Fintech One-On-One

Daniel Simon is the founder and CEO of Coast , which builds fleet payments, expense management and bill pay for businesses that work in the field, from plumbers and HVAC companies to construction firms and school bus operators. He previously co-founded Bread, an early buy now pay later company that sold for around $500 million in 2020. We talk about how Coast replaced the old fuel card model with...

Wade Arnold is the CEO and co-founder of Moov , the payments infrastructure company that brings every US payment rail together under a single contract and API. Last month Moov launched Moov Money, a real-time P2P product built with Visa and Mastercard that lets anyone with a debit card receive money, and a week earlier it announced a Coinbase partnership for stablecoin acceptance and settlement. W...

Omer Ismail is the CEO of OnePay , the consumer fintech majority-owned by Walmart and backed by Ribbit Capital, which now serves more than 7.5 million customers. He was last on the show in 2017, when he was running Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot has changed since then: we talk about why he left Goldman to start again from scratch, how OnePay turns Walmart shoppers and associates into banking custo...

Scott Sanborn is the CEO of Happen Bank , the company known until this summer as LendingClub. He is the first guest to appear on the show four times, and each visit has caught the company at a turning point. This time it is the rebrand: we talk about why the LendingClub name no longer fit, what six years of running a chartered bank has taught him, and how he is preparing for a world where AI agent...

Michelle Beyo is the founder and CEO of Finavator , a consultancy that helps banks, fintechs, and corporates step into the future of finance. Her new book, Mastering the Future of Finance , just published this week by Wiley, breaks the industry into nine elements across data, trust, and technology. We talk about why she wrote it, why she believes there should be a human data right, and how she kep...

Vroon Modgill spent two decades in payments as an accountant, finance director and CFO before founding Sokin in 2019. The company launched as a subscription-based consumer remittance app and is now a B2B payments and treasury platform running across 170 countries and 70 currencies, growing 100% a year while staying profitable. We talk about the pivot out of consumer, where stablecoins actually ear...

Paul Gu dropped out of Yale in 2010 to join the first class of Thiel Fellows, spent time at the quant fund D.E. Shaw, and then co-founded Upstart on a simple premise: the techniques Wall Street uses to price corporate risk should work at least as well on consumer credit. Fourteen years later, he took over as CEO from co-founder Dave Girouard, and six weeks after that, the OCC granted conditional a...

Arpit Goel built his first company, Gamma, on a simple pitch: legacy data-loss-prevention tools took nine months to show value, and Gamma got customers there in two weeks. Palo Alto Networks acquired Gamma in 2021. Now Goel is running the same play in a completely different industry. Root is a payments orchestration layer that lets enterprises move money bank-to-bank in about five seconds, with no...

René Saúl spent seven years running an offline agricultural lending business in Mexico before selling it and pouring the proceeds into Kapital, a bet that the future of B2B fintech in Latin America belonged to companies willing to become regulated banks. Today Kapital is the largest B2B fintech in the region, and René is the only founder in the space who has bought not one but two banks, one of th...

Enova International has spent two decades using machine learning underwriting to serve consumers and small businesses who sit outside prime bank criteria, and its pending $369 million acquisition of Grasshopper Bank would give it a national charter for the first time. Steve Cunningham became CEO in January 2026 after nearly a decade as the company's CFO, following earlier stops as a bank regu...

Very few people in this industry have sat in all three of the seats that matter in the bank-fintech story. Amanda Swoverland started as a compliance examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spent nine and a half years at Sunrise Banks rising to Chief Risk Officer, then joined Unit as its fourth employee and Chief Compliance Officer. Six months ago she became President of Hatch Bank , a...

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 in...

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 p...

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, br...

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...

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...

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 ser...

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 m...

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 busine...

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, Ellio...

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%...

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 conve...

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 i...

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-backe...

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 movemen...