There has been endless talk in fintech over the past year and a half about the pullback from equity investors and how difficult it is to raise money in this environment. Less is being talked about the debt investment landscape. So, I wanted to bring Jacob Haar, Founder and Managing Partner of Community Investment Management (CIM), back on the show (he was previously a guest in 2015 and 2020). He has been a debt investor in fintech for almost a decade now and he has deep experience with...

Trillions of dollars is spent on credit and debit cards every year in the US. These payments are all processed on one of the most expensive card processing networks in the world, costing merchants tens of billions of dollars. Account-to-account payments, otherwise known as pay-by-bank, is yet to take off in this country but it does have the potential to put some of these card processing dollars back in merchants' pockets. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Eric Shoykhet, the...

There is no technology that has generated more buzz this year than generative AI. We have all played around with ChatGPT and marveled at its capabilities. But what is really happening with this technology in financial services? Or more importantly, what is going to happen? My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Anu Sachdeva, Global Business and Service Line Leader at Genpact. She has deep knowledge of banking and fintech and has become an expert on generative AI and how it will...

There are tens of millions of Americans who have limited access to credit. Those with thin files or FICO scores below 650 often have difficulty accessing credit. Many have to resort to payday loans or pawn shops when they incur an unexpected expense. But there are fintech companies whose sole focus is serving this population with affordable credit access. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Todd Schwartz, the CEO and Founder of OppFi. OppFi has been around since 2011 (they have...

Medical debt is the number one reason people go bankrupt in the United States. So, you would think there would be a plethora of fintech companies attacking this problem from many angles. And while there are certainly lenders willing to finance medical procedures there are few companies taking a holistic approach to patient financial health. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Itzik Cohen, the CEO and Co-Founder of PayZen. He saw the problems medical debt has created firsthand...

The people who lead the national banking regulatory agencies typically come from long careers in banking and law with a traditional view of the banking world. But there has been one exception to this rule. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Brian Brooks, the former acting head of the OCC and a current partner at O'Melveny & Myers. Now, don't get me wrong, Brian has had a long career in banking and law but he has also spent time outside of traditional finance, thinking...

As recently as six or seven years ago modern payments infrastructure in Latin America didn't really exist. Most countries had a monopoly when it came to payments processing and these monopolies sit on old technology that is difficult and expensive to maintain. A lot has changed today. Digital payments infrastructure has been built and while those old monopoly companies still exist there is now digital payments infrastructure throughout the region. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One...

In the consumer lending space, fintech lenders have been using AI in their underwriting models for many years. But there are still many consumers who slip through the cracks and get declined for credit when they should have been approved. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Gal Krubiner, the CEO and Co-Founder of Pagaya. They work with a large number of both traditional and fintech lenders and apply their sophisticated modeling to find consumers who have been mispriced. Their...

When you stop and think about it, it is kind of crazy that we don't have a global network for moving money instantly and cheaply. The internet is more than 30 years old now and it seems to me that this should be a solved problem by now. But it isn't, at least not yet. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is David Marcus, the CEO and Co-Founder of Lightspark. If David's name sounds familiar that is because he was the leader of the now-defunct Libra/Diem project at Facebook a few...

One of the richest areas of fintech innovation right now is in instant payments. The launch over the summer of FedNow has brought heightened awareness to instant payments but there have been other offerings available in this country for some time. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is David Watson, the President and CEO of The Clearing House. They are the creator of the first instant payments network in the USA called Real Time Payments, a network that has been operating for over...

Much has been written about the student loan challenges for domestic students in this country. But what about international students, those people coming to the U.S. to study for a Master's or Bachelor's program? There are few good loan alternatives for international students as they are ineligible for federal student loan programs. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Manu Smadja, the CEO and Co-Founder of MPOWER Financing. They are working to address this problem, providing...

Why is it that, in 2023, we are still getting paid on a fixed schedule? It seems crazy to me that payroll systems that were built for batch processing on mainframe computers still maintain this batch mindset in a world where everything can be instant. We should be able to choose the exact cadence of when and how we want to be paid. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Kevin Coop, the CEO of DailyPay. The team at DailyPay has created the largest Earned Wage Access (EWA) business...

The first wave of fintech focused on helping those people who already had money. The bottom half of the population was mostly ignored, and those companies that did try failed to get traction. But in recent years, there has been a new breed of fintech company emerging squarely focused on helping those people who are living on the financial edge. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Rodney Williams, the President and Co-Founder of SoLo Funds. They call themselves a community...

It seems like every day there is a story coming out of Washington that can have a major impact on fintech. Whether it is the CFPB, OCC, SEC, the Fed or new legislation being proposed, fintech companies can be profoundly impacted by what happens in our nation’s capital. That is why it is important to have an independent trade association making our ideas and opinions known. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Phil Goldfeder, the CEO of the American Fintech Council, a job he has...

One of the early players in the fintech lending space is Best Egg, formerly known as Marlette Funding. At one stage they were the fastest-growing lender in the country. While their growth has slowed down they continue to be one of the largest online lenders by originations. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Paul Ricci, the new CEO of Best Egg. He recently took over from the founding CEO, Jeffrey Meiler (see my interview with Jeffrey from 2019). This is Paul's very first...

All areas of fintech are changing fast. But it is in payments where the most groundbreaking changes are happening right now. After years of development, we finally saw the launch of FedNow last month (on time!) as this country begins its transition to instant payments in earnest. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Stephany Orum, the CEO and Co-Founder of Orum. I wanted to get her back on the show (she was last on in 2021) to discuss FedNow and what it is going to mean for the...

When it comes to running an e-commerce store there is no bigger name than Shopify. They have been helping entrepreneurs run all aspects of their e-commerce business for well over a decade. And in recent years they have quietly built up an impressive suite of financial products. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Vikram Anreddy. He is the Head of Product for Financial Services at Shopify. With Shopify Credit launching just this week the company now has all the major components...

It wasn't that long ago that robo-advice was this exciting new industry that was going to bring automated investing to the masses. Today, much of that initial promise has been realized and all the major investment firms have this as part of their offerings. But there is much more work needed to be done here. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Sarah Levy, the CEO of Betterment. Betterment was one of the pioneers in the space and it is interesting to see how they have evolved...

Last month we announced a groundbreaking partnership with Fintech Meetup that is going to transform the fintech space. With that in mind, I thought it would be helpful to dive more deeply into the partnership between Fintech Nexus and Fintech Meetup.  So, on the next episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast we have my good friend and partner, Bo Brustkern, CEO and Co-Founder of Fintech Nexus and Jon Lear, the President and Co-Founder of Fintech Meetup. In this podcast you will...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That is pretty much how you could describe the environment for fintechs at the height of the pandemic. Some industries were booming while the world was reeling from the global pandemic. But in the fintech lending business, if you weren't involved in the PPP you were likely struggling. You would not think this was good timing to launch a working capital offering for small business. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Alek...

Where fintech has had a dramatic impact already is in international payments. Sure, there is still work to do but there are companies out there today facilitating payments, often instantly, to people all around the world. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Charles Rosenblatt, the President of PayQuicker. What PayQuicker does is help companies pay their gig workers in 200+ countries and those workers can receive these funds instantly. They have been doing this for more than a...

When I first heard that QED Investors and BCG were putting together a report on the future of fintech I knew it was going to be good. I was not wrong. Never before have we seen an in-depth and rigorous analysis of where the industry is today and more importantly where we are headed. The report is titled Global Fintech 2023: Reimagining the Future of Finance, and it provides a level of optimism that has been missing in fintech for the past 12-18 months. But this is not blind optimism, it is...

Investing in fintech companies is never dull. The last three-plus years have seen every type of investing environment there is. Are we edging toward a new normal? Probably not yet but investment demand could start to pick up within the next nine months. My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Mark Fiorentino, a partner at Index Ventures. One thing that is really interesting about Mark is that he comes to venture investing from the operating side of fintech. And not just any...

While the fintech lending space is maturing with a number of lenders achieving significant scale today, the longevity of most platforms goes back barely more than a decade. But there is one lender today that was already seven or eight years old during the financial crisis of 2008-09. I am not saying the turbulent times we are experiencing today are equivalent to what become known as the Global Financial Crisis, but there are important lessons that can be learned from companies that survived...

Last month at Fintech Nexus USA in New York City we announced that Fintech Nexus has acquired Fintech Blueprint, one of the leading fintech newsletters. It is led by Lex Sokolin, who is one of the great thinkers in our space, so I used the opportunity of being together in person to record an interview. The latest episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast is a discussion with Lex Sokolin (I last had him on the show two years ago) recorded in the podcast theater at the event. While we touch on...