Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. So much time and energy is spent acquiring new banking/payments/investing customers. But while financial apps have industry-high usage numbers in terms of how much time users spend on them, user lifecycles are short. A recent study showed that less than 5 percent of people who download a financial app are still using it 90 days later. Tearsheet's Sara Toth Stub wrote a story on what top fintech and banking firms are doing to increase engagement on their apps. From focusing on an apps feed, to increasing content production, to partnering with brands their customers love, firms are finding a way to keep their users around. Sara Toth Stub is my guest today for a deep dive podcast to discuss how top fintech and banking apps are finding success in deepening their engagement and retention of their customers.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. While retail interest in digital assets peaked in 2018, crashed and is rebounding now, institutional interest has been steadily growing. Jeanine Hightower-Sellitto is helping that happen. Previously the COO of the ISE, she’s a managing director at Gemini. She joins us on the podcast to discuss what it means to be a licensed digital asset exchange and the value it provides for institutional investors. We dive into her experience running exchanges and how Gemini is both similar and different than traditional setups. Jeanine shares her views on what it will take for digital asset exchanges to become more influential to expand crypto ownership. We talk about Gemini’s custody business as well. Jeanine Hightower-Sellitto is my guest today on the Tearheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. There are a lot of personal finance apps out there. And yet, many people still feel shut out from being able to have a conversation about their finances. Maybe the apps are too heavy, too complicated or just the language is different than how people talk in real life. Scott Grimes addresses all of this with Stackin. Stackin’s CEO and co-founder built a personal finance app which lets people save and invest and is entirely text messaging-based. So, not only is there not a complicated app people need to learn — there’s no app. He and his team built this for the average american who wants this level of simplicity and guidance around their finances — and it needs to be judgment free. Stackin is well on its way to a million users and has sent over 70 million text messages over the past year. Scott joins us on the podcast to talk about the app and how Stackin tries to establlsh a relationship based on trust and fun. More fintech apps are adopting a conversational interface and we discuss the benefits in doing that for UX. Scott shares some of his product roadmap, as well. Scott Grimes is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast. 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

Fintechs basically have a major decision to make early on. Do you compete head on with incumbents and try to displace them? Or, do you go the b2b route and empower the bigger players with tech? Andrew Jamison, co-Founder and CEO of Extend (https://www.paywithextend.com/), took the second route. He and his firm have built a credit card platform for existing players to instantly distribute credit cards to anyone at any time. He joins us on the podcast to talk about his experience at Amex maintaining all B2B payment solutions, including virtual card platforms, and how that informs what he’s building with Extend. We also discuss how Extend differentiates in a quickly growing competitive space and what he’s cooking up in the product pipeline in the near future. Andrew Jamison is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast. 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

In this episode of The Challengers, Josh Liggett and Zack Miller discuss Visa's $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid. Admittedly, data aggregation isn't that sexy but Zack thinks it is the underpinning of modern financial technology. Data agg enables customer financial data to move securely between financial institutions and fintech apps. Zack thinks Visa is interested in leveraging Plaid's inroads into some of the top fintech firms (Robinhood, Venmo, Square) as the payments firm continues to build out its own ecosystem. Josh says that people don't really understand what Plaid does, and yet Plaid -- and solutions like it -- are vital to the growth of the digital finance industry. 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

In this episode, we're announcing the winner of Tearsheet's first annual Best Innovation Program Award. We ranked innovation programs on four attributes: creativity, innovative thinking, customer value and results. Mastercard's Start Path program won this year's award. To discuss how Start Path works inside and outside Mastercard, we have Amy Neale, the head of Start Path, joining us on the podcast today. She'll discuss how Mastercard defines innovation, how Start Path is organized and what the flows look like, and who the program is designed for. Amy describes why Mastercard chose this model of innovation and provides a few examples of success stories of fintech startups that graduated the Start Path program. Tearsheet would like to thank Mastercard and the other companies and teams that applied for the Best Innovation Program award.

For many fintechs, debit cards act as their monetization engine. As users spend, they pocket part of the interchange fee. To encourage users to swipe more, we’re seeing a resurgence of rewards programs around debit card usage — something that waned after the financial crisis of 2008 and new regulation that capped fees for debit cards. Tearsheet’s Sara Toth Stub recently published ‘Programs without gotchas’: Startups get more creative with rewards programs for debit card holders. We invited Sara on to the podcast to talk about what she was hearing in rewards land, what’s new with incentives around debit cards, and where this may all be headed. We discuss: Initial pullback from debit cards rewards Fintech leads a resurgence in debit card rewards programs Innovation? Rise of the super apps Creative rewards What’s driving debit rewards programs Looking ahead with debit rewards Flexibility and tailor-made programs are also a theme

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. Between startup challenger banks and digital arms of incumbent banks small businesses still struggle to get services. Startups as clients are particularly challenged given their particular needs around cash management. Today’s guest is Everett Cook, co-founder and CEO at Rho Business Banking. As a hedge fund analyst, he saw an opportunity to change the way businesses interacted with banks. Rho targets venture-backed startup clients that fall between the cracks at the Chases and Wells and firms like Silicon Valley Bank. With $1 million to $30 million in revenue, they’re too big and complex to operate out of a general checking account but not big enough to warrant attention at the big banks. Everett discusses the firm’s recent launch of TeamCards and Team Accounts which offers managers at startups deep insight and analytics into their business’ performance by seeing a snapshot of their teams’ performance on a cash-flow basis in real time, inside their bank accounts. We discuss the challenges in banking high growth companies and where Rho is headed. Everett Cook is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. One of the major trends we’ve seen over the past couple of years is the credit cards firms moving into push payments. Being able to push money out to a debit card influences the types of fintech applications currently being built and further cements firms like Visa in the fintech ecosystem. Bill Sheley, the head of Visa Direct, joins us on the podcast today to talk about his role and the importance of Visa Direct for the firm and its customers. We discuss the growing pervasiveness of faster payments and the work Visa has done with cash flow tools for small businesses. Bill describes his plans for expanding Visa Direct’s capabilities around the world. Bill Sheley is our guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to The Challengers podcast episode number 11. Your hosts Tearsheet's Zack Miller and OurCrowd's Josh Liggett look at the past year for challenger banks and digital banking in general. Zack and Josh discuss, in tongue in cheek, the various colors and materials of new debit cards launched this year. Josh said how this was indicative of how competitive the market is getting. And speaking of competition, so much money ($3 billion) rolled into challenger banks in 2019. They will be spending this expanding globally and to acquire new customers. Finn was the big loser in 2019. JPMorgan Chase's challenger brand lived a short life and exemplified the need for the incumbents to play to their strengths while the upstarts play to their strengths. Josh expects the WeWork fiasco to have some blowback on challenger banks raising money in the future as investors get more focused on unit economics. Zack expects more firms like Credit Karma, Dave, MoneyLion, and Betterment to launch banking products in the future as banking as a service firms enable customers to bank with the brands they love. Josh and Zack appreciate your support throughout this year and encourage you to tune in in 2020 as they explore digital banking and challenger banks.