The Fintech Blueprint

Lex chats with Siddharth Batra, Co-founder at X1 Card, about his experience in technology and software development. X1 is a FinTech company that has created a smart credit card and has become one of the top 100 credit cards in the US with a waitlist of 600,000 people. Together, they discuss how Sid has articulated his consumer product building learnings from his experience as head of engineering a...

Lex interviews Hristo Borisov, CEO and co-founder of Payhawk, a leader in B2B payments and expense management. Together, they discuss the evolution of product development, from mobile apps to platforms that solve customer problems. Touching on the 2017 trend of chatbots and the practical uses of this technology today via ChatGPT. Additionally, Hristo expands on the company he founded in 2018 - Pay...

Lex interviews Kaito Cunningham, Co-founder and CEO of Utopia Labs, the modern system for managing contributor payments, expenses, and more for your DAO, supported by communities such as FWB, Sushiswap, and PleasrDao. Together, they touch on what a DAO really is and how the theoretical concept has evolved over time. The true benefits of transparency and verification have not been brought to fruiti...

Lex interviews Michele Tucci, the Managing Director in North and Latin America and Chief Strategy Officer of CredoLab, the largest developer of bank-grade digital credit risk scorecards based on mobile device data. Together, they touch on digital banking, digital credit, as well as the intersection between financial services, telecoms, and technology more.     MENTIONED IN THE CONVERSATION   Credo...

Lex Sokolin continues his Build It Series, focusing on the differences between B2C and B2B strategies, and on the implementations of some foundational marketing principles. He discusses branding and the two ways of doing it right. Then he dives into the various programs that can be implemented to generate demand, from content, to social media, to paid acquisition. Finally, he touches on the import...

Lex interviews Dean Tribble, co-founder and CEO of Agoric. Agoric is a Proof-of-Stake chain utilizing secure JavaScript smart contracts to rapidly build and deploy DeFi, comprised of a team who are experts in smart contracts. Agoric was founded on open-source principles which look to build a public economy. Dean is considered a technical genius and a long-time developer around blockchain, smart co...

Lex interviews Stephen Balavan, the CEO of Lambda Labs, a company that provides GPU servers, workstations and cloud services for training neural networks. Stephen talks about his background in computer science, economics, and deep learning, and how his interest in AI began with reading Neuromancer by William Gibson. He discusses the history of AI research, the concept of perceptron, and the breakt...

Lex interviews Sean Bennett, the co-founder and CTO of Stronghold, a Fintech company. Sean started out as an independent software developer, building software for clients. This experience led him to entrepreneurship and he used his skills to tackle the problem of remittance. He created Coinex, a stable coin issuer on the Ripple network, which allowed people to send money cheaply and quickly. Howev...

 In this podcast, Lex interviews William (Bill) Capuzzi, CEO of APEX, a Fintech company transforming financial services. Bill talks about his journey from studying environmental science to working in the financial industry, first at the banking and trading divisions of DLJ, then at Pershing where he learned the "bowels" of the industry, and then at Convergex where he learned about the importance o...

In this conversation, our Editor-in-chief Lex Sokolin walks through how 2023 is the year for executing on raw fundamentals, which means understanding how to design a Fintech or DeFi business model and understanding the shape of demand. Companies must focus on customer centricity and use a Lean Startup methodology to validate ideas and assumptions. This is done by testing products and services with...

In this conversation, we chat with Jesse Proudman, the VP of Crypto Investing at Betterment, who was also the co-founder and CEO of Makara. Proudman shares his journey of building a web-design business, which eventually morphed into a cloud computing service and was later acquired by IBM. He then explains his interest in blockchain and the business he built to manage crypto portfolios, which led t...

In this conversation, we chat with Jarred Ward, CEO and co-founder of Twisp. Ward has been tasked with building nearly every part of the modern financial ecosystem, from a greenfield core banking stack, direct integrations with Visa and the card networks for card issuing, and later, building a banking-as-a-service API on top of BBVA’s global core. Ledgers are the detailed records of transactions a...

In this conversation, we chat with Will Beeson, who currently works at Standard Chartered Ventures. Previously, Will was the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at digital bank BELLA, as well as, a Principal at Rebank, a fintech advisory firm. Will’s banking entrepreneurship streak doesn’t end there, he co-founded Allica, a digital bank for businesses in the UK. We discuss the evolution of the bank...

In this conversation, we chat with David Shuttleworth, the managing director of token engineering at Binance. Prior to this, David was a Senior DeFi Economist at ConsenSys, where he focused on mechanism design, tokenomics, and protocol design. David’s experience is extensive and includes leading the development of the Medical Advanced Analytics team at GlaxoSmithKline and was a data scientist at v...

In this conversation, we chat with Adam Nash, the co-founder & CEO of Daffy – a new fintech platform focused on charitable giving. Adam has served as an executive, angel investor, and advisor to some of the most successful technology companies to come out of Silicon Valley. He is currently on the Board of Directors for Acorns, the country’s fastest-growing financial wellness system, and Shift Tech...

Timestamp 1’24”: From the US Secret Service to fraud control at Visa - what kickstarted this journey? 3’58”: Transitioning from the public to the private sector and building an electronic crimes task force 6’15”: The goals of payment network VISA relative to the e-commerce in which it participated 9’15”: Dispelling the myths around risk in e-commerce and how these narratives evolved into crypto 14...

In this conversation, we chat with David Beiner, Co-Founder and CEO of Hume – a web3 entertainment company pioneering music in the metaverse. David’s background is in media strategy working with companies like Comcast/NBC and MGM. In 2017 he went down the Ethereum rabbit hole and never looked back. Hume’s community-building approach blends music, digital identity, and storytelling to develop virtu...

In this conversation, we chat with David McFarland, co-founder and CEO of Coterie Insurance – a US- based insurance entity focused on making risk transfer efficient for the small commercial P&C insurance space. Coterie uses industry-leading tech, deep insurance expertise, and product innovation to embed insurance into their partners’ existing products and workflows, leveraging data from multiple s...

In this conversation, we have a special episode where Lex Sokolin - Chief Editor of The Fintech Blueprint - walks us through some strong mental models for how FinTech works, how financial services is evolving, how technology is spreading into and out of financial services, and also how we consumers, people are getting reprogrammed or used to different modes of engagement entirely. Additionally, Le...

In this conversation, we chat with Shamir Karkal, CEO and Co-Founder of Sila - a banking and payment platform for software teams building the next generation of financial products & services in regulated and unregulated industries. A true FinTech pioneer, Shamir played a crucial part in building the infrastructure that would pave the way for online banking. In 2009, he co-founded Simple, the first...

In this conversation, we chat with Gwendolyn Regina, Investment Director at BNB Chain. Her main responsibilities include streamlining processes around deal sourcing, investment strategy, portfolio management and growth. As a part of her role she invests in promising projects in the web3 and MetaFi space (GameFi, SocialFi, NFTs etc.), and leads the MVB incubation program, which she set up. Gwen was...

In this conversation, we chat with Jeff Keltner, the SVP Business Development at AI-powered digital lending fintech, Upstart. Jeff joined Upstart in 2012 after spending 6 years at Google. He launched and built the Google Apps for Education business, growing market share from zero to almost 70% in its first four years. Jeff spearheaded marketing efforts for Google Apps in Global 2000 accounts and l...

In this conversation, we chat with Soups Ranjan, the co-founder and CEO of Sardine. AI, a VC funded company with the mission to “confidently load money into a digital wallet”, where Sardine takes care of fraud and compliance issues related to money movement and instantly funds the money in the wallet. Prior to founding Sardine, Soups was head of crypto for Revolut and head of data & risk for Coinb...

In this conversation, we chat with Carlos Domingo, is a senior executive, entrepreneur, investor, and currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Securitize, Inc. Carlos has 25+ years of experience in innovation and digital transformation. Before becoming the CEO of Securitize, Carlos co-founded and launched SPiCE VC, a fully tokenized VC fund. In order to ensure global compliance for SPiCE VC, Carlos and...

In this conversation, we chat with Justin Drake, Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. He is also front and center of the biggest upcoming change to happen in Ethereum’s short history by transitioning from proof of work to proof of stake, commonly known as The Merge. A major engineering feat for what is the most active Blockchain in Crypto Justin lives in Cambridge, UK where he studied mathematic...