Rebank: Fintech Analysis

Platform banking's role in the growth of fintech can hardly be understated, with companies including Monzo, N26, Revolut, Chime, Acorns, Betterment, MoneyLion and many, many more starting or expanding on top of regulated third-party banking partners. Similarly, the promise of embedded finance, where non-bank brands and consumer experiences deliver banking and other financial services directly to c...

Today we explore the wild and wondrous world of equity primary markets. We're joined by Anand Sambasivan , Co-Founder and CEO of PrimaryBid , Marcus Stuttard , Head of UK Primary Markets for the London Stock Exchange , and Aman Ghei , Principal at Finch Capital . To get the conversation started, former investment bankers Anand and Aman walk us through the quirky and questionable dynamics of invest...

Richard Gendal Brown is the CTO of R3 , an enterprise blockchain company backed by a number of high profile strategic investors. R3 has been working on its Corda platform since the early days of blockchain mania and is now actively supporting projects and implementations in syndicated lending, trade settlement, supply chain management and more. In this conversation, Richard reconciles the early hy...

Ned Phillips is the Founder and CEO of Bambu , a white-label roboadvisory platform. Backed by Franklin Templeton , among others, Bambu builds roboadvisory offerings for banks, investments firms and other consumer-facing businesses. In this conversation, we discuss the limitations of current roboadvisory offerings, the reasons banks have trouble designing solutions for customers and where the space...

Sean Hanafin is the Group President of Greensill, a modern supply chain finance provider that has raised an astonishing $1.5 billion in equity this year alone. Backed by General Atlantic and Softbank, Greensill is aiming to quickly scale its technology-driven supply chain finance offering across the largest markets in the world. On top of that, the company is looking to leverage an approach simila...

Charlie Delingpole is the Founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage, a global AML, sanctions screening and transaction monitoring company. Backed by Balderton and Index, the latter of which led a $30-million Series B in the company in January, ComplyAdvantage is scaling beyond financial services to deliver real-time compliance monitoring across industries. We're joined in today's conversation by Aman Ghe...

Kristo Käärmann is the co-founder and CEO of TransferWise, a payments company fighting to break banks' usurious grip on FX and international transfers.    TransferWise is one of Europe's greatest fintech success stories, most recently valued at $3.5 billion in a secondary offering earlier this year. The company has nearly 2,000 employees around the world, moves $5.5 billion a month between nearly...

Freddy Kelly is the Founder and CEO of Credit Kudos, a UK company redesigning the credit bureau for the modern age. Unhappy with the inaccuracy, opaqueness and questionable data ethics of the traditional model, Credit Kudos is using Open Banking, machine learning and customer consent in an attempt to create a more transparent, more predictive credit scoring system.  In addition to the insights we...

Immad Akhund is the founder and CEO of Mercury , a bank for startups.  Mercury, which  launched to market in April , has raised $26 million from Andreessen Horowitz and a number of others, including the founder of Silicon Valley Bank, a respected player in the startup banking space. Mercury offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts, along with payments, cashflow analytics and API-access to...

Naftali Harris is the Co-Founder and CEO of SentiLink, a synthetic fraud prevention company. Naftali was the first data science hire at Affirm, where he built some of the lender's first fraud models. For the past couple years, Naftali has been working to solve the problem of synthetic fraud, a surprisingly pervasive and little-discussed source of credit losses for banks. Earlier this year, SentiLi...

Lex Sokolin is the Global Fintech Co-Head at ConsenSys, the leading crypto software development studio and venture builder.  As regular listeners know, Lex is one of the world's leading authorities on the intersection of crypto, disruptive technologies and financial services. In this conversation, we get Lex's perspective on where crypto is focused today, the emergence of decentralized finance and...

Joseph Healy is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Judo Bank, an SME challenger bank in Australia. Fresh off a A$400m equity raise from Bain Capital and others, Judo is on track to lend A$1 billion by year end. Prior to starting Judo, Joseph held executive positions at NAB, ANZ, CIBC World Markets, Citibank and Lloyds. From 2008-2014, Joseph ran NAB's Business Banking unit, the largest business banking...

Oliver Prill is the CEO of Tide , a leading business banking provider for UK SMEs. Charles McManus is the CEO of ClearBank , the first new clearing bank in the UK in nearly 200 years .  Tide and ClearBank recently won a £60 million grant as part of the RBS remedies program, which we've discussed before on the podcast and which Charles describes to start us off. With the funding, Tide, backed by Cl...

Seth Rosenberg focuses on fintech at Greylock , one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, with noteworthy investments including LinkedIn, Facebook, Airbnb and many more. In this conversation, we talk through Greylock's fintech thesis, Seth's view of where the industry is going and the way the firm looks at investments in general. We reference a deck Greylock published, accessible here ....

Mike Massaro is the CEO of Flywire , a Boston-based payments company. Flywire specializes in large-value payments for education, healthcare and travel. Flywire has raised over $140 million from leading investors including Spark Capital, Fidelity's F-Prime, Bain Capital, Temasek, Accel Partners and QED Investors. In this conversation, Mike and I discuss the drivers and implications of recent consol...

Ryan Gilbert is a General Partner at Propel , a San Francisco-based venture firm with investments in companies including Coinbase, Personal Capital, Trussle, Prosper and many more. Prior to joining Propel, Ryan founded and ran SmartBiz loans, a leading SBA loan originator. In this conversation, we explore a few interesting fintech verticals, including mixed commerce, insurtech and payroll benefits...

Sankaet Pathak is the Founder and CEO of Synapse , a platform banking provider.  Fresh off a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz , Synapse is operating at the leading edge of the potentially massive platform banking trend. In this conversation, we discuss the issues with existing sponsor banking infrastructure, examples of new propositions that can be created using a platform like Synapse and the...

Donna Parisi is a Derivatives Partner and Global Head of Financial Services and Fintech for Shearman & Sterling , a leading global law firm. In addition to her work on a range of derivatives, structured products, securitization, capital markets and commodities matters, Donna has built specific expertise in crypto, tokens and digital assets, which are the subject of our conversation today. Donna an...

Jon Stein is the Founder and CEO of Betterment , one of the world's leading digital investments companies. We first connected with Jon in January 2018 in a great episode that's still very relevant today. Since then, Betterment has added $4 billion in assets under management to its platform, and today, they're launching checking and savings accounts as they extend their offering into banking. This...

The subject of today's conversation is design in financial services. We talk all the time about the new customer experiences shaping the evolution of finance, generally focusing on the implications of those forces and others on the trajectory of the industry. Today, we take a closer look at those experiences themselves, through the eyes of the people designing them. The first voice you'll hear aft...

The investments space is changing as fast as any other financial services vertical, with roboadvisors, free stock trading apps, contextual behavioral experiences, software automation, AI, new pricing structures and crypto all shaping the future direction of the industry. Today, we discuss the current state and likely future of the space with two of the leading firms in the industry. Chris Worle is...

Paul Taylor is the founder and CEO of Thought Machine, a cloud native core banking platform. We first connected with Paul in November 2017, where we walked through his background as a Google AI engineer and the origins of Thought Machine. Today, we zoom out and update, digging deeper into what drives banks' decisions to modernize core infrastructure and how, what approaches are best for what organ...

Michael Rolph is the co-founder and CEO of Yoyo , a payments, loyalty and receipt app enriching commerce for customers and merchants. The payments space has been actively lately, as incumbents consolidate and startups seek new attack vectors leveraging open banking, native device components, tokens and other emerging technologies. Michael brings a value perspective to recent developments in the sp...

Nick Hungerford is the founder of Nutmeg , the UK's leading roboadvisor.   Nick founded Nutmeg in 2011 and ran it for five years. Currently, Nick is a partner at Portag3 Ventures and serves on the boards of Nutmeg, multiply.ai and Hong Kong based digital bank Neat .   In addition to the insights we deliver through our podcast and newsletter, Rebank offers advisory services to fintechs, banks and c...

Ron Suber is the former head of Prosper , one of the original peer-to-peer lenders.   Prior to getting involved in Prosper, Ron built and sold Merlin, a tech-first prime broker for the long-tail of hedge funds, acquired by Wells Fargo in 2012 .   Ron invests in and advises a number of fintech companies and has developed views on the space and where it's headed, all of which we get into today.   In...