Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

If you’ve been to Money 20/20 the past couple of years, you’re likely to have encountered Zeta. Maybe you were one of the 10,000 people who attended the Journey and Foreigner concerts the company sponsored. Or maybe you stopped by the firm’s big booth at the center of the floor. That type of marketing – what founder Bhavin Turakhia likes to call ‘nuclear strikes’ – is helping the credit card as a service firm mature in the US. Bhavin shares with us the playbook he’s using to grow Zeta, honed from his experience building and growing three other SaaS firms in his career. We discuss why Zeta targets the largest banks and fintechs and how the firm is landing and expanding via enterprise sales. Talking to Bhavin is like talking to a professor of real life business – he readily shares his experiences and frameworks for how he’s thinking about scaling his fintech firm. Bhavin Turakhia is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

In episode #3 of the Steez podcast, we talk about FinTok, and why Gen Zers are getting their financial education from social media. Our host, Rebecca Cohen is joined by Michael Wang, founder, and CEO of Prometheus, Jeff Frommer, Chief Content Officer at MoneyLion, and Michael Borough founder of Altro.

Welcome back to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and in today’s episode, we will discuss Walmart’s growing interest in BNPL and financial services, and Stripe’s new fiat-to-crypto payment offering. We will also talk about Wise and Deel’s new feature for global payroll, and the potential benefits and pitfalls of FedNow for B2B payments.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. I like talking to investors in financial services and fintech. I find that their perspectives, particularly around trends and big picture moves, are helpful in understanding what’s going on. Today’s guest is Rex Salisbury, entrepreneur, investor, and builder. He recently left Andreesen Horowitz to return to his roots, building networks of fintech founders and helping them with connections and expertise. He recently launched a $20 million fund and has made 9 investments so far. I spoke to Rex about his background as a community builder and the impact that has on the companies he invests in. We talk about his time at a16z, which saw massive growth in the team and the space. Rex shares why he looks to invest in ‘deep, boring, and broken’ spaces in the financial technology stack and why ‘fitnech at the intersection of something’ is a good investment strategy. Our broad reaching talk spans mortgage software to fintech community meetups in San Francisco to Big Tech’s interest in financial services. Rex Salisbury is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Today, we're talking about artificial intelligence – a tool uniquely positioned to help manage the complex issues presented by climate change. Due to its capacity to gather, complete, and interpret large, complex datasets on emissions, climate impact, and more, it can be used to support all stakeholders in taking a more informed and data-driven approach to combating carbon emissions and building a greener society. To help us understand more about how AI can help us solve the climate crisis, I've invited BCG's leading sustainability expert Mike Lyons to expand upon the real-world, practical applications for climate AI. To read the transcript of our conversation, please visit Tearsheet.co Sign up here for the Green Finance Newsletter: https://tearsheet.co/newsletters/

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet's Editor, Zack Miller. There are a couple of things about advances in financial services that continuously get me juiced – even after a decade of covering the space. One is when new products emerge that just work, whether that’s through integrating into existing platforms or through automation. There’s something almost magical when that happens. Another thing that inspires is inclusiveness – there’s so much being done at incumbents and fintechs that will make financial services more inclusive in the future. SecureSave ticks both of those boxes. It’s trying to popularize the emergency savings account. Haven’t heard of an ESA? That’s OK, I hadn’t either but it functions similar to a Health Savings Account and is intended to help employees save for an emergency. Offered through employers, an ESA is likely to have the same preferred tax treatment an HSA has in the future if Devin Miller has his way. With a strong background in financial software, Devin is a co-founder of SecureSave and is following the HSA playbook for bringing his firm and HSAs to market. Devin Miller is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Today’s episode is all about the creator economy. Host Rebecca Cohen was joined by Tony Tran, CEO of Lumanu, Blake Michael, Creator with 5M+ followers, actor and entrepreneur, and Julia Montgomery CEO and founder of Influent. The creator economy is an important conversation when capturing and retaining Gen Z for two main reasons. First, the entire line of communication for brands with their audiences must adapt to the channels by which Gen Zers communicate and require work with the creator economy that is already ruling those spaces. Secondly, young people, Gen Zers in particular, are at the forefront of this economy and are operating as one-person businesses. The industry is light years behind conquering the Gen Z mindset. That’s why we’ve partnered with Publicis Sapient to create #STEEZ, a hub for finserv potentials to learn more about Gen Z and what it means to capture and delight them. Download The STEEZ Guide to Gen Z readiness, here: https://steezlife.co/

Whenever I’ve spoken about transformation of traditional banks, I pointed to Goldman Sachs building Marcus, its new mainstreet brand. But look around the industry and there aren’t a lot of good stories of digital transformation. Even Goldman is trying, but it isn’t clear that Marcus is working financially, even though it has attracted a lot of deposits. That’s why stories about a traditional institution evolving into something new are compelling – it’s just really hard to do. Marc Butterfied heads innovation for the First National Bank of Omaha. And he and his team recently launched Bend, a credit card as a service offering that’s competitive to fintechs in the space. Marc shares how he went about creating a startup within the bank that made the most of its resources and institutional knowledge and experience to punch above its weight. We discuss the new product, Bend, and its work with Greenlight to launch a credit card used by families and kids. Marc Butterfield is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome back to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and in today’s episode, I’m joined by Josh Ackerman, Product Lead at Stripe. Josh leads a team of product managers that are constantly building and improving Stripe’s core payment products, which include Stripe Checkout, Stripe Payment Links, and Stripe Elements. His team creates APIs that allow startups, growth-stage companies, and larger enterprises to accept online payments. These products are used by millions of merchants and billions of end customers in different parts of the world. Josh joins me today to discuss the key findings from Stripe’s recent State of Checkouts report. He talks about the existing gaps between consumer expectations from online checkout and what most merchants currently offer, as well as how the checkout experience has evolved over the years.

COP27 ended around a week ago, and by now we've all probably seen the headlines – an agreement was finally reached to create a loss and damage fund to help poorer countries most impacted by climate change. Wealthier countries should pay, but exactly who will pay what is yet to be determined. While this agreement is a big milestone, there are some key aspects missing – there are no mentions of emissions peaking before 2025, or a clear follow-through on pashing down coal, which is discouraging. To help us get a better sense of what happened at the conference, today we're chatting with Lubomila Jordanova, the founder and CEO of PlanA. To read the transcript of our conversation, go to tearsheet.co.