Tearsheet Podcast: The Business Of Finance

For today's episode, I’m speaking with Matt Oppenheimer, co-founder and CEO of Remitly, an online remittance service based in Seattle that offers international money transfers to over 135 countries. He talks about the evolution of the remittance industry over the last decade, the changing needs of Remitly's customers, the potential role of crypto in remittances, and the future of global money movement. Oh, and we’re finally out of Zoom and back into the real world. We’re holding Tearsheet’s Power of Payments Conference on September 15 this year at Current, Chelsea Piers, New York City. Register here: https://bit.ly/3cEIG2G

The following was produced by Tearsheet Studios. We worked with payments provider Fiserv to create a podcast series about open finance and the work of empowering fintechs, brands, and FIs to collaborate and innovate together. In our first conversation in the series, we’re speaking with Sunil Sachdev, SVP and head of fintech at Fiserv, about where we are on the open finance journey, the technologies under the hood that are helping to enable the evolution, the potential hurdles to look out for, and what’s next.

This week on the Acquire Podcast, we’re joined by Erika White, VP of marketing and communications at Affirm. We spoke about building out a cheeky millennial-esque ad campaign, creating the flywheel effect through strong partner marketing, and some of the challenges and opportunities that come with marketing BNPL. Oh, and after two long years of pandemic, isolation, and general social weirdness –- Tearsheet is finally getting out of the screens and coming into the real world. Come September 15th, we’ll be holding our first in-person event in a long time, Tearsheet's Power of Payments Conference at Current, Chelsea Piers, NYC. Spaces are limited, register here: https://bit.ly/3vhaL6v

Patch is an API-based solution enabling companies to embed carbon footprint estimation and removal directly into their digital products and experiences. Today I’m talking to its CEO Brennan Spellacy to tell us how Patch works, as well as his insights on the whole carbon offsetting market, which has grown tremendously over the past few years, attracting a lot of interest. While it’s not a central solution to the wider problem of climate change, carbon offsetting an important piece of the puzzle, so tune in to find out how it all works.

The following was produced by Tearsheet Studios in partnership with embedded finance platform Helix by Q2. In our conversation with Ahon Sarkar, GM of Helix, we talk about what it takes for companies to succeed in offering Banking as a Service today. We break down all the important questions they must ask themselves, like: How to make sure your company should even be thinking about doing banking; Five core traits common to all the companies that succeed in Banking as a Service; How to prepare for jumping into the process and be ready for the expected unknowns; What to consider when choosing the right technology and banking partners; And, we wrapped up with a sneak peak of what Helix is busy doing and will be getting into the rest of the year.

Today we’re talking about crypto lending – many crypto holders out there don’t plan on spending it or cashing out, and now they can earn pretty high yields on their crypto assets, which baffle many folks in traditional finance. My guests today are Matt Ballensweig, managing director and co-head of trading and lending at Genesis, and Shannon Allmon, General Manager of Retail at BlockFi. Genesis and BlockFi are both some of the biggest centralized lending platforms out there, so tune in to find out how the crypto market evolved into offering retail and institutional investors the possibility to lend with crypto assets as collateral.

Today’s episode is about building financial literacy, both as a solution to a financially stressed America, and as a medium for branding and marketing. A few fintechs do this well, and Stash is one of them. Stash is a personal finance app that aims to make investing accessible to the 99% (of Americans). And to get people investing, they need to first understand the basics of their financial picture. I’ve got the chance to virtually sit down with Stash’s CMO, Dale Sperling, to pick her brain about how, without needing to spend huge budgets, Stash uses creativity, data, and the right partnerships, to develop and strengthen Stash’s brand mission of financial literacy across America – in their campaign Stash101 and beyond.

Welcome back to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and in today’s episode, we discuss how digital payments are making it easier for young consumers to overspend, and how the global microchip shortage is affecting the payments industry. We also talk about Revolut’s first venture into in-store payments with the Revolut Reader, as well as recent research from Marqeta that shows a growing level of consumer trust in mobile wallets.

My guest today is Mathias Wikstrom, CEO of Doconomy. Doconomy provides data services that help businesses monitor and assess their environmental footprint based on transactional and financial data. Consumers can find out the footprint of their lifestyle choices, brands can calculate their product’s footprint. And they’re also working to develop a tool that enables banks to aggregate the information provided to their consumers – this is really important because it means helping banks report on their ESG impact, by harnessing the data and insights from their total consumer credit portfolio. Me and Mathias had a really awesome conversation, so tune in for more on climate data, how it helps us understand our impact on the world and how the financial system can facilitate a net zero economy

Today we’re talking about how banks are digitizing their commercial lending operations. If consumer lines took the front seat when it comes to innovation and digitization, commercial lines have been waiting quietly in the backseat but are now next to be brought forward with the latest technologies and underwriting efficiencies. My guests today are Dan O’Malley, CEO of Numerated, a SaaS digital loan origination system, and Peter Grant, the President of OakNorth, which aims to transform commercial lending with its Credit Intelligence software product.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. I find it fascinating to hear how some of the largest FIs handle emerging technologies. Fidelity, for example, has the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, where it tests and assesses new tech, like the metaverse and blockchain. It’s almost like Fidelity’s skunkworks R&D arm. Today on our program I have Adam Schouela, the head of emerging technology at the center. Our discussion spans different technologies, emerging use cases, and sheds some light on how Fidelity thinks about its priorities and customers out into the future. We talk about the experiments Adam and Co. have done around blockchain technology, around the metaverse, and where it sees opportunities and just as importantly, where it doesn’t see opportunities. Adam Schouela is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and as you’ve probably noticed by now, we decided to do a rebrand! We think this new title for the podcast is shorter and snappier, and it also matches the name of our upcoming Power of Payments conference, which will be Tearsheet’s first conference on payments, as well as our first-ever in-person event. It’ll be held in New York on September 15. Today, I’m speaking with Bar Geron, co-founder and CEO at Balance. Balance is an Israeli startup that claims to be the first B2B ecommerce payments platform that offers a consumer-like checkout experience for merchants and marketplaces. In our conversation, Bar touched upon a number of topics, including the importance of bringing B2B payments online and how that’s linked with global supply chain issues, BNPL for business, as well as other B2C trends that are slowly being adopted in B2B transactions.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller, Tearsheet's editor in chief. For this episode, I’m joined by Darren Parslow, global head of Visa Business Solutions.  Darren and I chat about the innovation in the B2B payments space over the last few years. We discuss how Visa helps SMBs enhance their money flow operations. Lastly, we look to the future and I ask Darren what advice he would give to small businesses looking to digitize operations to better manage cashflow and expand payments beyond the point of sale to grow their businesses. Here's my conversation with Darren.

On today’s episode I’ve got the pleasure of speaking to a company I’ve been fangirling over for quite a while (who even fangirls over a company in the financial space? but it’s true). When I first heard of Earnin, a simple Google search led me to their many Facebook groups featuring a huge community of everyday people sharing their financial struggles and supporting one another in ways big and small –- despite being total strangers on the internet. I invited Brittanie Williams, Earnin’s CMO, to talk to us about building a strong and truly community-based brand, building with customers for customers, and flipping the script on what we think when we talk about the millions of people who live paycheck to paycheck.

Today we’re talking about banks and their role in the climate crisis. Big banks historically supported the global fossil fuel industry through massive amounts of funding, and now they’re being pressured to change. To help me unpack this I’ve called Chris Skinner, a financial technology expert, global commentator, bestselling author of multiple books and the website The Finanser. Chris is out with a new book, called Digital For Good, which explores how financial systems influence the economy, the purpose of banks, and how they impact society and the planet.

Banks and fintechs are looking to improve their lending operations - and increasingly, this means focusing on their customer relationship, while leaving the math to external partners. These partners offer lending software-as-a-service, and that's what we'll be talking about this episode. Joining our conversation we have Adam Huges, who’s the CEO of Amount and Rohit Mittal, the chief executive of Stilt.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. Tearsheet's Iulia Ciutina and Rebecca Cohen both traveled to Money 20/20 Europe earlier this month. They sat down with editor Zack Miller to discuss what they saw, learned, and experienced.

Welcome back to Power of Payments. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and in today’s episode, we talk about Klarna and the future of BNPL, PayZen’s ‘Care Now, Pay Later’ solution, and Mastercard’s recently announced ‘Smile to Pay’ system.

On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Scott Goodson, founder and CEO of StrawberryFrog, a marketing agency that works with some of the largest financial brands in the industry. I invited Scott to talk to us about his recent book: Activate Brand Purpose: How to Harness the Power of Movements to Transform Your Company. Ultimately, though, our conversation ended up covering much more: doing marketing with soul and intention, the shifting pyramid of power where the boss is no longer God, and the power of truly taking on corporate responsibility.

Green finance is not just about investing in clean energy or carbon sequestration. The core of the problem is sustainability - how to create financial systems that enable people to thrive over the long term. A lot of the focus today goes to the E in ESG investing, which represents the environmental factor, and the latter two parts - Social and Governance - are often overlooked. Today I’d like to explore what the S in ESG stands for. My guest is Timothy Flacke, who is the co-founder and executive director of Commonwealth, a national nonprofit helping the financially vulnerable build security.