Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. Earned Wage Access has become an important value proposition for workers and many neobanks generally offer it. But for largest incumbent institutions, few do offer it and a lot of it has to do with the lack of regulatory clarity – each state has a different approach to it. But that’s changing. Nico Simko, CEO of Clair, joins me on the podcast to talk about the evolution of EWA and some of the recent legal moves some states have taken to clear things up. Clair is a free on-demand pay app for front line workers. In addition to drilling down on regulatory changes for earned wage access, we also tackle: ** Clair’s distribution strategy ** How the app helps people save money ** The mechanics of wage advance and how they work ** Clair’s fundraising history and where Nico wants to steer the firm in the future

Banking is undergoing deep changes. We’ve been tracking that. And ss consumers become increasingly open to new digital options, incumbent banks are feeling the pressure. It’s hard to innovate when you spend upwards of 70% of your budget maintaining legacy systems. But neobanks are also dealing with their own reckoning – we’ve moved beyond the days where we got excited about the overall headline customer numbers. As they mature, unit economics matter for these institutions if they want to compete for the long term. Frankly, it’s not easy and it’s expensive to build a lasting banking franchise. Deloitte’s Nick Cowell, Digital Banking Leader, joins me on this podcast to go deep into talking about the challenges banks face. As he explores some of the causes of customer attrition, for example, Nick defines the characteristics of the eventual winners in the digital banking market. For him, the banks that will lead in the future will become a multi-tenant or multi-product provider for their customer base. This is part of a four part series we’re doing with Deloitte’s financial services leadership on the trends shaping our industry today and out into the future. **The big ideas and questions** $ What are the key forces driving the evolution of digital banking? $ How digital banking is changing the landscape. $ Consumers openness and intentionality around digital tools. $ Challenges faced by the incumbents. $. Characteristics of the winners in the digital banking market. $. Buy vs. build. $. What is the definition of success? $. Future trends that will influence digital banking propositions. $. How will digital banks evolve from just a bank to a multi-product provider? Here’s my conversation with Nick.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. This episode is part of a special series on Gen Z and financial services. We're really trying to get to the bottom of this next generation. The eldest Gen Zer was born in the same year Instagram was founded. Gen Z has always lived in a world with social media. Surrounded by tech tools and platforms means reaching Gen Z constitutes a challenge for financial firms. The language and ways that worked on their parents probably won’t work on Gen Z. This calls for bringing new strategies, communication, and advertising into play in ways that resonate with this generation To dive deeper into how financial firms can better market to the younger demographic, I brought in two of my favorite people here to talk about this subject here. We've got CJ McDonald, founder of Step. and Ruben Salazar, who runs Visa Direct. We explore the following questions: * What makes this generation unique? * What kind of challenges does serving this generation raise for financial services? * What do some firms get wrong marketing to Gen Z? What are common mistakes? * How does this uniqueness impact your firm’s marketing? product development? * What brands do you look to outside of financial services that nail marketing to Gen Z? * How does your business serve Gen Z today? How do you market that? * What are you doing to serve them better in the future? How will you market that? Tearsheet thanks our sponsor Publicis Sapient for their ongoing support of this series. To download research reports into the opportunity to better serve this generation, go to www.steezlife.co

Hiring in this market is super competitive. Like consumers have grown to expect from the companies they buy from, the bar has been raised in the hiring process. Hiring managers need to create good experiences for candidates if they want to be competitive. They must combine good UX with a growing sensitivity to secure applicants’ personal and professional data, too.  This dynamic is particularly poignant in background checks. Top hiring firms work with Checkr to streamline hiring and also promote more fair hiring practices. That boils down to the data the firm collects and how it accesses and shares it.  On this episode of the Tearsheet podcast, I’m joined by Scott Melman, director of data acquisition at Checkr to discuss the trends afoot in background checks and how better data, data sharing, and data permissioning are leading to better practices, better outcomes, and fairer hiring practices all around. Also joining us is Justin Stolzenberg, GM in the background screening space at Argyle, a leading provider of income and employment data that does deep work in financial services. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. Tearsheet has partnered with Argyle to create a four part podcast series that explores how different parts of the financial industry are using modern technology and access to new forms of data to power their businesses today and into the future.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. Joining me on this show are Stephen Randall, Global Head of Liquidity Management Services in the Treasury and Trade Solutions business at Citi, and Ricardo Josua, CEO and founder of Pismo, a banking and cards platform. The two firms are working to strengthen Citi’s corporate demand deposit accounts (DDA) to clients worldwide We’ll be talking about the partnership these two firms struck, how it fits into Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions’ tech strategy, and how it will impact Citi clients. Pismo’s Josua explains what a microservice-based ecosystem is and how it behaves. We also chat about the importance of having core expertise and knowledge in cloud-based banking and payment capabilities like Pismo has. Here’s my discussion with Citi’s Stephen Randall and Pismo’s Ricardo Josua.

Trintech CFO, Omar Choucair, talks about the recent acquisition of Fiserv's reconciliation businesses. They discuss the opportunities and challenges of M&A in SaaS and fintech, and the market outlook for the remainder of this year into 2024.

Today's companies think about going global from the start and in fintech, that means thinking about payments and money movement across borders. Partnerships can play a strategic and tactical role in going international. Join me Tearsheet's editor and Airwallex's Ravi Adusumilli, SVP of Partnerships for a LinkedIn Live session. As General Manager, Americas, Ravi oversees the company’s strategy and operations in the region, identifying opportunities to drive the company’s rapid regional growth. As SVP of Partnerships, Ravi oversees an international team across the US, APAC and EMEA, managing Airwallex’s extensive global network of strategic and financial partnerships. Prior to Airwallex, Ravi was Head of Global Partnerships at Pinterest, and also held a number of executive leadership roles across several fast-growth startups and tech businesses including with Tile, Netflix, Hitachi and Hewlett Packard.

We're kicking off a special podcast series where we explore this fascinating Gen Z deeper: their relationship with money, how they like to save, spend, and borrow money, their fears and aspirations, and their connections to social issues. This is part of the content series we've been doing on Steez, our branded work with Publicis Sapient on Gen Z and financial services. You can download our free Gap Z report on the disconnect between where banks think they are with this generation and what young customers really feel about their FIs, and what to do about it. Go to steezlife.co Our first podcast in the series is with Capital One's Shaun Rowley. Shaun is the National Capital One Café Executive, supporting all of the bank's Cafés throughout the country but calls St. Cloud, Minnesota home. He celebrated 20 years with Capital One this year. Since starting as a part time contact center associate, he has held multiple positions in front line teams, product, marketing, strategy, and analysis.

Welcome to our latest Tearsheet Live event. We're doing these weekly -- Wednesdays at 12 EST -- on Linkedin. Follow us here. I'm your host, Tearsheet editor, Zack Miller. Joining us is Hunter Somerville, creative director of Innovation Refunds. Occasionally we dig in to marketing and campaigns and how financial services and fintech companies are finding new ways to create leads, acquire new customers, and build brand. What's Innovation Refunds? Hunter Somerville, Innovation Refunds: The company has been around for a few years. And the mission is really to be a champion of small businesses. We feel like they're the backbone of the American economy and sometimes kind of overlooked and underappreciated. So, you know, the most powerful thing a small business can have, or medium sized business or any business for that matter is capital. So however we can we tried to make that happen. And currently, we're really focused on the ERC employee retention credit, which was part of the Cares Act. I think people are very familiar with PPP loans. USC was a part of that same, the Cares Act as the PPP loans. And so we're doing I think, a pretty darn good job at helping more and more small businesses, be aware of the ERC and take advantage of it if they are eligible. Listen to the whole episode: https://tearsheet.co/?p=55888

Welcome to another Tearsheet LinkedIn Live session. Joining me is Steven Faust, Dash Solutions CEO. Earlier this year, Prepaid Technologies rebranded as Dash. The company moved into a new corporate headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama. The company serves clients with 4 modalities: disbursements, rewards, spend, and pay. Stephen and I discuss the company’s rebrand and how that’s impacting the business. We discuss organic trends in the modalities where the firm competes. Stephen shares how Dash differentiates itself from a growing number of competitors and the impact the macroeconomy is having on his firm’s business.