The consumer lending space has seen a great deal of innovation in the past decade or more. But the number of completely new lending concepts that cross my desk has reduced to a trickle in the past couple of years. That is why I was excited to see an idea that was completely original and compelling.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Veetahl Eilat-Raichel, the CEO and Co-Founder of Sorbet. While you could think about Sorbet as an unsecured consumer lender, because that broadly d...

When you have been covering fintech as long as I have you get to know others in the space doing similar things. Zack Miller, the founder and managing editor of Tearsheet, was writing about fintech and interviewing people as I was getting serious about fintech lending back in 2012.Since I no longer own a fintech media company, we are no longer competitors so I wanted to get him on the show to talk about Tearsheet. He has done a great job building it up into one of the leading media companies i...

Account payable automation software is one of those areas of fintech that doesn't get as much coverage as it should. Creating an efficient accounts payable system is a pain point for pretty much every company, but particularly for those businesses occupying the middle market. This is the opportunity that our guest today seized upon when starting his company nearly 25 years ago.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Michael Praeger, the CEO, Chairman and Co-Founder of AvidXchange. ...

While there are tens of millions of Americans still struggling with their financial health the reality is that fintech is starting to have a significant impact here. Some companies are reaching scale and are helping those people living paycheck to paycheck save huge amounts of money in aggregate particularly when it comes to punitive bank fees.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Zuben Mathews, the CEO and Co-Founder of Brigit. As a college student, he lived the challenges of no...

Imagine serving unsecured consumer loans to a population that has no credit file and no banking activity whatsoever. This population primarily uses cash and operates outside of the traditional financial system. Is it even possible to serve this population with short-term loans profitably?My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Roberto Salcedo, the CEO and Co-Founder of Baubap. Roberto and his team have done exactly that, building the technology and the underwriting models themselve...

Despite all the advances in fintech lending, the way data has been furnished to the credit bureaus has remained largely unchanged for several decades. We still operate on a 30-day payment cycle with no allowance for real time data. Not to mention all the recent credit innovations such as BNPL and short-term cash advances. This is about to change.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Christian Widhalm, the CEO of Bloom Credit. They have created a system that can work with cash flo...

When you think about it, most, if not all, fintech innovation comes via the analysis and application of data. And financial services is more data-dependent now than at any time in its history. But this creates a challenge for brand new startups. How do you get access to data when all you have is an idea? Enter Fintech Sandbox.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Sarah Biller, the co-founder of Fintech Sandbox. This industry non-profit provides free access to financial services d...

Today, the back office for many lenders and originators is still very manual and human-intensive. We are talking lots of emails, reading contracts and processing Excel files. In some cases these processes have been in place, pretty much unchanged since the 1990s. That is because there has never been a comprehensive solution available to automate the capital markets process for originators and lenders.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Stu Wall, the CEO and Co-Founder of Setpoi...

"AI is probably the most talked about and least understood topic within financial services today," said John Sun, the CEO and Co-Founder of Spring Labs (previously, I had another co-founder of Spring Labs, Adam Jiwan, on the show back in 2020). The company is at the cutting edge of AI innovation in financial services with several interesting use cases in production today.The Spring Labs team decided that what the industry needed was a new event focused on AI applications beyond just the use o...

There is no faster-moving space in finance right now than the anti-fraud space. With all the advances in Generative AI, the fraudsters are more difficult to catch than ever. But there is one place where fintechs and banks can focus that has real promise: authenticating the mobile phone. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Rodger Desai, the CEO and Founder of Prove. They have developed sophisticated tools to verify identity through a mobile phone that can help banks and fin...

Today's show is our special 500th episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast. Rather than do a retrospective or a look back at some highlights from the last 11 years of interviews what I decided was to do my regular interview but with a fintech pioneer. I wanted a big name so I was delighted when the CEO and Founder of Cross River Bank, Gilles Gade, decided to join me.I first interviewed Gilles (along with Adam Goller) on the show way back in Episode 32 in March 2015. A lot has changed since t...

An e-commerce merchant is a unique type of business. They are built on top of a platform like Amazon, eBay or Shopify and as such there is a great deal of empirical data about their business. Which means that there is rich data available for lenders to feed into their underwriting models.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Ricardo Pero, the CEO and Founder of SellersFi. He saw the opportunity for a lender focused on e-commerce when a friend of his with an Amazon store was looki...

People often say that technology in insurance is just five years behind other areas of finance. But the reality is the technology rails that have been built for payments, lending and deposits have taken decades of evolution. Insurance is different. There is no Plaid, Stripe or even ACH for insurance, and so we have a product that still relies on a human for the vast majority of transactions. But that is going to change.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Wayne Slavin, the CEO a...

The humble credit score has come a long way. Consumers, particularly younger consumers, are more aware of their credit score today than ever before. Historically, banks and credit unions have been the gatekeepers of our financial lives so it makes sense that they would want to provide information and context around credit scores. At the same time drive their customers to relevant products based on this information. Enter SavvyMoney.My guest today on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is JB Orecch...

The financial system has become so much more complex over the last couple of decades that it is difficult to know what current trends will have staying power. How will the future financial system organize itself and will it look that much different to what we have today? I put these questions to one of the global thought leaders in fintech.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Emmanuel Daniel, the founder of The Asian Banker (now part of TAB Global) and one of the most interestin...

The core of the card payments system as we know it today has been around for many decades. This system has a number of major shortcomings, not least of which is the 45-character limited established by the ISO 8583 standard. That may have been enough characters back in the 1980s but it is severely limiting in today's complex world. But problems like these create opportunities for creative minds.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Oban MacTavish, the CEO and Co-Founder of Spade. ...

The Generative AI hype is not dying down. But where are the use cases in fintech beyond the basic chatbot? Particularly in fintech lending where AI has been used in underwriting for more than a decade. But not Generative AI. That is why I was very interested to chat with today's guest who has created a patent-pending Gen AI use case.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Ryan Rosset, the Co-CEO and Founder of Credibly. They are a small business lender that has been around since 20...

It is the big challenge for fintech: making the financial lives better for the those who are underserved. We have come a long way in the past decade but there is still so much more that has to be done. And one of the people who has been at the center of this fintech transformation is Arjuna Costa, Managing Partner at Flourish Ventures.He is someone I have wanted to get on the show for many years, so I am fortunate that the stars aligned and we were able to sit down for the engaging discussion...

While BNPL has gathered all the attention these past few years, there is another point-of-sale financing category that has been around for decades: lease-to-own, sometimes called rent-to-own. It has historically been full of unscrupulous actors charging excessive fees and it is not an area that has received much attention from fintech companies.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Neal Desai, the CEO and Founder of Kafene. After a thorough analysis of different opportunities he ...

The resources that consumer lenders have to work with today are better than ever before. Gone are the days when risk officers could just pull a bureau file and have access to the best data about a potential borrower. The credit infrastructure tools today are more sophisticated and predictive, allowing lenders to serve more borrowers without expanding their credit box.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Misha Esipov, the CEO and Co-Founder of Nova Credit. They are at the forefro...

There is a shift that is beginning to happen in financial services: using purchase history to provide more personalized offers from merchants. There is no richer data for advertisers than knowing how we actually spend our money. This is one of the reasons behind the huge growth of BNPL but today, there are some credit unions that are on the cutting edge of this trend.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is David Metz, the CEO and Founder or Prizeout. His company started in the gami...

The journey of the small business owner is often a lonely one. For many people, particularly first-time entrepreneurs, starting a small business can be overwhelming. But today, with the tools available, there has never been a better time to start a business. Having said that, most new small businesses don't make it to five years. What we need is a better support system for small business owners.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Carolyn Rodz, the CEO and Co-Founder of Hello Al...

It is a simple problem that every card issuer has. You have issued a credit or debit card to a new customer, so how do you get them to actually use it? More than that, how do you encourage this customer to make this new card their primary payment card.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Rory O'Reilly, the CEO and Co-Founder of Knot. He wrestled with that problem himself and decided to do something about it. His company has built API connectivity into most of the major merchants...

I have made no secret of my affection for earned wage access (EWA) as a product. It has been growing rapidly, particularly the last couple of years, as more consumers realize what a great tool it is. There have been several different approaches to implementing EWA from the major players in the space but no one has approached it the same way as Clair.My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Nico Simko, the CEO and Founder of Clair. While operating in a space without regulatory clarit...