Brian Harstine created Acquire Invest, powered by blockchain, to bring private equities to every investor and make investing more inclusive and accessible.

Billy Roberts, CEO of Wedge, created a smart debit card to simplify banking for users and stand out as a sustainable financial option.

Andy Witherbee, CEO and founder of Engage Partners Group, shares insight from his experience in the financial services industry and discusses building future-ready financial organizations.

Ben Soppitt, co-founder and CEO of Unifimoney, shares his goal of simplifying investing by cutting out third-party applications. His company’s vision is to ensure everyone is able to manage their money in one simple and easily accessible place.

Tyler Griffin, co-founder and managing partner of Financial Venture Studio, knows the ins and outs of what it takes for a founder to succeed. Griffin, who has decades of experience in the fintech and banking space, shared his first-hand experience in the fintech community and provided insight into how new founders can connect themselves to the broader fintech network.

Matt Kopko, VP of Public Policy at DailyPay, handles the company’s regulatory interaction, lobbying activity, and research on its financial wellness impact. Matt and Hunter discuss the future of payments and on-demand payroll.

If you’ve tried to buy a house in the past year (or just browsed a real estate marketplace for fun), you may have noticed that housing prices and the demand for real estate soared at a record-breaking pace. Hunter’s latest guest, Alex Leduc, founded Canadian-based proptech Perch with the goal of empowering people throughout the entire home buying process. 

Michelle Toll, the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Digital First, LLC joins the podcast. Prior to her new venture, Michelle had over 20 years of experience in community banking. Over the past decade, she nurtured an interest in fintech, disruption, and digital innovation. When she connected with a former colleague (turned co-founder), the idea of a community-focused, digital bank emerged and she decided it was the perfect fit for what the market needed.

On the latest episode, Hunter hosts Nancy Giordano, a strategic futurist whose accomplished career began in the advertising and branding space. Throughout this work, Nancy experienced each notable technology revolution - from the Internet to mobile to social media. Nancy brought her forward-looking mindset to the podcast to give us a peek into what’s to come.

Small businesses everywhere have struggled long enough with disjointed data streams that come from multiple different systems. To make the data “talk back” and tell the story of your business, the accounting data needs to be normalized via modern APIs. Sohaib Zahid joins the podcast to talk about how his company plans to unlock this new era of data for small business accounting.

There seems to be a “moving target” for how to define a digital bank strategy. As more banks and fintechs increase the diversity of their offerings and the size of their digital marketing investment, it’s time to step your game up if you’re thinking about launching a digital bank.

Customer service, and most importantly digital customer service, continues to battle tension between its legacy tools (e.g. IVR phone systems) and the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI), modularization, and on-screen voice. But customers of all ages expect their financial services partners to be there when, where, and how they want.

If you’ve felt uncomfortable while asking a friend to split the dinner bill, reminding a roommate to reimburse you for utilities or hearing an unfulfilled promise of, “I’ll pay you back,” you’re not alone. Our recent podcast guests, Haafiz Abdurrahim and Adoba Yua, co-founded their fintech RiftPay to solve this timeless problem.

Margaret Hartigan created Marstone, a digital wealth management platform, to humanize and demystify finance. The company was founded on solid pillars, including the desire to address a lack of financial literacy.

Trent Sorbe, founder and president of Central Payments, joins the Financial Experience Podcast to discuss innovation in the fintech space, payment partnerships, and why banks should act like a toaster. Yes, a toaster.

Hunter talks with the co-founders of a revolutionary app geared toward Gen Z. Katrin Kaurov and Aleksandra Medina, two young entrepreneurs who have traveled the world and now settled in New York City, noticed a pattern of poor spending habits while building and maintaining a social life in each new place. The price of coffee dates, dinners, and cocktail hours adds up, and they wanted to break the cycle of financial stress for social generations like Gen Z and millennials. So, they started...

“It doesn’t make sense to worry about things we can’t control because we can’t control them. On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to worry about the things we can control because we can control them.” Brian Nelson Ford shared this key piece of advice on our recent podcast as a reminder to us all in periods of great uncertainty. He’s used this principle and others to build a personal finance education company that has become a key facet of workplace financial education inside Truist Bank.

Jeff Marsico recently joined the podcast to talk about “operating discipline” and how banks can stay independent in a time of great change amidst a number of pressures on customer loyalty.

Locality Bank, a de novo that is expected to go live later this year, has the strategic advantage of launching at "an opportune time,” much like Keith’s previous bank that came to life out of the Great Recession. As de novo activity continues to sputter along nationally and M&A activity over the last decade removed many of south Floridian business owners’ favorite community banks, Locality’s stakeholders saw a clear need.

“You don’t start with the bank. You start with the customer. And most importantly you start with some really good data.” Liz High, EVP of Strategy and Marketing at Nymbus, recently joined the growing team at the rapidly-scaling financial technology company and can’t believe “this is really her job.” Creating twelve ready-to-launch brands in a matter of months, she and her team are redefining what it means to "build or buy" technology.

In an ever-changing industry with evolving rules and regulations, it is vital to have a well-oiled compliance rules engine. That is, at least, what Kevin Hart would say. The latest Financial Experience Podcast guest is the CEO of Green Check Verified, a company that has modernized how cannabis businesses and financial institutions work together.

On the latest podcast, Hunter virtually sits down with Joe Welu to discuss why undergoing a digital transformation can be difficult, why financial companies are often misaligned with what the customer needs, and what value creation looks like in a modern financial organization. Joe, CEO of Total Expert, the first marketing and customer engagement platform built for the financial services industry, has built his business going “a level deeper."

The core values of SECU Credit Union are based on the philosophy of people helping people and giving back to the community. In order to strengthen these values, SECU created a foundation to build a stronger Maryland. Sarah Ryan, Assistant Vice President of Community Engagement at SECU and Director of SECU MD Foundation, joins the Financial Experience Podcast to discuss the foundation’s broad impact on education, health and wellness, and community development. 

Our recent guest, Alpa Lally, discusses a common, yet staggering, credit statistic: 100 million people are said to be excluded from the credit ecosystem because they lack a traditional credit history or experience with traditional credit products. Alpa emphasizes that Experian’s team is continuously searching for novel ways to use data. In the future, she is excited for more opportunities to provide lenders with the data they need to fully evaluate a consumer’s position and involved risk.

Nathan Baumeister joined the Financial Experience Podcast to discuss the evolution of ZSuite Technologies from inside a community bank to a product that is solving commercial money management issues for banks across the country.  When Liberty Bank, based in Greater Boston, needed to grow deposits out of their productive commercial lending business, they took a unique approach. Listen to our latest podcast to hear how this community bank built a powerful tool that solved a customer pain.