Tearsheet Podcast: The Business Of Finance

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. A lot of monoline financial firms look a lot like banks nowadays. Rebundling, as we like to call it in the industry, is happening. You don’t need to look further than Betterment, a fintech firm whose roots were as a robo-adviser. The firm has been rolling out more banking functionality and the firm’s president of retail, Mike Reust joins us on the podcast to discuss the move into general banking. Mike was previously the firm’s CTO so his perspective on Betterment’s product roadmap gives some insight into where the firm is headed. He discusses the demand side and what customers are looking for. We also chat about the firm’s overall vision and how that impacts product development during the COVID-19 era. Mike Reust is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. Call volumes into banks have gone up 10x during the pandemic. Wait times have been hours at the peak of the crisis. Chatbots and other forms of conversational AI have been deployed to help. But they're not quite there yet. Tearsheet's Sara Toth Stub recently wrote a story about where chatbots are useful and where they aren't. After a lot of hype, they are providing some real value but it will be years before the technology approaches human customer service reps. Sara Toth Stub is my guest today for a deep dive podcast to discuss the innovations happing in the physical world of payments.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. When COVID hit, call volumes surged. Customers were calling their banks and financial institutions out of fear. Banks had to scale this volume while simultaneously transition their customer service staff to work from home. Vijay Balasubramaniyan is CEO of Pindrop which provide many of the top banks and insurers with voice authentication and fraud detection. Pindrop has raised more than $200 million. Vijay joins us on the podcast to talk about the challenges in today’s banking call centers and how some of the top firms are improving outcomes and reducing fraud. We discuss how COVID is impacting the financial industry and what the ecosystem may look like on the other side. Vijay Balasubramaniyan is my guest today on the podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Todays’s guest is Jemma Wolfe. She’s the head of Launch with GS, Goldman Sachs’ $500 million investment strategy in funding early stage companies built by diverse teams. Through Launch With GS, Goldman is trying to increase access to capital and facilitate connections for women, Black, Latinx and other diverse entrepreneurs and investors. Since its inception in June 2018, Launch With GS has deployed more than $230 million globally across businesses with diverse leadership. Joining Jemma is Jean Brownhill, founder and CEO of Sweeten, a home renovation marketplace and a participant in Launch with GS’ new Black and Latinx cohort.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. As fintech matures, many of the early pioneers in the space are realizing how important it is to become a user’s primary account. Wealthfront, which began as a robo-adviser, looks a lot like a bank nowadays. The company recently rolled out new checking account features. Chris Hutchins is the Head of Autonomous Financial Planning at Wealthfront. He joins us on the podcast to talk about his firm’s vision of Self-Driving Money and how the future of financial services will include more autonomous banking services. Chris was previously the co-founder and CEO of Grove, which was acquired by Wealthfront and co-founder of Milk, which was acquired by Google. Chris Hutchins is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Jud Linville. Jud has decades of experience in financial services and payments, heading up Citi Cards and American Express’ consumer services. He’s now a senior advisor at investment firm General Atlantic. He joins us to discuss the threats and opportunities within financia l services and how fintech and Big Tech are competitively positioned to take marketshare. Jud Linville is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Suman Bhattacharyya. As merchants face new obstacles amid COVID-19 and shelter-in-place mandates, Square is working to smooth their transition to digital. Today’s guest is David Rusenko, Square’s head of e-commerce. Rusenko, who founded website builder Weebly in 2006, has been working with Square since 2018, when Weebly was acquired by Square for $365 million. Since then, Square integrated Weebly’s platform into its e-commerce platform for sellers, which was relaunched as Square Online Store last year. The Square Online Store product suite helps merchants manage online-to-offline business integrations. It lets them manage payments, inventory, delivery and other business tasks in one place. Square joins Shopify, Facebook and Amazon that are seeking to grow their e-commerce merchant businesses. Square is growing its e-commerce chops while other ecommerce platform providers improve their financial services offerings. David joins us to discuss how COVID-19 influenced Squa

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Theodora Lau, the founder of Unconventional Ventures. When you listen to her, Theo challenges the industry to do better. Instead of producing another colored metallic debit card, she’d like to see real financial innovation that helps the people hurting the most. The unemployed. The poor. The older demographic. We discuss the financial industry’s relationship with consumer wellbeing and where needs aren’t being met. Theo describes what would need to happen to improve financial outcomes. Lastly, we talk about AI and algorithms and the challenges they impose on us all. Theodora Lau is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. A few years back, and the term ‘crowdfunding’ was pretty popular in fintech circles. We do'n't really use that jargon anymore and many of the biggest players have naturally matured into digital wealth management platforms. YieldStreet is one of those platforms — since inception, investors have deployed over $1 billion in asset classes like real estate, art and legal finance, and commercial loans. Founder and president Michael Weisz joins me on the podcast to discuss broadly the impact Covid-19 is having on the adotpion of fintech and which sectors are positioned to emerge successfully from this crisis. We talk about the evolution of digital wealth management firms in a Zoom world. Michael Weisz is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller Launching a new firm in the face of this global crisis takes fortitude. Timing couldn’t be worse. Or could it? Demand for different types of digital payments is ramping. That’s the space Qolo (https://qolo.io/) plays in. A bit like Marqeta, a bit like Fiserv, the company was launched by a team with a lot of payments industry experience to be a next-generation B2B payments hub and* *the first all-in-one payments solution. CEO Patricia Montesi joins us on the podcast to talk about building and launching a payments firm in the midst of the Covid crisis and the challenges and opportunities presented by this time. We drill down into Qolo’s capabilities and she desribes how firms are using its API to bring payments in-house. Qolo is going global from its inception and Particia talks about the need to build cross-border capabilities. Patricia Montesi is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. There are so many fees in the credit card processing market. Fattmerchant, which started almost a decade ago, set out to simplify things with the market’s first subscription, all you can eat, pricing for merchants. As the firm has matured, it’s grown into an integrated payment technology provider that continues to simplify the payment experience for SMBs by bringing various payment technologies together via API. Now, Fattmerchant has introduced a new partership with Finix on a new product called Flex which further empowers software firms to start processing payments immediately within their platforms. Fattmerchant President Sal Rehmetullah joins on on the podcast to talk payments, the evolution of Fattmerchant, the new Flex product and where the payments market is headed in the future. Here’s my talk with Sal.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Deposit Solutions has an open banking solution that connects customers and banks. Working in 20 European countries, the company has 30 million depositors on the platform with €25 billion in deposits. Now, Deposit Solutions is active in the U.S. We have Phillipp von Girsewald, Deposit Solution’s CEO in the US. on the podcast to talk about what challenges banks are most looking to solve. We talk about the US adoption of open architecture and how COVID-19 has generated a new perspective on how banks view and work with fintech partners. Philipp von Girsewald is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. When you talk to the founders of many of the leading challenger banks, you sense that they each have a touch of revolutionary in them. They see the present financial services system as broken — some more, some less — and their firms are out to provide better options for the bulk of people out there. Stuart Sopp’s the CEO of Current. Growing up through the industry as a trader, Sopp made a decision midway through his career to leave his job as a trader and build a challenger bank that’s targeting Millennials and Gen Z with lower — or no — fees and early direct deposit. Current saw 200,000 new users in April and May during the height of the Corona crisis. The company has more than 1 million active accounts. Sopp joins us to talk about the genesis of Current and how it’s helping its target customers. In a crowded field, he describes how Current differentiates itself from the other offerings out there. Sopp tells us how he thinks he can double his userbase in

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. In March, Credit Sesame debuted its banking offering, Sesame Cash. Since then, more than 200,000 customers have signed up, with thousands of new accounts per day, putting Credit Sesame among the fastest growing digital banking service providers in the U.S. 62 percent of Credit Sesame’s 15 million registered users have expressed interest in Sesame Cash for better cash and credit management. Cash was launched in collaboration with Canadian banking provider Stack. and now, Credit Sesame is announcing it has acquired Stack and will use the technology and team to expand for the first time internationally. My guests today on the podcast are Adrian Nazari, CEO and founder of Credit Sesame, and Stack’s CEO Miro Pavletic, who will assume the new role of GM, Canadian and International Business for Credit Sesame.

Welcome to Tearsheet’s Outlier Podcast. This subscriber-only podcast i exclusive for our Outlier members. We go deeper with subject matter experts, to take actionable steps that can impact your businesses and practice. To get access to the full audio and transcripts, head on over to Tearsheet and apply to become an Outlier member(tearsheet.co/outlier). The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently released its final rule covering remittance transfers. While the Remittance Rule requires transfer providers to generally disclose the exact exchange rate, the amount of certain fees, and the end amount expected to be delivered, it also allows certain banks and credit unions to continue to provide estimates of the exchange rate and certain fees under certain conditions. Today’s guest is Nick Catino, head of policy and campaigns for the Americas at TransferWise — he joins us to brief us on the CFPB’s final rule regarding remittances and what it means for fintechs, banks, and consumers.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. The PPP government aid program in the US continues to put a strain on the banking sector. We’re hearing an increasing number of stories of how traditional institutions are partnering with fintechs to navigate through the crisis. Anvil is one of those fintechs servicing traditional banks and FIs. The company, which replaces PDF forms with online workflows, collaborated with Sunrise Banks to get help the Minneapolis-based bank process $134 million in PPP loans in just five days for 1600 small businesses. Anvil also closed a recent funding round that saw Citi Ventures and Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused fund, participate. Anvil founder and CEO Mang-Git Ng joins me on Tearsheet Podcast today.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. One of the most exciting stories of this generation of fintech firms is Galileo. Recently acquired by SoFi for $1.2 billion, Galileo now provides the payments and banking backbone via APIs to many of the top names in the game — Chime, TransferWise, Robinhood and Bluevine. Firms like these use Galileo to open accounts and issue cards. Clay Wilkes founded Galileo 20 years ago and continues to lead the company today. He joins us on the podcast today to talk about why his firm is seeing so much interest from companies across industries that want to launch financial products. Clay describes the genesis story behind Galileo and what the early opportunities were for the problems he was attempting to solve. He describes the evolution of the platform, as financial services have matured. Clay dives into the use cases for his customers and lastly, he talks about the product and corporate strategy pipeline he’s got lined up for the near future. Clay Wilkes is my guest

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Banking systems were put to the test, surviving the impact of the current pandemic. In many cases, this crisis accelerated digital transformation programs. There is increased demand for digital solutions that require banks to seriously think about their legacy tech stacks and models. Joining us on the podcast is Rajashekara Visweswara Maiya, Finacle’s VP, Head-Business Consulting, Cloud & Blockchain Business. We discuss banking’s role in helping the economy recover and how the shutdown of physical branches and manual processes being unavailable have led to increased access to digital services. We talk about how banking modernization has suddenly become an urgent goal, leaving banking management to question which programs truly make a difference to the end-user. Maiya Visweswara is my guest today on the podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. Small business demand fo government relief is at record levels. Bigger banks, for the most part, have forsaken SMBs. Smaller banks and fintechs have emerged to service small and medium businesses with streamlined loan processes, technology, and new onboarding tools. Tearsheet's Sara Toth Stub wrote a story on he challenges SMBs are facing in this market and what type of financial services firms have emerged to help them. Sara Toth Stub is my guest today for a deep dive podcast to discuss how small businesses are increasingly turning to smaller banks and fintechs during the pandemic.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Ronald Oliveira, the U.S. CEO of challenger bank Revolut. Ron has a lot of experience in the traditional side of banking as he takes over the reins for the European fintech’s efforts stateside. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of the US market. Ron describes the firm’s product rollout cycle for Revolut, which wants to be a global bank. We would be remiss if we didn’t chat about the fintech vs. incumbent bank scenario and Ron’s perspective is important given the two worlds he’s straddled. Ron Oliveira is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.