Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Todays’s guest is Jemma Wolfe. She’s the head of Launch with GS, Goldman Sachs’ $500 million investment strategy in funding early stage companies built by diverse teams. Through Launch With GS, Goldman is trying to increase access to capital and facilitate connections for women, Black, Latinx and other diverse entrepreneurs and investors. Since it...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. As fintech matures, many of the early pioneers in the space are realizing how important it is to become a user’s primary account. Wealthfront, which began as a robo-adviser, looks a lot like a bank nowadays. The company recently rolled out new checking account features. Chris Hutchins is the Head of Autonomous Financial Planning at Wealthfront. He...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Jud Linville. Jud has decades of experience in financial services and payments, heading up Citi Cards and American Express’ consumer services. He’s now a senior advisor at investment firm General Atlantic. He joins us to discuss the threats and opportunities within financia l services and how fintech and Big Tech are competitively...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Suman Bhattacharyya. As merchants face new obstacles amid COVID-19 and shelter-in-place mandates, Square is working to smooth their transition to digital. Today’s guest is David Rusenko, Square’s head of e-commerce. Rusenko, who founded website builder Weebly in 2006, has been working with Square since 2018, when Weebly was acquired by Square for $365 million....

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Theodora Lau, the founder of Unconventional Ventures. When you listen to her, Theo challenges the industry to do better. Instead of producing another colored metallic debit card, she’d like to see real financial innovation that helps the people hurting the most. The unemployed. The poor. The older demographic. We discuss the finan...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. A few years back, and the term ‘crowdfunding’ was pretty popular in fintech circles. We do'n't really use that jargon anymore and many of the biggest players have naturally matured into digital wealth management platforms. YieldStreet is one of those platforms — since inception, investors have deployed over $1 billion in asset classes like real es...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller Launching a new firm in the face of this global crisis takes fortitude. Timing couldn’t be worse. Or could it? Demand for different types of digital payments is ramping. That’s the space Qolo (https://qolo.io/) plays in. A bit like Marqeta, a bit like Fiserv, the company was launched by a team with a lot of payments industry experience to be a next...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. There are so many fees in the credit card processing market. Fattmerchant, which started almost a decade ago, set out to simplify things with the market’s first subscription, all you can eat, pricing for merchants. As the firm has matured, it’s grown into an integrated payment technology provider that continues to simplify the payment experience f...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Deposit Solutions has an open banking solution that connects customers and banks. Working in 20 European countries, the company has 30 million depositors on the platform with €25 billion in deposits. Now, Deposit Solutions is active in the U.S. We have Phillipp von Girsewald, Deposit Solution’s CEO in the US. on the podcast to talk about what chal...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. When you talk to the founders of many of the leading challenger banks, you sense that they each have a touch of revolutionary in them. They see the present financial services system as broken — some more, some less — and their firms are out to provide better options for the bulk of people out there. Stuart Sopp’s the CEO of Current. Growing up thr...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. In March, Credit Sesame debuted its banking offering, Sesame Cash. Since then, more than 200,000 customers have signed up, with thousands of new accounts per day, putting Credit Sesame among the fastest growing digital banking service providers in the U.S. 62 percent of Credit Sesame’s 15 million registered users have expressed interest in Sesame...

Welcome to Tearsheet’s Outlier Podcast. This subscriber-only podcast i exclusive for our Outlier members. We go deeper with subject matter experts, to take actionable steps that can impact your businesses and practice. To get access to the full audio and transcripts, head on over to Tearsheet and apply to become an Outlier member(tearsheet.co/outlier). The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rece...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. The PPP government aid program in the US continues to put a strain on the banking sector. We’re hearing an increasing number of stories of how traditional institutions are partnering with fintechs to navigate through the crisis. Anvil is one of those fintechs servicing traditional banks and FIs. The company, which replaces PDF forms with online wo...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. One of the most exciting stories of this generation of fintech firms is Galileo. Recently acquired by SoFi for $1.2 billion, Galileo now provides the payments and banking backbone via APIs to many of the top names in the game — Chime, TransferWise, Robinhood and Bluevine. Firms like these use Galileo to open accounts and issue cards. Clay Wilkes f...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Banking systems were put to the test, surviving the impact of the current pandemic. In many cases, this crisis accelerated digital transformation programs. There is increased demand for digital solutions that require banks to seriously think about their legacy tech stacks and models. Joining us on the podcast is Rajashekara Visweswara Maiya, Finac...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. Small business demand fo government relief is at record levels. Bigger banks, for the most part, have forsaken SMBs. Smaller banks and fintechs have emerged to service small and medium businesses with streamlined loan processes, technology, and new onboarding tools. Tearsheet's Sara Toth Stub wrote a story on he challenges SMBs are facing in this...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Ronald Oliveira, the U.S. CEO of challenger bank Revolut. Ron has a lot of experience in the traditional side of banking as he takes over the reins for the European fintech’s efforts stateside. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of the US market. Ron describes the firm’s product rollout cycle for Revolut, which wants to b...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. We’ve got an interesting episode teed up for you today. It’s a case study with Finlocker and Fiserv. Finlocker is a super app that integrates with banks and other financial institutions to enable loans and financial transactions. Consumers consent to feed it with their bank account data and the personal finance assistant makes loan product recomme...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Data aggregation and connectivity firm Plaid recently announced Exchange, its open finance platform that allows banks and other financial institutions to share their customers’ data via a single API integration. As the public requires more forms of integration with the fintech apps they use, banks are looking for secure solutions. And for banks th...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Commercial payments are a huge opportunity. They’re antiquated — checks are still very popular in the U.S. -- they’re complicated, and they’re huge, worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. Mastercard’s James Anderson, evp of global commercial products, joins us on the podcast to talk about his team’s major launch of Track Business Payment Service....

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. N26 was the first foreign challenger bank to launch in the U.S. When you speak with CEO Nic Kopp, you know it was no simple feat. Now, five months in the market, Kopp joins us on the podcast to discuss the launch process and what it takes to bring a challenger online. We discuss who’s using N26 in the US and what they’re using it for. We talk abou...

On this episode of The Challengers Podcast, Zack Miller and Josh Liggett talk about the extension financing round some of the larger challenger banks are announcing. N26, Revolut and Judo all added to their war chests as they, and their investors, prepare to be going into what Zack called "a nuclear winter". Josh said some of the challenger banks looking to raise mid-2020 are suffering. So, those...

Flybits' Hossein Rahnama is one of our speakers at DataDay, the first-of-its-kind conference on financial data. Consumer data, data ecosystems, and data aggregation is changing the face of modern financial services. Join Adam and speakers from Plaid, Wells Fargo, Fiserv, MX, Stash, and more. Secure your spot at https://ti.to/tearsheet/tearsheets-dataday-conference-2020 The foundation for Flybits c...

Welcome to Tearsheet’s Outlier Podcast. This subscriber-only podcast is exclusive for our Outlier members. We go deeper with subject matter experts, to take actionable steps that can impact your business and practice. I’m Zack Miller, editor in chief at Tearsheet To get access to the full audio and transcripts, head on over to Tearsheet and apply to become an Outlier member(tearsheet.co/outlier)....

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Consumers increasingly expect higher levels of personalization from their financial services providers. Whether it’s from a challenger bank or Bank of America, people are used to Netflix-level of recommendations. An entire industry is cropping up to help provide a consumer’s data from all her accounts so that a service provider can provide actiona...