On our most recent LinkedinLive session, we spoke all about partnerships and how today's environment of higher interest rates, inflation, and less venture money flowing through is impacting how firms collaborate with one another. Joining me was Sunil Sachdev, head of fintech and growth at Fiserv. Sunil's role cuts across the Fiserv organization as the company aligns the way it works with merchants and banks to the demands of today's customers. Here's my conversation with Sunil.

Portage is a fintech-focused venture fund that invests globally, with two different strategies: early-stage investing (seed to B) and growth-oriented investing (late stage). I spoke to Stephanie Choo, general partner at Portage as part of a LinkedIn Live session. She shared the impact that the drop in venture capital funding has had on the sector and fintechs, with fundraising down around 70% year over year and deal volume down 30% to 40%. But despite the tech recession, the venture capital investor believes that consumer balance sheets are stronger than she expected, opening up new opportunities in the fintech space. Steph also shared that the fall of SVB and First Republic, though disruptive, are catalysts for new firms to step in and serve SMBs and tech companies. Portage is thematically-driven, investigating and investing along two or three theses at any given time. Steph mentions two interests right now: the intersection between fintech and climate, and artificial general intelligence. Steph shared several highlights in the Portage portfolio, including Tallied, a modern payment processor, and global investments in investing and insurance. Here's my conversation with Portage's Steph Choo.

There’s a lot of talk about personalization being the Holy Grail of banking. Some firms even use the terminology hyper-personalization. But to be honest, few banks actually provide deeply personalized products. With all the tech advancements of the past decade, it’s still mostly one-size-fits-all banking. It’s not necessarily their fault, either. Given the history of banking and data siloed by products, banks can struggle piecing it all together. That’s changing though as creative technology solutions are able to help banks take a more customer centric approach and in doing so, get much better at providing personalized offers and pricing. For this episode I spoke with Amdocs' Benzium Aviv. Bentzi heads the Financial Services Unit within the Amdocs organization. We talk about the big trends toward personalized financial products, drawing from parallels in the telecommunications industry and the technology and business changes it went through. When you hear Bentzi speak, you can tell he's passionate about personalization in financial services. He's an optimist and also pragmatic, aware of the challenges banks and other FIs have to get personalization right. This podcast was produced by Tearsheet Studios. We worked closely with Amdocs, a global technology company with 40 years of experience providing personalized pricing and products to the telecommunications industry. The firm is increasingly active in the financial services industry, too. This is part one of a 2-part podcast series. There's also a guide available with the best of this interview: Unlock the power of personalized product offerings: 3 approaches for banks to provide the experiences their customers want. Download here: www.library.tearsheet.co/amdocs23

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. On our podcast, we interview some of the top minds at work building the next generation of financial services. In its work with small businesses and consumer payments, Square is definitely one of the companies that matters. Christina Riechers heads up Square Banking which serves about 1 million small business owners with checking, savings, and loans. She leads engineering, product, design, product marketing, operations & policy, and data science. For Christina, helping solve liquidity issues runs deeper than just a job. She co-founded and led Evidence Action, a non-profit that addresses health concerns for 200M+ children annually and provides 4M+ East Africans with access to safe water. This work has a direct economic impact on their lives. Christina’s work doing good informs her professional life and the way she looks at finance. But it also works in reverse – her experiences building at scale have proven helpful in her work building efficient charity organizations, too. It’s clear for her that providing the right tools and opportunities can make a huge difference. Christina Riechers is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Tearsheet hosted its first LinkedIn Live session. Joining me on the show is Zip co-founder and CEO, Larry Diamond. Ten years ago, Zip was founded in Australia as a buy now, pay later service, embedding a quick and easy consumer loan in a retailer's checkout flow. Larry recently moved to the US to focus on Zip's expansion stateside. In this LinkedIn Live session, we discuss: *Zip's US opportunity *What the US BNPL market can learn from the more mature Australian market *Consumer protections and rising calls for regulation *How Zip differentiates *Levers in the business *Where Zip is headed next If you'd like to attend future LinkedIn Live sessions, follow me and Tearsheet on LinkedIn.

There’s a lot of talk about personalization being the Holy Grail of banking. Some firms even use the terminology hyper-personalization. But to be honest, few banks actually provide deeply personalized products. With all the tech advancements of the past decade, it’s still mostly one-size-fits-all banking. It’s not necessarily their fault, either. Given the history of banking and data siloed by products, banks can struggle piecing it all together. That’s changing though as creative technology solutions are able to help banks take a more customer centric approach and in doing so, get much better at providing personalized offers and pricing.  For this episode, I spoke with Katie Pagenkopf of consultancy, projekt202, about research she conducted that went deeper into what type of personalization bank customers really want, prioritizing the ones who are most open to targeted offers. Katie goes further, with some ideas about how banks can begin to deliver on the opportunities afforded by better personalization, leveraging their existing investments in their core technology. This podcast was produced by Tearsheet Studios. We worked closely with Amdocs, a global technology company with 40 years of experience providing personalized pricing and products to the telecommunications industry. The firm is increasingly active in the financial services industry, too. This is part one of a 2-part podcast series. There's also a guide available with the best of this interview: Unlock the power of personalized product offerings: 3 approaches for banks to provide the experiences their customers want. Download here: https://www.library.tearsheet.co/amdocs23

The public launch of generative AI in the form of ChatGPT greased the creative wheels for the impact of these types of technology. We’re seeing experts and firms scurrying, just trying to wrap their minds and their hands around AI.  We had something similar a few years ago when chatbots for financial services started getting interesting. The thing is – these were primarily black-box technologies that seemed very abstract from daily life for consumers and for the teams of developers at banks tasked with managing them. ChatGPT changed that and with a slight change in interface, it’s unlocked a lot of use cases for financial services. We’re early for sure in this evolution but companies that have been studying the space are already beginning to make a move. ApexEdge provides consumers – through their banks and fintechs – subscription management tools. Want to easily unsubscribe from a subscription to a streaming service you’re not using much? ApexEdge makes that easy. It even has created technology to help you negotiate how much you’re paying for your subscription services. The firm, which has been curiously studying the evolution of generative AI since ChatGPT-1, is already at work building the next generation of its product with ChatGPT at its center – including embedding it into how its flagship product works, as well as implementing AI tools internally to boost efficiency and increase productivity.  For ApexEdge, it’s a lot about scaling efficiently.  This is one of the first cases we’ve seen of a fintech firm embracing the next generation of AI tools so openly.  This story is part of a collaboration between ApexEdge and Tearsheet Studios. To read more, please head over to Tearsheet where there’s a downloadable guide and two episodes of a podcast about how ApexEdge is using AI as a foundation for the next generation of its product, as well as an important resource inside the firm.  Michel Mora is the CTO of ApexEdge, which runs Billshark, a popular consumer app that enables people to easily cancel subscription payments they’re making to streaming services, for example. ApexEdge utilizes the same technology to enable banks, FIs, and PFMs to offer similar services to their customers. Download a guide to how ApexEdge is using ChatGPT to power the next generation of its product and workforce here: www.library.tearsheet.co/apexedge23

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. Company transitions are always interesting. One transition I particularly like is that pivotal point when a startup matures to the extent a founder steps aside and makes way for new leadership. It’s an important stage – figuring out how to balance the passion and insight of a founder with new leadership to continue to grow the vision.  Stash, a company we’ve covered at Tearsheet over the past few years, is undergoing an important transition now. Liza Landsman joined a few months back as CEO. Liza seems to have the perfect background to lead Stash into its next leg of maturity – she combines deep product and leadership experiences in ecommerce, banking, and investing – at firms like Jet.com, Citigroup, BlackRock, and E*TRADE. She also worked with a lot of founders in her most recent role as investor at NEA. Stash’s model – which works with everyday folks to consistently invest a little bit at a time –  itself is part banking, part ecommerce, and part investing.   Liza joins me on the podcast to talk about her mandate as CEO and the work ahead. We talk about Stash’s mission and how it’s built a service that people genuinely enjoy using. Liza shares the metrics that will serve as the firm’s north star. We also discuss Stash Core – the firm built its next generation infrastructure that will allow it better economics as well as the ability to more easily plug in partners to the ecosystem. Liza says this will manifest itself on the consumer side but also in the firm’s new work embarking on B2B. Liza Landsman is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

The public launch of generative AI in the form of ChatGPT greased the creative wheels for the impact of these types of technology. We’re seeing experts and firms scurrying, just trying to wrap their minds and their hands around AI.  We had something similar a few years ago when chatbots for financial services started getting interesting. The thing is – these were primarily black-box technologies that seemed very abstract from daily life for consumers and for the teams of developers at banks tasked with managing them. ChatGPT changed that and with a slight change in interface, it’s unlocked a lot of use cases for financial services. We’re early for sure in this evolution but companies that have been studying the space are already beginning to make a move. ApexEdge provides consumers – through their banks and fintechs – subscription management tools. Want to easily unsubscribe from a subscription to a streaming service you’re not using much? ApexEdge makes that easy. It even has created technology to help you negotiate how much you’re paying for your subscription services. The firm, which has been curiously studying the evolution of generative AI since ChatGPT-1, is already at work building the next generation of its product with ChatGPT at its center – including embedding it into how its flagship product works, as well as implementing AI tools internally to boost efficiency and increase productivity.  For ApexEdge, it’s a lot about scaling efficiently.  This is one of the first cases we’ve seen of a fintech firm embracing the next generation of AI tools so openly.  This story is part of a collaboration between ApexEdge and Tearsheet Studios. To read more, please head over to Tearsheet where there’s a downloadable guide and two episodes of a podcast about how ApexEdge is using AI as a foundation for the next generation of its product, as well as an important resource inside the firm.  Steve McKean is the CEO of ApexEdge, which runs Billshark, a popular consumer app that enables people to easily cancel subscription payments they’re making to streaming services, for example. ApexEdge utilizes the same technology to enable banks, FIs, and PFMs to offer similar services to their customers. Download a guide to how ApexEdge is using ChatGPT to power the next generation of its product and workforce here: https://www.library.tearsheet.co/apexedge23

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miler, Tearsheet’s editor in chief.  We’ve covered a lot about buy now, pay later over the years. BNPL’s rise was strong, given how it is embedded into a merchant’s checkout process and appealed to younger customers who preferred financing certain transactions and not the revolving credit of a credit card. Honestly, BNPL’s takeup and growth has overshadowed the emergence of other forms of financing. One of those is lease to own – if you’re my generation and grew up in the US, you’re probably familiar with lease to own through Rent-A-Center commercials. In my mind, that always associated lease to own with some kind of shady business to finance subpar pre-owned furniture with cigarette burns. Neil Desai is my guest today – he’s co-founder and CEO of Kafene, which takes a lease to own financing model and embeds itself within in-store shopping experiences of over 1000 merchants. Embedding lease to own opens up new products and experiences for lease to own customers, primarily subprime buyers. Neal and I talk about the difference between BNPL and lease to own and why there’s room for both. Neal feels it’s a better model for many people. We discuss the challenges and opportunities in building out Kafene’s merchant network and the flywheel that Neal feels is kicking in now. We also look at consumer lending in light of what’s happening economically today.  Neal Desai is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.