Fintech One-On-One

Scott Sanborn is the CEO of Happen Bank, the company known until this summer as LendingClub. He is the first guest to appear on the show four times, and each visit has caught the company at a turning point. This time it is the rebrand: we talk about why the LendingClub name no longer fit, what six years of running a chartered bank has taught him, and how he is preparing for a world where AI agents shop for financial products on a consumer's behalf.

What We Covered

• Ten years as CEO and why it has never been the same job
• Why the LendingClub name no longer fit the business
• The customer research behind the Happen Bank brand
• How they will measure whether the rebrand is working
• What it took to get a bank charter six years ago
• Shepherds, not sheriffs: building the risk and governance team
• LevelUp Savings, LevelUp Checking and DebtIQ
• Innovating on the loan product with their own balance sheet
• The balance sheet and marketplace mix
• The switch to fair value accounting
• How AI is changing operations and discovery
• Getting ready for AI agents that shop on consumers' behalf
• Home improvement lending and home equity

Key Takeaways

• A brand is a promise, and the old name could not carry it. Customers told the company two things: they did not know it was a bank, and they did not want the word "lending" on a debit card that holds their own money. The rebrand waited until the product suite, and the financial returns, were there to back it up.
• The charter let them innovate more, not less. With its own balance sheet and a direct line to regulators, the company can test new loan terms and features like TopUp on its own portfolio, then bring investors the results a year later. It holds about 40% of originations on balance sheet.
• Simple incentives drive engagement. LevelUp Savings pays a 100 basis point rate kicker for depositing $250 a month. It has gathered billions in deposits, 20% of accounts come from borrowers, and borrowers who have paid off their loan hold an average balance of around $19,000 to $20,000.
• Agentic shopping favors lenders who already compete on value. Most Happen Bank customers already arrive through comparison sites, so Scott sees agents hunting for the best deal as a tailwind. The open questions are legal, such as what happens when an agent signs a loan disclosure.

About Scott Sanborn

Scott Sanborn has been CEO of Happen Bank, formerly LendingClub, since 2016, having joined the company in 2010 as Chief Marketing Officer. He led the acquisition of Radius Bank, the first time a fintech bought a chartered bank, and the 2026 rebrand to Happen Bank. Before LendingClub he held senior marketing and revenue roles at eHealth, RedEnvelope and the Home Shopping Network.

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Michelle Beyo is the founder and CEO of Finavator, a consultancy that helps banks, fintechs, and corporates step into the future of finance. Her new book, Mastering the Future of Finance, just published this week by Wiley, breaks the industry into nine elements across data, trust, and technology. We talk about why she wrote it, why she believes there should be a human data right, and how she kept the AI chapter current in a market that moves every month.

What We Covered

• Michelle's path from telco and online shopping to prepaid infrastructure at InComm
• Piloting one of the first WeChat top-up tests at 7-Eleven in 2017
• Why she concluded the future of finance was being built in Asia
• Surviving crypto winter at a blockchain startup
• Winning Money20/20 RiseUp and starting Finavator in 2019
• How Finavator works with banks, fintechs, and corporates
• The masterclass that led to a Wiley book deal
• The nine elements of the future of finance across data, trust, and technology
• Open banking, open finance, and open data explained
• The case for a human data right
• Keeping the AI chapter relevant as agentic payments took off
• Ending each chapter with a subject matter expert interview

Key Takeaways

• Number portability is the template for open data. Your phone number was the first piece of data you could take with you when you switched providers. Michelle sees open banking, open finance, and eventually open data as the same right extended to your financial life, and she wants it codified as a human data right at the ISO level, including the right to delete consented data.
• Trust is the core layer. In Michelle's framework, open data, digital identity, and cybersecurity with AML compliance sit at the center. Get that trust layer right and fintech, BaaS, and embedded finance can accelerate on top of it.
• Agentic payments are moving faster than the internet ever did. Memory, auditability, liability, and returns are still open questions. Until credential tokenization matures, Michelle suggests giving AI agents prepaid credentials rather than your core credential.
• Frameworks outlast specifics. Michelle finished writing in May and agentic payments had already moved by publication. The nine elements are built to hold up even as individual examples date.

About Michelle Beyo

Michelle Beyo is the founder and CEO of Finavator, which she started in 2019 after winning Money20/20 RiseUp. Before that, she spent six years in telco, eight years running online shopping and affiliate marketing programs for major airlines, led sales, marketing, distribution, and innovation for InComm Canada, and worked at a blockchain startup focused on digital identity and consent. She is the author of Mastering the Future of Finance: How Data, Trust, and Technology Are Reshaping the Global Economy (Wiley).

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Vroon Modgill spent two decades in payments as an accountant, finance director and CFO before founding Sokin in 2019. The company launched as a subscription-based consumer remittance app and is now a B2B payments and treasury platform running across 170 countries and 70 currencies, growing 100% a year while staying profitable. We talk about the pivot out of consumer, where stablecoins actually earn their place, and why he thinks the moat in agentic finance sits in the regulated plumbing rather than in the agent.

What We Covered

• Twenty years in payments before founding Sokin
• Watching his father fill out the same compliance forms on every remittance
• Why a consumer subscription app was the wrong business to be in
• The 2021 decision to go all in on B2B
• Sitting underneath the payments, treasury and FX providers
• One integration across 170 countries and 70 currencies
• Enterprise direct versus the embedded partner channel
• Embedded going from zero to 40% of projected US revenue in a year
• Why most of the world is not card first
• Owning the stablecoin stack instead of renting it
• The MCP connector and agent-prepared, human-approved payments
• Nine dollars of revenue for every dollar of net cash burned
• The Series B, the Oxford Finance debt facility and the licensing build-out
• What the Manchester United partnership actually delivers

Key Takeaways

• The defensible layer in agentic finance is not the model. An agent that decides to fund payroll still needs an account, a license and a rail, which is why the licensing build-out matters more than the AI demo.
• Stablecoins work best treated as a rail rather than a religion. Sokin bought the engineering DNA, runs fiat and stable through the same licensed infrastructure, and lets the route decide.
• Consumer remittance is a price and marketing game. Being right about the problem does not make it the right business, and the enterprise version of the same friction is where the money is.
• Profitable growth is a capital strategy, not just discipline. It let Sokin raise equity into strength and add debt at a lower cost than dilution.

About Vroon Modgill

Vroon Modgill is the founder and CEO of Sokin, a global business payments and treasury platform he launched in 2019. He trained as an accountant and spent roughly 20 years in payments and finance leadership roles, including finance director positions at startups and, from 2017 to 2019, North America CEO and global CFO of a crypto payments company. Sokin closed a Series B led by Prysm Capital with Morgan Stanley returning, followed by a debt facility from Oxford Finance, and is the official payments partner of Manchester United.

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Paul Gu dropped out of Yale in 2010 to join the first class of Thiel Fellows, spent time at the quant fund D.E. Shaw, and then co-founded Upstart on a simple premise: the techniques Wall Street uses to price corporate risk should work at least as well on consumer credit. Fourteen years later, he took over as CEO from co-founder Dave Girouard, and six weeks after that, the OCC granted conditional approval for Upstart Bank. This conversation covers what has actually changed at the top of the company, why Upstart went for a full de novo national charter rather than buying an existing bank, and where AI is reshaping the parts of lending that nobody talks about.

What We Covered

• Dropping out of Yale for the first Thiel Fellowship class
• What D.E. Shaw taught him about applying quant techniques to personal finance
• The income share agreement idea that brought the co-founders together
• What changed when he took over as CEO on May 1
• Losing the balance of a three-founder culture, for better and worse
• The core personal loan business and the future prime borrower
• The trifecta of growth, profitability and credit performance
• Auto and home, and the race to contribution margin positive
• What conditional approval from the OCC actually means
• Why a de novo charter rather than acquiring a bank
• Where the existing bank and credit union partners land after Upstart Bank opens
• AI in loan verification and servicing, beyond the underwriting model
• What happens when AI agents start applying for loans on people's behalf
• Ninety-one percent automation and whether 100% is reachable
• The case that fixing the cost of credit makes most Americans 10% wealthier

Key Takeaways

• Upstart went de novo rather than buying a bank because acquiring one means inheriting someone else's loan book, underwriting practices and operational history, and the whole pitch depends on being able to stand behind every decision inside the bank when a regulator asks.
• The bank changes who originates, not who funds. Upstart Bank will become the principal originator, but Gu is explicit that the company is not becoming a large, equity intensive balance sheet business, and the bank and credit union partners keep buying the assets.
• The next AI wins are in verification rather than underwriting. A HELOC can carry several thousand dollars of human verification cost because county property records are non-standard and non-deterministic, which is exactly the kind of work a generalized reasoning agent is suited to.
• Gu welcomes a world where AI agents apply for loans on borrowers' behalf, because agents have unlimited time to search and no brand loyalty to defend, which favors the lender with the best rate rather than the biggest marketing budget.

About Paul Gu

Paul Gu is co-founder and CEO of Upstart, the AI lending platform he started in 2012 after dropping out of Yale as one of the first Thiel Fellows and spending time at the quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw. He spent most of his career as the technical half of the founding partnership, running product, engineering and machine learning before taking general management of the auto and home businesses. He succeeded co-founder Dave Girouard as CEO on May 1, 2026.

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Arpit Goel built his first company, Gamma, on a simple pitch: legacy data-loss-prevention tools took nine months to show value, and Gamma got customers there in two weeks. Palo Alto Networks acquired Gamma in 2021. Now Goel is running the same play in a completely different industry. Root is a payments orchestration layer that lets enterprises move money bank-to-bank in about five seconds, with no intermediary ever holding the cash. In this conversation, Arpit explains why he thinks the US is finally close to a tipping point on instant payments, why Root never takes custody of the money it moves, and how the company handles banks that can't yet receive instant payments.

What We Covered

• Growing up in India, and the ADHD diagnosis that pushed him toward IIT Delhi
• Why he calls himself an "ignorant" founder rather than an experienced one
• The nine-months-to-two-weeks wedge that built Gamma, and why Root uses the same one
• Discovering the payments inefficiency by reading through ADP's 10-K
• Why 40% of US SMBs don't accept cards, and it isn't about the fees
• The dual pressure of RTP and FedNow that made 2024 the right moment to start Root
• The heart, arteries, and capillaries analogy for how Root fits into the banking system
• What actually happens to money in the five seconds between sender and receiver
• Why reliability, not transaction scale, is the hard engineering problem in payments
• How Root handles banks that can't receive RTP or FedNow
• Where stablecoins fit into a bank-rail-agnostic platform
• Why Root wants to be the pipes underneath the industry, not the brand

Key Takeaways

• SMBs refuse cards mostly because of settlement delay, not fees — restaurants earning their week's cash on a Saturday night don't see it until Tuesday, right when they need it most to restock.
• Root never takes custody of funds. Money moves directly between the sender's and recipient's own bank accounts, and Root charges a fee on top rather than earning float.
• Reliability, not transaction volume, is the hard engineering problem — Root has built retry and fault-tolerance systems, using the workflow engine Temporal, so a bank outage doesn't have to mean a failed payment.
• Arpit sees instant payments as a market that hasn't tipped yet but is close — RTP and FedNow now operating together create sustained pressure that neither rail created alone.

About Arpit Goel

Arpit Goel is the founder and CEO of Root. He holds a computer science degree from IIT Delhi and a PhD from Stanford, and previously founded Gamma, a data-security company acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2021, where he went on to lead product for the data-security business.

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René Saúl spent seven years running an offline agricultural lending business in Mexico before selling it and pouring the proceeds into Kapital, a bet that the future of B2B fintech in Latin America belonged to companies willing to become regulated banks. Today Kapital is the largest B2B fintech in the region, and René is the only founder in the space who has bought not one but two banks, one of the deals agreed to on a napkin.

What We Covered

• Why the future of fintech is regulated, and why that was a contrarian call in 2021
• René's seven years running an offline agricultural lending business in Mexico
• The founding thesis behind Kapital's one-stop B2B banking ecosystem
• How Mexico's electronic invoicing system became Kapital's underwriting moat
• The "red car theory" of spotting opportunities before they arrive
• Buying Banco Autofin on a napkin, and growing its deposits from $150 million to $400 million in three months
• Acquiring the banking, brokerage and payments assets of Grupo Financiero Intercam
• Building instant, 24/7 cross-border payment rails on top of SWIFT
• Closing the small business financing gap with AI-native underwriting
• Why Mexico is becoming a cornerstone of America's AI manufacturing boom
• The limits of banking an economy that still runs largely on cash
• Kapital's growth numbers and its path to a dual listing in New York and Mexico

Key Takeaways

• Mexico's electronic invoicing mandate hands Kapital more than 50,000 data points per customer, a seven-year head start on underwriting that competitors using third-party providers cannot easily close.
• For large enterprises and cash-strapped SMBs alike, a banking license, not a slicker app, is what earns the trust needed to hold their money and their cash flow.
• Opportunities have to be hunted, not waited for. Kapital tracked potential bank acquisitions for years so it could move in days when the Autofin deal appeared.
• Staying liquid and profitable before either acquisition is what let Kapital move fast when the opportunity came, rather than scrambling to raise capital under pressure.

About René Saúl

René Saúl is the co-founder and CEO of Kapital, which he built after selling an offline agricultural lending business that financed berry and avocado exporters in Mexico and Peru. Under his leadership, Kapital has grown into a licensed financial group serving more than 300,000 customers across Latin America, with more than $5.3 billion in assets and two bank acquisitions behind it.

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Enova International has spent two decades using machine learning underwriting to serve consumers and small businesses who sit outside prime bank criteria, and its pending $369 million acquisition of Grasshopper Bank would give it a national charter for the first time. Steve Cunningham became CEO in January 2026 after nearly a decade as the company's CFO, following earlier stops as a bank regulator at the FDIC and as chief risk officer at Discover. He joins the show to explain what a fully digital lender looks for in a nonprime borrower, why credit quality looks solid in his portfolio right now, and how he's answering the senators and state attorneys general who want regulators to block the Grasshopper deal.

What We Covered

• Steve's path from FDIC regulator to Capital One, Harley-Davidson, and Discover
• Moving from the CFO chair to the CEO chair six months in
• Enova's brand portfolio: CashNet, NetCredit, and OnDeck
• Underwriting nonprime and near-prime consumers versus underwriting small businesses
• The lift Enova's proprietary models get over a plain FICO or VantageScore
• Why all their products use different underwriting models
• What Enova's weekly vintage data shows about the health of the consumer
• Why gas prices matter less to consumer spending than headlines suggest
• How Enova is using generative and agentic AI across the business
• The real thesis behind the Grasshopper Bank acquisition (see my podcast with CEO Mike Butler)
• Steve's response to the senators and state attorneys general opposing the deal
• What banking-as-a-service adds to Enova's roadmap
• Where Enova wants to be by 2030

Key Takeaways

• Enova's NetCredit yields and losses aren't outliers when benchmarked against what banks themselves report to the FDIC each quarter, Cunningham argues, pushing back on the "predatory" framing critics apply to the company.
• The Grasshopper deal is primarily about simplifying a patchwork of direct state licenses and bank partnership arrangements, not chasing cheap deposits, though the deposit base is a welcome bonus.
• Because Enova's consumer loans repay every two weeks or faster, the company sees shifts in borrower behavior in its own vintage data well before those shifts show up in macro statistics.
• Small business underwriting at Enova is built around the health of roughly 900 different industry codes rather than a borrower's personal credit, making it a fundamentally different discipline than consumer underwriting.

About Steve Cunningham

Steve Cunningham is CEO of Enova International, a role he took on in January 2026 after nearly a decade as the company's CFO. He previously served as chief risk officer and treasurer at Discover, CFO of Harley-Davidson Financial Services, held senior finance roles at Capital One, and began his career as a bank regulator at the FDIC.

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Very few people in this industry have sat in all three of the seats that matter in the bank-fintech story. Amanda Swoverland started as a compliance examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spent nine and a half years at Sunrise Banks rising to Chief Risk Officer, then joined Unit as its fourth employee and Chief Compliance Officer. Six months ago she became President of Hatch Bank, a California-chartered ILC that works exclusively with fintech lending partners. She still describes herself as a banker at heart, and this conversation is a good explanation of why that matters more now than it did five years ago.

What We Covered

• From Fed compliance examiner to bank president
• Why she was never the department of no
• Learning product and sales inside a fintech infrastructure company
• Hatch Bank's credit-only model, with no deposits
• The five lending verticals Hatch focuses on
• Going deep with a few partners instead of diversifying across 30
• What a fintech gets from a small sponsor bank that scale cannot offer
• Lifting a BSA/AML consent order in under a year
• "Maturing for scale" as the theme of her first six months
• Using AI internally without sending agents out into the wild
• Why the quality of founders approaching sponsor banks has gone up
• The direct versus not direct debate after Synapse
• Why every fintech should have a second bank partner
• Where AI is genuinely working in compliance today
• DIDMCA, state charters and the usury patchwork
• What separates the sponsor banks that survive the next cycle

Key Takeaways

• The "direct versus not direct" framing that took hold after Synapse is, in Amanda's view, a distraction. If a bank has a program, the bank is in charge of it, whatever technology sits in the middle and whoever is acting as program manager. Everything else is a question of how you oversee it, not who is accountable.
• The next failure will not look like Synapse, because that particular gap has been closed. What worries her is banks that never learned the fundamentals: liquidity, credit oversight, BSA/AML, and how a multi-party lending program behaves when the cycle turns and payments stop arriving on time.
• A second bank partner is good for the fintech and good for the bank. Concentration risk cuts both ways, and Amanda actively introduces her own clients to other banks she trusts, and is happy to be someone else's second bank.
• Compliance is heading toward 100 percent sampling. Amanda thinks the days of testing a selected sample of transactions or complaints are ending, provided you test the system, watch the outputs, and keep a human in the loop.

About Amanda Swoverland

Amanda Swoverland is President of Hatch Bank, a San Marcos, California ILC that works exclusively with fintech lending partners across home improvement, small business, clean energy, student lending and healthcare financing. She began her career as a compliance examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spent nine and a half years at Sunrise Banks where she became Chief Risk Officer, and then five and a half years at Unit as Chief Compliance Officer, joining as the company's fourth employee. She was named to Forbes' 2026 list of the women shaping fintech infrastructure and banking strategy.

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Mike de Vere runs Zest AI, a company that has been applying machine learning to credit underwriting for over two decades, starting with some of the largest banks on the planet and now serving a large share of the credit union market. Since his last appearance on the show three years ago, Zest has expanded well past underwriting into fraud detection and portfolio management, tied together by an intelligence layer and a generative AI companion called LuLu. Mike makes a specific argument in this conversation: machine learning still makes the credit decision, generative AI makes the feedback loop faster, and the real advantage available to community financial institutions is a willingness to pool what they know.

What We Covered

• Zest today, from underwriting to fraud to portfolio management
• Why the intelligence layer is what makes an ecosystem
• Starting with Discover, Citi and Freddie Mac, then moving down market
• LuLu, named after a corgi, and what she actually does
• Safety and soundness as the first use case for most institutions
• Replacing quarterly reports that used to take weeks
• Peer benchmarking versus building your own data lake
• Collective intelligence across 2,000 credit models in production
• Why generative AI has no role in making the credit decision
• Shrinking model refit cycles from 18 months to daily evaluation
• Zest customers versus non-customers on growth, delinquency and efficiency
• Cash flow underwriting, and why generic national models fail
• Zest Protect and fighting AI-powered fraud with AI
• The two objections that come up most in sales conversations
• Takeaways from the IQ AI Lending Forum in Santa Fe

Key Takeaways

• The performance gap is measurable. Comparing Zest customers to non-customers across 2024 and 2025, Mike says his customers grew 16 times faster, ran roughly 20 points lower on delinquency, and were 501 basis points better on efficiency ratio.
• Generative AI belongs around the credit decision, not inside it. Zest still uses supervised, locked-down machine learning models for underwriting, because a regulator will ask you to explain the decision. What generative AI changes is the speed of evaluation, from an 18-month refit cycle to daily.
• Comparison is where the value sits. A lender looking only at its own data lake has visibility on itself and nothing else. LuLu is built to normalize performance data across institutions so a chief lending officer's instinct can be checked against thousands of real policy instances rather than one career's worth of experience.
• Community lenders have a structural advantage they underuse. The credit union industry holds roughly $2.4 trillion in assets. If it acted as one institution, it would be bigger than Wells Fargo, and unlike the big banks these institutions are actually willing to share.

About Mike de Vere

Mike de Vere is the CEO of Zest AI, the AI lending technology company that has been doing machine learning in credit since well before AI became a standard fintech conference track. He came to Zest from a career in data and consumer insights, with leadership roles at J.D. Power, The Harris Poll and Nielsen. Zest now touches $5.6 trillion in assets under management, and by the end of this year expects one in three credit union members to have their consumer loans decisioned with its technology.

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Nandan Sheth has spent 25 years in payments, building three growth companies along the way, including Harbor Payments (sold to American Express) and Acculynk (sold to First Data/Fiserv). He now runs Splitit, which takes a different path than most buy now, pay later providers: instead of originating a new loan, it turns the credit a consumer already has on their existing card into an installment plan, with no underwriting, no social security number, and no new debit card for repayments. With agentic commerce infrastructure being built in real time, Nandan argues that a frictionless installment option is exactly what merchants need to avoid being commoditized on price inside an LLM shopping platform.

What We Covered

• Three growth companies across 25 years in payments
• What attracted Nandan to Splitit from Fiserv
• Card-linked installments with no underwriting or new loan
• The card loyalist versus the credit needy
• $3.5 trillion of unused credit sitting on US cards
• Merchant-funded 0% economics and where the budget comes from
• A $1,300 average order value versus $250 to $300 for standard BNPL
• Point of sale through the Samsung Wallet integration
• Backing Google's Universal Commerce Protocol
• The overlooked small business to large supplier B2B use case
• Chargebacks, repudiation, and who carries the risk in agent-led purchases
• Splitit Go for the face-to-face services economy

Key Takeaways

• BNPL is really two markets, not one. Card loyalists want rewards, protections, and habit, while the credit needy want a new line of credit. Nandan thinks both get served, but by different products.
• The economics work because the merchant treats it as marketing spend. About 98% of Splitit's volume is a merchant-funded 0% plan, priced comparably to a percentage-off promotion, and it lifts average order value roughly four times over standard BNPL.
• In agentic commerce, price and delivery speed are the easiest things for an LLM to compare. A 0% installment option gives merchants a third lever that is not pure price competition.
• The B2B version may be the stronger use case. Small business owners face both a time problem and a working capital problem, which is a sharper reason to hand off buying to an agent than a consumer shopping for a polo shirt.

About Nandan Sheth

Nandan Sheth is the CEO of Splitit, the card-linked installments platform. He moved to the US from the UK 25 years ago and has spent his entire career in payments and fintech, including running e-commerce and omni-channel commerce at Fiserv. He previously built Harbor Payments, acquired by American Express, and Acculynk, acquired by First Data/Fiserv.

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