Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. At nearly eight years old, Avant is one of the pioneers in online lending. It has expanded its product set over the years to include banking functions for middle income consumers. James Paris is the CEO of Avant and joins us on the podcast to talk about the growth of the company and the opportunities it has to fill a mar...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. On today’s podcast, I’m joined by Will Peterffy and Eddy Soffer of Interactive Brokers. Will, son of Interactive Brokers’ founder, is a new board member of the online brokerage and its ESG Ambassador. Interactive Brokers recently rolled out a portfolio scorecard that grades equity portfolios along several dimensions, l...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Small businesses have a lot to contend with. In addition to the everyday battle around cash flow, many SMBs had to quickly change their business models and payment capabilities during the pandemic. Patrick Smith, the head of small business banking at Santander, joins me on the podcast to talk about Santander’s approach t...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Banks are hearing from their customers that they want better experiences — better experiences in banking, borrowing and in payments. Joining me today on the podcast is Finastra’s global head of payments, Paul Thomalla. The banking software provider recently launched a new product that makes it easier and quick for mid an...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. My guest today is Stuart Rubinstein, CEO of Akoya. A spin out of Fidelity, Akoya is a financial data aggregator that lets the customers of financial institutions grant and revoke third party access to their financial data safely. Akoya facilitates this access and eliminates the need for consumers to share their user IDs...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. As chat platforms have eclipsed the size of the largest social networks, businesses are increasingly using them to service their customers. Some financial institutions are even enabled for customers to transact over chat. Pieter de Villiers, co-founder and CEO of Clickatell, joins me on the podcast to talk about his visi...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. The first era of next generation financial companies focused on the bank account as the store of information and value for consumers’ and business’ financial lives. That’s changing, as fintechs and data aggregators go deeper into payroll data and payments. The topic is becoming more urgent since the PPP rollout earlier...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Embedded finance is powering the launch of all kinds of new companies and products around the world. Brazil-based Conductor is a digital banking and payment platform. It processes 1 billion payment transactions annually, totalling over $20 billion in payment volume and serves over 250 clients with more than 85 million ca...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Embedded Finance is becoming more competitive. New platforms are launching and existing platforms are expanding into new products and geographies. My guest today has seen it all. Dov Marmor has helped build some of the leaders in banking as a service, including Currencycloud, Green Dot, and now Railsbank. Railsbank’s chi...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. We’ve been talking for a long time about big tech’s move into finance. We’ve seen Apple’s launch of a credit card, Amazon and Shopify’s lending to merchants, and Facebook move deeper into payments on its messaging apps. News hit this week that gave us more insight into Google’s moves in banking. The company is launching...

The acceleration of digital banking that took hold during the pandemic allowed for continued adoption of Goldman Sachs’s consumer banking product suite. Marcus by Goldman Sachs, which launched four years ago, had $96 billion in deposits as of the third quarter of 2020. With personal loans, savings accounts, and Marcus Insights, its personal finance analysis tool, Goldman is building a comprehensiv...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Today’s guest on the podcast is Experian’s Chief Product Officer, Gregory Wright. Listening to Greg, you get a feeling for how the role of credit bureau is changing — to the point of even who they serve is evolving. We discuss fintech trends, like cloud, APIs and alt data, and how they’re impacting Experian’s ecosystem....

The past few years have shown that business banking customers no longer have to wait days or weeks to apply and receive loans to open bank accounts and transact. Many new options are being offered by fintech firms that don’t have to deal with large legacy technology stacks and legacy thinking. This frees them up to focus on servicing small business needs and delivering good banking experiences. La...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m editor in chief, Zack Miller. There’s a flurry of activity around creating bank accounts for young people. Getting the balance between autonomy and parental oversight is critical for teens and Step feels like it’s found the sweet spot. Joining me on the podcast is CJ MacDonald, founder and CEO of Step. CJ was the co-founder of gyft, a startup targeting the mas...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Today’s guest is David Donovan, executive vice president at Publicis Sapient. He leads the firm’s North American financial services practice. Publicis Sapient is a domain-lead digital consultancy. It works with many of the major banks and that gives David a good view into what’s going on strategically and operationally o...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet Editor in Chief, Zack Miller. As a founder of a tech startup, Immad Akhund found that the banks his firm used were all lost in the sea of mediocrity and sameness. He was surrounded by services in other parts of his business that were fresh, fast and worked well. His frustration with banking led him to found and lead Mercury, a bank for startups. The...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. There’s been a lot of talk about Varo, the first US challenger bank to receive a national charter. The bank has rebuilt its technology off its partner bank and is transitioning over its customers to its new technology stack. To do that, it turned to Temenos, the modern core banking software provider. Alexa Guenoun is the...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. As challenger banks battle over getting new customers, the discussion has moved over the big headline numbers to the quality of those new customers. More specifically, digital banks — but really all banks — are being judged on whether these new account openings turn into customers, whether these new users turn to the ban...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Eliot Buchanan dreamed up the idea of Plastiq seven years ago as an undergrad. A Canadian in the U.S., he got frustrated by how hard it was to transact paying for his tuition. His firm Plastiq enables individuals and businesses to pay for virtually any expense with a credit card — even if a merchant doesn’t take cards. S...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. When Western Union formally began building out its connection to the fintech community, it partnered with Techstars, a well-respected accelerator in Boulder, Colorado. The Techstars and Western Union Accelerator (https://www.techstars.com/accelerators/western-union) focuses on startups looking to shape the future of how...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. As challenger banks expand their capabilities, many with debit and credit cards are adding in rewards as a way to service their customers. Dosh gives millions of users cash back when they shop at top retailers that are using cash back as an acquisition tool. Dosh recently announced a major expansion of“Powered by Dosh,...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. As we’ve discussed many times on the podcast, the pandemic has accelerated a lot of digital trends that were already underway before COVID-19 hit. There’s been a big push away from cash and towards contactless but major US cities are pushing back on cashless retailers. So, where will all this lead? Diebold Nixdorf’s Simo...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. Eighteen months ago, there was a lot of talk around voice and the possibilities of using human speech as a new automated channel in financial services. There’s less talk now but the technology continues to improve. Today’s guest on the podcast is Clinc’s Jon Newhard. He’s been around technology a lot for the past 25 ye...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. Today’s guest is Steve Villegas, vp of payment partnerships in North America for PPRO. He works with acquirers and payment service providers to give them a single integration to offer a variety of local payment options to their customers. We explore a recent whitepaper PPRO published about how COVID has impacted consum...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Many people know Ingenico as a manufacturer of payment terminals. Over years, the company has acquired firms in the digital payment processing space. Our guest on the podcast today, Andrew Monroe, runs the epayments division in North America, helping large multinational merchants accept payments from consumers across the...