Fintech Takes

Not Fintech Investment Advice: Cardamon, Sprive, Figg, & Glide

May 21, 2025

Simon Taylor, a fintech thinker and author of FinTech Brain Food, joins to delve into intriguing topics. They discuss Cardamon, an AI tool simplifying compliance, challenging expensive law firms. Sprive emerges as a clever app redirecting funds to speed up mortgage payments, though its real value may lie beyond just mortgages. Taylor also highlights Figg Wealth's comprehensive dashboard that tracks net worth, suggesting AI-driven insights could revolutionize wealth management. The conversation is a captivating mix of innovation and industry challenges.

54:38

Episode guests

Simon Taylor

AI Summary

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Cardamon leverages AI to streamline regulatory compliance for fintech, potentially transforming product launch timelines and reducing legal costs.

Sprive redefines mortgage repayment by integrating cashback into overpayment strategies, aiming to solve inefficiencies in traditional mortgage management.

Fig Wealth offers a comprehensive dashboard for asset aggregation and AI-driven financial advice, enhancing accessibility to wealth management in the UK.

Deep dives

AI-Powered Compliance Solutions

An innovative company called Cardamon is introduced, which provides AI-driven compliance solutions for financial institutions to streamline regulatory mapping for product launches. By automating the mapping of regulatory obligations, impact assessments, and control recommendations, Cardamon enables banks and fintechs to launch products faster while ensuring compliance in the UK, EU, and US. The company targets sectors like brokerage and digital assets, indicating a focus on areas with significant growth potential. This solution not only reduces reliance on expensive law firms but also enhances efficiency in navigating complex regulatory landscapes.

Intro

2min

A Cozy Chat Amidst Fintech Chaos

2min

AI's Role in Fintech Compliance

25min

Revolutionizing Personal Finance with AI and Integrated Dashboards

5min

Innovations in Open Banking and AI

17min

Navigating Compliance in Fintech Opportunities

2min

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, the podcast where Simon Taylor and I (Alex Johnson) talk through fintech companies we’re intrigued by, puzzled by, and occasionally want to manifest into existence (but definitely not invest in).

First up is Cardamon, the cozy-sounding AI copilot tackling the cold, hard world of compliance. They’re building a regulatory assistant to speed up product launches (a direct threat to $500/hr law firms and a clever way to navigate the compliance iceberg). Their bet is that if you structure regulatory knowledge right, it can accelerate innovation. Which brings us to this question: What if compliance is actually the best place to start when designing financial products?

Next is Sprive, a UK app helping homeowners pay off their mortgage faster by redirecting cashback and round-ups toward debt repayment. It’s clever. It’s elegant. But it also risks falling into what Simon calls the “PFM ditch” (the only people who use the tool are the ones already inclined to do the behavior anyway). But is mortgage payoff the product, or a feature? And if the real value is in rerouting savings wherever they matter most, maybe Sprive isn’t a mortgage app at all?

Then comes Figg Wealth, the most complete “dashboard of dashboards” net-worth tracker we’ve seen in the UK. It pulls in everything (cars, property, crypto, stocks, bank accounts) and auto-values it all. The real unlock may be pairing that aggregation with AI-driven advice. If AI can widen both the top and bottom of the funnel, Figg might just make wealth management scalable.

Last is Glide, which began life as a neobank but pivoted to selling onboarding and lending infrastructure to community banks and credit unions.Now they sit in the middleware layer. But here’s the big question: what can vendors build beyond table stakes that offers these smaller institutions a real shot at differentiation?

No end-of-show manifestation this time, unless you count my dream of having agentic private bankers before we have agentic commerce!

00:02:30 – Cardamon

00:17:43 – Sprive

00:29:03 – Figg Wealth

00:40:43 – Glide

This episode is brought to you by:

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And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

Follow Simon:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sytaylor/

Substack: https://sytaylor.substack.com

Follow Alex:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

Companies featured:

https://cardamon.ai/

https://sprive.com/

https://figgwealth.com/