Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

As lenders become increasingly digital, they need to continuously manage the tradeoff between making really smooth experiences for their customers with becoming targets for fraud.  Plus, marketing funnels aren’t monolithic – helping prospects move from kicking the tires to applying for a loan needs to be balanced with making sure lenders are attracting the right, profitable people. It doesn’t help...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Earned Wage Access has become an important value proposition for workers and many neobanks generally offer it. But for largest incumbent institutions, few do offer it and a lot of it has to do with the lack of regulatory clarity – each state has a different approach to it. But that’s changing. Nico Simko, CEO of Clair, j...

Banking is undergoing deep changes. We’ve been tracking that. And ss consumers become increasingly open to new digital options, incumbent banks are feeling the pressure. It’s hard to innovate when you spend upwards of 70% of your budget maintaining legacy systems. But neobanks are also dealing with their own reckoning – we’ve moved beyond the days where we got excited about the overall headline cu...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. This episode is part of a special series on Gen Z and financial services. We're really trying to get to the bottom of this next generation. The eldest Gen Zer was born in the same year Instagram was founded. Gen Z has always lived in a world with social media. Surrounded by tech tools and platforms means reaching Gen Z...

Hiring in this market is super competitive. Like consumers have grown to expect from the companies they buy from, the bar has been raised in the hiring process. Hiring managers need to create good experiences for candidates if they want to be competitive. They must combine good UX with a growing sensitivity to secure applicants’ personal and professional data, too.  This dynamic is particularly po...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. Joining me on this show are Stephen Randall, Global Head of Liquidity Management Services in the Treasury and Trade Solutions business at Citi, and Ricardo Josua, CEO and founder of Pismo, a banking and cards platform. The two firms are working to strengthen Citi’s corporate demand deposit accounts (DDA) to clients wor...

Trintech, a global provider of cloud-based financial close solutions for CFOs and their teams, announced the acquisition of Fiserv’s reconciliation businesses in North America and EMEA. The deal comes at a time of relatively low M&A activity in the broader software vertical and, of course, sustained high interest rates. That said, it’s also happening within a segment that has an estimated value of...

Today's companies think about going global from the start and in fintech, that means thinking about payments and money movement across borders. Partnerships can play a strategic and tactical role in going international. Join me Tearsheet's editor and Airwallex's Ravi Adusumilli, SVP of Partnerships for a LinkedIn Live session. As General Manager, Americas, Ravi oversees the company’s strategy and...

We're kicking off a special podcast series where we explore this fascinating Gen Z deeper: their relationship with money, how they like to save, spend, and borrow money, their fears and aspirations, and their connections to social issues. This is part of the content series we've been doing on Steez, our branded work with Publicis Sapient on Gen Z and financial services. You can download our free G...

Welcome to our latest Tearsheet Live event. We're doing these weekly -- Wednesdays at 12 EST -- on Linkedin. Follow us here. I'm your host, Tearsheet editor, Zack Miller. Joining us is Hunter Somerville, creative director of Innovation Refunds. Occasionally we dig in to marketing and campaigns and how financial services and fintech companies are finding new ways to create leads, acquire new custom...

Welcome to another Tearsheet LinkedIn Live session. Joining me is Steven Faust, Dash Solutions CEO. Earlier this year, Prepaid Technologies rebranded as Dash. The company moved into a new corporate headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama. The company serves clients with 4 modalities: disbursements, rewards, spend, and pay. Stephen and I discuss the company’s rebrand and how that’s impacting the busine...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. One of the things I appreciate about Google’s approach to finding the right products and services in financial services and fintech to offer its users is that it’s playing the long game. A year ago, Jenny Cheng and her team launched Google Wallet which combines the payment capabilities of Google Pay with the convenienc...

After years of competing in the US, core software provider Temenos now has over a thousand clients in the U.S., including Regions Bank. Nelly Rezny leads a team of business consultants across the Americas, responsible for working with financial institutions with all of their different transformation initiatives. Nelly joins me on the podcast to discuss the challenges banks are seeing in the market...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. What I continue to find interesting is that the fintech tech stack peels away like an onion. Even the innovators have 3rd party innovation under the hood. Joining me on the podcast today is Tim Astanov, SVP, Product Commercialization & Partnerships at TabaPay. TabaPay is one of those companies that power payments for t...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. On today’s show, we’re going to explore opportunities. These types of opportunities we’ll be talking about don’t come around everyday but when they do, they can be transformative, if you’re able to really step up. I talk to Jannick Malling, co-CEO and co-founder of investing app, Public. For younger investors, the meme...

On our most recent LinkedinLive session, we spoke all about partnerships and how today's environment of higher interest rates, inflation, and less venture money flowing through is impacting how firms collaborate with one another. Joining me was Sunil Sachdev, head of fintech and growth at Fiserv. Sunil's role cuts across the Fiserv organization as the company aligns the way it works with merchants...

Portage is a fintech-focused venture fund that invests globally, with two different strategies: early-stage investing (seed to B) and growth-oriented investing (late stage). I spoke to Stephanie Choo, general partner at Portage as part of a LinkedIn Live session. She shared the impact that the drop in venture capital funding has had on the sector and fintechs, with fundraising down around 70% year...

There’s a lot of talk about personalization being the Holy Grail of banking. Some firms even use the terminology hyper-personalization. But to be honest, few banks actually provide deeply personalized products. With all the tech advancements of the past decade, it’s still mostly one-size-fits-all banking. It’s not necessarily their fault, either. Given the history of banking and data siloed by pro...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. On our podcast, we interview some of the top minds at work building the next generation of financial services. In its work with small businesses and consumer payments, Square is definitely one of the companies that matters. Christina Riechers heads up Square Banking which serves about 1 million small business owners wi...

Tearsheet hosted its first LinkedIn Live session. Joining me on the show is Zip co-founder and CEO, Larry Diamond. Ten years ago, Zip was founded in Australia as a buy now, pay later service, embedding a quick and easy consumer loan in a retailer's checkout flow. Larry recently moved to the US to focus on Zip's expansion stateside. In this LinkedIn Live session, we discuss: *Zip's US opportunity *...

There’s a lot of talk about personalization being the Holy Grail of banking. Some firms even use the terminology hyper-personalization. But to be honest, few banks actually provide deeply personalized products. With all the tech advancements of the past decade, it’s still mostly one-size-fits-all banking. It’s not necessarily their fault, either. Given the history of banking and data siloed by pro...

The public launch of generative AI in the form of ChatGPT greased the creative wheels for the impact of these types of technology. We’re seeing experts and firms scurrying, just trying to wrap their minds and their hands around AI.  We had something similar a few years ago when chatbots for financial services started getting interesting. The thing is – these were primarily black-box technologies t...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. Company transitions are always interesting. One transition I particularly like is that pivotal point when a startup matures to the extent a founder steps aside and makes way for new leadership. It’s an important stage – figuring out how to balance the passion and insight of a founder with new leadership to continue to grow the vision.  Stash, a co...

The public launch of generative AI in the form of ChatGPT greased the creative wheels for the impact of these types of technology. We’re seeing experts and firms scurrying, just trying to wrap their minds and their hands around AI.  We had something similar a few years ago when chatbots for financial services started getting interesting. The thing is – these were primarily black-box technologies t...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miler, Tearsheet’s editor in chief.  We’ve covered a lot about buy now, pay later over the years. BNPL’s rise was strong, given how it is embedded into a merchant’s checkout process and appealed to younger customers who preferred financing certain transactions and not the revolving credit of a credit card. Honestly, BNPL’s takeup and growth has overshadow...