A2Z Fintech

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 A Google engineer read his own company's unpublished data and moved about $1.2 million into a private wallet.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...

The US banking fortress just got a new neighbor. NuBank—the Latin American titan with 127M+ customers—has officially announced its US National Bank License. In this minisode, Aman and Zubin break down why this isn't just another fintech launch. We explore the "Wayne-dependent" reality of US regional banks stuck on 1980s COBOL code and why NuBank’s $1 cost-to-serve makes them a lethal competitor to...

In this A2Z Fintech minisode / hot take, we break down the shockwave acquisition of Brex by Capital One for $5.15 billion. Is this just a bank buying a startup, or is it the "Original Disruptor" reminding the world that while software is the wedge, the balance sheet is the wall? Key Discussion Points: The Deal Breakdown: Analyzing the $5.15B, 50-50 cash and stock exit for the darling of Silicon Va...

The "Buy Button" is moving from the screen to the conversation. > In this episode of A to Z Fintech , Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala report from NRF 2026. We move beyond the hype to the "Next Now"—the moment retail got an autonomous brain. Key Moments: (00:00) Cold Open: The Future of Shopping(00:45) Why Sundar Pichai Headlined NRF(04:00) Trend 1: Agentic Commerce & Google's UCP(06:12) Tr...

Welcome back to Season 2 of A to Z Fintech! Aman and Zubin are back from the holidays, but their brains are still in Vegas. This isn't just a gadget review; it’s a look at the "Re-Materialization" of technology. We are moving from a decade of "software eating the world" to "AI moving the world." From Nvidia’s shift into the laws of physics with Project Cosmos to the "Bot-naissance" of humanoid rob...

Lights out and away we go! For the Season One finale of A2Z Fintech, Aman and Zubin take you to the "Post-Race Press Conference" of 2025. This year, the tech and fintech worlds didn't just move fast—they behaved exactly like a Formula One championship season. From Nvidia lapping the field to Apple’s "curated pacing" and the internal engine fires at OpenAI, we break down the Constructors' Standings...

Is your career an album or a playlist? 🎶 We are moving from the Industrial Age (factories, pensions, 9-to-5s) to the Intelligence Age (feeds, algorithms, gigs), but our money is still stuck in the past. On this episode of A to Z Fintech , Aman and Zubin break down the "One-Person Enterprise" and the new Money OS needed to support it. We discuss: 📼 The 80s Paradox: Why the era of stability was ac...

In this episode, Zubin and Aman explore the transformative journey of Neobanks, tracing their evolution from early models to the current Neobank 2.0 era. They discuss the historical context of banking, the rise of digital finance, and the emergence of the Neobank Mag7, a group of successful neobanks that have mastered profitability and customer acquisition. The conversation delves into the Neobank...

In this edition of A to Z Fintech , Aman and Zubin decode OpenAI’s audacious DevDay 2025 — and frame it as the ultimate Game of Thrones for the tech world. From Sam Altman’s meteoric rise and billion-dollar alliances with Microsoft and Nvidia to whispers of a new Jony Ive–designed hardware empire, this episode explores the four great provocations defining the next decade of technology: 1️⃣ The Hou...

In this episode of A to Z Fintech , Aman Narain sits down with Aneace Haddad — executive coach, author, and former fintech CEO — to explore what it really means to live (and lead) a hundred-year career in the age of AI ." 🔥 You’ll hear about: Why midlife isn’t decline — it’s halftime How leaders can engineer “mini-crises” to stay alive and relevant What a corporate midlife looks like (and how to...

This conversation explores the evolution of authentication, the impact of AI and quantum computing on security, and the shift towards passwordless security through passkeys. The speakers discuss the historical context of authentication, the challenges posed by modern technology, and the importance of establishing trust in digital transactions. takeaways A common language for agents to transact sec...

In this A2Z Fintech mini-sode, Aman and Zubin break down one of the most exciting drops from Google Cloud: the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) . What does it mean for the future of payments, banks, and fintechs when agents—not humans—initiate and complete financial transactions? We unpack: What AP2 actually is, and why it matters How it builds on the API revolution to create agent-to-payments flow...