A2Z Fintech

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Andreessen Horowitz has published 90 slides arguing that AI is not a bubble, one month after closing a $1.1 billion fund for AI hardware. On slide 88, holographic Pokémon cards are up 110% since January 2024, against 72% for the Nasdaq. The real question is not whether there is an AI bubble, but who is holding it when the next buyer pauses. On 30 Septem...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Revolut is valued at $115 billion, holds more than £50 billion of customer money, and lends out about £2 billion of it. What does a bank that refuses to lend actually do with a deposit, and what happens when the man who built it is the only part that cannot be automated? In September Nik Storonsky won conditional approval from the OCC to form Revolut Ba...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. In seventy-two hours the AI industry asked to slow down, OpenAI shelved a trillion-dollar listing, and the President called the whole thing a hoax on speakerphone. Everyone called it the week AI flip-flopped; nobody did, and one supplier gets paid either way. On Saturday 12 September, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Fro...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Walmart's checkout inside ChatGPT converted at a third of the rate of its own site, and six months later OpenAI shut Instant Checkout with twelve Shopify merchants still live. On 2 September, Anthropic shipped the opposite architecture for agentic commerce and took nothing on the sale. What Anthropic learned, why Google is quietly winning, and why the a...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. UPI cleared 373 transactions in its first month in 2016. In July 2026 it cleared 23.66 billion in a single month, worth close to 30 lakh crore rupees. Ten years on, the most consequential payments network of the decade turns out not to be a company at all. On 25 August 2016 the Unified Payments Interface went live in Indian app stores, four months after...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Alphabet lost roughly $200 billion of market value in the eleven days after 5 August, close to a full year of its own AI infrastructure budget. On 14 August, a filing showed Berkshire Hathaway holding $37.8 billion of the same stock. On 5 August, Google DeepMind announced that Demis Hassabis would step back from day to day management to become Chair of...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Stripe has agreed to pay more than $7 billion for OpenRouter, a company valued at $1.3 billion in May. In the same season it has bid $60.50 a share, roughly $53 billion, for PayPal. The Collison brothers own a publishing house, and they have stopped collecting books. Over the weekend Bloomberg reported that Stripe had finalised an agreement to acquire O...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. What if a new banking product offered you a staggering 6% interest on cash deposits and 3% cash back on spending? Sounds too good to be true, right? In this episode of A2Z Fintech, join hosts Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala as they dive deep into the launch of X Money, the latest banking venture from Elon Musk's company, X. This fintech podcast unpacks...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Trump Accounts give every American child born between 2025 and 2028 a $1,000 investment account, seeded by the US Treasury. Left alone it grows to about $250,000; filled to the $5,000 annual limit every year it reaches $13 million, and the distance between those two children is the thing nobody is explaining. Trump Accounts were signed into law on 4 Jul...

What happens when a $53 billion PayPal acquisition offer shakes the foundations of the payments industry? Join hosts Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala in this gripping episode of A2Z Fintech as they dissect the recent bid for PayPal acquisition, a move that could redefine the landscape of financial technology. This acquisition offer, made by heavyweights Stripe, Block, and Advent, has sent ripples...

Have you ever wondered how technology is reshaping the landscape of wealth management? Join hosts Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala in this enlightening episode of A2Z Fintech, where they explore the evolution of investment strategies and the transformative impact of financial technology on the industry. As they share personal anecdotes from their extensive experience in finance, listeners will gai...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. More than 140 institutions just launched OpenUSD, and the day it landed Circle's market value fell 16 percent. Tether, the largest stablecoin on earth at 185 billion dollars, has no share price to fall, but its business model took the same bullet. On the week America marked its 250th birthday, a consortium called Open Standard, with Bridge co-founder Za...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. On Friday 12 June 2026, a SpaceX rocket climbed out of Cape Canaveral as the opening bell rang in New York on the largest stock market debut in history. By the close, the company was worth more than $2 trillion and Elon Musk was the first trillionaire, and the traders still called the 19% pop disappointing. This summer America is hosting two World Cups...

A US Army sergeant bet roughly $33,000 on Polymarket on an arrest he had just been briefed on, and turned it into the price of a house. A Google engineer read his own company's unpublished data and moved about $1.2 million into a private wallet. On a public blockchain, both men left a trail the FBI could follow to the cent. That is the paradox at the centre of prediction markets: the transparency...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Twelve hours after Sundar Pichai walked off the Shoreline stage, the recap industry was already ranking his Google I/O 2026 announcements top ten this, best five of that. Two former Googlers with 50 years between them think that misses the story. On Wednesday 20 May, Sundar Pichai closed Google I/O 2026 with a 150-minute keynote that pulled together a 2...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Patrick Collison says agents will soon account for most online transactions. The Machine Payments Protocol that replaces the buy button is now live, and Stripe, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft have all signed on. This week at Stripe Sessions 2026, the architecture of agentic commerce stopped being a thesis and started being plumbing. The Machine Paym...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Stripe shipped 288 features in a single morning at Sessions 2026 in San Francisco. The right pattern match for what the company is becoming is not Visa, Mastercard, or PayPal — it is Google in 2006. On the final Wednesday of April, almost ten thousand founders, engineers, and CFOs queued around Yerba Buena Gardens, the same plaza where Steve Jobs unveil...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Two best friends from an accounting class in Ohio, both turning fifty this year. One spent the next thirty years inside the world's largest banks. The other made fun of them. Both just watched their first careers become obsolete in twelve minutes. This is a different kind of A2Z Fintech episode. Recorded in Mumbai during a long working swing across Indi...

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Ninety days ago we made ten fintech predictions on this podcast for 2026. Today we graded them in public. Four have already played out fully. Three are directionally correct. One is spectacularly wrong. One is still waiting on a phone call from Ben and David at Acquired. This is the Q1 2026 fintech scorecard, recorded at the quarter-pole of the season....

Click here to watch a video of this episode. Mastercard paid $1.8 billion for BVNK, the largest stablecoin acquisition in history. Four months earlier, Coinbase walked away from a $2 billion deal for the same company. What changed, and what it means for Visa, Amex, Capital One, JPMorgan, and Circle. On Tuesday 17 March, Mastercard announced a definitive agreement to acquire BVNK, the UK-based stab...

India has 100 million diabetics. 47% of the population is overweight. And we are the most wellness-educated generation in history. That's the paradox. Sumaya Dalmia has been transforming bodies and building businesses since 1997 — before fitness was even an industry in India. She's Vogue's Celebrity Trainer of the Year, WEF's Entrepreneur of the Decade in Health & Wellness, and the architect o...

In the age of AI, stock trading is still writing cheques.  That changed this week. On March 9, 2026, Nasdaq partnered with crypto exchange Kraken  to build the Equities Transformation Gateway — tokenized  equities trading 24/7, settling in seconds, instant, fractional,  and always on. Four days earlier, NYSE's parent Intercontinental  Exchange invested in OKX at a $25 billion valuation with the  s...

In September 2000, Elon Musk boarded a plane for his honeymoon. By the time he landed in Sydney, he was no longer CEO. His co-founders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, had staged a midnight coup, scrapped his everything-app vision, killed the X.com brand, and reborn the company as PayPal. Twenty-five years later, that company has gone from a $360 billion peak to a $65 billion acquisition target. And...

The Schroder family survived Napoleon, two World Wars, the fall of merchant banking, and the rise of passive investing. On February 12, 2026, they said "cash me out" — agreeing to sell their 222-year-old firm to Nuveen (TIAA) for £9.9 billion. The Financial Times called it "the defining deal of a glass half-empty UK." Philip Augar, who worked at Schroders in the 1990s and wrote The Death of Gentle...

Ever wondered if banks are just giant dodos stuck in legacy land, or could they actually get hip and healthy? Well, Alastair Campbell is here to dish out the secrets of making money healthy again, minus the boring behind-the-scenes. Buckle up, it’s a juicy ride through data, archetypes, and the ultimate goal: banks that actually get you. In this episode: Why 63% of industry value growth is flowing...