's instant payment offerings.
How fraud in instant payment networks can be mitigated.
His vision for the future of instant payments.

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Much has been written about the student loan challenges for domestic students in this country. But what about international students, those people coming to the U.S. to study for a Master's of Bachelor's program? There are few good loan alternatives for international students as they are ineligible for federal student loan programs.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Manu Smadja, the CEO and Co-Founder of MPOWER Financing. They are working to address this problem, providing affordable financing for international students looking to study at American and Canadian universities.

In this podcast you will learn:

The hardship story that was the trigger for starting MPOWER.
The biggest challenges for international students coming to this country.
Why demand from international students is stronger than ever.
Their mix of graduate and undergraduate students.
How they are underwriting these people.
Why the type of major is a critical data point in the underwriting process.
How they approach loan pricing.
The typical terms of an MPOWER student loan.
What kind of documentation is needed to obtain a loan.
What MPOWER does to help students beyond providing the loan.
The percentage of these students that stay in the U.S. after graduation.
Their experience with loan performance.
How they are funding their loans.
The scale they are at today.
Why they decided to become a B-Corporation.
Manu's vision for the future of MPOWER.

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Why is it that, in 2023, we are still getting paid on a fixed schedule? It seems crazy to me that payroll systems that were built for batch processing on mainframe computers still maintain this batch mindset in a world where everything can be instant. We should be able to choose the exact cadence of when and how we want to be paid.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Kevin Coop, the CEO of DailyPay. The team at DailyPay has created the largest Earned Wage Access (EWA) business on the planet where employees of DailyPay customers can get early access to their earned wages whenever they want. This is a huge deal for those people living paycheck to paycheck.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Kevin to the CEO role at DailyPay.
Why we are all still getting paid on these fixed time periods.
How DailyPay actually works.
What their app shows employees.
How often employees access their earned wage before payday.
The different features that they provide employees.
How they integrate with the employer payroll systems.
How these advances are funded.
The benefits for employers of adding DailyPay.
How DailyPay earns money.
How this is improving the financial health of employees.
How DailyPay is engaging with regulators at the state and federal level.
How they are partnering with the large payroll providers.
The different segments that are popular with DailyPay.
How Kevin thinks about the competitive moat that DailyPay has built.
The impressive scale they are at today.
His vision for the future of DailyPay.

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The first wave of fintech focused on helping those people who already had money. The bottom half of the population was mostly ignored, and those companies that did try failed to get traction. But in recent years, there has been a new breed of fintech company emerging squarely focused on helping those people who are living on the financial edge.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Rodney Williams, the President and Co-Founder of SoLo Funds. They call themselves a community finance platform and they are squarely focused on the subprime market. In fact, 82% of their members live in underserved zip codes. They are supplying a loan product that is sorely needed in these places.

In this podcast you will learn:

The essential need that led to the founding of SoLo Funds.
How their loan platform works.
The three verifications new borrowers must go through.
How many loans a typical borrower uses in a 12-month period.
What the typical use cases are for the borrowed funds.
Rodney's favorite stat on their borrowers.
How they maintain the balance between borrowers and lenders on their marketplace.
Their regulatory challenges and where they stand with regulators today.
The three different ways they make money.
The list of investors backing them.
Why they recently decided to expand to Nigeria.
Why their p2p lending model is perfect for the subprime market.

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It seems like every day there is a story coming out of Washington that can have a major impact on fintech. Whether it is the CFPB, OCC, SEC, the Fed or new legislation being proposed, fintech companies can be profoundly impacted by what happens in our nation’s capital. That is why it is important to have an independent trade association making our ideas and opinions known.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Phil Goldfeder, the CEO of the American Fintech Council, a job he has held since March of this year. He is advocating for our industry every day, not just in Washington, but also in statehouses around the country.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Phil to the job at the American Fintech Council.
What the AFC does exactly.
The basic story that Phil tells legislators about fintech.
The core issues that the AFC is working on in Washington.
How they are engaged at the federal level on earned wage access.
Why he wrote a recent op-ed in American Banker.
Why fintech should not reflexively push back on new regulation.
Details of the AFC Policy Summit in Washington DC in November.
What needs to happen for fintech to have a seat at the table.
Why Phil is optimistic that there can be change in Washington that is positive for fintech.

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One of the early players in the fintech lending space is Best Egg, formerly known as Marlette Funding. At one stage they were the fastest-growing lender in the country. While their growth has slowed down they continue to be one of the largest online lenders by originations.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Paul Ricci, the new CEO of Best Egg. He recently took over from the founding CEO, Jeffrey Meiler (see my interview with Jeffrey from 2019). This is Paul's very first interview since becoming CEO in June and we cover a lot of territory. He is no newcomer to the industry having been Best Egg's CFO since the very beginning.

In this podcast you will learn:

His role at Best Egg before he became CEO.
How the transition to CEO has gone.
A profile of their target customer.
The competitive dynamics of the personal loan market today.
How they have adjusted their underwriting given the changing environment.
Why they launched a credit card and how it is going.
How their innovative home equity loan product works.
Why they decided to acquire Till and the new product that became part of Best Egg.
Why they are not looking to get their own banking license.
How they know their products are having an impact on their customers' financial health.
The scale that Best Egg is at today.
How fintech lending is doing as an industry.

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All areas of fintech are changing fast. But it is in payments where the most groundbreaking changes are happening right now. After years of development, we finally saw the launch of FedNow last month (on time!) as this country begins its transition to instant payments in earnest.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Stephany Orum, the CEO and Co-Founder of Orum. I wanted to get her back on the show (she was last on in 2021) to discuss FedNow and what it is going to mean for the payments landscape. Orum works with several banks that are part of FedNow and they provide an infrastructure layer for most payments rails.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Stephany describes Orum today.
How banks and fintechs should think about the various payments rails.
An explanation of payments orchestration.
Why FedNow is a game changer for faster payments.
Some of the advantages of FedNow.
Feedback from some of the participating banks operating in FedNow's first week.
Why it is more important for banks to work on receiving first for FedNow.
How the mindset is changing inside banks towards a real-time operation.
What the Fed has learned from the experience of RTP.
Why interoperability between instant payment rails is inevitable.
The role of the other types of payment rails.
How banks and fintechs can combat fraud in an instant payments world.
What it will mean for the country when most payments are instant.

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When it comes to running an e-commerce store there is no bigger name than Shopify. They have been helping entrepreneurs run all aspects of their e-commerce business for well over a decade. And in recent years they have quietly built up an impressive suite of financial products.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Vikram Anreddy. He is the Head of Product for Financial Services at Shopify. With Shopify Credit launching just this week the company now has all the major components of a typical bank or fintech: bank account, bill pay, installment loans and credit cards. We delve into each of these products and more in this interview.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Vikram to Shopify.
How Shopify Capital works.
The amazing growth they have seen at Shopify Capital.
The unique data points they are able to use in underwriting.
How Shopify Balance is different to a regular bank account.
Why they attract brand new entrepreneurs with Balance.
What they are doing with Shopify Bill Pay.
The differentiators for their new Shopify Credit Card.
How they are using the learnings from Shopify Capital for their credit card
What having a full suite of financial products does for Shopify.
How they think about expanding their financial products into international markets.
Some of the fintech companies and products that inspire Vikram.
The keys to a successful launch of a new product line.
How they are bringing different products into a unified design.
Their plans to add more products to their financial services offerings.
What is exciting about the future of financial products at Shopify.

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It wasn't that long ago that robo-advice was this exciting new industry that was going to bring automated investing to the masses. Today, much of that initial promise has been realized and all the major investment firms have this as part of their offerings. But there is much more work needed to be done here.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Sarah Levy, the CEO of Betterment. Betterment was one of the pioneers in the space and it is interesting to see how they have evolved since launching 13 years ago. As you will find out, it is about far more than consumer robo-advice today.

In this podcast you will learn:

What prompted Sarah to move into fintech from the media business.
What attracted her to Betterment specifically.
The different business lines they have today.
How the narrative has changed since their early days.
Details of their Cash Reserve account that pays 5.25%.
How the banking crisis in March impacted their business.
Their typical customer and target demographic.
Why Sarah championed their business-to-business offerings.
The four different marketing channels they focus on.
What their customers value most when it comes to investment choices.
Why they decided to add crypto to their offerings.
Sarah's views on the lack of women-run fintech companies.
What we can do to create changes at the top.
The diversity programs they have inside Betterment.
Her vision for the future of Betterment.

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Last month we announced a groundbreaking partnership with Fintech Meetup that is going to transform the fintech space.

With that in mind, I thought it would be helpful to dive more deeply into the partnership between Fintech Nexus and Fintech Meetup.

So, on the next episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast we have my good friend and partner, Bo Brustkern, CEO and Co-Founder of Fintech Nexus and Jon Lear, the President and Co-Founder of Fintech Meetup.

In this podcast you will learn:

Background of how Fintech Meetup began.
The genesis of the discussions between Fintech Nexus and Fintech Meetup.
What the partnership entails exactly.
What this means for existing Fintech Nexus sponsors and attendees.
The different components of the Fintech Meetup 2024 event.
How their meetings program works.
Why their Table Talks program is so important.
How they are going to run their co-located events.
Details about their location: The Venetian in Las Vegas.
How Fintech Meetup fits in with the broader Hyve Group.
How Fintech Nexus is developing our digital media products.
What is most exciting about this new partnership.

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That is pretty much how you could describe the environment for fintechs at the height of the pandemic. Some industries were booming while the world was reeling from the global pandemic. But in the fintech lending business, if you weren't involved in the PPP you were likely struggling. You would not think this was good timing to launch a working capital offering for small business.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Alek Koenig, the CEO and Co-Founder of Settle. They launched in the summer of 2020 with an accounts payable product paired with working capital. The business took off because they found an underserved niche in desperate need of capital: e-commerce businesses.

The founding story of Settle.
How they launched the company.
Why launching at the height of the pandemic was fortuitous timing.
How their core accounts payable software works.
How the working capital offering integrates into this software.
The maximum term they are financing today.
How their underwriting process works.
The range of interest rates they charge.
How they are funding their working capital loans.
What makes their AP software unique.
Some of the brands they are working with today.
How the movement towards embedded finance has made their life easier.
How Alek's time at Affirm informs how he runs Settle today.
How he built his Ukrainian team.
The scale that Settle is at today.
How they have navigated the downturn in fintech the last 12 to 18 months.
His vision for Settle.

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Where fintech has had a dramatic impact already is in international payments. Sure, there is still work to do but there are companies out there today facilitating payments, often instantly, to people all around the world.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Charles Rosenblatt, the President of PayQuicker. What PayQuicker does is help companies pay their gig workers in 200+ countries and those workers can receive these funds instantly. They have been doing this for more than a decade.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Charles to the role at PayQuicker.
What PayQuicker does exactly.
The different geographies they operate in.
The most common use cases for their payouts technology.
What is exciting about their Payouts OS product.
Why PayQuicker does not take possession of the money.
The big value proposition for PayQuicker's clients.
What they are doing in their partnership with Mastercard.
How the end consumer receives their money.
His view on crypto and stablecoins as a payments tool.
How they partner with global banks.
How they facilitate instant payouts.
Why fraud is not a major problem for PayQuicker.
What's next for PayQuicker.

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While the fintech lending space is maturing with a number of lenders achieving significant scale today, the longevity of most platforms goes back barely more than a decade. But there is one lender today that was already seven or eight years old during the financial crisis of 2008-09. I am not saying the turbulent times we are experiencing today are equivalent to what become known as the Global Financial Crisis, but there are important lessons that can be learned from companies that survived that time.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Al Crawford, the CEO and Co-Founder of BHG Financial. Al founded the company back in 2001 and has been the CEO and Chairman since that time. He has some very interesting lessons to share from running a fintech lender for more than 20 years. I interviewed Al at the recent Fintech Nexus USA event in New York City, where this session led off the Credit and Underwriting track.

In this podcast you will learn:

Background on the founding of BHG back in 2001.
The different lending verticals they operate in today.
What makes their loan funding marketplace unique.
The recent volume they have seen on their marketplace.
What they are learning from their borrowers today.
The lessons they learned from the 2008-09 financial crisis.
How their bank partners have adjusted their credit boxes.
How BHG is taking advantage of the pullback in originations from other lenders.
Details of the ABS deal they closed just after the SVB blowup.
How BHG runs their credit team.
Where their borrower demand is coming from.
How their credit and fraud team helps prevent loan stacking.
The keys for lenders to survive in turbulent times like we are experiencing now.

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Last month at Fintech Nexus USA in New York City we announced that Fintech Nexus has acquired Fintech Blueprint, one of the leading fintech newsletters. It is led by Lex Sokolin, who is one of the great thinkers in our space, so I used the opportunity of being together in person to record an interview.

The latest episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast is a discussion with Lex Sokolin (I last had him on the show two years ago) recorded in the podcast theater at the event. While we touch on the acquisition of Fintech Blueprint, most of the episode is spent discussing many of the hottest fintech topics of the day.

In this podcast you will learn:

A description of his Fintech Blueprint newsletter
Why he agreed to the partnership with Fintech Nexus.
Some of the broader platform shifts he is tracking today in fintech.
How Lex views decentralized finance in the context of today's risk-off environment.
The two strategies that are bringing traditional finance and crypto together.
His views on the government crackdown on crypto.
The different regulatory climates in the US, UK, and Europe.
How decentralized finance might impact the payments landscape.
His vision for self-driving money and the role AI will play.
The technologies Lex is looking at most closely over the next two to three years.

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There is no more hyped technology right now than Generative AI. But what does it really mean for financial services? What is the potential? And what about practical applications?

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Marco Argenti, the Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs. This interview was recorded at Fintech Nexus USA in New York City on May 10, Marco was actually our opening keynote speaker. And this ended up being the most talked-about session at the entire event. The keynote was titled, A Revolution of Knowledge: Generative AI, Data & Digital Transformation in Financial Services.In this podcast you will learn:

What Marco learned from his time at AWS.
What is top of mind at Goldman Sachs when it comes to innovation today.
Why he compares Generative AI to the advent of the printing press.
The two ways to think about AI today.
How AI can help bring internal company knowledge to new employees.
How companies can turn their top performers into "superhumans".
A practical example of how you can think about the ROI of AI.
The primary opportunities Marco sees for Generative AI.
The keys to Goldman's success in their Platform Solutions business.
Why thinking of developers as their clients is key.

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There is no hotter area in technology today than AI. We see articles in the press about it every day but in the fintech lending space using AI in underwriting is something that has been mainstream for some time.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Mike de Vere, the CEO of Zest AI. Zest are pioneers in the field of using AI for underwriting having been working on this for more than a decade (listen to my interview with the former CEO and founder of Zest, Douglas Merrill, here).

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Mike to Zest AI.
How he describes Zest today.
Some of the large lenders they work with.
What Mike makes of the current AI craze.
Where we are at today with explainable AI.
How they are removing bias from underwriting models.
Details of their different offerings.
How they customize their offerings for lenders.
How they use alternative data.
How their models have improved over time.
How quickly they can deploy a new credit model.
What is involved in implementing Zest into a lender.
Why they build models for new customers at no cost.
The pushback they receive when talking with new customers.
How lenders operationalize the Zest models.
How Zest is engaging with the regulatory bodies in Washington and the states.
What they are working on now that is most exciting.

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Given the environment we are in today I think it is important to hear from leading fintech venture capitalists to get their perspective on the state of fundraising and where the industry is going. This episode continues my semi-regular feature of leading VCs.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Tricia Kemp, a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Oak HC/FT. We cover a lot of territory in this conversation and Tricia provides advice for fintech entrepreneurs throughout the interview.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Oak HC/FT.
Their investment thesis when it comes to fintech.
Their favorite areas within fintech.
Why they are stage-agnostic when it comes to writing checks.
Their geographic focus.
The total assets they have under management.
How they invested capital over the last 18-24 months.
How entrepreneurs should approach raising capital today.
What the options are for those companies that are struggling.
How fintech companies can position themselves for M&A today.
Whether the IPO window will open up any time soon.
Reflections from her Forbes article on DeFi from last year.
The types of companies that are having a hard time today.
How the payments space will evolve over the next few years.
Why they are bullish on Latin America for fintech.
What a normal funding environment will look like.
The most exciting vertical in fintech right now.

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At this time every year, we do the Fintech Nexus USA preview show. Our big annual event is coming up next week on May 10-11. Tickets are still available, you can register here to receive 15% off (discount will be applied automatically).

On this episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast, I chat with Todd Anderson, Chief Content Officer and Matt Murnane, Chief Experience Officer at Fintech Nexus. We go through all the different components of the show and how you can get the most out of your time there.

In this podcast you will learn:

What the expo floor at the show will look like.
How the content will work during the event.
How people can get involved in one-on-one networking.
Who gets into the VIP Meetings Lounge.
Some of the unique experiences available to attendees.
How the PitchIt contest will work.
What our Women in Fintech program is all about.
The different content topics that will be covered this year.
The layout of the show.
Highlights on the keynote stage.
How the Awards Show will work this year.
What is most exciting about the event.

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One thing that has been driving the fintech industry forward in the last few years has been the growth of infrastructure companies. Building the plumbing for modern finance is one of the hottest areas in all of fintech, particularly when it comes to international finance. This burgeoning fintech-as-a-service subsector has produced some market leaders.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Arik Shtilman, the CEO and Co-Founder of Rapyd. They are a truly global company operating in more than 100 countries around the world with a team also disbursed throughout the world. And they are growing fast.

In this podcast you will learn:

The pivot they made initially that led to Rapyd.
How Arik describes the company today.
The four different components of fintech-as-a-service.
How their offering differs between geographies.
Their big competitive differentiator.
The number of geographies they operate in today.
How they approach compliance with so many different countries.
What they are focused on in the U.S. market.
The different types of companies that are using their infrastructure.
What they mean by "Build Bold."
The size of their team and where they are located.
Why they chose Dubai for their tech hub.
Where the biggest opportunities are in fintech today.
Rapyd's strategy when it comes to M&A.
Where they are on the path to profitability.
Arik's thoughts on payments rails and where we are heading.
The biggest challenges and opportunities in cross-border payments.
Key findings from their report, The State of B2B Cross-Border Payments.
Where they are focusing their energy right now.

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The marketplace lending space is now relatively mature, particularly when it comes to consumer loans, with several platforms 10-15 years old. The first public securitization was back in 2013 by SoFi and there have been hundreds of deals closed since then. The unsecured personal loan space now has a long track record with consistent performance.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Gunes Kulaligil. He is the Structured Finance Co-Lead at Stout, an investment bank and advisory firm. He has been advising on the marketplace lending space for many years and he has written for Fintech Nexus News before (see here and here). One of the stories that has received little attention is the stellar year that marketplace lending had last year, so I wanted to dig into that with Gunes.

In this podcast you will learn:

His core focus at Stout today and their two service offerings.
The types of companies that hire them for valuation services.
How Gunes first got interested in marketplace lending.
The state of the industry today.
Why 2022 was a record year for marketplace lending.
Who is buying the senior tranches of prime securitization deals.
How credit boxes are tightening in 2023 deals.
Where demand for securitizations will come from later this year.
Why prepayments are down dramatically.
How marketplace lending will perform this year and next.

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The small business lending space has been going through a lot of change since the start of the decade. It basically shut down for anything non-PPP related in 2020 and 2021 but it has now bounced back to a new normal with good companies looking for capital to help them grow. And the role of the SBA loan continues to be very important.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Evan Singer, the CEO of SmartBiz (he was last on the show back in 2016). They are focused on SBA loans of less than $350,000 and work with a large number of banks to fund their loans. Today, there is a lot of demand for these kinds of loans.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Evan describes SmartBiz today.
The three main SMB loan products they offer.
The pricing of these loans.
How they helped small businesses during the PPP.
The amount of fraud they caught during PPP.
The state of small business lending today.
How they are working with small business owners on Employee Retention Credits.
The credit performance they are seeing over the past three to six months.
A profile of their typical small business borrower.
Evan's thoughts on expanding the SBA 7(a) lending program.
What SmartBiz does to help make the loan application less onerous.
How they are partnering with Cross River Bank.
How they decide where to send successful loan applications.
What they do with those companies that can't qualify for a bank loan.
How the mindset of bankers has changed since before the pandemic.
What Evan is most excited about right now.

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When we have a customer service issue with a bank, credit union, or fintech today, we often approach it with some trepidation. So many organizations provide a poor experience that is painful and frustrating for their customers. But we have the technology now for customer service to be exceptional.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Dan Michaeli, the CEO and Co-Founder of Glia. They have technology that can make customer service extraordinary every time and they are 100% focused on financial services.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Glia.
The three core components of digital customer service.
What banks and credit unions do well when it comes to digital customer service.
What they are doing poorly.
The core piece that fintechs get wrong.
How Glia's call center offering works.
How they transition from an online chat to a live person.
What they are doing with automation.
Dan's thoughts on ChatGPT and its relevance to what they offer.
What the early days of the pandemic were like for Glia.
Why they established a CUSO (Credit Union Service Organization).
The geographic footprint of Glia.
The scale they are at today.
His vision for the future of customer interactions.

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The pioneers in the fintech lending space are now well-established companies that have been in business for 15 years or more. Many millions of customers have been served and yet many (most?) consumers are still struggling with their finances. One of these pioneers is working hard to change that.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Brad Stroh, the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Achieve (formerly known as Freedom Financial). Achieve has quietly become one of the largest fintech lenders in the country, with a focus on helping consumers who are experiencing financial challenges. While this is the first time I have had one of the co-founders on the show, a few years ago I interviewed the then-head of their asset management division, Joe Toms.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Achieve.
Why the company did not launch as a digital-first business.
How they differentiate their personal loan business.
Why they expanded into home equity loans.
How their debt resolution products works.
Why they developed two mobile apps for consumers.
How Bills.com fits into their product suite.
Why they decided to rebrand from Freedom Financial to Achieve.
How their core customer struggles with debt.
The root causes for these debt struggles.
The impact inflation has had on loan demand.
Brad's view on financial literacy and how to improve that.
Their approach to the capital markets and why they remain active in securitization.
His vision for the future of Achieve.

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While AI has been around for decades there has never been more interest in this topic than there is today. In underwriting, some lenders have been using AI for a while but it is only recently that it has caught on for mainstream lenders.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Pankaj Kulshreshtha, the CEO and founder of Scienaptic (he was last on the show two years ago). A lot has changed in the last two years and they have seen tremendous adoption among credit unions, which we discuss in some depth.

In this podcast you will learn:

How he describes Scienaptic today.
How much they emphasize the AI part of what they are offering.
The process of migrating their clients from a manual process to an automated one.
How the human touch can be maintained, or even increase, with more automation.
Why credit unions have become the core focus for their technology solutions.
What their credit unions are asking for most.
How they work with existing loan origination platforms.
What is involved in implementing Scienaptic's solution.
The types of loans they are working with for their credit union partners.
How they ensure their models remain free of bias.
How their AI models are getting better over time.
What Pankaj makes of the sudden interest in AI with ChatGPT.
How they could augment some of this technology into their systems.
How this technology is going to develop over the next 3-5 years.

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One of the real promises of fintech is to bring new populations into the financial system for the first time. While this sounds great in theory it is difficult to execute, particularly in developing countries where it is most needed.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Shivani Siroya, the CEO and founder of Tala (Shivani was last on the show back in 2017). They are operating on the front lines of fintech, bringing financial tools to people who have not had access before. And they are doing it at scale having served eight million customers across four different countries.

In this podcast you will learn:

What their mission of "enabling financial agency" means.
The geographies they work in today.
How they think about whether to enter new markets.
What the countries they operate in have in common.
Why cash is still such an important part of what they do.
How they establish trust with their customers.
The major use cases for a Tala loan.
The results of their recent impact survey.
How they have developed a new kind of credit score.
The type of non-financial data that is most predictive.
Why providing a low friction experience is so critical.
How they engage with their customers beyond the lending product.
How financial literacy is core to their mission.
The scale Tala is at today.
What is like to run a company across four different regions.
The vision for Tala going forward.

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One of the hottest areas of fintech today is anti-fraud. It has never been more challenging to stop fraudsters and for most fintechs this is not a core competency. Thankfully, new companies are arriving on the scene with deep experience to help fintechs combat the increasing fraud threats.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Soups Ranjan, the CEO and Co-Founder of Sardine. They have combined risk, compliance, and payment protection into one platform and they have started in the most challenging of all sectors when it comes to fraud: crypto. And they are about to move into mainstream fintech later this year.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Sardine.
Why they called the company Sardine.
The biggest fraud and compliance challenges today in fintech.
The different types of scams that are most popular today.
Why combatting social engineering is all about education.
What Sardine does exactly.
How they are using behavioral biometrics.
The three different products they offer.
Where the most fraud is coming from today.
How they are preparing for a world of real-time payments.
Details of the new consortium they are getting ready to launch.
How they are leveraging the expertise from the big name VCs on their board.
What is next for Sardine.

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When an immigrant first arrives in the U.S. they face a myriad of challenges. One of those core challenges is getting a bank account and becoming part of the financial system. Traditional banks find it very difficult to deal with these populations so, not surprisingly, fintech has come to fill in the gap.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Magnus Larsson, the CEO and co-founder of Majority. It is a fintech company founded by immigrants for immigrants that offers an all-in-one mobile banking solution tailored for new arrivals in this country. As you will find out they are offering far more than just a bank account.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Majority.
Why Magnus moved back to the US.
The mistake that big brands make when dealing with immigrants.
Why traditional banks find it so hard to serve immigrants.
Majority's core product offerings.
Why they work hard to build a community as well as a digital app.
How they customize their products to serve each country's diaspora.
Why they have opened physical locations in select cities.
How they can open bank accounts without a social security number.
Why they spent so much time choosing their bank partners.
Details about their bank partnerships.
The key to success as a niche digital bank.
What it was like raising equity capital in 2022.
The scale that Majority is at today.
Where they are on the journey to profitability.
Their different sources of revenue.
Magnus's vision for Majority.

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Max Levchin is one of the giants of the fintech space. He was a co-founder and CTO of the original fintech, PayPal, and now he leads Affirm, the company that is reinventing how we pay for things at the point of sale.

The buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) space continues to be hot. Consumers love it and so the volume of merchandise funded in this way keeps growing every year. But what is behind that growth and why is BNPL so much better for consumers than credit cards? We delve into a detailed discussion of this and more in the latest episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast.

In this podcast you will learn:

The catalyst for the founding of Affirm.
Why they decided to start in point-of-sale lending.
Why transparency was integral to their offering.
Why Max thinks credit cards have a lot in common with payday loans.
How the CFPB views BNPL.
The types of loans Affirm offers and the different ways they make money.
How Peloton became such a big part of their business.
The key to landing partnerships with both Walmart and Amazon.
How they are adapting their credit models to drive lower delinquencies.
Max's thoughts on their recent layoffs.
How they have engaged with the CFPB.
Why there has been a bunch of fintech startups by ex-Affirm execs.
His surprising view on the future of cards as a payment vehicle.

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The payments space continues to see innovation, probably more so than any other area of fintech today. Payments is a complex business, particularly when you are talking international payments, but technology has taken away a lot of the complexity. Now, with the movement towards embedded payments, nearly any company can offer payments services to their clients.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Ralph Dangelmaier, the CEO of BlueSnap. They are a leader in the payments space, offering an all-in-one Payments Orchestration platform as they call it. They are able to offer local payments in 47 countries and they have an embedded payments platform that allows their customers to offer their own global customized payment experience.

In this podcast you will learn:

The origins of BlueSnap.
How Ralph describes BlueSnap today.
The biggest mistake merchants make when accepting international payments.
The two trends that have benefited BlueSnap recently.
The different payment types they can work with.
How they consult with their partners as to the optimal payment methods.
How they are different to Stripe and Adyen.
Ralph's thoughts on the impact of Apple Pay and Google Pay.
How they handle account-to-account payments.
His perspective on supporting the new, alternative payments rails.
The use cases for stablecoin payments.
How BlueSnap operates its embedded payments platform.
How the economics work for embedded payments.
The definition of a PayFac (payments facilitator)
What Ralph does for the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA).
His vision for the future of payments.

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The crypto space continues to evolve and grow, despite the challenges of the past nine months. Companies continue to build new infrastructure and products that are being adopted around the world. This work is ongoing and independent of the price of crypto.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Edward Woodford, the CEO and Co-Founder of Zero Hash. His company provides embedded crypto infrastructure to fintechs and brands, allowing these companies to buy, sell, hold, pay and earn rewards with crypto. They have taken a conservative and compliance-first approach which put them in a good position to weather the crypto storm.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Edward first became passionate about infrastructure companies.
The founding story of Zero Hash.
How he describes their core offerings.
Where Zero Hash fits in the crypto ecosystem.
The breadth of their service offerings.
How the money flows through their system.
How they navigated the very turbulent last year in crypto.
Why it was easy to say no to the products that caused others' downfall.
What the crypto industry needs to do to regain the trust it once had.
How he views the trend towards embedded finance.
How their partnership with Stripe came about.
Why interest in crypto has been decoupled from crypto prices.
How web3 is going to transform web2 companies.
What it will take for crypto to become a mainstream payments mechanism.
The crypto use cases Edward is most excited about.
What is coming down the pipe at Zero Hash.

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Since the start of the pandemic there has been a surge of new fintech companies coming to market from a number of different niches. Most of these fintech companies need access to the banking system in some way and they need help in figuring out which banks to partner with and how to structure these partnerships.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Peter Hazlehurst, the CEO and co-founder of Synctera. They have placed themselves at the center of the fintech ecosystem, helping fintechs build, launch and scale new financial products. They work with a number of banks and have quickly become one of the leading banking-as-a-service platform in the industry.

In this podcast you will learn:

What it was like growing up with a famous aunt in Australia.
The groundbreaking work Peter did at Google and Uber.
The founding story of Synctera and the opportunity Peter saw.
The number of banks they have on their platform.
The kinds of use cases that Synctera is built for.
Some of the more edge cases that Synctera has helped bring to market.
How their APIs work for these edge cases.
How they work with non-fintech companies.
How they help their clients navigate any regulatory uncertainty.
What capabilities a bank needs to be part of their marketplace.
Peter's view of the competitive landscape for banking-as-a-service.
How they are able to help fintechs as they scale.
Peter's advice for fintech founders navigating today's environment.
What they are seeing when it comes to demand for lending products.
Peter's vision for the future of banking-as-a-service.

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Every lender has to process documents from their borrowers during the application process. Often, there is a large number of these documents from a wide variety of sources. What lenders need is a way to process all of these documents that provides a uniform set of data regardless of where the document came from.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One is Sam Bobley, the CEO and Co-founder of Ocrolus. They have become the standard when it comes to document automation in the small business lending space and they are now tackling consumer lending and the incredibly complex mortgage lending process.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Ocrolus.
What their technology actually does.
How their waterfall of automation techniques allows them to review any financial document.
Why it is so important to have humans involved in this process.
The percentage of documents they can process instantly.
Why they decided to start in small business lending.
The number of small business lenders they have on their platform today.
How their technology helped power many PPP lenders.
Sam's view of the small business lending landscape today.
How their fraud detection processes work.
Details of their business model.
How they approached the fundraising process.
What Sam is most excited about right now.

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This country has a savings problem. We have heard it so many times: the average person cannot afford a $400 emergency expense. While fintech has made some inroads here the problem is worse that it has ever been. What we need is a fintech that is laser-focused on this problem, working to create a simple and effective solution to truly address it.

I am delighted to welcome my next guests on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast. Suze Orman needs no introduction, she has been providing personal finance advice for decades with her own TV show, many bestselling books and more. Devin Miller is the CEO and Co-Founder of SecureSave and he and his co-founder have teamed up with Suze Orman to address the emergency savings problem once and for all.

In this podcast you will learn:

The sorry state of emergency savings today in the U.S.
The founding story of SecureSave.
How Suze came to be involved.
Why she hates celebrity endorsers and what she is bringing to the table.
How she helped the company get to the right product market fit.
How SecureSave is actually changing people's savings habits.
The level of adoption they are getting with the average company.
How people are accessing their emergency savings account.
What people are withdrawing money for.
Why they focus so much on the emergency part.
Why they don't really focus on the demographics of their users.
Their vision for the future of SecureSave.

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We are revisiting the venture capital space today because we are at such an interesting inflection point. Some VC firms took a very cautious approach amid the tumultuous market of 2022 but things might be turning around albeit slowly.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Clara Sieg, a partner at Revolution, the venture capital firm started by AOL founder Steve Case. Clara has been investing in fintech for many years and has an interesting take on the space today.

In this podcast you will learn:

The origins of Revolution Ventures.
What attracted Clara to come on board at Revolution.
Why they actively look to invest outside of the hot tech locations.
How the geographic shift over the last three years has changed venture capital.
How Revolution navigated the lofty valuations of 2021 and early 2022.
Why they didn't do a single deal in 2022.
The range of check sizes they are doing.
Why they decided to invest in Sila and Paro.
The different segments within fintech they are most interested in.
Clara's perspective on the lack of capital flowing to women-led companies.
Why she thinks this year will lead to more consolidation in fintech.
Their expectation to do more deals in 2023.

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While there has been a lot of fintech innovation in small business lending, it has mostly been focused on loans of $500,000 or less. When it comes to loans of $1 million to $50 million there has been less innovation and it is still very much a manual, relationship-based process. But that is changing.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Blair Silverberg, the CEO and founder of Hum Capital. He looked at that market and realized a data-driven process could vastly improve efficiency so he has created a platform that intelligently pairs growth companies with investors and lenders. He calls Hum the world's only intelligent capital market.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Blair started his entrepreneurial journey at the age of six.
The short term and long term opportunity that Blair saw that led to Hum Capital.
Examples of how their platform works.
Why they are focused purely on quantitative data.
How they meet the demands of different types of investors.
Why they are focused on private debt over equity.
The range and average loan sizes
How they have challenged the relationship-based approach to mid-market lending.
The compelling pitch they make to businesses seeking capital.
What types of data they are working with.
The two simple calculations they use to help businesses compare lending products.
How they have removed bias from the lending process.
How Blair feels about the impact of the changing macroeconomic environment.
The different risk appetites of their investors.
His vision for the future of Hum Capital.

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With all the layoffs in the news it would be easy to get the impression that fintech is on the downswing. But nothing could be further from the truth. There has never been a better time to start a fintech company and, as you will find out in this episode, the volume and quality of new fintech companies continues to increase.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Rex Salisbury. He is the founder of Cambrian Ventures and the creator of the Cambrian fintech community. He is one of the most well-connected people in all of fintech and has been supporting early-stage fintech companies for many years.

In this podcast you will learn:

The genesis of the Cambrian fintech community.
What Rex did during his time at Andreessen Horowitz.
How his co-founder matching service works.
The size and focus of his first fund.
Why he doesn't like to be a lead investor.
How he sources new deals.
Details of one of his first investments: Keep Financial
The most interesting verticals in fintech today.
What the pre-seed and seed fundraising market is like today.
Why hiring at early-stage companies is easier than it has ever been.
The volume of new fintech companies being created.
What it is like being a solo GP in your own fund.
Where he is taking Cambrian Ventures and the community.

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There are few trends in fintech hotter today than embedded finance. There are companies offering to embed different type of financial products within the product flow of banks, fintechs and even brands. This is part of the rebundling of financial services and it is creating opportunities for many new companies.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Roy Ng, the CEO and co-founder of Bond. Today, Bond provides embedded consumer and business credit solutions for a range of different companies, but as you will find out in this episode, they are not stopping with credit.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Bond.
How Roy defines embedded finance.
Why they moved from a broad offering to doing one thing: credit.
The target market they are focused on.
How their process works when they onboard a new client.
What the partnerships with their partner banks look like.
How they are working with Adam Neumann's new company, Flow.
The different areas where they are looking to expand.
Roy's perspective on the future of embedded finance.

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The right lending infrastructure is what allows lenders to launch new products easily, to adapt products to changing economic conditions or to start an entirely new lending operation.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Eddie Oistacher, the CEO and Co-Founder of Peach Finance. Incubated inside Affirm, Peach has created a new kind of lending infrastructure that is adaptive and flexible and can scale for virtually any lending product (outside of mortgage).

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Peach.
How Max Levchin, the CEO of Affirm, supported new companies like Peach.
The biggest challenges for lenders today.
How Eddie describes Peach and where they sit in the technology stack.
What an Adaptive Core is and why it is important.
The different lending verticals they support.
Type types of companies that use their software.
What fintechs should be looking for when launching a new lending program.
How lenders should think about loan servicing given a possible recession this year.
What launching right before the pandemic was like.
How their self-service migration tool works and why it is a big deal for lenders.
What is next for Peach.

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In the fintech space fighting fraud is a never ending battle. And there have been recent developments that is skewing the playing field in favor of the fraudsters. Fintech companies cannot do this themselves, they need the help of experts who are completely dedicated to making fraud as difficult as possible.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Kevin Gosschalk, the CEO and founder of Arkose Labs. Kevin has built Arkose Labs to tackle online fraud head on, having built a suite of tools used by fintechs and others operating online.

In this podcast you will learn:

The simple concept behind Arkose's approach.
The state of play in the fraud space today as it applies to fintech.
How Arkose Labs works with fintechs today.
How much it costs to buy a valid identity on the dark web.
What Cybercrime-as-a-Service is and why it is a huge issue.
How fintechs can try to stop Cybercrime-as-a-Service.
How to balance increasing friction and reducing fraud.
An explanation of credential stuffing.
Why they provide a $1 million warranty for credential stuffing.
Why Arkose Labs created MatchKey to replace CAPTCHA.
How they will adapt MatchKey to ensure it has longevity against criminals.
How they are preparing for future fraud attacks.

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The fintech industry has become much more sophisticated in how it engages with lawmakers and regulators in Washington. There are now many people in leadership positions, both within fintech companies and within the trade associations, with deep experience in government who can make sure our voice is heard. And that the issues that are most important to fintech companies are being discussed at the highest levels with Washington.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Penny Lee, the CEO of the Financial Technology Association (FTA). She has been around politics and government her entire career and now is bringing her expertise and connections to help the fintech industry engage with leaders in Washington.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Penny to the role at the FTA.
Their mission and the types of fintech companies they represent.
Some of the big names on their board.
How they are engaging specifically with lawmakers and regulators.
Their plans for engaging with some specific state fintech issues.
What initiatives have a shot at passing a divided Congress.
How they are specifically engaging with the CFPB.
The FTA's perspective on FedNow and what it could mean for fintech.
How they are supporting the bank-fintech partnership model.
How the FTA interacts with other fintech trade associations.
What Penny is most excited about for 2023.

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Pix is probably the most successful fintech product in the history of the world. It is Brazil's instant payment system that launched in November 2020 and has taken the country by storm. More than 130 million Brazilians now use Pix and for around half of those people, it is the first digital payment tool they have ever used. If you are interested in fintech, you need to understand the Pix phenomenon.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Carlos Brandt, the Head of the Management & Operations of Pix at the Central Bank of Brazil. I spoke with Carlos at Fintech Nexus LatAm held in Miami on December 13-14 and it was the highlight of the event for many of the attendees.

In this podcast you will learn:

The role Carlos played in the development of Pix.
How his nine-year-old son helped in user experience and design.
Why they rolled out Pix to both banks as well as non-banks on day one.
Why they mandated all large financial institutions to join.
The huge number of people who have done a digital transaction for the first time.
What this means for Brazil's economy.
How Pix has impacted the growth of e-commerce.
How they are encouraging B2B payments.
Why the Central Bank of Brazil is opening up Pix's protocols to other central banks.
How Pix sits in relation to credit cards.
If there is a place for crypto payments rails alongside Pix.
How they are working to reduce fraud.
What is on the roadmap for 2023 and the next five years.

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User-permissioned financial data is becoming a bedrock of fintech innovation. Ever since Plaid came on the scene and enabled us to connect our bank account to other financial institutions, consumers have appreciated the advantages of this concept. But what the industry has really needed is an independent standard for this data sharing.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Don Cardinal, the Managing Director of the Financial Data Exchange (FDX). This non-profit organization has created a common standard for the secure and convenient access of permissioned consumer and business financial data.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Don to the opportunity at Financial Data Exchange.
Don's work at FS-ISAC and what that organization does.
The original vision for FDX and how it has evolved today.
The state of open banking in the US today.
The five core principles of financial data that FDX adheres to.
Details of the FDX API standard they have developed.
How that interfaces to the work that Plaid is doing.
How the authentication of credentials works.
Why biometric authentication is so much better than passwords.
Some of the big names who are members are FDX.
How they balance the different perspectives of banks, fintechs and consumer groups.
The connection between FDX and the Open Financial Exchange (OFX).
How they keep their own technology updated.
Don's vision for the future of open finance.

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While there are plenty of instant payment options for consumer like Cash App, PayPal, Venmo and Zelle. But when it comes to business payments it is a different story. And those aforementioned payments are not really instant, they still settle like all other bank transactions, typically in two business days. This is all about to change.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Kevin Greene, the Chairman and CEO of Tassat Group. His company has created a blockchain-based instant payment network for banks. It works within existing banking regulations and it is live today processing around $50 billion in payments a month.

In this podcast you will learn:

What led to the founding of the Tassat Group.
The two components that differentiates what Tassat is doing.
Why he decided to join as CEO after being on the Board from the beginning.
The state of the B2B bank payments market today.
What TassatPay does and how it works.
The percentage of TassatPay transactions that occurs outside of banking hours.
How they might use smart contracts within their payments system.
How the flow of funds work for banks on the Digital Interbank Network.
The size of bank they are targeting.
What is involved in getting this setup at a bank.
Why they decided to build their system on a private permissioned blockchain.
Why Kevin is super excited about FedNow.
The state of blockchain knowledge among bank CEOs today.
Their biggest obstacle to getting people comfortable with TassatPay.
How they are working with regulators to help them understand.
What the payments system will look like in ten years.

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The credit union space, like all of financial services, was dramatically impacted by the pandemic. With consumers demanding digital access to financial products the industry had no choice but to embrace fintech offerings. This has presented an opportunity for an organization like CMFG Ventures, the venture capital arm of CUNA Mutual Group.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Brian Kaas, the President and Managing Director of CMFG Ventures. His company is focused on making fintech investments that will benefit the credit union space, while at the same time helping to bring together the fintech and credit union communities.

In this podcast you will learn:

Their founding story and how they fit in with CUNA Mutual Group.
The investment thesis of CMFG Ventures.
The three main fintech verticals they are focused on.
Details of their two investment funds.
What the last three years have been like for CMFG.
Why they have remained actively investing in 2022.
How due diligence has change this year compared to 2021.
Why they created their Fintech Forum.
The state of play in credit unions today and how they have fared the last couple of years.
Why credit unions are more open to fintech partnerships now.
How credit unions are positioning themselves to focus on a younger demographic.
Why and when they acquire fintech companies and the niche they are focus on there.
Brian's vision for the future of the credit industry.
The fintech trends he will be following most closely in 2023.

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Fraud prevention tools are an essential tool for every company in financial services. Fraud attempts continue to get more sophisticated but thankfully the fraud prevention tools continue to evolve as well to the point where companies should think about creating a complete anti-fraud tech stack.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Bence Jendruszak. the COO and Co-Founder of SEON. They are one of the most interesting companies in the fraud prevention space as they give away their fraud tools for free on their website. We talk about why they do that and much more in this interview.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of SEON.
The types of fraud that fintech companies need to be focused on today.
How they are able to detect fraud.
Why they give away their fraud detection products for free on their website.
Why they use and collect only publicly available information.
How they think about fraudsters reverse engineering their tools.
How they can differentiate between a synthetic and a real identity.
An explanation of account takeover fraud.
Some of the companies that are using SEON.
How SEON makes money.
Where we are at today in the fight with fraudsters.
What data or score they are providing back to their customers.
Why fraud attempts increase during the economic downturns.
What's on tap for SEON in 2023.

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Consumers have dozens of fintech options when it comes to bank accounts. In the small business space, there are fewer options but recently better choices are emerging. Some fintech companies have thought deeply about small business and have created bank accounts with options tailored just for the small business owner.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Eytan Bensoussan, the CEO and Founder of NorthOne. Eytan never intended to create a fintech bank account for small businesses but after talking with a hundred or more small business owners it became clear this was still a major pain point.

In this podcast you will learn:

How interviews with a hundred small business owners led to the founding of NorthOne.
Why it became obvious that a new kind of bank account was what was needed.
Why they took several years to develop the product.
Profile of the typical small businesses that are attracted to NorthOne.
How they reach these small business owners.
What small business owners actually want from a bank account.
How can they profitably serve this market.
Why they eliminated overdraft and NSF fees.
Their relationship with their bank partner, the Bancorp Bank.
How important open banking is to what they are doing.
What types of data are they connecting to.
The scale they are at today and where their people are located.
Eytan's thoughts on getting their own banking license.
What it was like raising equity capital in 2022.
Where they are on their path to profitably.
What he is excited about for 2023.

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The neobank space is very competitive. Every company has a solid app with extensive functionality, that is a given these days. But where there is differentiation is how these neobanks are engaging with the customers. Some are focused on optimizing for interchange fees, some are focused on credit products, some on deposit gathering while others provide all of that and more. But there are few companies approaching their customers in completely new ways.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Dee Choubey, the CEO and co-founder of MoneyLion. I last had him on the show six years ago and his company has changed so much since then. They are now a public company (NYSE:ML) and they are approaching their market in a completely different way to other neobanks. What they are doing with media, how they think about customer engagement, how they are using their marketplace - this is quite unique in the entire fintech space.

In this podcast you will learn:

A profile of the typical MoneyLion customer.
Where people are spending the most time on MoneyLion.
How their personalized content helps with financial literacy.
What Dee means by creating a form factor change in finance.
The engagement with their app that they are seeing.
Their view of the American consumer right now.
The primary use case for crypto and any changes they are seeing there.
Why they acquired Even Financial and how they are developing that platform.
What they are doing in media and how they are using AI and ML to optimize it.
How they will eventually become the search engine for financial products.
Why they have gone all-in on NASCAR and are also focused on the NBA G-League.
How they are navigating this bear market in fintech valuations.
Why Dee has no regrets about becoming a public company when they did.
What he is most excited about for 2023.

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More than ever before, people today have different forms of income. They might have a day job but do gig work at night and on weekends. They might have a different side hustle that started out as a hobby but now generates an income. Getting an accurate picture of an individual's income requires sophisticated data engineering but it is something that is becoming increasingly critical.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Kurt Lin, the CEO and Co-Founder of Pinwheel. They make sense of real-time income and employment data to help lenders, fintechs and banks get an accurate financial picture of the people they are dealing with.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Pinwheel and the pivot they quickly made.
Details of their product offerings today.
How their connectivity works.
An example of how their figure out someone's true income.
Why Earned Wage Access is such an important product for consumers.
What Pinwheel has done with Earned Wage Access that has never been done before.
Why having read/write access to direct deposit is key for this new product.
The problem they are solving with their Direct Deposit Switching product.
The different use cases for Direct Deposit Switching.
Some of the key findings from their recent survey.
What the future holds when all this data is connected.
Why becoming a Credit Reporting Agency was important for Pinwheel.
Kurt's vision for the future of Pinwheel.

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When we think about cross-border payments, we typically think about consumer payments, people sending money back to their home country. But the business-to-business market for cross-border payments is many times larger and more complex.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Patrick Gauthier, the CEO of Convera. Now, you may not have heard of Convera, they used to be Western Union Business Solutions. This business was spun out of Western Union last year and rebranded. Convera is actually the largest non-bank cross-border commercial payment company on the planet.

In this podcast you will learn:

What he saw as the opportunity with Convera.
Why they are focused on cross-border payments.
Convera's core product offerings today.
Their core technology behind the facilitation of payments.
The geographic corridors where they see the most activity.
The largest currency pairs in terms of volume.
How they make cross-border payments simple and predictable.
How they quickly reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
How they are able to keep track of regulations in every country.
Patrick's views on crypto and how it applies to cross-border payments.
The volume of payments they processed last year.
What Patrick has brought to Convera from his time at Amazon.
Their plans for 2023.

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When it comes to the velocity of money in banking in many we are back in the days of the horse and buggy. Whereas communication between banks can move around the world instantly when it comes to transactions most of the banking world is on a two-day settlement window known as T+2. This 48-hour delay means huge liquidity costs for banks.

But we are moving to a world of real-time settlement and one of the global leaders in this movement is Fnality. This organization, based in London, was created by a consortium of banks whose goal is to move the banking system to real-time settlement. At our recent event in London I sat down with Rhomais Ram, the CEO of Fnality, to discuss "Increasing the Velocity of Money with Real-Time Settlement."

In this podcast you will learn:

How the consortium for Fnality first came together.
What Fnality is building in layman's terms.
Why we live in a T+2 settlement world between banks today.
Why banks want to move to a real time settlement world.
What are the primary use cases.
How a transaction will flow within the Fnality system.
How many banks they have on board today.
Ram's views on a CBDC and the role of Fnality.
The different geographies where they are focused today.
How Fnality will make money.
The liquidity savings that could be achieved here.
An example on how this technology could interface with DeFi.
How a financial institution could manage their liquidity.
The potential scale of transactions they could hande.
Rhom's vision for what this can look like in the future.

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Before the FTX blowup there was a serious conversation happening around regulation of the DeFi space. During our Merge event in London last month I interviewed Lawrence Wintermeyer, the Chair of the GBBC Digital Finance (and the former chair of Innovate Finance) on the topic, Paving the Way for Web3 Legitimacy.

Given the events of the last couple of weeks this topic has new urgency. For the DeFi industry to scale it must begin a serious and open discussion with regulators and it needs to address some of the thorny issues caused by its decentralized structure. This interview was recorded on October 17 and there was a prescient quote from Lawrence during the interview: "The industry just does not look like a very safe place to put your money right now."

In this podcast you will learn:

Why people are at war in the digital innovation space.
Why it is critical for the web3 industry to come together and self-regulate.
What a co-regulatory model could look like.
How can approach regulating DeFi where it is by definition decentralized.
The difficult issues that most need to be addressed.
Why identity and liability considerations are so important for DeFi.
How far away we are from effective DeFi regulation.
His thoughts on permissioned and closed DeFi networks.
What's the most practical thing that we can do to create Web3 legitimacy.

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Someone had to be first. More than a decade before the word fintech became a thing we had the original fintech bank, First Internet Bank. As the name implies they were the first bank to operate completely online when they launched in 1999. In many ways they have been a trailblazer, paving the way for a new generation of fintechs to thrive.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Nicole Lorch, the President and COO of First Internet Bank. She has been at the bank since the very beginning and has seen it grow to become a successful and profitable online bank. There are many lessons here for the new crop of fintech banks.

In this podcast you will learn:

What it was like launching an online bank in the dot com era.
The types of consumers they attracted in the early days.
How RV and horse trailer loans became a successful niche.
The different verticals they are involved with today.
Who they think about as their competitors in banking.
What they have done to emulate in-person banking in the digital world.
How they manage their customer service call center.
Details of their tech stack and their approach to technology.
Nicole's view on the recent rise of the digital neobank.
How they are partnering with Treasury Prime for banking-as-a-service.
Why First Internet Bank has such a deep understanding about fintech-bank partnerships.
What they are focused on when it comes to growing the bank.
How she views the moves by big tech into financial services.
What Nicole is excited about for 2023.

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Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) continue to gain momentum around the world. While we are not exactly leading the way in this country there is important work being done already, work that will help shape how a CBDC will function here.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Daniel Gorfine, the co-founder of the Digital Dollar Project. This organization is doing incredibly important work, combining the efforts of all the existing research that is out there, and helping to create real-world pilots. A U.S. CBDC is most likely coming, and in this interview, you can discover what it will look like and how it will work.

In this podcast you will learn:

What the Digital Dollar Project is and how it got off the ground.
The people and organizations that are involved.
How they work with existing CBDC projects such as Project Hamilton.
Details of pilots they are involved with right now.
What they are learning from the CBDCs of other countries.
How a CBDC could work with a bank-issued stablecoin.
What the programmable element of digital money could mean.
Where we are at in Washington when it comes to CBDCs.
What is the end game for the Digital Dollar Project.
How a Digital Dollar will actually work and Daniel's best guess on a timeline.

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The card space (both debit and credit) has seen tremendous innovation over the last decade. Use cases that were inconceivable 10 years ago are now commonplace due to the steady march of fintech innovation. The company that has been at the very center of these developments is Marqeta. They have basically invented a new category of fintech, what they call "modern card issuing".

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Randy Kern, the CTO of Marqeta. He has had a career in enterprise tech, outside of finance, so he brings a fresh perspective to fintech. We delve deeply into the technology that is behind one of the most innovative companies in all of fintech.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Randy to the CTO position at Marqeta.
How he describes modern card issuing.
Some of the use cases of their card technology.
Their role in the Uber ProCard that was recently announced.
How Randy's background in enterprise tech helps him at Marqeta.
A great analogy on the growth of embedded finance.
How Marqeta thinks of embedded finance.
How the growth of digital wallets is being fueled by Marqeta.
Why tokenization of cards is the key to better security.
How they are helping small business lenders today.
How open APIs help speed the development of fintech products.
The challenges of running a tech company across multiple geographies.
What Randy is excited about for the future of Marqeta and fintech in general.

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The most interesting use cases for DeFi are still being discovered. But tokenization of real world assets, or anything that has an income stream associated with it, is starting to take shape. And there are blockchains being built today with digitization and tokenization of assets as their core use case.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is John Wu, the President of Ava Labs, the organization behind the Avalanche blockchain. John has a deep knowledge of technology as an investor and was early in bitcoin. Now, he is leading Ava Labs and the Avalanche blockchain into becoming a major force in a multi-chain world.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Ava Labs and the Avalanche blockchain.
Why Emin Gün Sirer is so well respected in the crypto space.
What makes the Avalanche blockchain unique.
How Ava Labs is working with traditional financial institutions.
The two core benefits of tokenization.
What assets lend themselves best to tokenization.
The interesting use cases for tokenization getting traction now.
The benefits of Avalanche over private blockchains.
What it will take for tokenization to become mainstream.
How programmable money fits into the Avalanche vision.
How fintech and TradFi should think about web3 disruption.
How the downturn in crypto has affected Ava Labs (or not).
What John would like the TradFi world to understand about DeFi.
The role of Ava Labs in the future of crypto.

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The rise of Chinese fintech in the 2010s is one of the most exciting and intriguing stories in all of fintech. This has been followed in this decade by a government crackdown on fintech and technology more broadly. But everyone should understand the innovations that led China to become the most advanced country in the world when it comes to fintech.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Martin Chorzempa who I got to know in 2014 when I started visiting China. He is now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and he has written a very important book on Chinese fintech called "The Cashless Revolution: China's Reinvention of Money and the End of America's Domination of Finance and Technology." This is a must-read for anyone in fintech, not just for those people who follow China, as there are lessons here for us all.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Martin found his way to work at a Chinese think tank, CF40.
The work he did at CF40.
What he is focused on today at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
How he was able to become fluent in Mandarin.
The state of financial technology when Martin arrived in China in 2012.
How Tencent and Ant Financial became critically important fintech companies.
Why the rise of the Super App was the key to the rise of these two companies.
How the Chinese government enabled this rise.
What propelled the growth of peer-to-peer lending in China.
The amazing rise of Sesame Credit, Ant Financial's official credit bureau.
The government's approach to the huge amounts of data these companies generated.
The stunning fall of the peer-to-peer lending platform Ezubao.
How Ant's money market fund, Huabao, became the largest in the world.
How one speech from Jack Ma become the “The Costliest Speech in History”.
The lessons the U.S. and the West can take from the rise and fall of fintech in China.

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Small business data is heterogenous and typically stored in silos that are not connected to each other. While some level of integration is starting to happen, getting the big picture of a small business from all these silos is challenging. But that is also changing.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One is Pete Lord, the CEO and Co-Founder of Codat. His company's mission is to bring all that data together to make life easier for small businesses. Codat's clients are able to access the data they need seamlessly to help them get a complete picture of each small business.

In this podcast you will learn:

The problem Codat was created to solve.
What they mean by the "universal API for small business data".
Some of the companies where they have an API connection.
An example of how this data access actually works.
The state of play of open banking in the UK and the US.
Their geographic footprint and the challenges of working internationally.
Some of the 42 different use cases for Codat.
Why they started with lending and how SMBs are getting more access to credit.
How they connect with bank data.
What they actually return to their clients when it comes to data.
How Codat's clients are using climate data.
Details of their $100 million Series C fundraise closed in Q2.
The size of their team today.
Pete's vision for a connected world when it comes to business data.

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A decade ago, to say the Latin American fintech industry was nascent would have been an overstatement. While there were a handful of enterprising startups, no one had achieved much scale and there was very little funding available to help. And yet, these bootstrapping entrepreneurs were at the forefront at what would soon be a thriving industry.

Today, Latin American fintech is hot, although like the rest of the fintech world it has cooled down somewhat in 2022. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Christine Kenna, a partner at IGNIA, a Mexican VC firm, where she has spent more than a decade. During that time, she has witnessed and participated in the explosive growth of the fintech industry.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Christine came to Mexico and to IGNIA.
What it was like being an investor in Mexico a decade ago.
When they first started paying attention to fintech.
How IGNIA has responded to the changing investing environment.
What it means to entrepreneurs to have big name American VCs in the region now.
The different environments for early stage and later stage investment.
The most interesting areas of fintech today in Latin America.
Why cash is still so prevalent in Mexico today.
Why Christine is bullish on crypto long term.
Why LatAm entrepreneurs are always looking cross border.
The stage of companies IGNIA focuses on.
The quality of the entrepreneurs approaching her today.
What Christine is most excited about for the future of LatAm fintech.

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Despite the early successes of some of the robo-advice platforms, good financial advice is still something that is difficult to scale. The wealthy often work with professional advisors and the rest of us manage it ourselves where there is limited advice and often the accumulated assets just sit in retirement accounts being ignored. But that could be able to change.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Mike Sha, the CEO and Co-Founder of SigFig. They are on a mission to deliver quality advice at scale and are working with some of the largest financial institutions in the country. But even Mike agrees much more needs to be done and they are looking at advice beyond wealth management to provide a more holistic approach.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Mike's time at Amazon helped shape his thoughts on customer experience.
The founding story of SigFig and what preceded it.
How their first commercial product, a portfolio tracking tool, was developed.
The behavior patterns of the two types of investors.
The opportunity provided by the coming massive transfer of wealth from baby boomers.
How they work with banks and wealth management firms.
Some of the bigger clients they serve.
Why people hire financial advisors today.
How SigFig has expanded beyond investments.
How their new platform called Engage grew out of the pandemic.
Mike's view on the UBS-Wealthfront acquisition/breakup saga this year.
How he thinks about the direct-to-consumer robo-advisor model and why they chose b2b.
What's next for SigFig.

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Being a small business owner has many challenges. Deal with finances is one of the major stresses for any small business and fintech is really starting to make a difference here. But what if we could take the financial component of any small business and take it from a cost center to a profit center, or at least make it cost-neutral?

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Eliot Buchanan, the CEO and Co-Founder of Plastiq. They help small businesses with flexibility on both how they pay and accept payments, offering a full suite of innovative offerings.

In this podcast you will learn:

The problem Eliot had that led to the founding of Plastiq.
Why they evolved from a consumer business to focus on small business.
Details of their flagship product, Plastiq Pay.
The three other products they now offer.
Why they created an embedded finance product for small business platforms.
How Plastiq is turning credit card acceptance on its head.
The types of businesses that are using Plastiq.
How financing through Plastiq is even cheaper than bank capital.
Why they decided to go public via SPAC in 2022.
How they are making this move with their eyes wide open.
What they are planning to do with a new war chest of capital.
How a Main Street business should view Plastiq.
Eliot's vision for Plastiq.

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On the news show today we discussed big fintech news from FSOC, the White House (blueprint for AI bill of rights), U.S. Congress, Customers Bank, Cogent Bank, Western Alliance Bank, Afterpay, bank fees, KServicing, Kim Kardashian and more.

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On the news show yesterday we discussed big fintech news from Celsius, Square, SWIFT, Chainlink Labs, JPMorgan Chase & Co., FTX, Nova Credit, HSBC, Caitlin Long, Do Kwon, Upstart and more.

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Consumer BNPL has become an entrenched part of the modern payments flow for a large number of companies. But the payments flow in the business-to-business space still looks similar to the way it did a decade ago. I think that is about to change.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Chris Tsai, the CEO and Co-founder of Resolve. He has thought deeply about buyer flows in b2b commerce and has created a complete system to manage the process. As he describes in this episode it is not really about BNPL, although that is a piece of what they do, it is about growing transactions into relationships.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Max Levchin and Affirm was instrumental in the founding of Resolve.
What the early days of Resolve were like.
The four steps in the buying process that coincides with Resolve’s core products.
How they perform credit checks on behalf of their clients.
How BNPL for business is different to consumer.
A profile of the typical Resolve customer.
Why they often like to talk of themselves as an embedded payments platform.
Details of their underwriting process.
The interplay between credit insights and relationship insights.
How their business model works.
How Resolve customers immediately benefit once they are onboarded.
Why they offer credit card processing as part of the interface.
How they interface with the popular accounting software platforms.
The scale they are at today.
Chris’s vision for Resolve.

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The benefits of blockchain technology are yet to be realized in banking. While some large banks have commercial projects nothing has really taken off yet. Much of that is due to regulatory uncertainty but many banks are actively engaging and learning while we are in this something of a holding period.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Robert Morgan, the CEO of the USDF Consortium, a group of banks creating a blockchain-based system for tokenized deposits that will make banking safer, cheaper and more reliable for consumers. Rob used to be the head of innovation at the American Bankers Association (we had him on the show back in 2017) and so he has a deep understanding of banking and technology.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why Rob decided to make the jump from the ABA to the USDF Consortium
How he describes what USDF is exactly.
How banks will use USDF and a description of the payments flow.
The primary benefits of USDF and the most popular use cases.
How the programmability of USDF can be leveraged.
Why USDF will be complementary to Fedwire and FedNow (when it launches).
How the USDF Consortium, the Provenance Blockchain and Figure are related.
How they are working with the Federal regulatory agencies today.
Details of their response to Treasury’s RFC on digital assets.
How they view CBDCs and how it could be complementary to what they are building.
The types of banks that are members of the consortium.
Where they are at when it comes to USDF going live.
The objections of banks who are not ready to join the consortium.
What Rob thinks the next move from regulators will be when it comes to digital assets.
What the banking system could look like in ten years time.

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One the news show yesterday we discussed big fintech stories from FTX, Stash, Voyager, Adyen, Cash App, Nasdaq, Sardine, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, Synctera and more.

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Starting a business is an exciting time for new entrepreneurs, a time full of optimism and possibilities. That optimism can fade as reality sets in with a myriad of legal and financial steps that must be taken that have nothing to do with his or her passion. Thankfully, there are technology companies that are making it much easier today.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Sameer Gulati, the head of fintech for ZenBusiness, a company helping would-be entrepreneurs launch new businesses. His company realized that once a business has been created there are a myriad of financial products that the new entrepreneur will need and who better to help them than the company that guided them through the setup process.

In this podcast you will learn:

What was the catalyst for taking this role at ZenBusiness.
The mission of ZenBusiness and how they have evolved.
The amazing number of new businesses that are being created today.
Why the idea of a side hustle has been a real accelerant.
What kinds of businesses people are starting.
The demographic profile of these new entrepreneurs.
How they are giving potential new business owners the confidence to take the leap.
What ZenBusiness provides once people have made the decision to start a business.
The financial services that ZenBusiness is going to offer their clients
How they have approached the development of new financial products.
The huge advantage that ZenBusiness has over other fintechs.
How they intend to grow with their small business customers.
The types of partners they will work with to help their faster-growing customers.
Details of their recent $200 million fundraise.
How they are raising awareness of the ZenBusiness brand.
How the shift to embedded finance is making their move into fintech so much easier.

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Every company on the planet processes payments. They will usually take some combination of cash, checks or credit cards. But increasingly companies are offering ACH, wires or some other kind of electronic payment. If your organization is doing hundreds or thousands of these kinds of transactions a day you need to have software to help you reconcile it.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Dimitri Dadiomov, the CEO and Co-Founder of Modern Treasury. Dimitri and his co-founders saw this challenge firsthand while working at LendingHome (now Kiavi) and they realized it was a pain point that many companies have. Reconciling large numbers of ACH or wire payments is not a trivial task but it is a critical function that needs to work every time.

In this podcast you will learn:

The founding story of Modern Treasury.
Why the infrastructure for receiving wires and ACH payments had not been built.
How they were able to land their first client.
How their product offerings have evolved since they started.
Some of the verticals they are focused on.
A detailed case study: how they are helping Pipe.
How banks view what Modern Treasury is doing.
How they are working with Silicon Valley Bank.
What they are doing with real-time payments.
How they had to change their systems for real-time payments.
How they approach fraud and what they make available to their customers.
The scale they are at today.
The vision for Modern Treasury.

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On this week's news show we discussed the OCC's views on bank-fintech partnerships, UBS, Wealthfront, Binance, Coinbase, Zelle, Apple, Walletmor and more.

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I would say that most banks today talk about digital transformation. They know that what made them successful in the 2010s may not work as well in this decade. So, they partner with fintechs, build innovation teams and try to transform their bank. One bank that is all-in on this process is Arvest Bank, a $26+ billion bank based in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Laura Merling, the Chief Transformation & Operations Officer at Arvest Bank. Laura left a senior role at Google to work for this community bank, the reason behind that is compelling in and of itself. But when you listen to this interview you will have an appreciation for how Arvest is tackling this whole process of transformation in a different way.

In this podcast you will learn:

What attracted Laura to Arvest that caused her to move there from Google.
How she defines her title, Chief Transformation and Operations Officer.
The advantage of coming from outside of finance to this position.
The size and different business lines of Arvest Bank.
What early wins they have had since Laura started at the bank.
Why they decided to change out their core banking platform.
How they get everyone on board for transformation.
How the culture is unique at Arvest, leading to multiple awards.
Details of their Million Meals Program.
How the Walton family is involved with Arvest.
What upcoming in the near term on their transformation path.

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On the fintech news show today we discussed big stories about The Federal Reserve Board, Klarna, Alloy, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Tether, State of California, Ticketmaster, Dapper Labs, Andreessen Horowitz and more.

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In Mexico there is a huge need for banking services. It is one of the most unbanked economies in the world as most consumers stay in the cash-based informal economy. But as the fintech ecosystem develops, there are compelling reasons for people to join the formal economy, and Kueski is at the heart of those efforts.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Adal Flores, the CEO and Co-Founder of Kueski. They have been doing consumer loans for many years but their BNPL product Kueski Pay, is starting to get serious traction as Kueski is looking to build a complete financial ecosystem.

In this podcast you will learn:

The story behind the founding of Kueski.
How the company has evolved since they started in 2013.
How they encourage people to move away from the cash economy.
What is behind the growth of BNPL in Mexico.
How they underwrite people who are only using cash.
Details of their small pilot with physical stores for BNPL.
Why they are building a financial ecosystem.
Why the growth of BNPL in Mexico is very different to the USA, Australia of Europe.
How the Mexican regulators view fintech innovations like BNPL.
Why CoDi, the digital payments system, has not taken off in Mexico.
The scale they are at today.
Adal's vision for bringing more people into the formal economy.

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Today, we discussed big fintech news from FTX, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, Ramp, J.P. Morgan, Zelle®, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, Bank of America, Seedrs and more.

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A myriad of documentation is needed for lenders to make an accurate lending decision. This becomes even more complicated in the case of auto loans where an entirely new category of paperwork enters the picture. Lenders need to be able to process this unstructured data quickly and easily.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Justin Wickett, the CEO and Co-Founder of Informed.iq. They have tackled this challenge head-on and are able to automate verifications in real-time with 99% accuracy.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Justin's time at Lyft and Credit Karma helped solidify the idea for Informed.
Details of the Informed core product.
How the automated verification process works.
How the gig economy has complicated income verification.
The kinds of documents they are processing.
How they are using AI and Robotic Process Automation.
What they are doing when it comes to fraud prevention.
Why they decided to start with auto loans.
The core target market for Informed.
What their partnership with Origence (formerly CU Direct) means.
How they work with credit unions, where there are limited tech capabilities.
Justin's vision for the future of Informed.

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On the show today we discuss big fintech news from the Federal Reserve Board, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, Affirm, Galaxy Digital, BitGo, Silvergate Bank, Signature Bank, Customers Bank and more.

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This week on the news show we discussed big news stories from Plaid, Wise, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, Tornado Cash, Figure, Digit, Coinbase, Marqeta, Upstart and more.

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Before the pandemic, very few banks were interested in small business loans, those sub-$100,000 loans that are the lifeblood of millions of small businesses. But when forced into action with the Paycheck Protection Program banks found (often with the help of fintechs) that they could not only underwrite these loan sizes, they could do it online. That has been a game changer.

My next guests on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast are Brock Blake, CEO and Founder, and Denada Ramnishta, Chief Growth Officer, of Lendio. They enabled hundreds of thousands of PPP loans and were integral in helping hundreds of banks become online lenders. Now, they are taking it to the next level.

In this podcast you will learn:

How people should think about Lendio today.
How the PPP has changed small business lending forever.
What is the state of small business lending today.
The idea of the three Capital C's of lending.
The different types of data that are important in underwriting today.
The rich data Lendio has internally across so many different businesses.
Why the critical piece here is open data.
How they help small business owners decide on the best loan product.
What has to happen to make capital-on-demand a reality.
The different types of lenders they work with.
The impact of higher interest rates on small businesses.
What is most exciting about the future of small business.

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If you go back just nine months, you will remember a time when fintech founders were raising capital with ease. Nine-figure funding rounds were the norm, and a new fintech unicorn was minted almost every day at ever higher valuations. Today, the pendulum has swung in the completely opposite direction where any funding round is a surprise with down rounds and layoffs now the norm.

To make sense of all this craziness, we invited Logan Allin, the founder and managing partner at Fin Capital, to the podcast. His recent Navigator deck caught my attention, it is packed full of advice for founders and thoughts on the industry, and he has made it publicly available for everyone.

In this podcast you will learn:

Logan's background and the founding story of Fin Capital.
How he first got into fintech and what attracted him to it
The gaps in the industry that were not being addressed by traditional VC.
What he means when he talks about SaaS Plus businesses.
A breakdown of their three private funds and their different focuses.
The six sub-sectors of fintech where they invest.
The quarterly Navigator deck that they share with their founders and now the industry.
Logan's specific advice for founders looking to ride out this downturn.
How founders should think about valuation multiples today.
When Logan thinks the IPO window for fintech companies will reopen.
What a normal fintech valuation market looks like and when we will get there.

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On this week's Fintech Nexus News show we discussed big news stories from Coinbase, BlackRock, Robinhood, PayPal, SoFi, CFTC, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Equifax, #superapps, #consumercredit, #cryptohacks and more.

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When it comes to Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) consumers continue to spend. They love the product in all of its varieties. While those of us in the fintech space lament the huge drop in valuations with many of the BNPL leaders, consumers don't care. They just continue to use the product.

The BNPL pioneers all focused on the merchant model, where they do deals with large brands to offer their BNPL solutions to consumers. But there is more awareness today (thanks to Apple) of the direct to consumer model.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Al Periu, the CEO of Zilch USA. Zilch began in the UK and built a successful direct to consumer BNPL business very quickly and they have recently launched in the US.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Al first connected with the Zilch team.
Why his experience at Funding Circle was just what Zilch needed.
A description of Zilch's UK business.
How their product works in the US.
Who their typical customer is.
How they are trying to get to top of wallet with the consumer.
Why they decided to go direct to consumer instead of focusing on merchants.
Al's thoughts on Apple's entry into the BNPL space.
What the BNPL pioneers provided to the market that helps Zilch.
Details of their business model.
Where the capital is coming from to fund the Pay-in-4 loans.
How lawmakers should be thinking about BNPL.
His thoughts about Klarna's recent down round.
How Zilch was able to close a funding round at a flat valuation.
Where BNPL is going to go over the next decade.
Their plans for Zilch in the US.

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Those companies that are no longer small businesses but not yet large corporations occupy what is called the "middle market." When it comes to lending to these companies, it is very relationship-driven and not exactly a tech-forward operation. So, this spells an opportunity for a fintech-centered approach to middle market lending.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Meredith Carter, the CEO of Context Business Lending. They are an asset-based lender (ABL), and you can tell they are a little different because they have trademarked the term: Consider ABL Disrupted.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Meredith became aware of Context Business Lending (CBL).
The state of the middle market asset-based lending market.
How transactions get done in this market.
The different industries they focus on.
The typical companies that come to CBL for a loan.
Range of loan terms and interest rates.
How they are bringing automation to the underwriting process.
The average length of time from initial contact to funded loan.
How they fared during the pandemic.
Why they decided to lean in and continued during that time.
The capital markets advantage of being backed by a single family office.
How they work with banks when co-funding the loans.
What they do to monitor their loan portfolio.
The scale they are at today.
Meredith's vision for CBL.

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If you have been following the crypto space for any length of time, you hear the excitement that many people have for the tokenization of assets. They talk about being able to trade any asset globally, doing it instantly and with transparency. But there has always been a missing piece to this puzzle: compliance. How are governments going to get comfortable with this?

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Dan Doney, the CEO and Co-founder of Securrency. They have taken this challenge head-on. You see it right there on their home page: "imagine a world of effortless compliance, borderless transactions and newfound financial fluidity." Now, these words sound idyllic but what is different with Securrency is they have built the technology and capability to make this a reality.

In this podcast you will learn:

The circuitous route Dan took to become an entrepreneur.
The broader problem that Securrency is looking to solve.
Why compliance and liquidity are inextricably linked.
The services they are providing for financial institutions.
How and why they first connected with WisdomTree.
Details of the assets they will be tokenizing for WisdomTree.
Why globalized distribution is one of the key use cases.
How they are blending the payments process with the investing process.
How Securrency has tackled and solved the compliance challenge.
How they work with new issuers to tokenize their assets.
An example of how someone will be able to trade tokenized assets.
Why they are not focused on tokenizing crypto assets at this time.
Dan's vision for the future of the global financial system.

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On today's show we discussed big news from Celsius, Stripe, Klarna, Three Arrows Capital Pte Ltd, Plaid, OpenSea, The Home Depot, PlayStation, Quadrata, Inc., BNPL and more.

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Tens of millions of people are living and working in a foreign country and sending money to their families back home. They want a remittance service that is convenient, inexpensive and trustworthy. And while the remittance business has been around for more than a century, there are better options today than ever before.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Matt Oppenheimer, the CEO and founder of Remitly. He started the company back in 2011, just as smartphones were getting going, and has built it into one of the world leaders in the space operating in some 135 countries today and sending billions of dollars around the world each year.

In this podcast you will learn:

How Matt's time in Kenya gave him the idea to start Remitly.
Why the timing for starting Remitly was one of the keys to his success.
How he describes Remitly today.
Where they operate and the main remittance corridors.
How the remittance process works exactly.
The prevalence of cash versus electronic transfers.
Why the complexity is in doing localization at scale.
What is involved in expanding to a new geography.
A profile of the typical customer using Remitly.
What banks are missing by not serving the immigrant population.
Matt's views on crypto and its role in the remittance space.
What he is working on today that is most interesting.
What he finds most exciting in payments and banking today.
His vision for remittances and where we will be by the of the decade.

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On the news show today we discuss big fintech news from Voyager Digital, FTX, Nexo, Vauld, Meta, Klarna, Goldman Sachs, ONE, defi, embedded finance and more.

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There is a massive market that has been all but ignored by fintech founders. I am talking about the senior market. We have tens of millions of people, many with a decent net worth, with few financial services targeting them. This needs to change because the financial needs of this population are only going to become more complex and demanding over time.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Abby Levy, the co-founder and general partner at Primetime Partners. After helping her father who had been retired for 20 years she realized there is very little infrastructure in place to support older adults and she saw that as a real opportunity. So, she started a venture capital firm to help founders looking to provide products for this market.

In this podcast you will learn:

How her personal experience led to her becoming a venture capitalist.
How she met her partner, the venture capital legend Alan Patricof.
The state of the financial wellbeing of seniors in this country.
Why fintech founders are not focusing enough on this massive market.
The many categories where there are huge opportunities:
- Asset decumulation - why we need a plan to tap into liquidity of assets.
- Pre-retirement or "pretirement" - planning for retirement later in a career.
- Post-retirement - gig economy opportunities and the off-ramp for retirees.
- Senior-friendly credit products - we need more creative products to help seniors and their families.
- Care insurtech - only 7% of Americans have Long Term Care insurance, we need better options.
- Health-fintech crossovers - hospitals and providers are partnering with fintechs on payment schemes.
Who the founders are that are coming across Abby's desk.
What it will take for fintech founders to focus on the senior market.
What the future might look like for fintechs focused on this population.

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On the show today we discussed fintech news from FTX, BlockFi, Robinhood, Celsius, OpenSea, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Cambridge Judge Business School, Amount, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple and more.

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Mortgage servicing is one of the few areas of finance that has been relatively untouched by fintech. It is very complex with huge technology and compliance requirements that creates a large barrier to entry for newcomers. But there are new entrants that are not taking on the incumbents directly but partnering with them in one of their key areas of need: loss mitigation.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Eric Rachmel, the CEO and Founder of Brace. They have created a modern tech stack that works seamlessly with the traditional systems of the large servicers to provide end-to-end loss mitigation.

In this podcast you will learn:

The opportunity Eric saw that led to the founding of Brace.
Why there has been such little innovation in mortgage servicing.
How mortgage servicers operate today.
What their standard procedure is for loss mitigation.
How the Brace loss mitigation system works.
The types of loan servicers that Brace works with today.
How a new system such as Brace works with legacy servicing solutions.
What they found out in their consumer survey from earlier this year.
Eric's perspective on the potential acquisition of Black Knight by ICE.
How he used his background as a VC when raising money for Brace.
Why loan servicing has taken the spotlight in recent years.
What an economic downturn might do for Brace's business.
What is next for Brace.

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The venture capital business has had an interesting couple of years. Deals were done with a speed that was previously unimaginable and without any face-to-face meetings. Plus the entry of huge amounts of money from private equity and investors with deep pockets caused an unprecedented increase in valuations. Now, the world has changed again.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. This was recorded at Fintech Nexus USA in New York last month when I interviewed Matt on our keynote stage. You can also watch the video of this discussion.

Matt pulls no punches in this discussion and describes in pretty stark terms the challenges that fintech entrepreneurs will face over the next 12-18 months. We end with Matt's thoughts on the future of money and why decentralization is such a key part of this future.

In this discussion you will learn:

Why the state of fintech today is fantastic for the end users.
Why Matt believes the run-up in fintech valuations was a toxic situation.
How Zoom changed the venture capital business for Bain.
The percentage of all money invested in fintech that came from VCs.
Why fintech public market valuations say more about public markets than it does about fintech.
Why Matt thinks the public markets are broken.
How the venture capital business compares today to pre-pandemic times.
Why there is a narrow window in the very short term to get deals done.
Matt's thesis on the future of money that he wrote in Forbes.
What is inevitable about the move to decentralized finance.
What finance will look like in 20-30 years.

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On the show today we discussed Coinbase, BlockFi, Celsius, PayPal, Affirm, HomeLight, Mayor Eric Adams, Abra, American Express, European Central Bank and more.

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Employee retention is something that many companies, large and small, struggle with constantly. Despite this obvious pain point, there has not really been a fintech-focused approach to attacking this problem. Stock options and season tickets to ballgames will only motivate, or be appropriate for, certain audiences. But everyone loves cash.

My guests on today's episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast are Rob Frohwein and Kathryn Petralia. They became big names in the fintech space as the founders of Kabbage which they sold to American Express in 2020. This dynamic duo is back with a new company called Keep Financial and they are out to revolutionize employee compensation.

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On the news show this week we talked about big news from Apple, PayPal, Senators Lummis and Gillibrand, Custodia Bank, Checkout.com, Upstart, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Stripe and more.

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The financial regulatory apparatus in this country is incredibly complex. Much of it has been patched together over the past 90 years or so and does not reflect the realities of this modern world. But what needs to change? How can government become better at regulating finance?

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Sultan Meghji. He is the former head of innovation and the FDIC and he grappled with those issues firsthand. Now that he has left the agency he is able to talk freely about what is most needed for regulators to, not just deal with a rapidly changing financial system, but to embrace it.

In this podcast you will learn:

Why Sultan decided to take the job at the FDIC.
The innovations he was most focused on.
The programs he worked on first.
When it comes to new technology, what banks need most urgently.
The biggest challenge to enacting change in banking.
Why banks are getting a lower percentage of money injected into the economy.
How the government can attract talent and why it is such a big problem.
What he highlighted in his Bloomberg op-ed.
The reasons that Sultan quit after a year on the job.
The reaction he received from his op-ed.
If we were designing a regulatory system from scratch, what it should look like.
Why we need to incentivize global capital to come to the United States.
Some incremental changes that can happen to get us to a better place.
Sultan's perspective on the future of financial regulation.

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The debt buying process is one that has traditionally been highly manual with Excel spreadsheets flying around and not much automation or sophistication. But that has started to change as fintech has come to debt buying and selling.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Matthew Wratten, the CEO and founder of EverChain (formerly known as Debt Trader). EverChain has created a platform that allows debt buyers and sellers to manage their non-performing loans with a level of technology and compliance not before seen in the industry.

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On the news show this week we discussed Affirm, Stripe, OpenSea, Binance, Ripple, FTX, Nav Technologies, Inc., Marcus by Goldman Sachs, Gemini, TikTok, Chime and more.

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When you have a population of several hundred million people with high penetration of smartphones and a banking system that does not serve the majority of the population well, you have a recipe for fintech innovation. And that is exactly what is happening in Southeast Asia today.

My next guests on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast are Moses Lo and Tessa Wijaya, co-founders of Xendit. Xendit is a fintech infrastructure company, building payments infrastructure to make it easier for the millions of businesses in Indonesia and the Philippines to accept payments. And they are quickly expanding into other products.

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At any point in time, there is $40 trillion in accounts receivable on the balance sheets of all global businesses. That is a huge amount of capital that, if unlocked, could be a major boost to the world's economy. But how to unlock this capital efficiently?

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast has an answer. Sandy Kemper is the founder and CEO of C2FO, a platform that enables companies to work with their suppliers and customers to unlock this capital. How they do this is the subject of this episode.

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Every financial institution on the planet needs to have a digital identity solution. Consumers want to open accounts online or on their phone and they want it to be a quick and efficient process. At the same time, banks want the process to be secure with as little fraud as possible. These two approaches are often at odds with one another.

The next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Mike Tuchen, the CEO of Onfido. They have dedicated themselves to solving this conundrum and in doing so have become a world leader in helping financial institutions verify the identity of their customers.

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The use of AI underwriting models has become widespread in recent years as lenders look to expand their credit boxes without taking on additional risk. But there has been a lot of talk, particularly in the last year or so, about bias in these lending models. There is a real need to address this bias problem head-on.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Kareem Saleh, the CEO and Founder of Fairplay. Their mission is to bring fairness to automated decisioning models in something they call Fairness-as-a-Service.

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On the Fintech Nexus (formerly LendIt Fintech) news show we discussed big stories from FTX, Plaid, Klarna, Nubank, Robinhood, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Keep Financial, Xendit, Chime and more.

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It is that time of year again, time for the LendIt Fintech USA Preview Show. The first big fintech show of the year is happening in New York City next week, on May 25 and 26.

My guests on the preview show are none other than Bo Brustkern, CEO and Co-Founder and Todd Anderson, Chief Content Officer. We take you through the different components of the event so attendees can get the most out of the show.

We are in the process of a rebrand, so our big LendIt Fintech USA show will be known as Fintech Nexus USA going forward.

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Many fintech companies need significant amounts of debt capital, and I am not just talking about lenders. For young companies, this can be a real problem because they don't have a track record that could bring in a warehouse line at a bank. This is where i80 Group comes in.

Today, my guests on the Fintech One-on-One podcast are Asher Hochberg and Peter Frank of i80 Group. Their company operates in a niche where they provide massive amounts of debt capital to VC-backed companies, up to 50 times the amount of equity capital.

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On the news show this week we discuss the crypto meltdown, stablecoins, Janet Yellen's comments, Coinbase, Tiger Global Management, Chainalysis Inc., CFPB, Terry Angelos, DriveWealth, Robinhood and more.

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TRON is the fastest-growing public blockchain in the world with almost 92 million accounts. It was founded by Justin Sun in 2017 and is a layer 1 decentralized blockchain with an entire ecosystem built around it. It recently switched to become a DAO and they have just launched the USDD decentralized stablecoin.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Dave Uhryniak, the Director of Blockchain Strategy at TRON. He introduces us to the different parts of the TRON ecosystem and explains why decentralized finance is so important.

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The rise of Ethereum and decentralized finance has resulted in a huge amount of press coverage in both mainstream and fintech press. Some people like to focus on the prices of the various tokens and others prefer to talk about the technology piece. But very little has been written about the origin story of Ethereum and why decentralization has been so important.

My guest today on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Laura Shin. She was one of the first journalists in the world to cover crypto full time and has had a front-row seat to all the developments over the last several years. She is the host of the popular podcast, Unchained and has recently published a book called The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze.

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The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

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On this week's show we discuss big fintech stories about Stripe, Plaid, Yuga Labs, Robinhood, Fiserv. Affirm. California, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, nfts and more.

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The global supply chain is extraordinarily complex and, as we have seen recently, prone to disruption. But technology has made vast improvements for both buyers and sellers which means these disruptions can be mitigated to some extent.

The next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Christian Lanng, the CEO and Co-Founder of Tradeshift. With 1.5 million companies in 190 countries connected on their platform Tradeshift is the world's largest trade technology platform. Many, if not most, of the largest manufacturers, distributors and retailers use Tradeshift to maintain the efficiency of their supply chain.

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A large number of fintech lenders launched in the early 2010s and some are reaching a significant scale today. It is interesting to see those that have stayed focused on lending and those that have expanded into adjacent areas of finance, offering a more full suite of banking services.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Eyal Lifshitz, the CEO and Founder of BlueVine. They began life as a lender but Eyal's vision was always bigger than that. He sees BlueVine as providing the primary financial relationship for their small business customers, meeting all their needs in one platform.

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On today's show we discussed the Rohit Chopra's (CFPB Director) testimony to both the House and Senate, Fidelity Investments, Robinhood, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, stablecoins, Starling Bank, LendingClub, Lendistry and more.

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Today is a good time to be an investor in alternative assets. Whether it is art, crypto, private equity, real estate, venture capital, or private credit there are many good options, particularly for accredited investors. And at the forefront of this alternatives boom is Yieldstreet.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Milind Mehere, the CEO and Co-Founder of Yieldstreet. He was last on the show back in 2017 and since then they have grown to be the market leader in alternative investments for individuals with around $3 billion invested.

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The tokenization of digital assets is still in its infancy. There are some innovative companies that have created the technology to put a variety of assets onto the blockchain. But no one had done anything with venture capital and limited partners until SPiCE VC, the world's first tokenized VC fund.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Carlos Domingo, the CEO and Founder of Securitize. Carlos and his co-founder spun out the technology for SPiCE VC and formed Securitize in 2017. Since then, the company has achieved a number of breakthroughs, not least of which was becoming the first SEC Registered Transfer Agent operating on the blockchain in 2019.

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Making fintech news this week were Coinbase, Robinhood, Goldman Sachs, FTX, Plaid, Column, Nexo, Chime, digital onboarding, stablecoins and more

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While many fintechs have had a busy last couple of years I think BM Technologies may trump them all. They went into the pandemic as part of Customers Bank but in the last 16 months they have completed the spinoff from that bank, they have gone public via SPAC and they have recently announced that they are going to acquire a community bank in Seattle.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Luvleen Sidhu, the CEO and Chairman of BM Technologies. She was last on the show back in 2019 and, as I said, a lot has changed since then. They have become a real trailblazer in the banking as a service space and are in the process of becoming a bank again.

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Today we are talking about student loans. The $1.7 trillion student debt burden is causing real changes in the behavior of Gen Z and Millennials. It is a huge problem and it needs big ideas to bring about solutions that can scale. Every student loan holder needs to know all their options and how best they can save money. And in many ways, the best place to provide this help is a local bank or credit union.

My guests on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast are Laurel Taylor, the CEO and founder of FutureFuel and Sunil Sachdev, the Head of Fintech at Fiserv. These two companies have partnered to tackle the student debt problem, by bringing tools, awareness, and scale in this unique partnership. [Editor's Note: this conversation was recorded on March 31, 2022 and on April 6 we learned that the student loan moratorium has been extended to August 31.]

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Making news on this week's show was Brex, Circle, BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), The Digital Dollar Project, MoonPay, Step, FIS, Fireblocks, TransUnion and more.

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I am a big fan of alternative investments, it is how I got involved in fintech in the first place (through investing in LendingClub loans). I prefer to invest in alternatives through a tax-advantaged retirement account. But investing in alternatives through an IRA account has been a cumbersome and complicated process. Until now.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Eric Satz, the CEO and Co-Founder of Alto. He saw what a bad experience it was for investors trying to open a self-directed IRA and he decided to do something about it. Now, Alto is on a mission to take alternative IRA investing mainstream. Full disclosure: I have been an Alto customer for over a year now.

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Crypto as a payment mechanism has never really taken off. The mechanics are difficult and there has never been an easy way for merchants to accept crypto for payment. But there is a new kind of tool that is starting to get some real traction: a crypto-backed debit card. This is where you spend your crypto through a regular Visa or Mastercard debit card.

Our next guests on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Pavel Matveev and Harold Montgomery of Wirex. Wirex came out with their first debit card all the way back in 2015 and so it is now quite a mature product. They introduced this product to the world, starting in Europe and just recently launching in the United States.

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Credit unions are in a challenging place right now. While they typically have a loyal customer base, their customers are demanding cutting-edge technology which is often beyond their technical capabilities. So, many are turning to fintech companies to help them compete in the market.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Jeff Winner, the CEO of Happy Money. They have focused on the credit union space, working with them as capital partners for many years. But soon Happy Money will be launching an API-based lending-as-a-service offering that will bring cutting-edge tech to credit unions.

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Small business owners have better tools than ever before to help them manage their finances. But even with all these tools, the user experience is often not intuitive and there are long learning curves for them to be really useful. Yet, many consumer-facing apps have beautiful and simple interfaces that are a joy to use.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Wayne Chang, the co-founder and co-CEO of Digits. They have built intuitive tools designed to be used by both small business owners and accountants that are truly groundbreaking. They have taken the best design principles of consumer apps and applied them to small business finance. Wayne did a live demo of his new software during the podcast and I came away impressed.

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Over the last couple of years, we have seen many of the biggest names in UK fintech launch in the United States. None have been able to enjoy the same traction they received at home as they struggle to differentiate themselves in the very complex and competitive U.S. market. But there is one company I have been paying close attention to as they have planned their launch here.

My next episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast features the leaders of Curve. Shachar Bialick is the founder and CEO and Amanda Orson is the head of their US operations. They have just launched to customers here this month so I wanted to chat with them to discuss their plans and learn more about their unique products.

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I would argue that few if any digital bank CEOs were thinking seriously about crypto back in 2015. Fewer still were thinking they should start a digital bank with the goal of incorporating crypto opportunities into the very fabric of their bank. And none would be so crazy as to create their own banking core from scratch with crypto very much central to this process.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Stuart Sopp, the CEO and founder of Current. He did all those things and now he leads one of the fastest-growing digital banks in the country. And they are poised to take full advantage of the many opportunities that crypto and DeFi provide.

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Making news this week was ConsenSys, Microsoft, European Parliament, Apple, the CFPB, Quadrata, Inc., Green Dot Corporation, Plaid, OppFi, American Express and more.

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Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) has become quite popular these days with dozens of banks offering different services to fintechs and tech companies. But almost all these banks were not originally conceived this way, they are adding BaaS as a new product offering.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Wendy Cai-Lee, the CEO and Co-Founder of Piermont Bank. The bank only began operations in 2019 but it is a fully chartered bank that has been built from the ground up to take advantage of the BaaS opportunity.

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We have seen this stat so many times. If you add up all the community banks and credit unions in the United States their scale would make them a top-five bank. Sure, but that really doesn't make much sense because all these community institutions are separate companies. But what if you could combine some of the marketing and product offerings and streamline it across hundreds or even thousands of institutions? Then you might see some real advantages.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Gabe Krajicek, the CEO of Kasasa. This is exactly what Kasasa is doing. By providing a unified product and marketing program community banks and credit unions can take advantage of their collective scale and have offerings to compete with even the largest of the megabanks.

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The crypto space is having a moment. Most of us saw the Superbowl ads from a variety of crypto firms and the war in Ukraine is focusing more attention on crypto than ever before. People often compare the surge in crypto to the dot.com era but there is a big difference. Many of the large firms in crypto today are already profitable and have been able to raise almost infinite amounts of money.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Nicolas Cary, the vice-chairman and co-founder of Blockchain.com. While they did not take out a Superbowl ad they are one of the leaders in crypto and have been around longer than pretty much all their competitors.

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One of the most dynamic spaces in fintech today is identity verification. The way we verify ourselves online keeps changing as the tools improve and we try to stay ahead of the fraudsters.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Rick Song. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Persona. Again and again on the show, Rick talked about the importance of customization for the way identity is verified. There should be no one-size-fits-all approach today as companies need to change their approach depending on the risk factors being presented by the user.

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The lending space has come a long way since the original online lending pioneers came on the scene 15 years ago. Today, so much underwriting is done instantly, disbursements can be instant (even on weekends) and the loan application experience is quick and easy. Many lenders have expanded into new product lines to keep their customers engaged.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Tom Burnside, the CEO and Co-Founder of LendingPoint. Tom was last on the show back in 2018 and obviously a lot has changed since then. LendingPoint has added many products beyond the simple term loans and is one of the few consumer lenders to have expanded into business lending.

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It was another busy week of fintech news and on the show today I discussed the top stories with Todd Anderson and Jonah Crane. We discussed big news from BlockFi, Coinbase, Crypto.com, FTX, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Discover Financial Services, BIM - Buy It Mobility Networks, Circle, MoneyGram International, NYSE and more.

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When we really started covering financial inclusion and financial health here at LendIt five years ago it seemed that we had a very long way to go. Tens of millions of consumers were still left outside the financial system with no credit score and therefore had little to no access to credit. That has changed a great deal in the last five years. At the same time we have seen an explosion in Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platforms.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Greg Wright, the Chief Product Officer at the Experian credit bureau. Experian has released multiple products and tools in recent years that brings the scored population of those actively looking for credit close to 100%. They have also just announced a brand new initiative, a BNPL credit bureau, which is key in their mission to expand financial access.

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Banking is at an interesting inflection point. There is better technology available today than ever before that can really help banks run more efficiently as their customers are demanding faster and more user-friendly services. At the same time, just over the horizon is blockchain technology, DeFi, stablecoins and more that could make some of today's cutting-edge technology obsolete.

My next guests on the Fintech One-on-One podcast are living at the center of this conundrum. Ryan Zacharia and Adam Aspes are both General Partners in JAM Special Opportunity Ventures. They have recently created a joint venture between Jacobs Asset Management and FINTOP Capital called JAM Fintop. They manage two funds, a $150 million BankTech fund and a new $110 million Blockchain fund.

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On today's news show Todd Anderson, Kabir Kumar and Peter Renton discuss big fintech news from the SEC, Silvergate Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Polygon Technology, FDIC, GoCardless, DriveWealth, Betterment and more.

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Good financial habits should be formed before adulthood. Unfortunately, most schools still don't spend much time teaching this kind of thing. But the good news is that there are new tools out there today that make it easy for kids to not just learn good habits but to understand what it means to be financially healthy. And how you reach teenagers today is through the phone.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is CJ MacDonald, the CEO and Co-Founder of Step. Today, Step provides a bank account for teens but, as you will discover in this interview, their goal is so much more than that. As the parent of teenagers this episode is personal for me.

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While the media focuses on the unicorns and the massive funding rounds happening in fintech today, there are so many interesting early-stage companies that are often overlooked. The newsletter, This Week in Fintech, has one of the most extensive lists of fintech funding rounds, often reporting on companies that have raised less than a million dollars.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Nik Milanovic, the founder of This Week in Fintech and the general partner of The Fintech Fund I. He has become one of the leading voices covering fintech and his meetups are bringing together fintech enthusiasts in cities all over the world.

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It was another busy news week in fintech and we discussed it all on the LendIt Fintech Weekly News show, today with Todd Anderson, Andrew Dix, and me. Making news today was Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, FTX, Ramp, Amount, Linear Financial Technologies, Upgrade, Inc., Block, Afterpay, PayPal, TD and more.

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For digital assets like bitcoin to go truly mainstream they need to have onramps through banks. People trust banks with their money and if their own bank is offering crypto trading in a seamless way many more millions of people will join the crypto revolution. But for banks to be able to offer this they need sophisticated infrastructure, which is where our guest today comes in.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Patrick Sells, the Chief Innovation Officer of NYDIG. They are building the technology to allow any bank, credit union or fintech to offer bitcoin to their customers and they are really starting to get some traction.

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One of the many benefits that fintech has brought is the democratization of investing. What initially attracted me to fintech was the ability to invest in consumer loans through LendingClub, an asset class previously unavailable to individual investors. Another asset class that has been unavailable to regular investors is collectibles. Want to invest in a classic car, rare baseball cards, books, coins or wine? You typically had to be wealthy. Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is George Leimer, the CEO of Rally. With Rally you can buy and sell shares in a wide range of collectible assets. With low minimums and no accredited investor requirements, they really are democratizing investing in a new way.

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Making news this week were Walmart (along with Even and ONE Finance), Silvergate Bank, Diem Association, Apple, UBS, Wealthfront, Experian, Plaid, the SEC, LendingClub and more.

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The franchise industry is unique. While the franchisees are often small businesses run by entrepreneurs, the franchisors they work with can be large businesses. It is an unusual space to underwrite when it comes to small business loans, so it requires unique expertise to do well.

Our next guest of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Denise Thomas, the CEO and Co-Founder of ApplePie Capital, they are specialists in franchise financing. We last had Denise on the show five years ago and I wanted to get her back on to see how the franchise industry has been doing and how her business has evolved.

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The auto finance market is such a unique space. In some ways it has a lot in common with home finance, it is an asset-backed loan after all, but it also seems to be a far less mature market when it comes to fintech disruption. That is starting to change, thankfully, because there are likely tens of millions of people who are overpaying for their auto loans today.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Kevin Bennett, the CEO of Caribou (formerly called MotoRefi). Caribou is tackling two problems at the same time. One around awareness of the very concept of auto refinancing and two, saving people money on their car payments as well as other car expenses.

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This week on the News Show we discussed big news from SoFi, NYDIG, Ron Shevlin, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Crypto.com, Meta, Coinbase, Truist, Russia and more.

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Embedded finance is one of those fintech terms that gets thrown around a lot. But the reason this trend has real traction is because there are huge benefits for the end-user when finance operates in this embedded fashion. One of the very earliest proponents of embedded finance was DriveWealth, having started in 2012.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Bob Cortright. He is the CEO and founder of DriveWealth, the platform for embedding brokerage infrastructure. Their most common use case today is helping any company enable fractional stock market trading in U.S. equities but the platform has potential far beyond that.

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It was a much busier news week in fintech this week. On our weekly news show, this week with Todd Anderson and Timothy Li, we discussed Checkout.com, Brex, PayPal, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, TransUnion, Spring Labs, Federal Reserve Board, Figure, PointCard™ and more.

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If you receive a parking ticket or are late on a utility bill your options as a consumer are pretty limited. You need to go to the website and pay or send a check in the mail by the due date. If you don't there will likely be serious consequences. What about bringing the power of technology to enable more flexibility in these situations?

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, she is the CEO and Co-Founder of Promise. They have a unique product that allows users to use almost any payment method to pay government bills. Need to pay your parking ticket by Venmo or your water bill by installments using Cash App? No problem. Promise is bringing the power of fintech to a huge but overlooked sector of the economy.

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In the first news show of year we discuss 2022 fintech trends to watch, Dave becoming a public company, Petal announces the first big funding round of the year, China's CBDC is working with WeChat, BNPL is coming to credit reporting agencies and Starling Bank's founder, Anne Boden, in hot water with her fellow fintech entrepreneurs.

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At LendIt Fintech LatAm I also chatted with Angela Strange, a general partner at the well-known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Angela has become a prolific investor in Latin American fintech, as well as U.S. fintech, and so brings a unique perspective to the region.

If you want to get some background on Angela's thoughts on Latin American fintech, she co-authored this paper earlier this year that laid out the case for the rapid growth of Latin American fintech.

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At LendIt Fintech LatAm I chatted with Pierpaolo Barbieri, the CEO and founder of Ualá. I decided to turn this interview into a podcast because I think Ualá is becoming a really important company in the region. And it is a company we are going to continue to hear more from as they grow.

Ualá started with a prepaid debit card in Argentina and in less than four years they have amassed almost 4 million customers, including 25% of the 18-25 year old population. They have recently expanded to Mexico and have become one of the fastest-growing companies in all of fintech.

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Another fast-paced #fintech news show today with Todd Anderson and Bo Brustkern. We covered the big stories of week discussing NYDIG, Anchorage Digital, MoneyLion, Even Financial, Asenso Finance, ConsenSys, Mastercard, Thirty Five Ventures, Coinbase and the 2022 predictions from Ron Shevlin.

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It has been said many times in the past couple of years: "in the future, every company will be a fintech". But what does that really mean and how do we get there?

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Yuval Brisker, the CEO and Co-Founder of Alviere. He has taken this vision and run with it, creating the infrastructure that really will enable any company to offer financial services to their customers.

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In a special Latin American edition of the LendIt Fintech Weekly News Show we focus on the Nubank IPO with special guest Andres Fontao of Finnovista. This is the biggest IPO in fintech history and with a $48 billion valuation Nubank is the most valuable financial services firm in all of Latin America. We also cover some of the highlights from the LendIt Fintech LatAm event that took place in Miami this week.

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The neobank space has really heated up the last couple of years. The leaders are getting real traction with millions of customers now and the rapid growth showing no signs of slowing down. These fintech companies have really changed consumer expectations now and we are seeing banks react to these new dynamics.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Jason Wilk, the CEO and Co-Founder of Dave (Jason was last on the show back in 2019). Dave was the first neobank to offer real overdraft protection and have started a movement there that is being felt by banks large and small. But they are just getting started.

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The biggest #fintech stories of the week featured Jack Dorsey. Square, Capital One, New York Community Bank, Figure, David Marcus, SoFi, Thought Machine, Fundbox and more.

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As finance went digital in 2020 the identity verification space became hot. Suddenly every bank needed to onboard customers online and they had to verify the identity of these customers. So, established companies that could provide a simple way to do this were in hot demand.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Laura Spiekerman, the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Alloy. Alloy has been around since 2015 and they were starting to get real traction before the pandemic hit. Now, they have been on a growth tear as demand for identity verification has skyrocketed due to the pandemic.

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The use of income and employment data in lending has become much more widespread in recent years. For any fintech-enabled lender, access to this data instantly via API is critical to their ability to provide a seamless borrower experience. And of course, they want coverage of as much of the working population as possible.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Joel Rickman of Equifax. His official title is the Senior Vice-President of Verification Services at Equifax Workforce Solutions but basically, he is in charge of The Work Number (TWN). This is the most mature and widely used income and employment verification system out there, with coverage of more than 125 million workers.

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Another action-packed fintech news show today with Todd Anderson and special guest Kabir Kumar. We hit on all the big news stories of the week discussing VanEck, N26, Upgrade, Inc., Amazon, Visa, Oportun, Digit, BlockFi, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Plaid, Crypto.com and more.

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More than any other vertical, the business lending space has gone through a transformation these past couple of years. And those companies providing digital lending solutions have seen interest in their services skyrocket.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Dan O'Malley, the CEO and Co-Founder of Numerated. They have been one of the real beneficiaries of this seismic shift in attitudes towards business lending at banks and they have fully embraced this opportunity. Not bad for a company that was spun out of a 200-year-old bank just four years ago.

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We are focusing on Latin America again this week in the lead-up to LendIt Fintech LatAm. This week we get the view of a native Bolivian, someone who has become a real thought leader not just in Latin American fintech but U.S. fintech as well.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Miguel Armaza, the co-founder and managing partner at Gilgamesh Ventures. But many of you will know him better as one of the hosts of the Wharton Fintech Podcast, where he hosted 140 episodes. He has graduated from Wharton now and has a new show called Fintech Leaders and a newsletter of the same name.

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Another great news show this week with Todd Anderson and special guest Dan Quan. We discussed the top #fintech stories of the week including news from Amazon, Venmo, Robinhood, Socure, Coinbase, Affirm, SoFi, Upstart, #stablecoins and more.

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We have a problem in this country. For the most part, money moves around slowly, at much the same speed as when we had a paper-based payments system decades ago. This makes no sense in today's world but we have a very complex system today that is going to take years, or more likely decades, to truly move to instant money movement.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Stephany Kirkpatrick, the CEO and founder of Orum. They are trying to solve this very big problem a financial infrastructure layer that can work with any kind of payment, be it ACH, wire, Visa Direct, RTP, or eventually FedNow.

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Another great news show today with Todd Anderson and Timothy Li where we discussed the biggest #fintech stories of the week. We talked about Nubank, COP26 - UN Climate Change Conference, Klarna, Kakaopay, Commonwealth Bank, Gemini, Chainalysis Inc., #DeFi, #vcfunding, #stablecoins and more.

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It is easy to forget that the Washington we read about or see on television is quite different from the Washington where our industry is conversing with regulators. This is where trade associations engage with regulators on substantive issues and get their voices heard. Six years ago fintech had no real trade association at all. Today, we have a vibrant trade association that is lobbying on our behalf to help drive the industry forward.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Garry Reeder, the CEO of the American Fintech Council (AFC). Garry became CEO of the newly formed organization in March, formed from the merger of the Marketplace Lending Association and the Online Policy Institute.

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One the weekly news show today we discuss important news from Nubank, Chime, Stripe, Klarna, Visa, Mastercard, Bakkt, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Robinhood, LendingClub, and more.

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We are going to back to Latin America today as we do a deep dive into the payments space there. With dozens of countries in the region all with their own currency, their own payments infrastructure, it has not been easy to expand into new geographies, but it certainly is possible.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Wagner Ruiz, the Chief Risk Officer and Co-Founder of EBANX. EBANX is a payments leader in Latin America where they operate in 15 countries, making it easier to do cross border transactions.

(As we were about to publish there were two big announcements from EBANX. The have filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO and they acquired Brazilian B2B fintech Juno.)

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Until recently virtually no fintech companies were interested in a bank charter. It was just back in 2016 that SoFi ran a Superbowl ad with the "Don't Bank. SoFi" tagline. Now, they are looking to become a bank. Square and LendingClub have joined SoFi as approved banks (via different routes) and there are many applications that are still pending. So, I thought it was time to talk bank charters on the podcast.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Michele Alt, a co-founder and partner at Klaros Group. We spend a lot of time discussing the various options for fintech companies and we delve into some of the unique ways fintech companies are pursuing bank charters today.

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Another engaging news show today where we discussed a very busy week of news in fintech. There was big news from Plaid, the SEC, Facebook, PayPal, New York State Attorney General, PIMCO, FTX, N26 and more.

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One of the true pioneers of the fintech space joins us for the show today. This is someone who has become a giant of the fintech space, taking two companies from an idea to unicorn status in just a few short years.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Renaud Laplanche, the CEO and Co-Founder of Upgrade. He is back on the show for the third time (here are the first and second times) and the first time since he started Upgrade. We cover a range of different topics today and we delve deeply into some of Upgrade's unique product offerings.

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This week we cover the following news stories:

Coinbase is launching its own NFT platform to take on OpenSea
NerdWallet IPO Filing Shows 21M Unique Visitors Per Month
Crypto Lender Celsius Network Raises $400M in Bid to Reassure Regulators
Tala grabs $145M to offer more financial services in emerging markets
Crypto could cause 2008-level meltdown, Bank of England official warns
Oportun pulls bank charter application, says it plans to refile
Bank Dora: The First Neo-Credit Union in the U.S.
New custom fintech stock market ticker launches from LendIt Fintech
Jamie Dimon says bitcoin is ‘worthless’

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I have said many times that Latin America is the hottest region for fintech on the planet. The digital banks and lenders get most of the attention it seems but the payments space is where companies are actually profitable as they scale. One of the payments leaders in Latin America is Stone Co.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Augusto Lins, the President of Stone Co. Stone is a publicly traded company (listed on Nasdaq) based in Brazil that started in payments processing but now offers a fully integrated suite of banking, finance and software products for their merchants.

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We are talking about open banking again this week and we have one of the fintech pioneers on the show sharing his experience over the long evolution of open banking.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Steve Smith, the CEO and co-founder of Finicity. Finicity has been a real pioneer in the open banking space, or as Steve likes to call it an open financial data network, which is probably more accurate. Most importantly, we talk about what open banking can actually do, what it is doing today, and that is opening up access to credit for people who have previously been denied credit.

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This week we cover the following fintech news stories:

Google kills the Goolge Plex
The postal banking pilot
How card issuers helped fuel the BNPL boom
When Facebook went down so did Novi
US Bank launches a bitcoin custody service
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler testifies before Congress
Fintech's explosive growth has regulators scrambling

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Open banking is not a new concept. More than a decade ago companies like Yodlee were allowing their 30 million users to connect to online banking. But it has certainly come of age in the last two to three years as consumers demand more and better access to their financial data.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Justin Jackson, the VP of Product Management at Fiserv. Fiserv is a leader in technology solutions for financial services firms and Justin is an expert in open banking. In this illuminating discussion, he takes us through the open banking landscape and how banks and credit unions, as well as fintechs, are using open banking today.

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Using artificial intelligence in lending decisions has gone from a curiosity to, I would argue, the mainstream over the last five years. Most lenders have either started a pilot program or are considering it seriously and some, led by fintech lenders like Upstart, have made it core to their business.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Shri Santhanam. He is the EVP and GM of Global Analytics at Experian. Shri has spent much of his career bringing big data and AI to bear on a myriad of business challenges. For the last two years, he has been leading the global analytics initiatives for Experian.

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Embedded finance is a relatively new term in fintech but it getting set to revolutionize finance. Today it is relatively easy to add finance functionality either within a financial or non-financial firm. And we are beginning to see large brands embrace financial services as a way to increase engagement with their customers. I think this is a trend that is unstoppable.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Nigel Verdon, the CEO and co-founder of Railsbank. Nigel has deep experience in the fintech space, this is his third fintech company, and he has created Railsbank to make it quick and easy to scale any financial use-case via simple APIs, which are at the heart of embedded finance.

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The payments space was really the first sector within fintech to really get going. And while the payments pioneers like PayPal, Square and Marqeta (all more than a decade old) have brought us tremendous innovations there is a new wave of developments that will be reshaping the payments industry.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Kevin Olsen, also known as the Payments Professor. His day job is as the SVP of Payments Solutions at VSoft but I wanted to get him on the show to give us a Payments 101-type session so we can learn how the payments system works and what new developments we should know about.

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There are still more than 5,000 credit unions in this country and the vast majority of them are small. Few have large technology budgets but that doesn't mean they can't be at the forefront of technology innovation. Being small can make it easier for them to partner with fintech companies.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is David Tuyo, the CEO and President of University Credit Union, based in southern California. David believes that not only can credit unions compete, but they also have some inherent advantages over banks and even fintech companies.

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The home mortgage space has been undergoing a transformation over the past couple of years. We have seen fintech lenders grabbing market share as they were best suited to grow during the pandemic when everything went virtual. There has been so much innovation that financing a home is no longer the long and painful process that it historically has been.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Dan Snyder. He is the CEO and co-founder of Lower. They have been flying under the radar until recently but they are part of the new breed of fintech lender that is digitally native and growing rapidly.

See the full show notes here:

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With real estate prices at record highs all across the country, owning a home is becoming more out of reach for first-time homebuyers. For millennials and Gen-Z, saving enough money for a downpayment has become a huge challenge, much harder than it was for their parents or grandparents. A huge problem like this calls for a creative solution.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Adena Hefets, the CEO and co-founder of Divvy Homes. They have created a unique pathway to homeownership by rethinking the much-maligned rent-to-own model. With Divvy, people can search for their dream home, and when they find it, make a compelling, all-cash offer on behalf of Divvy. Divvy will buy the home and then rent it back to them, with a portion of the rent payments being used to build equity.

Full episode notes are here: https://www.lendacademy.com/podcast-311-adena-hefets-of-divvy-homes/

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The expense management space is heating up. While it has not garnered headlines much in the past there has been a lot more attention focused on it in the last couple of years. Earlier this year we saw Bill.com acquire Divvy for several billion dollars and companies like Brex are unicorns many times over. But hardly one is focused on the middle market companies, those with 50 to 1,000 employees.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Thejo Kote, the CEO and founder of Airbase. They have a differentiated offering bringing together bill payments, corporate cards and reimbursements within a single system that integrates deeply with the major accounting systems.

For the full notes of the episode go here:

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The home insurance industry has been dominated by legacy insurance carriers for decades. These companies are still doing business the same way as last century with a primarily transactional relationship with their customers. But there is a new breed of insurtech companies that are challenging the status quo and doing so in remarkable new ways.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Assaf Wand, the CEO and Co-Founder of Hippo. Hippo just went public this week (under the ticker HIPO) when they completed their SPAC merger and are set to become a major force in home insurance. Their approach is fundamentally different that will become apparent as you listen to this episode.

Full episode details are here: https://www.lendacademy.com/podcast-309-assaf-wand-of-hippo/

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In many ways the racial wealth gap has it roots in the financial system. It was one the driving forces behind the Community Reinvestment Act of the 1970s but clearly that did not solve the problem. We need radical new solutions that get to the heart of the problem and one of those solutions is more home ownership for minorities.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is B.C. Silver, the CEO of ChangeFi and President of The Change Company. ChangeFi is the digital banking arm of The Change Company and they call themselves "America's CDFI" with a focus on providing equal access to the American Dream.

Full episode notes are here.

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While America remains the richest economy in the world it is also the one where it is the most expensive to be poor. I have written about overdraft fees before (here and here) and that is one of the real problems with the banking system that is holding people back that live paycheck to paycheck. But it is about more than overdrafts, it is about expensive bank accounts and payments that take too long to clear.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Aaron Klein, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. He speaks and writes frequently on topics concerning economic equality and the flaws in our banking system. He is someone I have followed and admired for years and I was delighted when he agreed to this interview.

Full episode notes here.

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The freelance market in the U.S. is huge and it continues to grow. During the pandemic as millions of people were displaced from their regular job, many decided to supplement or replace their income with freelance work. These people have unique needs when it comes to banking, they are not quite a consumer and not really a small business. They are a bit of both.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Lilac Bar David, the CEO and co-founder of Lili. Lili is a digital bank designed and built for freelancers. They claim to be the only app a freelancer needs to manage their finances with all the popular features that users have come to expect from a digital banking app and many unique services built just for freelancers.

Full episode notes are here.

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I have been following Citizens Bank for many years as they built this robust online lending operation across multiple verticals. They have also launched an in-house digital bank called Citizens Access and they have a groundbreaking partnership with Apple which has, in many ways, changed the iPhone buying experience. They are a top 25 bank that has the mindset of a fintech.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Brendan Coughlin. He is the Head of Consumer Banking at Citizens Bank. He has been at the bank for 17 years and has worked in pretty much every consumer division and he now runs the entire consumer business for Citizens.

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One of the main use cases for decentralized finance (DeFi) has been lending. This typically involves crypto investors using their holdings as collateral to take out a loan to (often) invest in more crypto. This is all done programmatically via smart contracts but it has all seemed far removed from traditional finance. But in April, we had the world’s first real estate transaction conducted via DeFi.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Kirill Bensonoff, the co-founder and head of product at New Silver. He was the driving force behind this transaction and, as you will learn in this episode, is 100% committed to bringing more real estate transactions to DeFi. He sees many advantages which is he discusses in some depth on this show.

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The underserved are having a moment. And it is about time. There are more fintech companies targeting the non-prime community than ever before with better and less expensive products. The revolution in technology and data access is enabling fintech companies to go deeper into the underserved population than ever before.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Ken Rees, the co-founder and CEO of Covered Care, a patient financing provider for the non-prime. Ken has spent the past two decades focused on this population and he has gathered his thoughts in the new book, Teetering. His insights paint a clear picture of the challenges of those living paycheck to paycheck and what we can do about it.

Teetering: Why So Many Live On A Financial Tightrope And What To Do About It

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You have probably heard the terms DeFi, which is an abbreviation for Decentralized Finance and NFTs, meaning Non-Fungible Tokens. They have been covered in the news a great deal in the past month or more. So, I wanted to do an episode where we do a deep dive into these topics to find out not just what they are but what they might mean for the future of finance.

My next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast has a front row seat to this the changes we are seeing with DeFi and NFTs. Lex Sokolin is the Global Fintech Co-Head and the Chief Marketing Officer at ConsenSys, the leading blockchain technology software company that is building many of the tools for the next generation of financial infrastructure. Lex is also the author and publisher of the Fintech Blueprint newsletter and podcast.

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The biggest decision in anyone's life is the decision to start a family. For the growing segment of the population that can't do so naturally there is, of course, fertility treatments. Now, this is an exciting, scary and often heart wrenching time. And for many people the financial burden for these treatments is too much and they have to turn elsewhere for support.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Claire Tomkins, the CEO and Founder of Future Family. Claire knows firsthand the joy and the devastation that this journey can entail but she when she saw how backward the whole process was and how no lender was focused on this segment she decided to do something about it. While Future Family provides financing for fertility treatments her vision goes way beyond being just a financial partner for this important segment of the population.

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We have heard many times on this show and in the media that last year was a good one when it comes to savings rates and loan delinquencies. People were not spending as much and they received government stimulus to help with their savings. So, when I received a survey last month that showed the exact opposite of this consensus, I wanted to learn more. So, while those generalizations are true, there is a segment of the population that has been hit brutally hard by the pandemic and in this episode we find out more about them.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Leigh Phillips, the CEO of SaverLife. SaverLife is a non-profit dedicated to helping build financial security for those people who need help saving money. They do this in a number of ways, including a gamification approach that makes saving fun.

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SoFi has been somewhat of a quiet achiever in the p2p lending industry. But they have been breaking a lot of new ground over the past few months. In this edition of the Lend Academy Podcast I talk with Mike Cagney, the co-founder and CEO of SoFi. I came away from this interview so impressed with what SoFi is doing. They are executing incredibly well and have many new tricks up their sleeve.

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We have a very special guest for the 20th edition of the Lend Academy Podcast: Renaud Laplanche, the CEO and founder of Lending Club. I first met Renaud in the spring of 2011 just after Lending Club moved from Redwood City to downtown San Francisco. Back then Lending Club had about 50 people and a lot of extra space on the one floor they leased in that building. Back then, Lending Club was a company with a lot of potential and today they are realizing some of that potential.

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Today, p2p investors have many options when it comes to analyzing loan performance. One of these options is PeerCube which was founded by Anil Gupta, a software engineer with a background in data analytics. In this latest edition of the Lend Academy Podcast I talk with Anil about PeerCube and the importance of data analysis for p2p investors.

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Without question real estate is one of the hottest sectors in marketplace lending right now. We have gone from just a couple of platforms two years ago to nearly 100 today. And more seem to be launching every week.

At the forefront of this movement is Realty Mogul. It was co-founded by Jilliene Helman less than two years ago but it has already become one of the leaders in this burgeoning new industry. Jilliene came on the Lend Academy Podcast to give investors a deeper understanding of not just her business but how and why real estate investing is becoming so popular.

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In the latest episode of the Lend Academy Podcast I talk with Noah Breslow, the CEO of OnDeck, about their lending products and the small businesses that use them. OnDeck is one of the leading alternative lenders in the small business space having issued over $1 billion in loans since they began operations in 2007.

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Session 16 of the Lend Academy Podcast features Charles Moldow, a partner at the venture capital firm Foundation Capital. His firm has made several equity investments in the p2p lending industry, the most notable of which is their investment in Lending Club last year alongside Google.

He recently authored the popular white paper titled A Trillion Dollar Market By the People, For the People. We talk about this white paper and get Moldow's view on the industry and where it is headed.

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In Episode 15 we talk with Emmanuel Marot, the co-founder and President at LendingRobot. His company has created an investing tool of the same name that helps individual investors automate their investing on the Lending Club and Prosper platforms. LendingRobot uses the API of both platforms to execute loan orders as soon as new loans are added to the respective platforms.

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Dara Albright is the co-founder of the LendIt Conference, the wold's first and largest peer to peer lending conference. We discuss LendIt 2014 on May 4-6 in San Francisco.

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Don Davis is the president of Prime Meridian Capital Management and the managing partner of the Prime Meridian Income Fund (PMI). This is a fund for accredited investors that was started in 2012 and invests primarily on the Prosper platform today.

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In the online space small business lending is several years behind consumer lending and there are no players with long track records like Lending Club and Prosper. But the longest track record belongs to Funding Circle, who have been in business since 2010. With their merger with Endurance Lending last year, the small business lending space in this country gets to benefit directly from the knowledge and history of this leading player. In this podcast we talk with Alex Tonelli, the Managing Director at Funding Circle, about how his company has been doing since the merger, his passion for small business lending and where Funding Circle is going.

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Last month I visited San Francisco and brought along my trusty audio recorder for a podcast interview in the Lending Club offices with Scott Sanborn. Sanborn joined Lending Club in 2010 as the Chief Marketing Officer and last year was promoted to Chief Operating Officer. He is responsible for Lending Club’s day to day operations and he has still maintained his marketing role.

We talked about a number of different topics in particular the rapid growth of Lending Club and how they are managing this growth, balancing demand from from the retail and institutional investors, Lending Club PRIME, Policy Code 2 loans and of course, the topic that seems to be on everyone’s mind these days: the Lending Club IPO.

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While in London last week I sat down at the offices of Liberum Capital, a UK investment bank, to talk with Cormac Leech and his team. Liberum are somewhat unique in that they have a team devoted to studying the p2p lending market - they have probably more knowledge about this sector than any other investment bank in the UK or the US.

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Fintech One•On•One: Recent Episodes

Peter Renton