Fintech One-On-One

Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra , one of the largest financial software companies in the world, serving over 7,000 banks globally including 45 of the world's top 50. He joined the company a little over a year ago, bringing an unusually broad background spanning consulting, Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and several other technology businesses. This is a wide-ranging conversation about w...

Ali Niknam is one of fintech's most unconventional founders. He built multiple unicorns before turning his attention to banking, then self-funded Bunq with nearly €100 million of his own money before taking a single outside investor. That conviction paid off: Bunq posted €85 million in profit in 2024, putting it in rare company among European neobanks. Now, having applied for a US national ba...

Timothy Li, CEO and Co-Founder of LendAPI , has spent nearly a decade trying to solve the same problem: launching a lending product takes too long and costs too much. With LendAPI, he's built a no-code platform that lets banks, credit unions, fintechs, and retailers go from idea to live lending product in weeks, not months or years. Think of it as a GoDaddy-style experience for financial serv...

Kareem Saleh is the CEO and co-founder of FairPlay , an AI enablement platform helping financial institutions test, tune, and monitor AI systems in production. Four years after his first appearance on the show , Kareem returns to discuss how FairPlay has evolved from credit model fairness into a full AI enablement infrastructure layer and why the rise of generative and agentic AI has made that wor...

Most of us assume that major hotel brands have sophisticated financial systems running behind the scenes. In this episode, Jess Conroy, CEO and co-founder of ROH , explains just how wrong that assumption is — and why she's spent the last several years building the financial core that hospitality never had. What We Covered: The manual payments problem hiding in plain sight Why the biggest hote...

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Leif Abraham, the co-CEO of Public.com . Public has been carving out a really interesting niche in the brokerage space. They're not trying to be another discount broker competing on free stock giveaways. Instead, they're building what Leif calls the first truly agentic brokerage, where AI agents can actually help you construct and manage...

My guest today is Denada Ramnishta, the Chief Revenue Officer at Efficient Capital Labs . I've known Denada for over a decade, having first met her during her time at American Express where she was part of the early team building out merchant financing. She's been a consistent champion for democratizing capital access for small and medium-sized businesses, and now she's doing that a...

Payment declines happen millions of times a day, but how a financial institution handles that moment of failure can define the entire customer relationship. My guest on this episode is Amir Wain, the Founder and CEO of i2c , a global payments and banking infrastructure company he has been building for more than 25 years. Amir is a serial entrepreneur who made a foundational architectural bet early...

In banking, we often talk about the "front end" customer experience or the "back end" systems of record. But according to S.P. “Wije” Wijegoonaratna, the founder of Aliya , the real revolution is happening right in the middle. From his early days in the UK to his time in the high-stakes world of New York hedge funds and his role as an early investor at SoFi, Wije has consistent...

My latest guest is Chris Black, CEO of Thread Bank , a Nashville-based community bank that has been purpose-built around embedded banking. Chris came to banking by way of a career as an Air Force pilot, followed by time on Wall Street analyzing banks during the financial crisis, before eventually making his way into community banking in Nashville. He partnered with fintech investor Joe Maxwell of...

Open banking in the United States has been on a long and winding road, and the journey is far from over. In this episode, I sit down with Steve Boms, Executive Director of FDATA North America , the trade association representing the fintech companies at the heart of the open banking ecosystem. Steve has been one of the most active voices in shaping U.S. open banking policy for over a decade, and h...

What happens when all the world's money moves on chain? That's not a hypothetical for Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs , it's the company's mission. In this episode, Marc explains how Polygon is evolving from its roots as an Ethereum layer two into the blockchain for global payments, detailing two recent acquisitions that form the foundation of what he calls the "open mone...

Aaron Schumm, CEO and Founder of Vestwell , knows firsthand how broken America's savings system is. When he tried to set up a 401k for his previous 30-person company back in 2010, the process was so difficult, expensive, and confusing that he decided to build a better solution. Today, Vestwell serves 2 million savers with $50 billion in assets, has reduced 401k setup times from 40-70 hours do...

The financial system has run on basically the same payments rails for the past several decades. But there is new infrastructure being built today that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of stablecoins. In some ways, the future is already here as Visa has processed several billion dollars in transactions that have been settled in stablecoins. But who will build the infrastructure needed for...

Ryan Christiansen has had one of the more unusual career trajectories in fintech, from managing credit portfolios during the 2008 financial crisis to leading bank integrations at Finicity during the early days of open banking, helping launch the Financial Data Exchange, and then making an unexpected leap into academia as Executive Director of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah. In this c...

I don’t know anyone who enjoys filing their taxes. It is something we begrudgingly do every April, or earlier for the well-organized, and it is usually a somewhat painful exercise. What if filing your taxes was easy, taking less than 30 minutes? What if tax planning wasn't a once-a-year chore but an embedded feature in your banking app, payroll platform, or investment account? In this episode...

Today, I sit down with Daren Guo, co-founder of Reap , the stablecoin infrastructure company and the world's largest stablecoin card enabler, processing over $6 billion annually. Daren shares his journey from being employee #90 at Stripe to building the next generation of financial rails based on stablecoin infrastructure, serving everyone from neobanks in Brazil and Africa to traditional fin...

Today I'm talking with Darragh Buckley, the CEO and co-founder of Increase . If you've been following fintech for a while, you probably know Darragh as employee number one at Stripe, where he built the team responsible for moving money at a massive scale. At Stripe, he learned a crucial lesson about infrastructure: when you're stuck solving business, technical, and risk problems all...

Today's guest is Jason Lee, a fintech veteran who has been at the forefront of employee financial wellness innovation for nearly a decade. After co-founding and scaling DailyPay into one of the pioneering companies in earned wage access, Jason went on to launch Salt Labs, an innovative employee rewards platform that Chime acquired just 18 months after its founding. Now, as the leader of Chime...

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Clive Kinross, CEO and co-founder of Propel Holdings . Propel is one of the most successful fintech lenders serving underbanked consumers, and what makes their story particularly compelling is how they've achieved it: profitably, almost from day one.  Since founding the company 14 years ago with just $4 million in capital, Clive and his three co-founde...

Nubank co-founder Cristina Junquiera joins the podcast to discuss one of fintech's most remarkable success stories, from a Brazilian startup that had customers begging to get off the waitlist to a publicly traded company serving 127 million customers and reaching 60% of Brazilian adults. In this wide-ranging conversation, Cristina shares the origin story of how three founders from different c...

In this special episode recorded live at Money2020 in Las Vegas, we dive deep into what I think is the most transformative development in lending over the past decade: cash flow underwriting. I welcome back to the show Jason Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Prism Data (I last had Jason on the show back in 2019 when he was with Petal), to explore how real-time bank account data is revolutionizing credi...

In this episode, I sit down with Davi Strazza, who leads Adyen 's business in North America. Davi brings a fascinating global perspective on payments, having spent over a decade at Adyen working across Brazil and now the US market. We dive into how Adyen's banking license, which they've held since 2021, fundamentally changes what they can offer to marketplaces, digital businesses, a...

In this episode, I sit down with Rich Clow, Head of Innovation and Strategy, Global Payments Solutions at Bank of America , to explore how one of the world's largest financial institutions is approaching payments innovation, such as instant payments and digital wallet technology. Rich shares insights into Bank of America's unique perspective, given their scale of serving tens of millions...

When it comes to paying for a place to live, the economic benefits have always skewed towards homeowners, with renters getting no credit for all their on-time rent payments. But that is changing today. Piñata is helping millions of renters across America build their credit score and earn rewards with their rent payments. In this episode, CEO and Co-Founder Lily Liu reveals how her company is trans...