Tearsheet Podcast: The Business Of Finance

Flybits' Hossein Rahnama is one of our speakers at DataDay, the first-of-its-kind conference on financial data. Consumer data, data ecosystems, and data aggregation is changing the face of modern financial services. Join Adam and speakers from Plaid, Wells Fargo, Fiserv, MX, Stash, and more. Secure your spot at https://ti.to/tearsheet/tearsheets-dataday-conference-2020 The foundation for Flybits came from a research lab and Hossein's PhD research, which was about understanding context in large data sets. "I spun that off about six years ago and now, Flybits is a venture backed company headquartered in Toronto with offices in New York, San Francisco, London and Dubai," he said. AI requires domain knowledge and the understanding of the context in which the technology finds itself. For example, it’s very hard for an AI engine to understand the needs of a parent when she’s at home versus that parent’s needs traveling across borders. "You can train AI algorithms to understand and predict patterns but understand

Welcome to Tearsheet’s Outlier Podcast. This subscriber-only podcast is exclusive for our Outlier members. We go deeper with subject matter experts, to take actionable steps that can impact your business and practice. I’m Zack Miller, editor in chief at Tearsheet To get access to the full audio and transcripts, head on over to Tearsheet and apply to become an Outlier member(tearsheet.co/outlier). Today’s guest is Dan Faggella, a global expert on artificial intelligence and its use cases for financial services. Dan’s the founder and head of research at Emerj, a research and advisory company on AI. Dan takes a practical approach when it comes to discussing AI’s potential in financial services. The adoption challenge for banks taking up AI are real — he’s polled them and has built a framework around them and how to overcome hurdles. We talk about concrete use cases for AI in the front office and where we’re headed when it comes to cross-selling or customer acquisition. Dan Faggella is my guest today on the Out

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Consumers increasingly expect higher levels of personalization from their financial services providers. Whether it’s from a challenger bank or Bank of America, people are used to Netflix-level of recommendations. An entire industry is cropping up to help provide a consumer’s data from all her accounts so that a service provider can provide actionable advice when she needs it most. Envestnet I Yodlee’s senior vice president of products and strategy Brandon Rembe joins me on the podcast to talk about what leading financial services organizations are doing about best practices in personalization for their customers. Hyper-personalization, he says, presents an opportunity for FIs to provide insights that take into account and anticipate consumer behavior based on their savings, investing, and spending habits. Especially in crazy times like we’re experiencing today, aggregating financial data and creating insights with these tools ultimately enables consumers t

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. If you’re a retailer or a new challenger bank, it just doesn’t make sense anymore to build out payments infrastructure when you have firms like Rapyd out there. Eric Rosenthal, Rapyd’s managing director of the Americas, joins us on the podcast to talk about the hot fintech as a service firm that has gone global from its very start. The company just launched into Brazil and Eric describes the company’s global strategy and how Brazil plays into that. We talk about who’s integrating payments and where the market is headed. Eric Rosenthal is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast. But before we jump into the show, I wanted to tell you about Tearsheet’s newest online conference, DataDay 2020. Entire financial ecosystems are emerging around financial institutions and large fintech companies with data at its core. We’re spending three days hearing from top executives at firms like Fiserv, MX, Wells Fargo, Envestnet I Yodlee, Plaid and more about they are best

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. The current COVID-19 crisis presents a massive challenge to the financial industry. And like every crisis, it also presents an amazing opportunity to service customers in an entirely new way. In the US, the CARES Act and its Paycheck Protection Program means banks will need to process approximately 50 times their normal annual loan volume in the next 30 to 60 days. On today’s podcast, we talk to UK lending platform OakNorth’s CIO Sean Hunter. Sean and his team have designed an end-to-end solution —from application and document collection to pre-screening and forgiveness — to help regional and community banks process this insane volume. Sean takes us through the requirements of the various government assistance programs, how banks are dealing with the strain, and how OakNorth built its new capabilities through a process of running its own loan book for its UK challenger bank. Sean Hunter is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

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). 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 all the major investment banks and that gives David a good view into what’s going on strategically and operationally on the ground in banking. David doesn’t mince words when it comes to digital transformation. For him, it’s really a matter of life or death, and that’s before we were hit with the COVID-19 crisis. He takes us behind the scenes to show how some of the top banks are transitioning to a work from home environment and how it’s impacting his o

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. From Skype to Thomson Reuters, David Gurlé has sat on the cutting edge of enterprise communications for two decades, in 2014, David founded Symphony, a communication and collaboration platform for financial services. David joins us on the podcast to talk about how communications technology has evolved in the financial sector and looks out ahead to what’s in store. More than just a platform to connect, Symphony has APIs so that its users can share and automate workflows. The company recently released the second generation of its platform with simplified interactions and a customizable UI and smart notifications. David Gurlé is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Dwolla’s new CEO Brady Harris joins me on the podcast. He’s been in the payments industry long enough to see the real opportunity for B2B payment players and how the space has evolved over time. We talk about ACH, the role it plays in payments ecosystem, and where it might be headed. Use cases are expanding and Harris describes how different firms and industries are using it to advance their payments experiences. We talk about Dwolla and where the company can continue to find growth. Brady Harris is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Nicole Newlin. She’s the vp of solutions at Ocrolus, which provides fintech infrastructure for data analysis. She runs the team that handles client onboarding and integration. She’s also NYC Fintech Women’s newest board member. Nicole shares her personal journey as a woman rising through the ranks within fintech. She also shares her plans to extend NYC Fintech Women’s reach through things like education, community and coaching. I ask her for career advice she’d give her younger self. Nicole Newlin is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. When we launched our podcast 10 years ago, one of our first guests was a French entrepreneur living in San Francisco. He had a small but upwardly aspirational startup. Renaud Laplanche’s Lending Club ended up becoming a major player in fintech as a public company and a force in the marketplace lending arena. Now, Laplanche is back for more. He’s the CEO of Upgrade, a new challenger bank that was built with lending at its heart. He joins me on the podcast to talk about the genesis story of Upgrade and how so much of his experience launching and growing LendingClub informs Upgrade’s products and positioning. We discuss how the current COVID-19 crisis is impacting the industry for both incumbents and upstarts and how Upgrade’s new products — a contactless credit card that has built in pay-over-time features — play into today’s market dynamics. Renaud Laplanche is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

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). Today’s guest is Louis Sciullo, executive director financial services at Landor (landor.com/) North America, a brand consulting and design firm with deep roots in the financial services industry. He’s spent nearly three decades managing Wall Street brands like Lehman Brothers and Barclays. Now, he leads the financial services practice at Landor, supporting and growing some of the largest financial brands. Louis joins us to talk about what the COVID-19 pandemic calls for from both large and small financial brands. He explores the transformation of financial retail and what it takes to be an agile financial brand. We discuss customer retention strategies in an

Sara Toth Stub joins editor Zack Miller on a Deep Dive podcast to discuss a recent article she wrote on push payments. In It's a simple idea with Extraordinary impact: Inside the growing world of push payments, Sara describes what this form of payment is, how it works, and how entire fintech ecosystems are being built around push payment providers, like Visa and Mastercard.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Before COVID-19 hit, we spent a lot of time talking about the competitive environment for bank deposits. Every week, an incumbent or new challenger bank was making high rate offers in order to attract new customers. The dynamic may be different now, but financial institutions are getting increasingly savvy about their pricing strategies. Borrowing from retail, we are moving away from one-price-fits-all into a more data-driven and competitive market. Joining us on the podcast today is Nomis’ Prashant Balepur. We talk about the firm’s new product, a lightweight tool which provides banks and credit unions real time pricing intelligence around mortgages and deposits. Prashant describes how many FIs make pricing decisions today and what type of data science it takes to optimize products across sectors, geographies and customers. Prashant Balepur is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. There’s a sea of sameness out there in digital offerings. Challenger banks seem to provide, more or less, the same services and products. They’re debit cards attached to a personal finance manager. HMBradley launched last week with an investment from PayPal and Affirm founder, Max Levchin. It bills itself as a bank for people serious about savings and it has an incentive mechanism that pays the highest interest rates to those doing the best job saving. Co-founder and CEO Zach Bruhnke joins us on the podcast to talk about why he’s dreamt of launching a bank and where he plans to take his new challenger in the future. Zach Bruhnke is my guest on the Tearsheet Podcast.

In this episode of The Challengers, Josh Liggett and Zack Miller explore the pandemic's impact on incumbent banks as well as on challengers. Zack mentioned fears are high and that's creating rumors that certain challengers are failing. Josh believes it's a good time for incumbents to really get focused around digital. They have no other choice. Next, the hosts discuss OakNorth, which is still Europe's fastest growing startup. But growth of its loan book is slowing, whether by design or by market forces. The bank is profitable -- perhaps the only one of many challengers to reach this milestone. Square gets a license and Zack believes that we'll see Square move strongly into lending to merchants using its technology. Like PayPal, Amazon, and Shopify, this captured lending is powerful and makes a ton of sense from a service model perspective. It can also be quite lucrative. Credit Sesame, like Credit Karma a few months before it, is rolling out a banking product, Sesame Cash. PFMs want to own the money moveme

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today we have another special episode — we’re still talking about bank - fintech partnerships by studying some of the best, most impactful ones out there. We have JP Morgan’s Jason Tiede and FISPAN’s Lisa Shields on the show to talk about their partnership that essentially embeds JP Morgan’s payments and treasury functionality into its clients ERP environment. This partnership won Tearsheet’s Bank Fintech Partnership Award for Ecosystem in 2020. We discuss how the two parties met and why JPM chose to partner with FISPAN. We discuss best practices in standing up a good working relationship with two vastly different companies and cultures. Lisa Shields and Jason Tiede are my guests today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today we have the two winners of Tearsheet’s Bank/Fintech Partnership Award for Digital Transformation, Midwest BankCentre and Mantl. We’re joined by MBC’s President and CFO Dale Oberkfell and Nathaniel Harley, CEO and CO-founder of MANTL. We talk about the collaboration between the two firms on Rising Bank, a new digital brand launched by MBC along with MANTL. The company hit its 1 year deposit savings goals within 5 months and both parties are continuing to pursue the benefits of partnership to go deeper. Here’s our show.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Card issuance is enjoying a lot of fintech light shone on it as technology and use cases catch up to the modern economy. From Marqeta to Stripe and now Adyen, payment firms are moving quickly in this space. Roelant Prins, chief commercial officer of Adyen, joins us on the podcast to talk about his firm’s new card issuing service, where the idea came from and what type of customer demand they’re seeing for it. We discuss Adyen’s global approach and drill down into what he describes as unified commerce’. Roelant Prins is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. We’re continuing to celebrate the winners of 2020’s Bank / Fintech Partnership Awards. Up today are our overall winners — two firms that changed significantly directly from the nature of their partnership that was struck almost 10 years ago. We have Tony Gorrell, CEO of Sutton Bank, a 130 year old bank in Ohio, and Omri Dahan, chief revenue officer of Marqeta, a leader in modern card issuance. I’ll let them describe the nature of their partnership and how they modeled a collaboration that has become a paradigm for today’s best fintech/bank collaborations. Let’s go.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. As new challenger banks and financial products emerge, one trend we’re seeing is the targeting of teens. These soon-to-be-adults are experiencing choices in personal finance and banking apps that' they've never had before. Greenlight is a leader of this new generation of services and products. Founded about 5 years ago, the firm is rapidly growing with nearly 1 million users using its platform to help educate and manage young financial lives. CEO and co-founder Tim Sheehan joins me on the podcast to discuss what problem Greenlight solves and how families collaborate around the financial app. We also drill down into the macro trends that are encouraging the development of new financial tools for the younger generations. Lastly, he shares his view on where Greenlight may head in the future. Tim Sheehan is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.