Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast, where we explore financial services together with an eye on technology, innovation, emerging models, and changing expectations. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. Fintech just lived through four distinct ages — pioneers, growth-at-all-costs, the 2021-22 hype cycle, and the brutal reset that followed. Now we're in a fifth: bigger, more profitable, and mo...

Debt consolidation has always rested on a promise lenders couldn't verify. A borrower takes out a HELOC, says they'll pay off their credit cards, and the lender hands over the cash and hopes for the best. Credit bureau data lags by 30 days. There's no mechanism to confirm the debt actually got retired. And a significant share of consolidation borrowers end up re-accumulating balances — leaving len...

Small business banking has always had a structural problem: the companies that hold your money and the companies that build your financial software have been two different things. One moves the money, the other tracks it, and small business owners are stuck in the gap between them. A new generation of fintechs has been trying to fix that, but most are still building horizontal tools for every busi...

Most people leave money on the table every time they swipe — not because they're careless, but because the credit card rewards ecosystem is genuinely complicated. Thousands of cards, millions of merchants, shifting bonus categories, buried benefits. The promise of AI is that it can do that optimization work invisibly, in the background. Today I'm joined by Tikue Anazodo, co-founder and CEO of Kudo...

Unlock how stablecoin infrastructure is transforming cross-border payments, global treasury, and enterprise fintech strategy. In this episode, Avinash Chidambaram, Founder & CEO of Cybrid, breaks down how stablecoin rails are becoming production-ready payment infrastructure for fintechs, neobanks, and enterprises seeking faster settlement, lower fees, and programmable global money movement. Discov...

The credit system in the US was built on a fundamental assumption: that past borrowing behavior predicts future risk. That assumption has left roughly 100 million Americans essentially invisible to lenders — no score, thin file, or a history that doesn't reflect who they actually are financially today. The result is a system that compounds exclusion, requiring debt to unlock debt, and pricing risk...

The pressure building on commercial banks today comes from several directions at once. Corporate treasurers are younger, more digitally native, and less tolerant of manual reconciliation. Business structures are more complex: A franchisee group running fifty locations needs fifty entities managed cleanly, not fifty separate bank accounts generating a month's worth of reconciliation work. And the b...

For two decades, Squarespace has been the platform entrepreneurs turn to when they want to build something that looks like they hired a designer. But over the past few years, something has changed. Squarespace has been building a financial stack. Payments launched in 2023. Capital followed in 2025, offering merchants flexible financing based on their sales history. And just two weeks ago, Squaresp...

Early Warning built Zelle into the dominant peer-to-peer payments network in the U.S. — processing over a trillion dollars in yearly transactions. Paze is their next bet: a bank-backed digital wallet for e-commerce checkout, backed by the same seven major banks, designed to bring that same institutional trust to online shopping. Serge Elkiner came on as GM in late 2024, brought over from Visa wher...

A mid-market company with dozens of bank accounts shouldn't have to deploy a small army to figure out where its money is. But for most commercial banking clients, that's still the reality because the systems tracking it haven't kept up. Banks know this. Most of their commercial clients know this. The gap between what legacy infrastructure can deliver and what today's treasury teams actually need h...

For years, companies that needed to move money at scale faced the same frustrating tradeoff: build their own bank integrations and compliance infrastructure — a process that could take months — or stitch together a patchwork of specialized vendors, each covering a different rail. Modern Treasury has spent years sitting inside that problem, providing software infrastructure to help companies integr...

There's a tension at the heart of modern banking that technology doesn't seem to totally resolve: how do you be both, digitally excellent and deeply human at the same time? Most banks have picked a lane: either betting on digital efficiency or doubling down on relationship banking. But consumers aren't asking for one or the other. They want both. They want their banking app to work flawlessly when...

Sponsor banking has become one of the most scrutinized business models in financial services. The headlines focus on enforcement actions and regulatory pressure, but behind that noise is a more interesting question: when done right, how do bank-fintech partnerships actually expand financial access to people the traditional system has left behind? My guest today is Anthony Sharett, President of Pat...

Digital banking has become the largest branch of modern banking, yet most banks and credit unions still aren't approaching these experiences with a product mindset. They're managing digital channels the way they've always managed technology: as IT projects, rather than products that need constant refinement based on user behavior. The result is an ecosystem where institutions miss opportunities to...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast, where we explore financial services together with an eye on technology, innovation, emerging models, and changing expectations. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. For fintechs, cracking the credit union market is notoriously difficult. It's relationship-based, insular, and requires a fundamentally different approach than banking. Many try and fail. But...

Financial institutions are rethinking loyalty at a critical moment. Credit card spending sits at record highs, but economic uncertainty looms. For banks aiming to stay relevant, loyalty can no longer be an afterthought – it needs to be embedded into every customer experience from the start. At FIS's Emerald 2025 conference in Orlando, Mladen Vladic, general manager of loyalty services at FIS, sat...

Commercial banks are confronting a rapidly shifting landscape as private credit markets grow toward $3.5 trillion and fintech competitors accelerate their offerings with AI-powered tools. Rather than retreating, traditional institutions are doubling down on technology investments and reimagining their commercial lending strategies to compete in this new environment. "Banks are not short-term think...

Community and regional banks operate in an environment of perpetual tension. They need to grow deposits and drive lending profitability while managing operating costs that threaten to overwhelm smaller institutions. They must also prevent increasingly sophisticated fraud while delivering customer experiences that match Amazon and Netflix. And they need to do all of this while building technology f...

The GENIUS Act brings regulatory clarity to stablecoins, but Conduit CEO Kirill Gertman argues that clarity alone won't guarantee success. Banks face a choice between building their own infrastructure or becoming the pipes for others. Kirill Gertman has watched the stablecoin industry evolve from multiple angles. He spent nearly two decades in financial services before founding Conduit in 2021, in...

The venture capital world has a liquidity problem. With IPOs scarce and M&A exits few and far between, investors have been stuck in positions for years, unable to return capital to their LPs or move into new opportunities. But while traditional exit doors have stayed shut, technology has opened up new ones—specifically, platforms that make it possible to create and trade Special Purpose Vehicles a...

Some partnerships in financial services begin with a handshake and end with a contract dispute. Others start with a Sunday morning LinkedIn message and evolve into something that transcends the typical vendor-client relationship. The collaboration between Cross River Bank and Best Egg falls firmly into the latter category. "When we first got into the business, we met several new companies, and som...

CFOs are abandoning quarterly planning cycles for week-by-week assessments as trade tensions, tariff uncertainty, and supplier volatility force a new short-term reality onto financial leadership. Seamus Smith, EVP and Group President of Automated Finance at FIS, and Chrissy Wagner, SVP of GTM at FIS, break down how finance leaders can balance urgent risk management with strategic growth positionin...

Welcome to a special 4dFi podcast exploring the latest trends and technologies reshaping finance. I'm Zack Miller, Tearsheet's Editor in Chief. Today, we're unpacking the rise of AI agents and their potential to transform how consumers interact with financial services. I'm joined by my partners Russell Weiss, an AI expert and startup builder, and Josh Liggett, a seasoned fintech investor. Together...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast, where we explore financial services together with an eye on technology, innovation, emerging models, and changing expectations. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. We've been covering AI in financial services for a while now—chatbots, generative AI, fraud detection models. But something fundamental is shifting. We're moving beyond AI as a tool that assis...

Banks dramatically underestimate how their customers share financial data, and most of it happens through insecure screen scraping that creates fraud vulnerabilities and slows performance. Shane McWilliams, Head of Retail Digital Banking at FIS, breaks down the three critical challenges separating thriving institutions from those being left behind: serving small and medium businesses as a central...