Fintech Takes

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I riff about fintech companies we’re absolutely not giving investment advice on. (Speaking of Simon, he’s got a new day job: he’s joining Tempo, a payments-first blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. Will this lead to spicier payment takes? We shall see!) We kick things off with Welcome Tech, an operating system for immig...

We’re at the finish line of Source of Truth, the new podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at SOLO. And much like in a relay race, Eric Woodward (CEO at FinatIQ, who shaped one of the most successful digital payment platforms in the U.S. as the former Group President at Early Warning, the parent of Zelle) is the anchor that’s going to bring us home. In this final episode...

Hello, and welcome back to Source of Truth, a new miniseries sponsored by our friends at SOLO. This series is about information asymmetry; the enemy of financial services.  Until now, we’ve focused on theory: the broken data infrastructure we’ve inherited. In Episode 3, we move from theory to reality. I ask four veteran founders and operators: What are the most difficult challenges you face when b...

Welcome back to Bank Nerd Corner featuring Kiah Haslett (whose inaugural Fintech Takes Banking newsletter is officially live – subscribe here to stay dangerously informed and entertained). First up: big banks are asking the OCC to write one uniform rulebook that overrides conflicting state rules. We unpack OCC vs the state regulators’ group (CSBS), why it’s harder to cut a Fed master account off f...

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) by my partner-in-recapping, Jason Mikula.  First up, the open banking saga continues with a new 13-paged ANPR (Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) that reopens every fight. From whether “representatives” can access your data, if banks can charge cost-recovery fees, how liability hides under “security,” what counts as privacy vs...

Hello, and welcome back to Source of Truth, the new podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at SOLO. This series is about information asymmetry (the enemy of financial services; especially lending).  In Episode, we tackled truth vs. trust. And in Episode 2, we explore history vs. overconfidence, which goes something like this: In 1995, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac effectively...

Hello, and welcome to Source of Truth, a new podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at SOLO. This series is about information asymmetry (which is *the* enemy in financial services — especially in lending).  Information asymmetry (the gap between what the customer knows and what the financial service provider knows) explains most inefficiencies. It’s the reason why qualifie...

Bank Nerd Corner is back with Kiah Haslett returning … not just as co-host, but as an official member of Fintech Takes!  That’s right, big news: Bank Nerd Corner will soon be its own podcast feed, with Kiah hosting (and Alex dropping in monthly as a guest).  Kiah’s podcast launches this September alongside her new weekly newsletter, Fintech Takes Banking! If you’re listening to this episode, you b...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Dan Murphy — Founder of Sunset Park Advisors and former CFPB official who helped craft the agency’s open banking rule (finalized last October). Our plan is simple: for listeners less steeped in the regulatory process, we’ll walk through how the rule took shape, assess where things stand today, and focus on what comes next (and...

In the finale of Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders (a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay), we confront the biggest questions yet:  What does financial regulation look like in the age of AI (when the very concept of governance is under strain)? And in a world where algorithms move faster than institutions can react, how do we pr...

Welcome back to Fintech Takes.  I’m Alex Johnson, and today we’re trying something different: a little audiobook experiment.  I’m turning my recent deep dive, “Why Is This Happening? An Exhaustive Review of the History and Nascent Culture of the CFPB,” into a podcast episode for your listening pleasure(s) anytime, anywhere. It’s a sweeping, inside-the-agency history of the Consumer Financial Prote...

Welcome back to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders, a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay. In some ways, this is the episode everything has been building toward. We’ve explored AI in customer acquisition, underwriting, and compliance — but we haven’t gone deep on the buzziest, most frontier concept in the mix: agentic AI. In Epis...

Welcome back to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders, a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay. In Episode 4, we’re turning the spotlight on a part of lending that rarely gets the AI treatment: customer acquisition and marketing. With Kareem Saleh (Founder & CEO of FairPlay) riding shotgun as cohost, we sit down with Alana Levine (Chi...

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I riff about fintech companies we're absolutely not giving investment advice on (though this one may test our willpower). We kick things off with Alix, which tackles one of the most bureaucratically brutal processes most people will ever face: settling a loved one’s estate. It’s admin + grief = chaos. Alix offers a $249 flat-fee...

Welcome back to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders, a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay.  With FairPlay’s Kareem Saleh (Founder & CEO) at my side, we unpack: how can banks and fintechs build fair, compliant lending systems in a time of regulatory uncertainty? In episode 3, we’re digging into compliance in the age of AI; an area...

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) by my partner-in-recapping, Jason Mikula. Usually, we sift through a grab bag of headlines, but not this time. There are two seismic fintech stories worth your time (both tied to data access, control, and what comes next). So that’s where we’re headed. No visit to BaaS Island this time.  Our first story: JPMorgan Chase’s proposed...

Welcome back to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders, a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay.  With FairPlay’s Kareem Saleh (Founder & CEO) at my side, we unpack: how can banks and fintechs build fair, compliant lending systems in a time of regulatory uncertainty? In Episode 2, we’re joined by Kevin Moss (Senior Advisor at Baselayer...

Welcome to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders, a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay. In this series, I’m joined by FairPlay’s Kareem Saleh (Founder & CEO) to explore how banks and fintechs can build fair, compliant lending systems in an era of regulatory uncertainty. Episode 1 tackles one of the biggest questions in financial se...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Evan Weinberger, Bloomberg Law reporter and bank regulation whisperer (and the rare guest who can quote both Caddyshack and Empire Strikes Back in a single episode, enjoy). This week’s show unpacks the JP Morgan Chase open banking fee bombshell (they’re now charging for access to their open banking APIs) — the story Evan himsel...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Matthew Goldman — Totavi founder, serial fintech builder (Wallaby, Vertical), ex-Bankrate, and still rocking 30 credit cards. We cover a lot of ground in this episode, but if there’s a through-line, it’s this: premium cards are evolving into subscription bundles, fintechs are embedding loyalty into everyday local spend, and cry...

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I talk about fintech companies that we're definitely not giving investment advice on. We kick things off with Polar (think Stripe Billing but for LLMs). Polar tracks things like token usage, execution time, and even GitHub access to handle metered billing for AI-native products. It's not even payments; it’s pre-payments, too. Po...

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) with my partner-in-fintech-recapping, Jason Mikula. Let’s get into it. First up: at long last, FICO score versions now include BNPL data, but there’s a catch (several, actually). Affirm is furnishing data, but other major players like Klarna and Afterpay? Not so much. We dig into why most BNPLs resist sharing data (hint: it’s expe...

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, joined by Martin Kleinbard; advisor at Granular, ex-CFPB, and author of the absolute banger of a research report How Cash Flow Data Can Diffuse the Credit Score Time Bomb (which we just published on Fintech Takes!). Martin and I have been having nerdy off-the-record chats about credit risk and underwriting systems for years. B...

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, and today we’re lucky enough to dig into stablecoins (again!) with James Wester, co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research, who previously led strategic communications for blockchain, crypto, and digital currencies PayPal and served as a market research analyst at IDC.  Last time on the pod, we tackled domestic payment use cases (A...

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I talk about fintech companies that we're definitely not giving investment advice on!  We kick things off with Nekuda. Human-not-present is the new card-not-present. Nekuda’s building SDKs (software development kits) for agentic checkout, so your AI assistant can securely store and inject payment credentials at just the right mo...