Around The Coin

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Oded Zehavi, the Founder & CEO of Mesh Payments, and board and advisory board member of several Israeli FinTech companies. Previously, he served as Payoneer's Chief Revenue Officer. Prior to Payoneer, Oded served as the business development director for PayPal, where among other responsibilities he led the inception of the PayPal services in the Middle East and Africa. He also held leadership roles at several technology, banking and software companies, focusing on sales and customer relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Steve Berneman, the CEO and Co-founder of Blueprint. He is a former practicing attorney and a serial entrepreneur. Prior to starting Blueprint, Steve was the Co-founder and CEO of Overdog, a gaming company acquired in 2016. Steve formed the thesis for Blueprint while an Entrepreneur in Residence at Vanderbilt.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Paul Garibian, President of Nota. Fintech expert, entrepreneur, and executive Paul has spent nearly 20 years helping financial institutions drive product development and grow revenue and market share. Nota is an innovative legal industry fintech solution powered by M&T Bank that adds value through increased productivity and decreases compliance risk. Built primarily for small law firms and solo attorneys, Nota helps simplify trust account management, making it seamless and efficient for attorneys to adhere to accounting requirements.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Brenda Loya, the CEO and one of the founders of Tellor. She's an economist and a self-taught solidity developer. Previously, she was an economist and supervisor at the U.S. Department of Labor, developing and leading teams to develop statistical software for principal economic indicators. She joined the space initially by helping to develop a derivatives protocol, Daxia, which had an oracle problem. We couldn’t find one that was decentralized so we built one and it became Tellor!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Stephen Stonberg, CEO of Bittrex Global, one of the most reliable and secure cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Stephen has spent his entire 25-year career working in financial markets in London and New York. He left the traditional world of finance to get involved in the crypto and blockchain industry.Prior to Bittrex Global, Stephen joined the Investment Management Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co. Stephen advised executives, entrepreneurs, and foundations on all items of economic impact to their balance sheet. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, he advised some of the world’s most sophisticated investors as a Partner and US CEO at Brevan Howard, Head of the New York office at Winton Capital, and Managing Director at Credit Suisse Asset Management.Prior to this, Stephen worked as a Managing Director in Fixed Income Sales and Trading at JPMorgan, and in Mergers and Acquisitions. Stephen holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Columbia University. He has served on several public companies and non-profit boards.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with the architect of the Supra BFT Consensus Algorithm. Blockchain Designer & Developer, Joshua Tobkin is a Meta-Game Theorist behind projects such as Unitychain.io's venture projects and more recently SupraOracles.comA lateral thinker, creative, and curiously dyslexic, Josh has been building SaaS companies for the last 10 years. Josh is a well-known distributed ledger technology architect.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Trent Sorbe, President and Founder of Central Payments & Co-Founder of Falls Fintech. He is an architect of Central Payments’ Open*CP Fintech API Marketplace. With more than 28 years of debit, credit, and prepaid payments experience, Trent is responsible for products garnering nine Paybefore Awards, three of which garnered Best in Class or Category. He is also the inventor on 14 patents related to consumer financial services. Trent previously held senior positions at three nationwide payment card issuers and the FDIC. In 2016, Trent was named to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Community Bank Advisory Council and chaired the agency’s Cards, Payments, and Deposit Markets Committee. He hosts the Fintech Brews & News podcast and sits on the Board of Directors for the Central Bank of Kansas City. Central Payments provides payment technology and solutions through its Open*CP Fintech API Marketplace, one of the only true bank-as-a-service payments platforms and the technology responsible for Central Payments’ rise to the fastest growing prepaid card issuer since 2015.* Along with its fintech accelerator program, Falls Fintech, Central Payments produces a podcast called Fintech Brews & News where you can find unique perspectives on how to bridge the gap between banking, startups and the entire fintech industry. In 2019, Central Payments created Falls Fintech, a custom, 12-week program designed to accelerate market readiness for early-stage financial technology startups. Falls Fintech is the only fintech accelerator in the U.S. brought to you by a market-leading, full-scale, digital payments bank that concludes with a bank partnership and access to the payments ecosystem through Central Payments and its Open*CP Fintech API Marketplace.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Vivek Krishnamurthy, Principal at Commerce Ventures, an early stage FinTech, InsurTech & RetailTech focused fund based in San Francisco. The Fund's investments include Marqeta, Bill.com, MX, Socure, Forter, and +90 others. At Commerce Ventures, Vivek primarily focuses on vertical FinTech applications, core financial services enablement technologies and insurance data & infrastructure platforms. Prior to CV, he was a member of the investment banking team at Financial Technology Partners where he worked on private placement and M&A transactions for growth and late-stage FinTechs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Matt Spoke, the Founder and CEO of Moves, a social finance product for independent 'gig' workers across the U.S. Matt founded the company on a belief that the gig economy isn't working for its workers and by building a product that solves their systemic financial challenges, millions of independent gig workers can come together to improve and own the future of the gig economy. Founded in August 2020, Moves has rapidly grown to become one of the leading financial products for gig workers in the U.S with members across all 50 states with over 15 supported gig platforms. As CEO of Moves, Matt spearheads the mission of the company and inspires a team of 35 world-class designers, engineers, product managers and growth marketers to build a better gig economy for its workers.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Ryan Cantor, Chief Product Officer at Thryv. He leads the Thryv product and engineering teams and is responsible for the vision and execution of platform improvements and enhancements in alignment with corporate strategy.Ryan joined Thryv after working with N2 Publishing leading their product effectiveness and scaling improvement efforts. Prior to his tenure at N2 Publishing, Ryan served as Vice President/GM at hibu, where he led the explosive growth of a new community-focused product to over $50M ARR in under 18 months.Before joining hibu, Ryan worked as a general manager for Apple, where he assisted with the launch of the first iPhone and iPad. He has also held leadership positions at AOL and Target.Ryan received his Bachelor of Arts from the State University of New York and his MBA from Clarkson University.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices