The Free Toaster

Klarna just filed to become a bank. They're the ninth major fintech since December, joining Affirm, PayPal, Upstart, Revolut, Bunq, Mission Lane, and OppFi. The OCC saw 18 de novo applications in 2025, nearly matching the previous four years combined. Carlos and Nick break down why everyone is running for the regulatory door: cheaper funding through insured deposits, control without a sponsor bank...

In this solo News Pod episode, Carlos unpacks the story underneath Lending Club’s recent rebrand to Happen Bank. The story was covered in this week’s Newsletter: https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/happen-bank-is-running-chime-in-reverse ****** The Affiliate Marketing Summit For Lenders San Francisco - September 23rd & 24th The Exploratorium 150-person, curated room Early bird tickets ($999) end...

Carlos sits with Megan Bauer, Head Of Customer Success at Spinwheel, to discuss affiliate marketing & business lessons learned playing poker. ****** This episode is reposted from Spinwheel's Video Podcast - "What's Your Wheelhouse." Check out the video version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXcLSTMLAK4

Nick and Carlos discuss an Editorial piece recently published in The Free Toaster Newsletter https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/how-lenders-win-when-ai-calls-the   The premise of the conversation -- an LLM-based personal finance tool is going to be the most effective/useful way for consumers to shop for cards and lending products. Given that future, how should CMOs at lending companies be thinking a...

Most lenders underestimate how long it takes to get onto a major affiliate platform. The honest answer is 6 to 12 months. Sometimes 18. If one of these channels is on your 2027 roadmap, you need to start now.   In this solo episode, Carlos breaks down the five phases that explain the timeline: Internal prep. Do you have a competitive product and funnel? Get your application rate above 40%. Card is...

Pagaya filed a lawsuit against Klarna for (allegedly) stealing is underwriting. Carlos & Nick discuss the implications for fintech marketers that share their underwriting policies with affiliate marketing platforms. Today's episode expands on coverage from this week's Newsletter. https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/pagaya-sues-klarna-for-allegedly ***** The Affiliate Marketing Summit For Lenders...

JD Power sued Chime in the Southern District of New York over its "America's #1 choice for banking" campaign, alleging breach of contract, trademark infringement, and false advertising. Carlos and Nick discuss, expanding on the coverage in this week’s Edition of The Free Toaster Newsletter.   Carlos & Nick discuss the Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders, September 23, sponsored by Experian...

We've been writing about Cash Flow Underwriting lately. This week we continue the conversation. We expand on what we wrote this week in The Free Toaster Newsletter: https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/will-llms-solve-distribution-for   ***** The Free Toaster is hosting the Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders on September 23rd & 24th in San Francisco.  Learn more: https://events.thefreetoaster....

In an October 2024 article in The Free Toaster, Carlos laid out 3 things that would unlock distribution for Cash Flow Based Lenders. In today's episode, he shares the progress we've made on all 3 fronts over the last 18 months. https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/where-is-the-demand-for-cash-flow-underwriting   ***** The Free Toaster is hosting the Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders on September...

ChatGPT just integrated Plaid, giving 200 million monthly users a personalized finance experience built on real account data. Carlos and Nick break down what that means for affiliate marketing. Credit Karma's approval odds models (and Experian's) become foundational infrastructure. Intuit's $100M OpenAI deal puts TurboTax and Credit Karma inside the chat. Generic content sites ranking for "best tr...

Jeff Keltner was the first non-founder employee at Upstart. He spent over a decade there running consumer acquisition, building the bank partnership business from zero to ten banks, and managing both sides of the affiliate marketplace. Today he hosts What the AI, a weekly podcast covering the top stories in AI with co-host Annie Delgado. This conversation goes two places. First, how a Business Dev...

Carlos and Nick break down NerdWallet's Q1 2026 earnings, the first full read on the company since the stock dropped 32% post-print. Headline numbers look fine on the surface. $222M in revenue, 6% YoY growth, $34M in non-GAAP operating income at a 15% margin. Look one layer down and the story turns. A major insurance carrier pulled back. Small business was down 15% YoY and got zero analyst questio...

Wall St. sold off what seemed to us like a killer performance from SoFi in Q1 2026. Carlos, Nick, and special guests Rachel Lauren react to the earnings report. This news Pod expands on our reporting from this week's Newsletter. https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/sofis-best-quarter-yet-disappoints ***** The Free Toaster Newsletter ships every Wednesday at www.thefreetoaster.com , curating the bigges...

Zak Ali runs the US business at Finder, the financial comparison site that started in Australia in 2006 and launched stateside in 2015. Lending now drives roughly 40–50% of Finder US revenue across personal loans, business loans, and earned wage access. In this conversation, Zak pulls back the curtain on how a major comparison publisher actually thinks — about Google's SEO meltdown, the reality of...

Nick Madrid interviews Carlos Caro live at the Fintech Summit in NYC on April 28th.   On the heels of a Curated Table Event on April 27th (sponsored by Spinwheel), Nick bumped into Carlos at the Fintech Summit and did a short Q&A on how lenders eliminate friction from their application flows. ****** To support The Free Toaster Podcast, please visit our sponsors:   Bulldog Media Group: Bulldog...

Carlos flies solo this week (Nick is wheels-up from NYC to SF after FinTech Week) to break down three stories from this week's newsletter: OnePay's no-deposit credit builder card, Credit One Bank's embedded integration with Bright Money, and Aven's new Bitcoin-backed Visa with credit limits up to $1M. He also opens up the floor on five format ideas for the September 23rd Affiliate Marketing Summit...

Carlos and Nick expand on the headline story from this week’s Newsletter. And they speculate on what this might mean for consumer lending distribution platforms. https://open.substack.com/pub/thefreetoaster/p/openai-doubles-down-hiro-finance?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web   ***** To support The Free Toaster Podcast, please visit our sponsors:   Spinwheel:   Reduce friction in...

Carlos and Nick try to make sense of Wells Fargo's 60% YOY increase in new credit card customer bookings. They covered this story in Wednesday's Newsletter and they dig deeper into potential sources of their growth: https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/wells-fargo-books-631000-new-credit     Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter ( www.thefreetoaster.com ) to get our curated news at the intersection...

Rachael Olson spent years running product strategy on Discover's $6 billion personal loan business, and she joins the show to walk through a real lender's application from marketplace click all the way to the hard pull, screen by screen. Using a hypothetical billion-dollar lender for round numbers, Rachael shows why the highest-leverage work isn't always at the top of the funnel. A 3% lift in soft...

Carlos and Nick welcome Amanda Braslow to the show as the newest partner in the business and GM of events. Amanda brings fifteen years from Capital One, most of it in the co-brand trenches. Her first big project putting together the Free Toaster Affiliate Marketing Summit on September 23rd in San Francisco at the Exploratorium.  Three stories this week. First, Experian extended its no-ding decline...

Deposits aren't loans. That sounds obvious, but the implications for affiliate marketing are anything but. Alana Levine joins Carlos Caro to break down how affiliate marketing works on the deposit side of the house: different unit economics, different optimization cadence, different failure modes, and a compliance environment that will humble anyone coming over from lending. Topics include how CP1...

Carlos and Nick sit down with John Doppke, VP at Upgrade, to unpack Boost Money — a four-in-one financial account combining a checking account, secured credit-building card, high-yield savings, and interest-free cash advances.   John explains the product's free and premium ($9.99/month) tiers, the rationale behind launching Boost Money as a standalone brand with its own app and microsite, and how...

Carlos Caro chats with Rakesh Patel , the Executive Vice President of the Experian Marketplace. For those of you not familiar with the Experian Marketplace, it got started in 2017 and it's quietly become one of the largest consumer marketplaces in the world for credit cards, personal loans, and auto insurance.    In today's episode we'll cover: -Experian's vision to become a financial co-pilot for...

Carlos sits down with Dennis Fish and John Minalga of the ICS Corporation following a roundtable dinner with 16 consumer lending executives in New York City to talk about one of the most misunderstood channels in financial services: direct mail. We discussed:   Busting the "Direct Mail is Dead" Myth Direct mail accounts for roughly 40% of new accounts for many lenders. Dennis pushes back on the id...

Carlos and Nick sit with Kelvin Chen, Head of Policy at the Consumer Bankers Association. We discuss Kelvin's recent post on LinkedIn that challenges a commonly cited fact in the media that credit card balances are at record highs. Kelvin's LinkedIn post below: "Is the consumer in trouble, or is the math just misleading? 🤔 Multiple times a day, we hear affordability stories about consumers strugg...