Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

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.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. Tearsheet's Iulia Ciutina and Rebecca Cohen both traveled to Money 20/20 Europe earlier this month. They sat down with editor Zack Miller to discuss what they saw, learned, and experienced.

Welcome back to Power of Payments. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and in today’s episode, we talk about Klarna and the future of BNPL, PayZen’s ‘Care Now, Pay Later’ solution, and Mastercard’s recently announced ‘Smile to Pay’ system.

On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Scott Goodson, founder and CEO of StrawberryFrog, a marketing agency that works with some of the largest financial brands in the industry. I invited Scott to talk to us about his recent book: Activate Brand Purpose: How to Harness the Power of Movements to Transform Your Company. Ultimately, though, our conversation ended up covering much more: doing marketing with soul and intention, the shifting pyramid of power where the boss is no longer God, and the power of truly taking on corporate responsibility.

Green finance is not just about investing in clean energy or carbon sequestration. The core of the problem is sustainability - how to create financial systems that enable people to thrive over the long term. A lot of the focus today goes to the E in ESG investing, which represents the environmental factor, and the latter two parts - Social and Governance - are often overlooked. Today I’d like to explore what the S in ESG stands for. My guest is Timothy Flacke, who is the co-founder and executive director of Commonwealth, a national nonprofit helping the financially vulnerable build security.

Today we’ll be talking about the small and medium sized business sector and how it’s becoming increasingly supported by digital lenders. Securing loans from traditional banks is very tough for SMBs – it’s a long and complicated process and it’s not that likely they’ll get the cash they need – only 15% of small business applications get approved at big banks, for example. This is another reason why digital players like Square and PayPal are able to be some of the largest SMB lenders in the US, giving out billions of dollars in loans to the small business sector in 2021. And THAT is a reason why the two companies are my guests today - I talk to Luke Voiles, general manager at Square Banking, and Bernardo Martinez, vice president of Global Merchant Lending at PayPal - to hear their thoughts on small business lending.

Today’s guest is Nikhil Behl – the CMO of FICO. FICO was founded way back in 1956, making it one of the oldest standing firms in the financial industry. Today we’ll talk about how it manages to keep its relevance and purpose in today’s world. Every American knows about FICO scores, and most of us are usually confused, and potentially worried, by our three-digit score. But it wasn't meant this way. The credit scoring system, the lending landscape around it, and the financial systems at large have been changing and will continue to change. And FICO is not planning to stay behind.

Green finance is all about what the finance industry is doing to address climate change - we know business as usual isn’t sustainable, so we are essentially in the middle of a transition towards reaching net zero. But this is not an easy thing to do, it involves collaborations between many institutions, companies and people - so let’s talk about how to get there. In light of this, my very first guest on this podcast is Aspiration CEO Andrei Cherny. Aspiration is a fintech that wants to help customers use their deposits for sustainable investments and gives them the option to offset their carbon footprint - a fundamentally different strategy from traditional banks.