Financial News Network: Spotlight

In this episode of The FNN Spotlight: Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Mitchell Troyanovsky, founder and CEO of Basis, to talk about why accounting may be one of the clearest use cases for AI in financial services.

Mitchell explains why accounting is much more than a compliance function, and why reliable financial information underpins everything from lending and investing to day-to-day business decisions. That made it an obvious target for an AI-native company built from the ground up around rapidly improving models rather than traditional software assumptions.

Jillian and Mitchell dig into how quickly accounting agents are improving, moving from handling individual tasks to taking on larger chunks of work like reconciliations, investigations and month-end processes. They also explore what happens to the role of the accountant as more of the repetitive work gets automated, and why Mitchell believes humans will spend more time on judgment, review, client relationships and deciding what “good” accounting should actually look like.

The conversation also tackles the trust problem. Mitchell argues that AI should be thought of less like perfectly deterministic software and more like a highly capable coworker whose work still needs appropriate review. He explains why Basis is selling agents to accounting firms rather than trying to replace them, how early adopters are learning to work with increasingly capable AI, and why the companies that start building those habits now could gain a compounding advantage.

They also get into how Basis thinks about competition, why end-to-end workflow matters more than a chatbot, and how team building changes when execution gets cheaper and better decision-making becomes the real bottleneck.

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In this episode of The Financial News Network: Spotlight, host Jillian Williams sits down with Lightspeed investor Sam Eisler to take stock of where AI and fintech are heading, and which ideas are starting to look more durable as the market matures.

Sam traces her path from Google into venture capital and explains how dramatically the fintech investment landscape has changed since 2021. AI has gone from a nice-to-have area of expertise to something that increasingly sits at the center of how financial products are being built. But some of the assumptions from the beginning of the generative AI boom have already proved wrong. Rather than waiting for models to become perfectly accurate, companies have learned to build around their limitations and use AI where it is strongest.

Jillian and Sam dig into some of the areas attracting the most attention today, from automating the CFO stack and rebuilding legacy ERP systems to agentic commerce and the emerging financialization of compute. They also discuss why B2B AI companies can be easier to underwrite today, even as Sam argues that one of the biggest fintech winners of the next decade could ultimately be a consumer AI business focused on personal finance or wealth.

The conversation also gets into what makes an AI startup genuinely defensible. Sam explains why proprietary data has not become the moat many investors expected, and why more traditional advantages like workflow depth, distribution, becoming the system of record and simply executing faster may matter much more. They also look at why the application layer still has plenty of room to win, particularly in highly regulated industries like fintech.

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In this episode of TWIF Spotlight: Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Kush Bavaria, co-founder of Ornn, to talk about what happens when the explosive growth of AI turns compute into something that starts to look a lot like a commodity.

Kush explains Ornn’s thesis that compute will become a core input for businesses across the economy, creating a market where companies increasingly need to buy, sell and hedge access to GPU capacity. Ornn is building both a marketplace for compute and financial indices that track its price, with the goal of creating the infrastructure for compute to trade more like oil or electricity.

Jillian and Kush dig into why compute prices are still so volatile, how open-source models could actually increase demand, and why growing fragmentation across both model providers and compute suppliers creates an opportunity for a more transparent market. They also discuss who is already trading and hedging compute exposure, from data centers and market makers to hedge funds and retail investors.

The conversation also covers what it takes to build a new financial market from scratch, Ornn’s ambition to own the full stack of compute as an asset class, and why Kush believes the eventual market could be much larger than most people currently appreciate. Plus, he shares his view on Nvidia’s moat and why he thinks its dominance could prove harder to disrupt than many expect.

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In this episode of TWIF Spotlight: Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Sophia Goldberg, Head of Payments at Rain and founder of Ansa, which was recently acquired by the stablecoin infrastructure company.

Sophia shares what took her from traditional payments into stablecoins, why she believes the technology has finally reached a point where major companies can take it seriously, and how Rain is using stablecoin rails to make global financial products easier to launch. They dig into the use cases where stablecoins already have a clear advantage, including cross-border payments, B2B payouts, stored value and programmable money.

The conversation then turns to agentic payments. Sophia explains why AI agents may need a mix of stablecoins and traditional card rails, how programmable money could make it easier to give agents tightly controlled spending power, and why micropayments for data and compute could become one of the most compelling early use cases.

Jillian and Sophia also tackle some of the harder questions still standing in the way, including fraud, identity, authorization and who takes responsibility when an AI agent makes the wrong purchase. Plus, Sophia explains why Rain helped launch the Agentic Payments Alliance and why cooperation across the industry will be essential to establishing the trust and standards needed for agentic commerce to scale.

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In this episode of TWIF Spotlight: Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Kahlil Lalji, founder and CEO of Natural, just after the company announced a $30 million Series A.

Kahlil explains why he believes AI agents will eventually execute the majority of global payment volume, and why the biggest near-term opportunity may be in B2B rather than consumer commerce. Unlike shopping, where taste and preference can make delegation tricky, many business payment flows are much easier to define as simply right or wrong, making them a natural fit for autonomous agents.

They also dig into what still needs to be built before agentic payments can truly scale, from identity and controls to trust, observability and risk. Kahlil shares why Natural spent its first months building foundational infrastructure before moving a single dollar, and why he thinks the market has already shifted from asking whether agentic payments will happen to asking when.

The conversation also covers what it is like building a company in the AI era, how Kahlil raised his Series A in just nine days, why he thinks startups have an opening against payments incumbents, and his long-term ambition for Natural to sit at the center of how money moves in an agent-driven economy.

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In the first episode of the new season of Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Jesse Pollak, creator of Base and a longtime leader at Coinbase, to talk about what happens when AI agents start spending money.

Jesse explains why he believes crypto could become a natural payment rail for AI: Agents are built to interact with software, and stablecoins and crypto wallets give them a programmable way to transact without relying on payment systems designed for humans. They discuss where agentic payments are already gaining traction, from micropayments for data and AI inference to the longer-term opportunity in everyday commerce.

The conversation also covers Base’s evolution into what Jesse describes as a blockchain for global finance, the growing adoption of stablecoins and tokenized assets, and why major financial institutions have become much more serious about crypto over the past 18 months.

Jillian and Jesse also get into one of the harder questions around agentic commerce: what happens when an AI spends the wrong amount, buys the wrong thing, or simply gets it wrong? Jesse shares how payments infrastructure may need to evolve to bring familiar protections like refunds, authorization and consumer safeguards into an agent-driven world.

Plus, Jesse explains how AI is changing the way teams inside Coinbase actually work, why smaller teams can now ship dramatically faster, and his prediction that agentic commerce could account for a meaningful share of payments within the next five years.

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What happens when venture capital stops being reserved for a small group of institutions and accredited investors?

In this episode of This Month in Fintech, Sasha Pilch sits down with Sarah Pinto, Head of Robinhood Ventures, to discuss Robinhood’s push to open private-market investing to a much broader audience.

Sarah explains the thinking behind Robinhood Ventures and its new RV2 fund, which is designed to give retail investors exposure to early-stage companies, including businesses coming out of the Y Combinator ecosystem. They discuss why so much wealth creation now happens before companies reach the public markets, the challenge of giving everyday investors access without sacrificing quality, and why Robinhood believes it can compete for allocations in some of the most sought-after private companies.

Sarah also reflects on her path from Goldman Sachs and private equity to Emerson Collective and Robinhood, where her previous investments included companies such as Stripe and OpenAI. The conversation explores women’s participation in investing and wealth creation, the impact AI could have on the next generation of founders, and why Sarah believes expanding access to venture could create not only more investors, but more entrepreneurs.

A conversation about venture capital, access, AI, entrepreneurship, and who gets to participate in the upside of the next generation of technology companies.

Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of fintech.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Sasha Pilch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-pilch

Sarah Pinto: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-pinto-peyronel/

About This Month in Fintech

This Month in Fintech is our premiere showcase podcast.  Each month, Sasha Pilch will have a deep 1:1 conversation with the leaders in the fintech arena, exploring questions about the industries next moves, where to focus energies, and how to lead into the next chapters and paradigm shifting technologies change everything again.

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Sasha Pilch is joined by Alan Imberman, CFO at Wealthfront, to talk about what it really takes to scale a modern fintech from early scrappiness to a successful IPO, without losing the product instincts that got you there.

The conversation starts with the finance leadership side: how the finance function changes across stages, why audits and regulation create discipline, and what the public-company jump demands behind the scenes, from bank selection to testing-the-waters meetings to the S-1 feedback loop. Alan shares what the “ring the bell” moment hides, and why telling the business story clearly becomes a core part of the job.

We also cover custodial accounts and tax gain harvesting, plus the early push into a mobile-first mortgage and refinancing product. Finally, we look at AI financial advice, LLM referrals, and how conversational AI could reshape client education and service.

Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of fintech.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Sasha Pilch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-pilch

Alan Imberman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-imberman-cfa-aab2371/

About This Month in Fintech

This Month in Fintech is our premiere showcase podcast.  Each month, Sasha Pilch will have a deep 1:1 conversation with the leaders in the fintech arena, exploring questions about the industries next moves, where to focus energies, and how to lead into the next chapters and paradigm shifting technologies change everything again.

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AI is changing how people shop, but the real story is what happens after the recommendation. When buying moves into ChatGPT-style interfaces, merchants suddenly face a new maze of platforms, protocols, and trust questions and nobody wants to rebuild checkout for every new “browser” of the AI era. We sit down with Karan, VP, Head of Agentic Commerce at Adyen, to get specific about what’s real today, what’s still early, and what infrastructure has to exist before agents can safely transact at scale. 

We break agentic commerce into four clear models: human-in-the-loop conversational checkout, consumer autonomous purchasing, machine-to-machine transactions, and B2B agentic procurement. Then we dig into the “universal translator” approach: real-time product feeds for discovery, cart creation that plugs into a merchant’s existing tax and fulfillment stack, and a payments trust layer that keeps transactions secure while preserving the merchant as merchant of record.

Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of fintech.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Sasha Pilch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-pilch

Karan Katyal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karan-katyal-14070438/

About This Month in Fintech

This Month in Fintech is our premiere showcase podcast.  Each month, Sasha Pilch will have a deep 1:1 conversation with the leaders in the fintech arena, exploring questions about the industries next moves, where to focus energies, and how to lead into the next chapters and paradigm shifting technologies change everything aga

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In this episode, host Sasha Pilch sits down with John Glasgow, CEO and CFO of Campfire, to explore what it takes to build an AI-native ERP for modern finance teams.

John shares why the next major shift in accounting software is not from on-premise systems to the cloud, but from cloud tools to AI-native platforms. They discuss the reporting, consolidation, and planning challenges that still force finance teams into spreadsheets, along with Campfire’s approach to automating routine workflows while keeping governance and business context at the center.

The conversation also covers John’s path from investment banking and corporate finance at Adobe to building Campfire through Y Combinator, plus his view on how AI agents and connected data can change the role of the general ledger.

Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of fintech.

This episode is sponsored by Granola. Try it free for 3 months at granola.ai/thisweekinfintech using code THISWEEKINFINTECH.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Sasha Pilch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-pilch

John Gasglow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnglasgow/

About This Month in Fintech

This Month in Fintech is our premiere showcase podcast.  Each month, Sasha Pilch will have a deep 1:1 conversation with the leaders in the fintech arena, exploring questions about the industries next moves, where to focus energies, and how to lead into the next chapters and paradigm shifting technologies change everything aga

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