Open banking in the United States has been on a long and winding road, and the journey is far from over. In this episode, I sit down with Steve Boms, Executive Director of FDATA North America, the trade association representing the fintech companies at the heart of the open banking ecosystem. Steve has been one of the most active voices in shaping U.S. open banking policy for over a decade, and he brings a uniquely informed perspective to where things stand today.

We dig into the current state of the 1033 rule and what amendments are likely coming, FDATA's firm stance that banks should not be permitted to charge fees for consumer-directed data access, and the growing complexity created by a patchwork of state-level regulations on data privacy, AI, and fintech products. We close with a fascinating discussion on how agentic AI, with its need for clear consent frameworks, robust APIs, and defined liability rules, could become the next major catalyst that finally forces meaningful open banking progress in this country.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The origin story of FDATA in the UK and how it came to the US.
• How Steve has been involved with CFPB and Section 1033 since 2015.
• Over the next 10+ years, how FDATA has been engaged in open banking policy.
• How open banking and open finance has evolved in the UK.
• Who their members are and what FDATA does for them.
• Where we are at today when it comes to the 1033 rule.
• The FDATA view on banks charging fees for access to their data.
• Why this is not really a bank versus fintech fight.
• Why it may be many years before we have a final rule for open banking.
• Why data access negotiations have been put on pause for now.
• What else Steve is working on beyond open banking.
• Why he is increasing concerned about the Balkanization of financial services regulation (see his recent Open Banker column).
• How they coordinate with the other fintech trade associations.
• How they think about the standardization of API and other data standards.
• Why Steve is optimistic about the future of open banking in the U.S.
• Why AI agents could be a catalyzing force for clear open banking rules.

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What happens when all the world's money moves on chain? That's not a hypothetical for Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, it's the company's mission. In this episode, Marc explains how Polygon is evolving from its roots as an Ethereum layer two into the blockchain for global payments, detailing two recent acquisitions that form the foundation of what he calls the "open money stack" - a single API combining on-ramps, wallets, and cross-chain interoperability.

With over $2.5 trillion in transaction volume already processed and partnerships with Revolut, Stripe, Nubank, and dozens of fintechs across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Marc makes the case that stablecoins are just the beginning. He shares why tokenized bank deposits will be the real game-changer, how banks are already positioning to profit from this shift, and why in 10 years he believes every dollar, whether paying a merchant down the street or sending a remittance across the globe, will move on a blockchain without anyone even thinking about it.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How Marc first got interested in blockchain and crypto technology.
• Why he decided to make the move to Polygon Labs.
• Why Polygon decided to focus on payments.
• All the components you need to move money around the world on blockchain.
• The idea behind the open money stack.
• How Polygon is working with the likes of Revolut and Stripe.
• How they differentiate themselves from the other payments blockchains.
• What they are doing in AML and sanctions policy.
• The scale that Polygon is at today when it comes to transaction volume.
• What will the financial system look like when more money stays on chain.
• The two things banks ask in their initial conversations with Polygon.
• How money will transform in the next 10 years and why most people will not notice.

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Aaron Schumm, CEO and Founder of Vestwell, knows firsthand how broken America's savings system is. When he tried to set up a 401k for his previous 30-person company back in 2010, the process was so difficult, expensive, and confusing that he decided to build a better solution. Today, Vestwell serves 2 million savers with $50 billion in assets, has reduced 401k setup times from 40-70 hours down to just minutes, and runs 14 state-sponsored auto IRA programs including New York's Secure Choice.

In this episode, Aaron explains why fintech has largely failed to move the needle on financial health, too many point solutions that put the onus back on individuals to figure out what to do and then implement it across multiple accounts. His solution? AI agents that will automatically route money from your paycheck to the optimal savings vehicle based on your income, location, tax rates, existing savings, and life circumstances. And he says we're less than a year away from making that a reality.

In this podcast you will learn:

• What is broken with the current savings system in America.
• The problem at his previous business that was the a-ha moment for Vestwell.
• Their initial use case and how they got going.
• How their product works exactly.
• The three channels they work with.
• How they are working with New York State and other government programs.
• The conversations they are having with the Federal government around savings programs.
• The percentage of employees who typically sign up for an auto-enroll program.
• The scale that Vestwell is at today.
• What their technology stack looks like.
• How much easier it is to set up a workplace savings plan through Vestwell than traditional companies.
• The different revenue lines for Vestwell.
• How they are working with Amazon.
• Why we are not further along in helping Americans with their financial health.
• How autonomous AI agents are going to optimize our financial lives in the future.

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The financial system has run on basically the same payments rails for the past several decades. But there is new infrastructure being built today that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of stablecoins. In some ways, the future is already here as Visa has processed several billion dollars in transactions that have been settled in stablecoins. But who will build the infrastructure needed for credit when we move to this new system?

Today’s guest is Rhett Roberts, the CEO and Founder of LoanPro. I last had Rhett on the show back in 2021, and needless to say, a lot has changed since then. Part of Rhett’s thesis is that this talk around interest rate caps could actually be a catalyst to hasten a movement away from the traditional credit rails. And his company is already working on the systems and protocols to create a new credit infrastructure that runs on stablecoins.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How LoanPro has evolved over the past five years.
• Why most fintechs are now moving into credit products.
• Why both banks and fintechs are using LoanPro to launch new credit products.
• Why the idea of an interest rate cap on credit cards is resonating today.
• What would happen if a 10% rate cap went into effect.
• Why this could be great news for BNPL and the other alternative lending products.
• Rhett’s thesis around stablecoins and the value proposition.
• The elephant in the room for a stablecoin payments network.
• How a line of credit backed by stablecoins could work in reality.
• Where the card networks will sit within this new system.
• How LoanPro is helping to create these processes and protocols.
• Where we will be in five years time with this new infrastructure.

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Ryan Christiansen has had one of the more unusual career trajectories in fintech, from managing credit portfolios during the 2008 financial crisis to leading bank integrations at Finicity during the early days of open banking, helping launch the Financial Data Exchange, and then making an unexpected leap into academia as Executive Director of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.

In this conversation, Ryan explains why the Center takes a unique multidisciplinary approach spanning business, engineering, and law schools, and shares details about their new master's degree program launching this fall. We also dig into why Utah has quietly become one of the country's most important fintech hubs, with over $1 billion in fintech wages and $7 billion in economic impact. We also discuss the upcoming Fintech Xchange conference on February 4-6 in Salt Lake City, which has become a must-attend gathering for fintech and banking executives looking for substantive content and genuine networking opportunities.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Ryan’s background building Finicity’s open banking platform.
• How and why he went from the corporate world to academia.
• The mission of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.
• The programs the university offers in fintech for its students.
• Details of their Masters in Financial Technology program launching in the fall.
• Why the fintech scene in Utah is so robust.
• Why they decided to create their own event called Fintech Xchange.
• What makes Fintech Xchange different.
• What attendees can expect at Fintech Xchange this year.
• What is most exciting about the work he is doing at the Fintech Center.

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I don’t know anyone who enjoys filing their taxes. It is something we begrudgingly do every April, or earlier for the well-organized, and it is usually a somewhat painful exercise. What if filing your taxes was easy, taking less than 30 minutes? What if tax planning wasn't a once-a-year chore but an embedded feature in your banking app, payroll platform, or investment account?

In this episode, I sit down with Ben Borodach, founder and CEO of april, the first company to build a nationally licensed tax engine in over 15 years. Ben shares how april is transforming tax from an annual burden into real-time financial intelligence, partnering with banks, fintechs, and payroll platforms to embed tax services directly into the financial tools Americans already use. We discuss the massive technical challenge of building tax infrastructure from scratch, why embedded tax makes sense for financial institutions, and how bringing tax decisions to the point of transaction, whether selling stock, adjusting payroll withholding, or buying a home, can fundamentally change how people manage their financial lives.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How he came to the idea of building a fintech company focused on tax.
• How april was incubated inside Team8.
• Why they decided to create an embedded tax solution rather than go direct to consumer.
• What their product offering does.
• How they are helping consumers to think about taxes beyond once a year.
• The three categories of companies they are focused on.
• Why banks should be offering tax services to their customers.
• Why being integrated into the banking cores is not a high priority right now.
• How april is different to the big tax providers, TurboTax and H&R Block.
• How their customers present the tax offerings.
• What it means to be a nationally licensed e-file provider.
• How they integrate with the IRS and the state tax agencies.
• How they are leveraging the growth of embedded finance.
• What is involved from a technology perspective to integrate with april.
• How he thinks about tax policy, as a tax infrastructure company.
• Ben’s vision for april.

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Today, I sit down with Daren Guo, co-founder of Reap, the stablecoin infrastructure company and the world's largest stablecoin card enabler, processing over $6 billion annually. Daren shares his journey from being employee #90 at Stripe to building the next generation of financial rails based on stablecoin infrastructure, serving everyone from neobanks in Brazil and Africa to traditional financial institutions expanding globally.

The conversation explores why stablecoins represent more than just faster cross-border payments, they are the foundation for a fully tokenized economy where FX, bonds, equities, and real estate all move on-chain. Daren discusses Reap's recent MPI license in Singapore, their expansion into the US market, and how programmable money enables entirely new financial products like payroll streaming and on-chain escrow that simply weren't possible with legacy infrastructure.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Daren’s background setting up Stripe’s Asia business.
• Why he decided to leave Stripe to start his own company.
• Their initial product vision.
• His thesis around stablecoins and why they represent the future of payments.
• Why they decided to start with stablecoin-powered credit card infrastructure.
• Where they are a Visa Principal member and the markets they serve.
• The types of companies that Reap is working with today.
• How the flow of funds work for users of Reap’s credit card.
• Who is providing the stablecoin collateral.
• Reap’s expansion plans for the US market.
• Why they applied for a Major Payment Institution (MPI) license in Singapore.
• The product suite that they are working on right now.
• The scale that Reap is at today.
• How they are serving traditional firms as well as crypto-native companies.
• Daren’s vision for the next generation of money movement.

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Today I'm talking with Darragh Buckley, the CEO and co-founder of Increase. If you've been following fintech for a while, you probably know Darragh as employee number one at Stripe, where he built the team responsible for moving money at a massive scale. At Stripe, he learned a crucial lesson about infrastructure: when you're stuck solving business, technical, and risk problems all at once, you need to drop down a layer. That insight led to Increase, which does something quite novel, instead of connecting to banks one by one, they connect directly to the Federal Reserve itself, operating their own banking core that exposes all this functionality through APIs. With a team of less than 20 people, they're now processing over $100 billion annually.

In this conversation, we dig into the lessons Darragh learned scaling Stripe, why he believes compliance and accounting should be built into engineering from day one rather than bolted on later, his vision for a future where community banks serve specific communities like dentists or families managing elderly parents' finances, and why he's personally investing in community banks across the Pacific Northwest. We also get into real-time payments infrastructure, including a great story about buying a car on a Saturday. Now let's get on with the show.

In the podcast, you will learn:

• How Increase was born out of early challenges at Stripe.
• What he learned about scaling fintech companies at Stripe.
• The advantage of dropping down a layer when building fintech infrastructure.
• How Increase is able to connect directly to the Federal Reserve.
• The concept of a side core and how it integrates with banking cores.
• The different types of companies they work with.
• A fun story about paying a car dealer with a real time payment on a Saturday.
• The scale that Increase is at today.
• Why they decided that now is the time to spread with word about Increase.
• Why it matters to build compliance into your product very early.
• What lessons compliance can learn from software engineering.
• How they are managing real time risk.
• Why Darragh has personally invested in several community banks.
• What will have changed in financial services if Increase is successful.

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Today's guest is Jason Lee, a fintech veteran who has been at the forefront of employee financial wellness innovation for nearly a decade. After co-founding and scaling DailyPay into one of the pioneering companies in earned wage access, Jason went on to launch Salt Labs, an innovative employee rewards platform that Chime acquired just 18 months after its founding. Now, as the leader of Chime Enterprise, Jason is on a mission to make financial health benefits as ubiquitous in the workplace as health insurance.

In this conversation, we explore why he believes every employer will eventually offer these programs, not out of altruism, but because it makes compelling business sense. Jason shares fascinating insights about how financial stress undermines productivity, why employees value Salt's non-dollar rewards even more than cash, and his ambitious vision for building an employer-focused financial health platform that could parallel what Fidelity achieved in retirement. It's a conversation about the intersection of fintech, HR technology, and the future of work – and why the employer may be the most powerful catalyst for improving Americans' financial lives.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Jason’s high profile background in fintech.
• The origins of Salt Labs and how they became part of Chime.
• The premise for Chime Workplace.
• Why they are fundamentally in the productivity business.
• How they are able to measure financial wellness outcomes.
• Why employers are caring more about the financial health of their employees today.
• Jason’s prediction for employers and financial wellness.
• The target market for Chime Workplace.
• What they hear when they first go into a new employer.
• Why they don’t charge employers for Chime Workplace.
• How their SALT rewards work.
• Jason's vision for the future of employer-driven financial wellness.

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Today I'm delighted to be joined by Clive Kinross, CEO and co-founder of Propel Holdings. Propel is one of the most successful fintech lenders serving underbanked consumers, and what makes their story particularly compelling is how they've achieved it: profitably, almost from day one. 

Since founding the company 14 years ago with just $4 million in capital, Clive and his three co-founders, who are all still with the company, have built a business that now serves a market of 100 million consumers across the US, Canada, and the UK. The company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2021 and has been the best-performing stock in its vintage.

In our conversation, Clive shares how his background as a chartered accountant shaped his disciplined, unit economics-focused approach to building a lending business, how Propel uses AI to analyze over 80,000 applications daily and make credit decisions in six seconds, and why he believes the opportunity to serve underbanked consumers in developed economies has never been stronger.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Why Clive decided to tackle credit for his second major business.
• How the company has evolved since its founding 14 years ago.
• The different brands they have in the US, Canada and UK markets.
• How their credit graduation programs work.
• The typical consumer coming to Propel for credit.
• How they differentiate themselves from others in the market.
• How their AI models work and the data they are feeding into these models.
• How Clive views the potential of AI throughout Propel’s business.
• Why he decided to take Propel public in 2021.
• How they were able to become a profitable fintech lender quickly and sustainably.
• What Clive is most excited about for the future of Propel.

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