Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring financial services together

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. On the heels of a $450 million investment round at a $15 billion valuation, Checkout.com (http://checkout.com/) became Europe’s most valuable venture-backed business and fourth largest fintech globally. Bradley Riss, the firm’s chief commercial officer, joins me on the podcast today to talk about the excitement around hi...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet Editor in Chief, Zack Miller. With the excitement around buy now, pay later, Citizens stands out among a small number of banks with an offering in the space. The firm has been providing point of sale financing since 2016 and has issued over $6 billion to more than 5 million accounts. Citizens Pay is expanding in the U.S. through more partnerships wit...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. It isn’t often that I’m totally out of my league on this show. Our two guests today are scientists focused on quantum computing. IBM's Stefan Woerner & Goldman Sachs' Will Zeng join me on the podcast to discuss some of recent findings they've made in quantum computing's ability to address derivative pricing. While I clum...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. It’s hard to differentiate between the hype around digital assets and what’s fundamentally changing. Our guest on the podcast today has a foot in both worlds. Rayne Steinberg is co-founder of Arca, a digital asset manager. He was also a co-founder of WisdomTree, a pioneer in the ETF industry. Arca is an institutional gra...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet Editor in Chief, Zack Miller. Rapyd is a embedded finance platform that has gone global from day 1. The company is expanding rapidly. Joining me on the podcast is co-founder and CEO Arik Shtilman who shares exactly how quickly the firm has been growing and the news that the company has closed a $300 million investment round with its eye on an eventua...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. With all the talk about challenger banks and mega banks, tier 2 financial institutions like community banks and credit unions frequently get lost in the conversation. My guest today on the show is Arcadi Lapiro. His experience building first generation challenger banks has molded his worldview on the banking industry....

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. 2020 was an interesting year for African financial services. We saw Stripe buy Nigeria’s Paystack, its largest acquisition anywhere, and other firms raise significant venture capital. Pngme is one of the firms contributing to the next stage of growth on the continent. Brendan Playford is founder and CEO of the firm which...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. As a fintech entrepreneur, I co-founded OurCrowd, one of the largest equity crowdfunding platforms in the world. Our back office was always hard to get our hands around. Money in and money out and the timing of that money in motion took a lot of time and effort to manage effectively. Payment flows and tools to integrate...

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor-in-chief, Zack Miller. So much time and money is spent on maintaining technology within incumbent organizations. Instead of calling this tension “technology debt” or even “legacy technology”, JPMorgan Chase CIO for consumer and community banking Rohan Amin likes to call it heritage tech. I like that description as it gives room for the ongoing...

As more challenger banks launch, we’re seeing the emergence of more and more niche offerings, serving a subset of users with distinct needs. Oxygen Bank, a challenger based in San Francisco, recognized that freelancers aren’t being served well. These people don’t identify as businesses and yet they are in business. Founder and CEO of Oxygen (https://oxygen.us/), Hussein Ahmed is one of the hardest...

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...