Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Today’s episode is about building financial literacy, both as a solution to a financially stressed America, and as a medium for branding and marketing. A few fintechs do this well, and Stash is one of them. Stash is a personal finance app that aims to make investing accessible to the 99% (of Americans). And to get people investing, they need to first understand the basics of their financial picture. I’ve got the chance to virtually sit down with Stash’s CMO, Dale Sperling, to pick her brain about how, without needing to spend huge budgets, Stash uses creativity, data, and the right partnerships, to develop and strengthen Stash’s brand mission of financial literacy across America – in their campaign Stash101 and beyond.

Welcome back to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and in today’s episode, we discuss how digital payments are making it easier for young consumers to overspend, and how the global microchip shortage is affecting the payments industry. We also talk about Revolut’s first venture into in-store payments with the Revolut Reader, as well as recent research from Marqeta that shows a growing level of consumer trust in mobile wallets.

My guest today is Mathias Wikstrom, CEO of Doconomy. Doconomy provides data services that help businesses monitor and assess their environmental footprint based on transactional and financial data. Consumers can find out the footprint of their lifestyle choices, brands can calculate their product’s footprint. And they’re also working to develop a tool that enables banks to aggregate the information provided to their consumers – this is really important because it means helping banks report on their ESG impact, by harnessing the data and insights from their total consumer credit portfolio. Me and Mathias had a really awesome conversation, so tune in for more on climate data, how it helps us understand our impact on the world and how the financial system can facilitate a net zero economy

Today we’re talking about how banks are digitizing their commercial lending operations. If consumer lines took the front seat when it comes to innovation and digitization, commercial lines have been waiting quietly in the backseat but are now next to be brought forward with the latest technologies and underwriting efficiencies. My guests today are Dan O’Malley, CEO of Numerated, a SaaS digital loan origination system, and Peter Grant, the President of OakNorth, which aims to transform commercial lending with its Credit Intelligence software product.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. I find it fascinating to hear how some of the largest FIs handle emerging technologies. Fidelity, for example, has the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, where it tests and assesses new tech, like the metaverse and blockchain. It’s almost like Fidelity’s skunkworks R&D arm. Today on our program I have Adam Schouela, the head of emerging technology at the center. Our discussion spans different technologies, emerging use cases, and sheds some light on how Fidelity thinks about its priorities and customers out into the future. We talk about the experiments Adam and Co. have done around blockchain technology, around the metaverse, and where it sees opportunities and just as importantly, where it doesn’t see opportunities. Adam Schouela is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and as you’ve probably noticed by now, we decided to do a rebrand! We think this new title for the podcast is shorter and snappier, and it also matches the name of our upcoming Power of Payments conference, which will be Tearsheet’s first conference on payments, as well as our first-ever in-person event. It’ll be held in New York on September 15. Today, I’m speaking with Bar Geron, co-founder and CEO at Balance. Balance is an Israeli startup that claims to be the first B2B ecommerce payments platform that offers a consumer-like checkout experience for merchants and marketplaces. In our conversation, Bar touched upon a number of topics, including the importance of bringing B2B payments online and how that’s linked with global supply chain issues, BNPL for business, as well as other B2C trends that are slowly being adopted in B2B transactions.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller, Tearsheet's editor in chief. For this episode, I’m joined by Darren Parslow, global head of Visa Business Solutions.  Darren and I chat about the innovation in the B2B payments space over the last few years. We discuss how Visa helps SMBs enhance their money flow operations. Lastly, we look to the future and I ask Darren what advice he would give to small businesses looking to digitize operations to better manage cashflow and expand payments beyond the point of sale to grow their businesses. Here's my conversation with Darren.

On today’s episode I’ve got the pleasure of speaking to a company I’ve been fangirling over for quite a while (who even fangirls over a company in the financial space? but it’s true). When I first heard of Earnin, a simple Google search led me to their many Facebook groups featuring a huge community of everyday people sharing their financial struggles and supporting one another in ways big and small –- despite being total strangers on the internet. I invited Brittanie Williams, Earnin’s CMO, to talk to us about building a strong and truly community-based brand, building with customers for customers, and flipping the script on what we think when we talk about the millions of people who live paycheck to paycheck.

Today we’re talking about banks and their role in the climate crisis. Big banks historically supported the global fossil fuel industry through massive amounts of funding, and now they’re being pressured to change. To help me unpack this I’ve called Chris Skinner, a financial technology expert, global commentator, bestselling author of multiple books and the website The Finanser. Chris is out with a new book, called Digital For Good, which explores how financial systems influence the economy, the purpose of banks, and how they impact society and the planet.

Banks and fintechs are looking to improve their lending operations - and increasingly, this means focusing on their customer relationship, while leaving the math to external partners. These partners offer lending software-as-a-service, and that's what we'll be talking about this episode. Joining our conversation we have Adam Huges, who’s the CEO of Amount and Rohit Mittal, the chief executive of Stilt.