Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

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.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. For publicly traded fintechs at scale, Wex is an interesting one. Combining a fuel card business with corporate payments and a healthcare offering, the firm has found a way to grow consistently over a couple of decades. Strategically, the firm is looking at synergies in its businesses – it recently launched Flume, a B2B digital wallet. And, it’s looking strongly at M&A opportunities as valuations come down in this market. Jay Dearborn, Wex’s chief strategy officer, joins me on the podcast today to talk about the state of the market – namely, where there are opportunities for new products and acquisitions. Jay talks about the dynamics around revaluing fintechs – he doesn’t believe that it will ever really be a buyer’s market, but he does see the need for companies to get profitable – or at the least, be able to persuasively thread a story about what the path to profitability looks like. Jay Dearborn is my guest on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. We’ve been covering fintech Dave from its early days as a tool to help everyday folks avoid overdraft fees. From there, it evolved into a lender and more recently, it’s expanded into more general banking. It also went public last year. Founder and CEO Jason Wilk joins me on the podcast to catch up with what’s been going on at Dave after the firm reported its most recent quarter. We talked a lot about ExtraCash, the firm’s short term overdraft loan and the role it plays in Dave’s customer experience and business model. Recent financials show that the firm has made strides to bring down its expenses while it’s also improved its monetization of its user base of 8 million people. My guest today on the podcast is Jason Wilk.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. I really enjoy talking to marketers, especially about rebrands. For me, the process a firm goes through when it rebrands is incredibly insightful for the team, for customers, and for partners. Successful fintechs can grow so quickly, when they rebrand or even refresh their brands, it forces them to stop, to take stock, and look at who they really want to be when they grow up. Today’s guest on the podcast is Brittanie Williams, chief marketing officer at EarnIn. My pronunciation is purposeful – part of the rebrand the firm with earned waged access at its core just underwent meant even looking at its own name differently. Britt and I discuss the customer research that went into the new brand and what it showed about Americans living paycheck to paycheck. We talk about the use of a brand muse and what that can do to help focus marketing and product. We also chat about how the firm expanded the aperture of its value proposition – to include helping people with financial anxiety – and what that enables the firm and brand to do going forward. Brittanie Williams is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor in chief, Zack Miller. There are a few brands that are synonymous with the modern financial services tech stack: Stripe, Galileo, Square. Marqeta is definitely in that list. Founder Jason Gardner stepped down recently and the firm named Simon Khalaf CEO. Simon was previously chief product officer at the firm and joins us on the podcast to take a look at the current market dynamics in this complicated time for financial services and technology. Simon talks about Marqeta’s recent acquisition of credit card program manager Power and takes us behind the scenes to share why customer demand led to this acquisition. With Power and credit along side the firm’s tech in debit and prepaid, it sounds like cards have a lot of room to provide intelligence and guidance to their holders going forward. Simon Khalaf is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast. You can access the audio and a full transcript here: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/our-partners-want-to-alter-consumer-behavior-with-the-credit-card-marqetas-new-ceo-simon-khalaf/

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m your host, Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Michael Shaulov, co-founder and CEO of Fireblocks. Michael strikes me as one of the smartest guys in finance – Fireblocks, for its part, is a platform to create blockchain-based products and manage day-to-day digital asset operations. Banks like BNY Mellon and BNP Paribas are using the firm’s wallet technology for digital asset custody.  For an industry in flux, Michael is positioning Fireblocks as an important layer in the digital asset technology stack. Our discussion happened before the failure of SVB and the closure of Signature Bank. Michael’s pragmatic approach is refreshing and speaking to him, you get the feeling that he’s building something for the long run. Michael Shaulov is my guest today on the Teasheet Podcast. You can access the audio and a full transcript here: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/you-can-programmatically-use-blockchain-to-reduce-counterparty-risk-fireblocks-michael-shaulov/

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. The move to faster payments is happening. When you zoom out and look where things like the real time payments initiatives are going to have a real impact, you can see that instant payouts can have a lot of resonance in insurance and supply chain. But to do this in B2B, you really need to make it easy and marry identity together with payouts. That’s because a lot more is at stake when things move to real time. My guest today on the show is Stephany Kirkpatrick, founder and CEO of Orum. Orum offers a single API integration for payouts that works over RTP, ACH, and other rails. Stephanie may be a financial planner by training but she’s all in on Orum and payouts. We discuss what’s driving the move to real time payments and how disbursements and early wage access are two of the most important first use cases. Stephanie shares what looking abroad can reflect about the road and impact to real time payments. She also shares her views on where the market is headed and her plans and goals for Orum in 2023. Stephany Kirkpatrick is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast. You can access the audio and a full transcript here: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/you-can-programmatically-use-blockchain-to-reduce-counterparty-risk-fireblocks-michael-shaulov/

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet editor-in-chief, Zack Miller. A couple of years back, Visa made a move to acquire Plaid but the Justice Department scuttled the deal. The idea was if a company whose business it was to create nodes at most of the financial institutions in the US and with millions of customers, it wasn’t far-fetched to see Plaid become a mover of money, not just financial data. Well, Plaid now does over a billion ACH transactions a year and is investing more deeply into its payments offerings. The firm recently hired John Anderson from Meta, who has a 20-year history with building out innovative payments platforms. I spoke with John about Plaid’s positioning in payments and where it’s headed. The company recently released Signal, an ACH risk assessment and scoring API. John Anderson is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast. You can access the full transcript and audio here: https://tearsheet.co/podcasts/signal-makes-the-us-banking-rails-behave-the-way-they-should-in-the-future-plaids-john-anderson/

Welcome to our first Tearsheet Pro webinar. This is for Tearsheet Pro subscribers. And this is where we go deeper into some of the topics that are really impacting financial services. You have to be living in a cave not to have experienced the excitement or elation around ChatGPT. For me and for the rest of our team, it really got our gears going about the potential impact of AI in financial services. I've invited two experts to our show to basically separate facts from fiction and really get a feel for what the opportunities are in financial services as we approach these types of technologies and what may be just sort of fantasy. Joining me on the show, I have Moses Guttmann, who's co-founder and CEO of ClearML. Moses brings more than 20 years of experience making visionary technologies a reality. He's co founder and CEO of ClearML, where he leads the teams behind the industry's only unified end to end frictionless MLOps platform. Prior to ClearML, Moses co founded and led several startups in the computer vision and embedded processing spaces, including Optical, CV for 3D cinema, and an embedded CV startup during his PhD, the last two of which were sold. Moses is an alumnus of the IDF 81 elite technology unit. He's been granted 13 patents and has applied for an additional 27 patents in the field of machine learning. He has been published in five academic journals, Moses is a graduate of Tel Aviv University with a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in computer science. Dev Patnaik is the CEO of Jump Associates, the leading independent strategy and innovation firm. He’s a board member of Conscious Capitalism. Dev has been a trusted advisor to CEOs at some of the world’s most admired companies, including Starbucks, Target, Nike, Universal and Virgin. Dev is a frequent keynote speaker at major forums, and his writing has appeared in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fast Company, and many others. He is the author of the book Wired to Care, named one of the best books of the year by both Fast Company and Business Week. Malcolm Gladwell called Wired to Care “just what we need for the lean years ahead.” When not at Jump, Dev’s also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, where he teaches social science methods to MBA and design students.