Breaking Banks

As banking, wealth, and commerce converge, customers increasingly expect one view of their financial life — a view they often get from third-party apps rather than their bank. Are banks misdiagnosing what is holding them back?

In this episode Brett King connects with Rob Rooney, Co-Founder and CEO of Hyperlayer to discuss emerging infrastructure for next-generation AI-based financial technology. Some listeners will know Rob from his 30-plus years at Morgan Stanley. He ran Morgan Stanley International through Brexit, and later became Global Head of Technology, Operations and Firm Resilience.

Hyperlayer is addressing a challenge common to almost every bank: the desire to launch products as fast as the neobanks, but institutions are hesitant to touch the core. By placing a programmable layer on top of a bank’s existing core system, Hyperlayer enables institutions to build and launch new products in weeks, with governance built in from day one.

 Listen as Brett and Rob discuss:

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As a Peace Corps volunteer with an engineering degree from MIT, Doug Ricket, Founder and CEO, PayJoy, a leading financial services provider for underserved consumers across emerging markets, learned first-hand what it means to build trust in underserved communities. The experience in West Africa sparked a long-held interest that eventually put Doug’s engineering and tech background to work to make a true financial impact and build a mission-driven business for underserved consumers, 20 million of them to date across 9 countries (Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Colombia, and the Philippines)

Listen as Doug shares his founder journey with Brett King and explains why he left a comfortable path in tech to help first-time borrowers build credit and access broader financial services and payments.

Smartphones have become essential economic infrastructure. A smartphone can be a customer’s first productive financial asset and first step into formal financial access, creating financial opportunity for consumers otherwise locked out of traditional credit and payments infrastructure.

40% of PayJoy’s customers are new to credit; 37% are first-time smartphone users. How does PayJoy build a credit profile for someone who’s never had access to credit before? What sets their approach apart from traditional lenders? Listen to find out.

Can a not-for-profit, member-owned credit union genuinely out-innovate a bank with a multi-billion-dollar AI budget by being more disciplined and mission-anchored?

In this episode of Breaking Banks, Bev Anderson (President and CEO of BECU) and Nadim Homsany (SVP, Head of AI at BECU) join host Jason Henrichs to unpack the strategy behind the credit union’s AI decisions. They discuss where to focus, the choice between buying and building, and whether traditional ROI even applies.

Discover how BECU is getting serious about AI and whether this marks an opportunity for credit unions to reshape financial services in the U.S.

Interested in hearing more? You can catch Nadim on stage at MoneyLive North America with Samer Saab (SVP of Product and Partnerships at Alloy Labs) in Chicago on September 14–15. Find out more at moneylive-insights.com/breakingbanks

In this episode host Brett King and Paolo Sironi, host of Breaking Banks’ sister podcast The Bankers’ Bookshelf, speak with Pal Krogdahl, author of Rip Out the Core—an essential guide for anyone wrestling with the stubborn realities of banking core modernization. Despite massive investments, many institutions still face overruns, delays, and outcomes that leave them no stronger than before.

Sparked by a flooded kitchen that perfectly mirrored the chaos of real-world banking transformation programs, Pal’s book shifts the lens from pure technology to organization, showing that lasting change is impossible without adapting how people work. Pal speaks to banking executives and transformation leaders tired of endless patching, converting hard-won industry experience into precise, actionable steps that finally deliver meaningful business value.

Join as the trio unpack why core modernization so often fails, how organizational design must evolve alongside systems, and the practical path to progress that stops the cycle of frustration once and for all.

Entrepreneurship is an odyssey with many unexpected stops on the journey. You could find yourself on a loading dock in East LA, freestyle rapping with a man known as DJ Trucker—yes, there is video proof.

In this episode of our special series, Killing It, hosts Jason Henrichs and Alex Johnson talk with Max Farrell. Max started his career in business development at Dwolla and went on to found WorkHound, which is now WorkStep. WorkHound began when Max stumbled upon a problem in an industry he didn’t come from, and he jumped right in.

The trio speaks candidly about the unpredictable nature of the founder journey and the need to deeply understand the customer. This includes Max spending 48 consecutive hours in the cab of a truck, winning a Truck Tank pitch competition, and recognizing when it is time to personally hit the road and move on.

This honest conversation shares the ups and downs of building a business. Max describes the near-failures, the acquisition, and his eventual decision to leave his founder identity behind. It’s an odyssey. 

For years, Banking as a Service (BaaS) was sold as a silver bullet for community banks to solve their deposit problems and grow non-interest income. Through its evolution, the industry has learned that it is not enough for BaaS to simply be programmable. For innovation in banking to flourish, without sacrificing the safety and security of the banking ecosystem, BaaS must also be governable.

With the bankruptcy of Synapse and the resulting consent orders, sponsor banks have been forced to prove their control over outsourced operations.

This week on Breaking Banks, Jason Mikula, who wrote the book on BaaS, literally!, and is publisher of FinTech Business Weekly; Ellen Linardi, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Synctera; and Reid Whiting, President of Lincoln Savings Bank join Jason Henrichs to talk about sponsor banking. Is it growing up or catching up?

Interested in learning more? Check show notes for a link to a paper, a blueprint really, for the choices a bank that wants to play in sponsorship banking will need to make.

White Paper Link: Orchestration, Control, and Observability: A New Framework for Sponsor Banking https://alloylabs.docsend.com/view/gs8925x8yeii5vxg

What if AI could replicate your consciousness?

Listen as Breaking Banks host Brett King connects with Paolo Sironi, host of Provoke.fm‘s The Banker’s Bookshelf about Paolo’s latest book, Quantum Sapiens.

Paolo’s foray into literary fiction explores the intersection of quantum gravity, philosophy, and the future of human consciousness in an AI-driven world, providing a unique way to explore complex topics.

Available at major bookstores and on Amazon, Quantum Sapiens is a haunting novel blending scientific speculation, the frontiers of artificial intelligence, theories of consciousness and urgent ethical questions into a compelling narrative.

Join Paolo and Brett as they dive into the “hard problem” of consciousness and how technology like AI acts as a mirror for the human experience.

In this episode of Breaking Banks host Brett King sits down with Farbod Sadeghian, Founder and Executive Chairman of TheBlock. Based in Dubai, TheBlock is a fintech collaboration space dedicated to fintech, blockchain development, and crypto, bringing together fintech, AI, and capital markets to build the next economy of virtual assets,

The conversation covers the origin story of TheBlock and the UAE’s regulatory landscape—specifically the Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA). They also discuss how TheBlock is building a virtual asset community that enables faster speed to market through direct collaboration with onsite advisors and strategic partners.

By connecting people, infrastructure and opportunities, TheBlock offers end-to-end support to help companies launch, operate and scale within the digital economy.

If in Dubai, stop by! 

Financial institutions (FIs) are currently navigating a “perfect storm” of technological, market, and consumer shifts. They face a multi-front war: constant economic and regulatory pressure, soaring consumer expectations for 24/7 personalization, and the existential threat of megabanks with massive tech budgets.

To survive and thrive, FIs must move beyond “pilot purgatory”—where 95% of generic AI pilots fail—and adopt a banking-specific AI workforce,an AI-powered intelligence layer for modern banking.

In this episode of Breaking Banks host Jason Henrichs is joined by Dan Michaeli, CEO & Co-Founder of Glia, a digital customer service and banking AI platform serving over 700 FIs, and Madeline Fredin, SVP of Growth & AI Transformation at Alloy Labs to explore how a self-learning institutional brain unifies data across the organization. By starting with the contact center—the richest source of unstructured interaction data—banks can build a foundation that shifts their entire operation from reactive service to proactive growth and agentic workflows.

Kiah Haslett walked into our Hot Takes session at the Alloy Labs annual member meeting with a thesis she’d been sitting on, and it’s a good one: in a lighter-touch regulatory environment, the prisoner’s dilemma rewards whoever moves first. The strategically correct move, she argues, might also be the morally bankrupt one. And she’s not sure that changes the math.

Dara Tarkowski — who sees the grand jury subpoenas before anyone else does — pushed back. Not on the logic, but on the premise. The statutes didn’t go anywhere. The switch can still be flipped.

And underneath both arguments is the question we’d been wrestling with the day before: if most banks only have a debt mindset — protect the downside, don’t lose, get your principal back — what are they leaving on the table? And what does it actually cost them to keep waiting for clarity that isn’t coming?

Joining Jason Henrichs are Kiah Haslett (Fintech Takes Banking), Dara Tarkowski (Much Shelist, P.C.), and Rick Geloff (Bank of North Dakota).