Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today’s guest is Nicole Newlin. She’s the vp of solutions at Ocrolus, which provides fintech infrastructure for data analysis. She runs the team that handles client onboarding and integration. She’s also NYC Fintech Women’s newest board member. Nicole shares her personal journey as a woman rising through the ranks within fintech. She also shares her plans to extend NYC Fintech Women’s reach through things like education, community and coaching. I ask her for career advice she’d give her younger self. Nicole Newlin is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. When we launched our podcast 10 years ago, one of our first guests was a French entrepreneur living in San Francisco. He had a small but upwardly aspirational startup. Renaud Laplanche’s Lending Club ended up becoming a major player in fintech as a public company and a force in the marketplace lending arena. Now, Laplanche is back for more. He’s the CEO of Upgrade, a new challenger bank that was built with lending at its heart. He joins me on the podcast to talk about the genesis story of Upgrade and how so much of his experience launching and growing LendingClub informs Upgrade’s products and positioning. We discuss how the current COVID-19 crisis is impacting the industry for both incumbents and upstarts and how Upgrade’s new products — a contactless credit card that has built in pay-over-time features — play into today’s market dynamics. Renaud Laplanche is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to Tearsheet’s Outlier Podcast. This subscriber-only podcast i exclusive for our Outlier members. We go deeper with subject matter experts, to take actionable steps that can impact your businesses and practice. To get access to the full audio and transcripts, head on over to Tearsheet and apply to become an Outlier member(tearsheet.co/outlier). Today’s guest is Louis Sciullo, executive director financial services at Landor (landor.com/) North America, a brand consulting and design firm with deep roots in the financial services industry. He’s spent nearly three decades managing Wall Street brands like Lehman Brothers and Barclays. Now, he leads the financial services practice at Landor, supporting and growing some of the largest financial brands. Louis joins us to talk about what the COVID-19 pandemic calls for from both large and small financial brands. He explores the transformation of financial retail and what it takes to be an agile financial brand. We discuss customer retention strategies in an increasingly competitive environment. Here’s a snippet of our Outlier briefing on branding with Louis Sciullo. To get access to the full audio and transcripts, head on over to Tearsheet and apply to become an Outlier member(tearsheet.co/outlier).

Sara Toth Stub joins editor Zack Miller on a Deep Dive podcast to discuss a recent article she wrote on push payments. In It's a simple idea with Extraordinary impact: Inside the growing world of push payments, Sara describes what this form of payment is, how it works, and how entire fintech ecosystems are being built around push payment providers, like Visa and Mastercard.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Before COVID-19 hit, we spent a lot of time talking about the competitive environment for bank deposits. Every week, an incumbent or new challenger bank was making high rate offers in order to attract new customers. The dynamic may be different now, but financial institutions are getting increasingly savvy about their pricing strategies. Borrowing from retail, we are moving away from one-price-fits-all into a more data-driven and competitive market. Joining us on the podcast today is Nomis’ Prashant Balepur. We talk about the firm’s new product, a lightweight tool which provides banks and credit unions real time pricing intelligence around mortgages and deposits. Prashant describes how many FIs make pricing decisions today and what type of data science it takes to optimize products across sectors, geographies and customers. Prashant Balepur is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. There’s a sea of sameness out there in digital offerings. Challenger banks seem to provide, more or less, the same services and products. They’re debit cards attached to a personal finance manager. HMBradley launched last week with an investment from PayPal and Affirm founder, Max Levchin. It bills itself as a bank for people serious about savings and it has an incentive mechanism that pays the highest interest rates to those doing the best job saving. Co-founder and CEO Zach Bruhnke joins us on the podcast to talk about why he’s dreamt of launching a bank and where he plans to take his new challenger in the future. Zach Bruhnke is my guest on the Tearsheet Podcast.

In this episode of The Challengers, Josh Liggett and Zack Miller explore the pandemic's impact on incumbent banks as well as on challengers. Zack mentioned fears are high and that's creating rumors that certain challengers are failing. Josh believes it's a good time for incumbents to really get focused around digital. They have no other choice. Next, the hosts discuss OakNorth, which is still Europe's fastest growing startup. But growth of its loan book is slowing, whether by design or by market forces. The bank is profitable -- perhaps the only one of many challengers to reach this milestone. Square gets a license and Zack believes that we'll see Square move strongly into lending to merchants using its technology. Like PayPal, Amazon, and Shopify, this captured lending is powerful and makes a ton of sense from a service model perspective. It can also be quite lucrative. Credit Sesame, like Credit Karma a few months before it, is rolling out a banking product, Sesame Cash. PFMs want to own the money movement piece for their customers. Lastly, we mention Bill Harris' new firm, One, which just launched in private beta after a $17 million funding round. Harris was CEO at PayPal and Intuit, and founded Personal Capital before this. In perhaps the worst launch timing in history, One will use dashboards with consumer credit at its core to help middle Americans with their money. Before we jump into the podcast, I wanted to introduce you to Outlier, Tearsheet’s leading membership program. It’s designed for top fintech and financial service professionals to stay on top daily of the biggest trends, the top companies, and the leaders of this next generation of finance. Get industry briefings by experts like the ones we’re doing this January on best practices in PR and customer acquisition. Find out more at Tearsheet.co/outlier

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today we have another special episode — we’re still talking about bank - fintech partnerships by studying some of the best, most impactful ones out there. We have JP Morgan’s Jason Tiede and FISPAN’s Lisa Shields on the show to talk about their partnership that essentially embeds JP Morgan’s payments and treasury functionality into its clients ERP environment. This partnership won Tearsheet’s Bank Fintech Partnership Award for Ecosystem in 2020. We discuss how the two parties met and why JPM chose to partner with FISPAN. We discuss best practices in standing up a good working relationship with two vastly different companies and cultures. Lisa Shields and Jason Tiede are my guests today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Today we have the two winners of Tearsheet’s Bank/Fintech Partnership Award for Digital Transformation, Midwest BankCentre and Mantl. We’re joined by MBC’s President and CFO Dale Oberkfell and Nathaniel Harley, CEO and CO-founder of MANTL. We talk about the collaboration between the two firms on Rising Bank, a new digital brand launched by MBC along with MANTL. The company hit its 1 year deposit savings goals within 5 months and both parties are continuing to pursue the benefits of partnership to go deeper. Here’s our show.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Card issuance is enjoying a lot of fintech light shone on it as technology and use cases catch up to the modern economy. From Marqeta to Stripe and now Adyen, payment firms are moving quickly in this space. Roelant Prins, chief commercial officer of Adyen, joins us on the podcast to talk about his firm’s new card issuing service, where the idea came from and what type of customer demand they’re seeing for it. We discuss Adyen’s global approach and drill down into what he describes as unified commerce’. Roelant Prins is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.