Fintech Takes

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about companies we're absolutely not giving investment advice on. First up is Primitive, an agent control plane for large financial institutions trying to figure out what to do with AI agents. We get into why regulated institutions need infrastructure that sits above any one model provider, token budge...

Welcome to Lending, Unbundled, a new series from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at TruStage. The series traces how consumer lending went from a single institution that handled everything to a modular value chain of specialized providers, each owning one piece of the loan, and asks what lending, unbundled, has cost the industry along the way. In Episode 1, I sit down with my co-host for th...

Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula. We start with Parker Card, an SMB charge card startup that abruptly shut down in early May. The failure itself wasn't the story. The SVB lawsuit against issuing partner Patriot Bank is, and what it reveals about $21 million in receivables that fell into contested no-man's-land when Parker's...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Andrew DiMattina, Product Architect at Persona (and expert in all things fraud and compliance, especially AML compliance), to explore the changing state of compliance in the U.S. and around the globe. The expectation going into this administration was deregulation. What banks and fintech companies have discovered over the last...

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, and today's episode is a little different. Before I wrote a newsletter for a living, I spent the beginning of my career working in B2B marketing in fintech and financial services. So this episode is built around the provocation that B2B marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to.  First up, Cokie Hasiotis (Head of Vertical Marketing at Socure and autho...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Dave Wasik, Partner at 2nd Order Solutions, for another episode of Facing Credit, our series on everything credit and lending. Dave comes armed with 2nd Order Solutions' new credit trends report, and the headline is: things are surprisingly OK, albeit there are yellow flags. Bankruptcies are up 14% year over year. New credit ca...

Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula. We kick things off with the accelerating trend of fintech companies becoming banks. Chime's CEO confirmed it's a matter of when, not if — reversing their "we're a software company" stance. Mercury got conditional OCC approval for a national bank charter the same week it raised $200M at a $5....

Welcome to Banking on Primacy, a four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by Chime. The series orbits one question that has become the most contested in consumer finance: what does it take to earn (and hold) the most important relationship in someone's financial life? In Episode 4, I sit down with Ryan King, technical Co-Founder at Chime, to explore what AI means for the primary...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Rafe Mazer, researcher and author of the excellent report "Who Pays for What? Pricing and Monetization Options in Open Finance." This episode is a deliberate step back from the U.S. open banking soap opera I've been living inside for the past year or so.  The question of who pays for open finance isn't one the U.S. gets to answ...

Hello, and welcome back to Cash Flow Conversations, a podcast series sponsored by our friends at Nova Credit. We've spent a lot of time in this series focused on the mainstream adoption of cash flow data within consumer lending: where to get started, the challenges you can expect to face.  Episode 6 leaves that territory behind for the open frontier, where the conversations aren't about operationa...

Welcome to Banking on Primacy, a four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by Chime. The series orbits one question that has become the most contested in consumer finance: what does it take to earn (and hold) the most important relationship in someone's financial life? In Episode 3, I sit down with Jason Lee, Chief of Chime Enterprise. We unpack fintech as an employee benefit, whi...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Jonathan Cohen, Policy Lead at the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. In keeping with a theme that we've been building on around here, today's episode is about sports betting, gambling, prediction markets, and the infiltration of all of these activities into...

Welcome to Banking on Primacy, a four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by Chime. The series orbits one question that has become the most contested in consumer finance: what does it take to earn (and hold) the most important relationship in someone's financial life? In Episode 2, I sit down with Vineet Mehra, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Chime, to dig into the rewards...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Danny Funt, author of the book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. This episode isn’t really about sports. It’s about how sports gambling evolved in the U.S. from a patchwork of legal quirks, a highly coordinated state-by-state lobbying campaign, and a set of product dynamics that, over time, becam...

Welcome to Banking on Primacy, a four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by Chime. The series orbits one question that has become the most contested in consumer finance: what does it take to earn (and hold) the most important relationship in someone's financial life? In Episode 1, I sit down with Mark Troughton, President at Chime, to dig into primacy. We kick things off with a...

We kick things off with personal financial management, a category I've been following through three distinct generations. From Mint and Credit Karma to newer subscription tools, the core problem hasn’t changed; most folks don’t want to manage their money. Now, with OpenAI acquiring Hiro and Perplexity AI partnering with Plaid, PFM is shifting from dashboards to AI agent interfaces. But is this sol...

Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether. In Episode 8, I sit down again with Ed Wallen, CEO of C&R Software, for a broader...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Mike Hsu, former Acting Comptroller of the Currency. I recently crossed paths with Mike at the Bank of North Dakota's fintech and stablecoin event in Fargo, where he led a 90-minute session on stablecoins from a policymaker's perspective. It was so impressive I wanted an interactive version for the podcast. In this episode, we...

Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections: what it enables, what it complicates, and why it may force the industry to retire the word "collections" altogether. In this episode, I sit down with Chris Smith, VP of Product at C&R Software to discuss what goe...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Rich Franks (a fintech advisor and consultant with 20+ years in credit risk across both the bank and fintech sides), for a new episode of Facing Credit. This one's about credit scoring. And it’s about why the market has changed more in the last year than in the prior 30. The FICO monopoly has cracked. Federal regulators opened...

Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether. In Episode 6, I sit down with Pedro Maya, Head of Collections and Credit Risk Exe...

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about fintech startups we're absolutely not giving investment advice on. First up is monk, an accounts receivable AI that helps small businesses get paid faster. Accounts payable has been well-served by spend management tools. Accounts receivable for small businesses is still stupidly hard. We dig into...

Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software – now with a fresh batch of episodes! The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether. In Episode 5, I sit down with Rochelle Gorey...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Jason Henrichs, CEO of Alloy Labs and co-host of the Breaking Banks podcast. This episode is structured in two parts. In part one, Jason and I zoom out on bank-fintech partnerships (once we get a rant out of our system; the Treasury Department announced who’d run Trump accounts as we recorded, and we had feelings). We’ve spent...

Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula. We kick things off with Bilt 2.0. After Wells Fargo pulled the plug on a partnership costing the bank reportedly $10M a month, Bilt rebuilt its stack with Column as the bank partner, Cardless as issuer processor, and Fidem Financial as the capital provider. The transition was not smooth. Pic...