Fintech One-On-One

I don’t know anyone who enjoys filing their taxes. It is something we begrudgingly do every April, or earlier for the well-organized, and it is usually a somewhat painful exercise. What if filing your taxes was easy, taking less than 30 minutes? What if tax planning wasn't a once-a-year chore but an embedded feature in your banking app, payroll platform, or investment account? In this episode...

Today, I sit down with Daren Guo, co-founder of Reap , the stablecoin infrastructure company and the world's largest stablecoin card enabler, processing over $6 billion annually. Daren shares his journey from being employee #90 at Stripe to building the next generation of financial rails based on stablecoin infrastructure, serving everyone from neobanks in Brazil and Africa to traditional fin...

Today I'm talking with Darragh Buckley, the CEO and co-founder of Increase . If you've been following fintech for a while, you probably know Darragh as employee number one at Stripe, where he built the team responsible for moving money at a massive scale. At Stripe, he learned a crucial lesson about infrastructure: when you're stuck solving business, technical, and risk problems all...

Today's guest is Jason Lee, a fintech veteran who has been at the forefront of employee financial wellness innovation for nearly a decade. After co-founding and scaling DailyPay into one of the pioneering companies in earned wage access, Jason went on to launch Salt Labs, an innovative employee rewards platform that Chime acquired just 18 months after its founding. Now, as the leader of Chime...

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Clive Kinross, CEO and co-founder of Propel Holdings . Propel is one of the most successful fintech lenders serving underbanked consumers, and what makes their story particularly compelling is how they've achieved it: profitably, almost from day one.  Since founding the company 14 years ago with just $4 million in capital, Clive and his three co-founde...

Nubank co-founder Cristina Junquiera joins the podcast to discuss one of fintech's most remarkable success stories, from a Brazilian startup that had customers begging to get off the waitlist to a publicly traded company serving 127 million customers and reaching 60% of Brazilian adults. In this wide-ranging conversation, Cristina shares the origin story of how three founders from different c...

In this special episode recorded live at Money2020 in Las Vegas, we dive deep into what I think is the most transformative development in lending over the past decade: cash flow underwriting. I welcome back to the show Jason Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Prism Data (I last had Jason on the show back in 2019 when he was with Petal), to explore how real-time bank account data is revolutionizing credi...

In this episode, I sit down with Davi Strazza, who leads Adyen 's business in North America. Davi brings a fascinating global perspective on payments, having spent over a decade at Adyen working across Brazil and now the US market. We dive into how Adyen's banking license, which they've held since 2021, fundamentally changes what they can offer to marketplaces, digital businesses, a...

In this episode, I sit down with Rich Clow, Head of Innovation and Strategy, Global Payments Solutions at Bank of America , to explore how one of the world's largest financial institutions is approaching payments innovation, such as instant payments and digital wallet technology. Rich shares insights into Bank of America's unique perspective, given their scale of serving tens of millions...

When it comes to paying for a place to live, the economic benefits have always skewed towards homeowners, with renters getting no credit for all their on-time rent payments. But that is changing today. Piñata is helping millions of renters across America build their credit score and earn rewards with their rent payments. In this episode, CEO and Co-Founder Lily Liu reveals how her company is trans...

Today, I sit down with Bill Capuzzi, CEO of Apex Fintech Solutions, to explore the critical infrastructure powering modern fintech investing. Bill shares the fascinating journey of Apex from its roots as a pioneer in API-enabled clearing to fractional share trading and becoming the clearing firm behind investment accounts for close to 25 million people across household names like Robinhood, SoFi,...

In this episode, I sit down with Jon Fry, CEO and co-founder of Lendflow , to explore how AI is transforming the embedded lending landscape. Jon shares his unconventional journey from building websites in college to becoming a key player in embedded lending, including the challenge of launching LendFlow in early 2020—just as COVID shut down the lending market. The conversation dives deep into how...

What if you could settle card transactions on weekends and holidays, reduce working capital requirements by orders of magnitude, and give fintechs global reach without the traditional banking infrastructure headaches? In this episode, I sit down with Farooq Malik, CEO and co-founder of Rain , a company that's quietly rewriting the rules of payment infrastructure by bridging traditional fintec...

Today we are focusing on financial crime and fraud management with the CEO and co-founder of Feedzai , one of the world's largest independent risk management platforms serving banks and fintechs. Nuno shares his fascinating journey from being the first Portuguese engineer at the European Space Agency to building a global fintech powerhouse with over 700 employees across four continents. The c...

Welcome back to the occasional series on the podcast called Fintech Revealed. This is a sponsored show where we take a deep dive into one topic with a couple of industry experts. Today, we are focusing on small business credit with Levi King, the CEO of Nav and Gerri Detweiler, a credit expert and educational consultant. We provide listeners with a clear understanding of how small business credit...

There are not many fintechs that can say they work with nine of the top ten banks in the United States. Or that they are working directly on deep integrations with the likes of Apple and Amazon. Meet Jordan Wright, CEO and Co-Founder of Atomic , who can say all those things. While Atomic started in direct deposit switching, a now relatively mature fintech product, what they have been working on re...

It is something of a mystery that virtually no fintech entrepreneurs have tackled one of the biggest markets there is: senior citizens collecting social security. Well, until now. In this episode, I sit down with Kevin Nazemi, CEO and co-founder of Charlie, to explore serving this large market. With over 60 million Americans in this demographic, Kevin explains why traditional banks and fintechs ha...

Today, I welcome back to the show Arad Levertov, CEO and co-founder of Sunbit (I last had him on the show in 2019 ), one of the leaders in offline buy-now-pay-later. From 2,000 retail locations in 2019 to nearly 30,000 across verticals like auto repair, dental, and veterinary services, Sunbit has achieved tremendous growth. But what I found most impressive is this: a 90% approval rate combined wit...

Today, I sit down with Joe Breeden, CEO and founder of Deep Future Analytics (DFA), for what is, in effect, a two-part conversation. First we do a deep dive into credit risk management and where it is falling short today and then we discuss AI monitoring and governance and how it is going to revolutionize software. The conversation covers why traditional machine learning models are missing critica...

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) has transformed how consumers approach purchasing, yet adoption in the US still trails markets like Australia and Europe. In this episode, we sit down with Joe Heck, US CEO of Zip , who brings somewhat of a contrarian perspective to the industry. Joe argues that BNPL isn't just another credit product, it's a financial tool designed for what he calls "undere...

In this episode, I sit down with Jason Guss, CEO and co-founder of Octane Lending , to discuss how the company became the #1 powersports lender in the country. The conversation covers Octane's early pivot from lender aggregator to direct lender, their dominance in niche markets, and strategies for thriving in challenging interest rate environments. Jason talked about how their early focus on...

Violet Abtahi is the CEO and Founder of Platonic , a company developing blockchain infrastructure to solve counterparty risk and privacy challenges in financial markets. With over a decade of experience in both traditional finance and blockchain technology, Violet transitioned from a mathematics background on Wall Street to building next-generation financial infrastructure. Violet argues that coun...

In this episode, I sit down with Tomás Campos, CEO and Co-Founder of Spinwheel , a fintech infrastructure company that's revolutionizing how lenders and financial platforms access consumer credit data. With over 20 years in fintech, Tomás explains how Spinwheel can authenticate users and connect to all their liability accounts—credit cards, loans, mortgages, and more—using just a phone number...

In this episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast, we talk with Paulette Rowe, CEO of Stax , a payments technology company that's making waves in the embedded payments space by taking a fundamentally different approach than many competitors. Rather than simply reselling services from payment processing giants, Stax has built and acquired the technology to own their entire stack, from gateway...

As long-time listeners will know, I love the consumer lending space. So, I am delighted to welcome back to the podcast Matt Potere, the CEO of Happy Money , a position he has held since September 2024. Previously, Matt served as CEO of Sunlight Financial, which he took public via SPAC in 2021. With decades of experience in consumer finance across multiple asset classes, Matt brings deep expertise...