The Free Toaster

Carlos and Nick break down NerdWallet's Q1 2026 earnings, the first full read on the company since the stock dropped 32% post-print. Headline numbers look fine on the surface. $222M in revenue, 6% YoY growth, $34M in non-GAAP operating income at a 15% margin. Look one layer down and the story turns. A major insurance carrier pulled back. Small business was down 15% YoY and got zero analyst questio...

Wall St. sold off what seemed to us like a killer performance from SoFi in Q1 2026. Carlos, Nick, and special guests Rachel Lauren react to the earnings report. This news Pod expands on our reporting from this week's Newsletter. https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/sofis-best-quarter-yet-disappoints ***** The Free Toaster Newsletter ships every Wednesday at www.thefreetoaster.com , curating the bigges...

Zak Ali runs the US business at Finder, the financial comparison site that started in Australia in 2006 and launched stateside in 2015. Lending now drives roughly 40–50% of Finder US revenue across personal loans, business loans, and earned wage access. In this conversation, Zak pulls back the curtain on how a major comparison publisher actually thinks — about Google's SEO meltdown, the reality of...

Nick Madrid interviews Carlos Caro live at the Fintech Summit in NYC on April 28th.   On the heels of a Curated Table Event on April 27th (sponsored by Spinwheel), Nick bumped into Carlos at the Fintech Summit and did a short Q&A on how lenders eliminate friction from their application flows. ****** To support The Free Toaster Podcast, please visit our sponsors:   Bulldog Media Group: Bulldog...

Carlos flies solo this week (Nick is wheels-up from NYC to SF after FinTech Week) to break down three stories from this week's newsletter: OnePay's no-deposit credit builder card, Credit One Bank's embedded integration with Bright Money, and Aven's new Bitcoin-backed Visa with credit limits up to $1M. He also opens up the floor on five format ideas for the September 23rd Affiliate Marketing Summit...

Carlos and Nick expand on the headline story from this week’s Newsletter. And they speculate on what this might mean for consumer lending distribution platforms. https://open.substack.com/pub/thefreetoaster/p/openai-doubles-down-hiro-finance?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web   ***** To support The Free Toaster Podcast, please visit our sponsors:   Spinwheel:   Reduce friction in...

Carlos and Nick try to make sense of Wells Fargo's 60% YOY increase in new credit card customer bookings. They covered this story in Wednesday's Newsletter and they dig deeper into potential sources of their growth: https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/wells-fargo-books-631000-new-credit     Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter ( www.thefreetoaster.com ) to get our curated news at the intersection...

Rachael Olson spent years running product strategy on Discover's $6 billion personal loan business, and she joins the show to walk through a real lender's application from marketplace click all the way to the hard pull, screen by screen. Using a hypothetical billion-dollar lender for round numbers, Rachael shows why the highest-leverage work isn't always at the top of the funnel. A 3% lift in soft...

Carlos and Nick welcome Amanda Braslow to the show as the newest partner in the business and GM of events. Amanda brings fifteen years from Capital One, most of it in the co-brand trenches. Her first big project putting together the Free Toaster Affiliate Marketing Summit on September 23rd in San Francisco at the Exploratorium.  Three stories this week. First, Experian extended its no-ding decline...

Deposits aren't loans. That sounds obvious, but the implications for affiliate marketing are anything but. Alana Levine joins Carlos Caro to break down how affiliate marketing works on the deposit side of the house: different unit economics, different optimization cadence, different failure modes, and a compliance environment that will humble anyone coming over from lending. Topics include how CP1...

Carlos and Nick sit down with John Doppke, VP at Upgrade, to unpack Boost Money — a four-in-one financial account combining a checking account, secured credit-building card, high-yield savings, and interest-free cash advances.   John explains the product's free and premium ($9.99/month) tiers, the rationale behind launching Boost Money as a standalone brand with its own app and microsite, and how...

Carlos Caro chats with Rakesh Patel , the Executive Vice President of the Experian Marketplace. For those of you not familiar with the Experian Marketplace, it got started in 2017 and it's quietly become one of the largest consumer marketplaces in the world for credit cards, personal loans, and auto insurance.    In today's episode we'll cover: -Experian's vision to become a financial co-pilot for...

Carlos sits down with Dennis Fish and John Minalga of the ICS Corporation following a roundtable dinner with 16 consumer lending executives in New York City to talk about one of the most misunderstood channels in financial services: direct mail. We discussed:   Busting the "Direct Mail is Dead" Myth Direct mail accounts for roughly 40% of new accounts for many lenders. Dennis pushes back on the id...

Carlos and Nick sit with Kelvin Chen, Head of Policy at the Consumer Bankers Association. We discuss Kelvin's recent post on LinkedIn that challenges a commonly cited fact in the media that credit card balances are at record highs. Kelvin's LinkedIn post below: "Is the consumer in trouble, or is the math just misleading? 🤔 Multiple times a day, we hear affordability stories about consumers strugg...

[Show notes reposted below from the LendAPI Podcast]   The Free Toaster Podcast is sponsored by: -Fintel Connect -Spinwheel -Bulldog Media Group ***** LendAPI Partner Podcast with Carlos Caro, Managing Partner & Founder of New Market Growth Guest: Carlos Caro   Host: Timothy Li   In this episode of the LendAPI Partner Podcast, host Timothy Li, Founder & CEO of LendAPI, sits down with Carlo...

REPOSTED FROM FINTECH TAKES. Alex's show notes below. I hope you enjoy!  -Carlos ***** Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined again by Carlos Caro (author of the Free Toaster newsletter and host of the Free Toaster podcast) to continue the conversation we started on Carlos’s podcast about MrBeast's acquisition of Step and what it means for the fintech ecosystem. This episode picks...

Tim Li , CEO of LendAPI, joins Carlos live in the DC studio for a wide-ranging conversation on how LendAPI is quietly becoming the infrastructure layer for modern lending. What We Cover: In-Store Buy Now, Pay Later Most BNPL players are built for online checkout — but 87% of commerce still happens in physical stores. Tim explains how LendAPI landed a major retailer (Sunglass brand Salmoiraghi &amp...

Carlos and Nick discuss Dave's record-breaking Q4 2025 Earnings Report. They also discuss Dave's rise to $4B valuation, drop down to a $50MM valuation, and pop back to $2.85B. Additionally, we break down their customer acquisition strategy and ask questions regarding their long-term viability given the DOJ case out there. They expand on the Free Toaster article recently published here: https://www...

Carlos and Nick try to make sense of NerdWallet's recent earnings report. They expand on the article they recently published here: https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/can-nerdwallet-outrun-the-ai-disruption   Note: Carlos misspoke early in the episode when he shared the topline revenue and growth numbers. The correct numbers are $225.4MM topline revenue and 23% YoY growth.   Sign up for The Free Toas...

Carlos and Nick discuss the implications of this week's headline story: Apple is now pushing the ability for Apple Pay users to pay with installments at the physical register, not just online and in apps. With iOS 26, installment options show up right inside the Apple Pay payment sheet when you tap to pay in store. What used to require opening a separate app or converting a purchase after the fact...

Our host Carlos Caro sits down with Alex Johnson (founder/author at Fintech Takes ) to unpack one of the more surprising stories in consumer finance: Mr. Beast's acquisition of Step, a Gen Z-focused neobank. Alex breaks down what Step actually is — a once-hyped neobank valued at nearly $1 billion in 2021 that quietly faded into obscurity, struggling like so many of its peers to crack the user acqu...

In April 2025, Transunion completed its acquisition of Monevo (a UK-based credit prequalification platform). In today's News Pod, Nick discovers that TU paid $56MM and that TU expects the Monevo acquisition to be immaterial to FY 2026 growth for TU. (Sources of that information below). Carlos and Nick discuss the Monevo business model and speculate on why growth could be muted in the US market. Pl...

Today we walk through a list of questions to ask yourself to determine whether your application experience needs a tune up. ***** About The Free Toaster Podcast:  Insights and interviews at the intersection of consumer lending, marketing, and technology. Hosted by Carlos Caro, co-founder at The Free Toaster and Managing Partner at New Market Growth , a growth agency for consumer lenders. ***** To...

This week Prithvi Prabhu drops in to help us contextualize Cash App Borrow's metrics from this Edition: https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/cash-apps-invisible-200-billion-loan   Then, we discuss Mr. Beast's Fintech Acquisition and talk about why buying Fintech's could lead to trouble for the mega content creator.   Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter ( www.thefreetoaster.com ) to get our curated...

The Free Toaster hosts Carlos Caro and Nick Madrid add context to the story covered in the Newsletter earlier this week. https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/wtf-2026-since-when-is-debit-now Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter ( www.thefreetoaster.com ) to get our curated news at the intersection of consumer lending & marketing, published every Wednesday. And then come here on Fridays to get o...