Fintech One-On-One

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...

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 w...

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 ba...

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 serv...

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 wor...

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 hote...

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...

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 a...

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...

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 consistent...

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...

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 h...

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 mone...

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 do...

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...

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 c...