Tearsheet Podcast: The Business Of Finance

There’s a lot of talk about personalization being the Holy Grail of banking. Some firms even use the terminology hyper-personalization. But to be honest, few banks actually provide deeply personalized products. With all the tech advancements of the past decade, it’s still mostly one-size-fits-all banking. It’s not necessarily their fault, either. Given the history of banking and data siloed by products, banks can struggle piecing it all together. That’s changing though as creative technology solutions are able to help banks take a more customer centric approach and in doing so, get much better at providing personalized offers and pricing. For this episode I spoke with Amdocs' Benzium Aviv. Bentzi heads the Financial Services Unit within the Amdocs organization. We talk about the big trends toward personalized financial products, drawing from parallels in the telecommunications industry and the technology and business changes it went through. When you hear Bentzi speak, you can tell he's passionate about p

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. On our podcast, we interview some of the top minds at work building the next generation of financial services. In its work with small businesses and consumer payments, Square is definitely one of the companies that matters. Christina Riechers heads up Square Banking which serves about 1 million small business owners with checking, savings, and loans. She leads engineering, product, design, product marketing, operations & policy, and data science. For Christina, helping solve liquidity issues runs deeper than just a job. She co-founded and led Evidence Action, a non-profit that addresses health concerns for 200M+ children annually and provides 4M+ East Africans with access to safe water. This work has a direct economic impact on their lives. Christina’s work doing good informs her professional life and the way she looks at finance. But it also works in reverse – her experiences building at scale have proven helpful in her w

Tearsheet hosted its first LinkedIn Live session. Joining me on the show is Zip co-founder and CEO, Larry Diamond. Ten years ago, Zip was founded in Australia as a buy now, pay later service, embedding a quick and easy consumer loan in a retailer's checkout flow. Larry recently moved to the US to focus on Zip's expansion stateside. In this LinkedIn Live session, we discuss: *Zip's US opportunity *What the US BNPL market can learn from the more mature Australian market *Consumer protections and rising calls for regulation *How Zip differentiates *Levers in the business *Where Zip is headed next If you'd like to attend future LinkedIn Live sessions, follow me and Tearsheet on LinkedIn.

There’s a lot of talk about personalization being the Holy Grail of banking. Some firms even use the terminology hyper-personalization. But to be honest, few banks actually provide deeply personalized products. With all the tech advancements of the past decade, it’s still mostly one-size-fits-all banking. It’s not necessarily their fault, either. Given the history of banking and data siloed by products, banks can struggle piecing it all together. That’s changing though as creative technology solutions are able to help banks take a more customer centric approach and in doing so, get much better at providing personalized offers and pricing.  For this episode, I spoke with Katie Pagenkopf of consultancy, projekt202, about research she conducted that went deeper into what type of personalization bank customers really want, prioritizing the ones who are most open to targeted offers. Katie goes further, with some ideas about how banks can begin to deliver on the opportunities afforded by better personalization, l

The public launch of generative AI in the form of ChatGPT greased the creative wheels for the impact of these types of technology. We’re seeing experts and firms scurrying, just trying to wrap their minds and their hands around AI.  We had something similar a few years ago when chatbots for financial services started getting interesting. The thing is – these were primarily black-box technologies that seemed very abstract from daily life for consumers and for the teams of developers at banks tasked with managing them. ChatGPT changed that and with a slight change in interface, it’s unlocked a lot of use cases for financial services. We’re early for sure in this evolution but companies that have been studying the space are already beginning to make a move. ApexEdge provides consumers – through their banks and fintechs – subscription management tools. Want to easily unsubscribe from a subscription to a streaming service you’re not using much? ApexEdge makes that easy. It even has created technology to help you

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. Company transitions are always interesting. One transition I particularly like is that pivotal point when a startup matures to the extent a founder steps aside and makes way for new leadership. It’s an important stage – figuring out how to balance the passion and insight of a founder with new leadership to continue to grow the vision.  Stash, a company we’ve covered at Tearsheet over the past few years, is undergoing an important transition now. Liza Landsman joined a few months back as CEO. Liza seems to have the perfect background to lead Stash into its next leg of maturity – she combines deep product and leadership experiences in ecommerce, banking, and investing – at firms like Jet.com, Citigroup, BlackRock, and E*TRADE. She also worked with a lot of founders in her most recent role as investor at NEA. Stash’s model – which works with everyday folks to consistently invest a little bit at a time –  itself is part banking, part ecommerce, and part investi

The public launch of generative AI in the form of ChatGPT greased the creative wheels for the impact of these types of technology. We’re seeing experts and firms scurrying, just trying to wrap their minds and their hands around AI.  We had something similar a few years ago when chatbots for financial services started getting interesting. The thing is – these were primarily black-box technologies that seemed very abstract from daily life for consumers and for the teams of developers at banks tasked with managing them. ChatGPT changed that and with a slight change in interface, it’s unlocked a lot of use cases for financial services. We’re early for sure in this evolution but companies that have been studying the space are already beginning to make a move. ApexEdge provides consumers – through their banks and fintechs – subscription management tools. Want to easily unsubscribe from a subscription to a streaming service you’re not using much? ApexEdge makes that easy. It even has created technology to help you

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miler, Tearsheet’s editor in chief.  We’ve covered a lot about buy now, pay later over the years. BNPL’s rise was strong, given how it is embedded into a merchant’s checkout process and appealed to younger customers who preferred financing certain transactions and not the revolving credit of a credit card. Honestly, BNPL’s takeup and growth has overshadowed the emergence of other forms of financing. One of those is lease to own – if you’re my generation and grew up in the US, you’re probably familiar with lease to own through Rent-A-Center commercials. In my mind, that always associated lease to own with some kind of shady business to finance subpar pre-owned furniture with cigarette burns. Neil Desai is my guest today – he’s co-founder and CEO of Kafene, which takes a lease to own financing model and embeds itself within in-store shopping experiences of over 1000 merchants. Embedding lease to own opens up new products and experiences for lease to own customers, pr

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. For publicly traded fintechs at scale, Wex is an interesting one. Combining a fuel card business with corporate payments and a healthcare offering, the firm has found a way to grow consistently over a couple of decades. Strategically, the firm is looking at synergies in its businesses – it recently launched Flume, a B2B digital wallet. And, it’s looking strongly at M&A opportunities as valuations come down in this market. Jay Dearborn, Wex’s chief strategy officer, joins me on the podcast today to talk about the state of the market – namely, where there are opportunities for new products and acquisitions. Jay talks about the dynamics around revaluing fintechs – he doesn’t believe that it will ever really be a buyer’s market, but he does see the need for companies to get profitable – or at the least, be able to persuasively thread a story about what the path to profitability looks like. Jay Dearborn is my guest on the Tearshee

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. We’ve been covering fintech Dave from its early days as a tool to help everyday folks avoid overdraft fees. From there, it evolved into a lender and more recently, it’s expanded into more general banking. It also went public last year. Founder and CEO Jason Wilk joins me on the podcast to catch up with what’s been going on at Dave after the firm reported its most recent quarter. We talked a lot about ExtraCash, the firm’s short term overdraft loan and the role it plays in Dave’s customer experience and business model. Recent financials show that the firm has made strides to bring down its expenses while it’s also improved its monetization of its user base of 8 million people. My guest today on the podcast is Jason Wilk.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. I really enjoy talking to marketers, especially about rebrands. For me, the process a firm goes through when it rebrands is incredibly insightful for the team, for customers, and for partners. Successful fintechs can grow so quickly, when they rebrand or even refresh their brands, it forces them to stop, to take stock, and look at who they really want to be when they grow up. Today’s guest on the podcast is Brittanie Williams, chief marketing officer at EarnIn. My pronunciation is purposeful – part of the rebrand the firm with earned waged access at its core just underwent meant even looking at its own name differently. Britt and I discuss the customer research that went into the new brand and what it showed about Americans living paycheck to paycheck. We talk about the use of a brand muse and what that can do to help focus marketing and product. We also chat about how the firm expanded the aperture of its value proposition – to

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. There are a few brands that are synonymous with the modern financial services tech stack: Stripe, Galileo, Square. Marqeta is definitely in that list. Founder Jason Gardner stepped down recently and the firm named Simon Khalaf CEO. Simon was previously chief product officer at the firm and joins us on the podcast to take a look at the current market dynamics in this complicated time for financial services and technology. Simon talks about Marqeta’s recent acquisition of credit card program manager Power and takes us behind the scenes to share why customer demand led to this acquisition. With Power and credit along side the firm’s tech in debit and prepaid, it sounds like cards have a lot of room to provide intelligence and guidance to their holders going forward. Simon Khalaf is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast. You can access the audio and a full transcript here: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/our-partners-want-to-alter

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m your host, Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Michael Shaulov, co-founder and CEO of Fireblocks. Michael strikes me as one of the smartest guys in finance – Fireblocks, for its part, is a platform to create blockchain-based products and manage day-to-day digital asset operations. Banks like BNY Mellon and BNP Paribas are using the firm’s wallet technology for digital asset custody.  For an industry in flux, Michael is positioning Fireblocks as an important layer in the digital asset technology stack. Our discussion happened before the failure of SVB and the closure of Signature Bank. Michael’s pragmatic approach is refreshing and speaking to him, you get the feeling that he’s building something for the long run. Michael Shaulov is my guest today on the Teasheet Podcast. You can access the audio and a full transcript here: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/you-can-programmatically-use-blockchain-to-reduce-counterparty-risk-fireblocks-michael-shaulo

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. The move to faster payments is happening. When you zoom out and look where things like the real time payments initiatives are going to have a real impact, you can see that instant payouts can have a lot of resonance in insurance and supply chain. But to do this in B2B, you really need to make it easy and marry identity together with payouts. That’s because a lot more is at stake when things move to real time. My guest today on the show is Stephany Kirkpatrick, founder and CEO of Orum. Orum offers a single API integration for payouts that works over RTP, ACH, and other rails. Stephanie may be a financial planner by training but she’s all in on Orum and payouts. We discuss what’s driving the move to real time payments and how disbursements and early wage access are two of the most important first use cases. Stephanie shares what looking abroad can reflect about the road and impact to real time payments. She also shares her view

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor-in-chief, Zack Miller. A couple of years back, Visa made a move to acquire Plaid but the Justice Department scuttled the deal. The idea was if a company whose business it was to create nodes at most of the financial institutions in the US and with millions of customers, it wasn’t far-fetched to see Plaid become a mover of money, not just financial data. Well, Plaid now does over a billion ACH transactions a year and is investing more deeply into its payments offerings. The firm recently hired John Anderson from Meta, who has a 20-year history with building out innovative payments platforms. I spoke with John about Plaid’s positioning in payments and where it’s headed. The company recently released Signal, an ACH risk assessment and scoring API. John Anderson is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast. You can access the full transcript and audio here: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/signal-makes-the-us-banking-rails-behave-the-way-they-should-in-the-futu

Welcome to our first Tearsheet Pro webinar. This is for Tearsheet Pro subscribers. And this is where we go deeper into some of the topics that are really impacting financial services. You have to be living in a cave not to have experienced the excitement or elation around ChatGPT. For me and for the rest of our team, it really got our gears going about the potential impact of AI in financial services. I've invited two experts to our show to basically separate facts from fiction and really get a feel for what the opportunities are in financial services as we approach these types of technologies and what may be just sort of fantasy. Joining me on the show, I have Moses Guttmann, who's co-founder and CEO of ClearML. Moses brings more than 20 years of experience making visionary technologies a reality. He's co founder and CEO of ClearML, where he leads the teams behind the industry's only unified end to end frictionless MLOps platform. Prior to ClearML, Moses co founded and led several startups in the compute

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Today’s guest on the show is Mohammed Badi, head of American Express’s global network business. He spoke at our Power of Payments conference last year and I invited him back on our podcast to talk about two new recent launches Amex made that I wanted you to hear more about. The first is Amex Business Link, a B2B payments ecosystem that includes Amex’s commercial bank partners, for their customers and their suppliers. B2B payments continue to be an important theme, as different players come at this from their unique angles. The second launch is a co brand card Amex recently launched with Simon malls that rewards in-person shopping. As the pandemic wanes, there is an appetite for in-person shopping (remember that?) – this card targets a younger demographic with incentives for spending money at malls. Mohammed and I discuss these new products as well as trends in Amex’s network business. Today’s guest is Amex’s Mohammed Badi.

Welcome back to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and today I’m joined by Jessica Cheney, VP of Product for the Digital Banking Solutions group at Bottomline Technologies. Jessica has been with Bottomline for over a decade. Prior to that, she held similar roles at a number of other fintechs, and was also part of the commercial product management group at US Bank. She has been involved with real-time payments for many years now, and says she has a comprehensive outlook on how payments impact financial services from a commercial, fintech, and retail perspective. In our conversation today, Jessica discusses the current state of adoption of real-time payments in the US, and how the launch of FedNow – the Federal Reserve’s instant payment service – is going to impact the banking industry. She also talks about how SMBs can use real-time payments to improve their day-to-day operations, and the overall impact that RTP adoption will likely have on banks, businesses, and consumers in the comin

Get the full transcript here: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/surveying-global-banking-and-niche-payments-with-standard-chartereds-anand-natarajan/ Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. An interesting thing is starting to happen with partner banks. What began as the purview of some smaller, regional players is now becoming interesting to some of the largest global banks. For example, we spoke a couple of weeks ago to Citi about its plans to provide partner bank services for global firms. That means a brand or fintech with global aspirations could work with a single bank in each market, instead of partnering with different local players on the ground. Standard Chartered is already supporting its clients with its own extensive footprint in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. I spoke with Anand Natarajan, who covers the technology, media and fintech segments for the firm’s treasury services. At a conversation that began in Las Vegas in 2022 and continued into the beginnin

Link to the full transcript: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/are-we-at-the-digital-tipping-point-for-payments-yet-deloittes-zachary-aron/ Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. My guest today is Zachary Aron. At Deloitte, Zach heads the payments practice globally and co-leads the US. We spend quite a bit of time trying to understand the move towards payments modernization. Of course, the current economic challenges influence how Deloitte’s clients are thinking about things like RTP and ISO20022 – Zach sees some FIs taking advantage of the opportunities to both streamline payments operations and products with an eye on future competitiveness. Zach also shares why he thinks payroll is one of the first use cases of real time payments. I first met Zach at Money 2020 in 2022 and this episode is a continuation of the conversation that was started in Las Vegas. Zachary Aron is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.