Fintech One-On-One

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...

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-O...

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 i...

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-fo...

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 Ocrol...

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 Fint...

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 i...

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 Ca...

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 t...

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 Bo...

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 flexi...

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...

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...

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 phen...

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 Cardina...

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 Green...

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...

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. The...

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...

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 compan...

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...

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 Bu...

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...

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 i...

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 Nicol...