Fintech One-On-One

Ilya Fridman is the founder and CEO of Byzfunder, a small business lender that started originating just as COVID hit in 2020 and is on track to fund more than $700 million this year with only 100 employees. In September Byzfunder launched TraceDataIQ, an AI underwriting platform that layers multiple large language models on top of bank, tax, background and public records data. We talk about how it was built, what it has done to performance and staffing, and why Ilya thinks AI will create a new wave of small business owners.

What We Covered

• From Morgan Stanley to mortgages to merchant cash advance
• Building one of the top independent sales offices in the country
• Why COVID was a blessing in disguise for a brand new lender
• Term loans, MCAs and a fast-growing revolving credit line
• The 60,000 small businesses Byzfunder sees every month
• Why off-the-shelf bank statement parsers fall short for small business lending
• Writing down every rule a human underwriter follows
• Running nine language models across the underwriting process
• Funding with just a Plaid link in under an hour
• How the human underwriter's job went from 10 minutes to two
• Byzfunder's first ABS deal and becoming more institutional
• Pricing transparency in revenue-based finance
• Why AI will produce more entrepreneurs

Key Takeaways

• Better data lets you lend deeper, not just safer. Byzfunder is not using AI to push its default rate down. It holds charge-off targets steady and uses more predictive models to approve more businesses at the same cost, with early 90-day-plus performance running about 250 basis points better than baseline.
• AI underwriting is mostly codified human judgment. The team wrote down every rule a human underwriter applies, from reading bank statements to spotting a mismatched name on a tax return, then trained a stack of roughly nine language models from different providers to apply them.
• Humans stay in the loop, but their job changes. Underwriters now get an instant summary of every risk flag instead of digging through 300-page background reports, cutting review time from about 10 minutes to two. Human oversight remains above a certain dollar amount because hallucinations still happen.
• Operating leverage is the real prize. Headcount is up around 15% year over year while originations are up 75% and units more than 150%, so Byzfunder can onboard more partners without sacrificing speed or service.

About Ilya Fridman

Ilya Fridman is the founder and CEO of Byzfunder. He began his career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley before moving into residential mortgages, then built a merchant cash advance independent sales office that he sold to BFS Capital in 2014. He ran revenue at BFS Capital for about three and a half years before launching Byzfunder.

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Daniel Simon is the founder and CEO of Coast, which builds fleet payments, expense management and bill pay for businesses that work in the field, from plumbers and HVAC companies to construction firms and school bus operators. He previously co-founded Bread, an early buy now pay later company that sold for around $500 million in 2020. We talk about how Coast replaced the old fuel card model with open-loop Visa cards and real-time vehicle data, why going deep on the trades beats building for everyone, and how the AI data center build-out is driving demand across the physical economy.

What We Covered

• From Wall Street software engineer to Yale Law School
• The insight behind Bread and the early days of buy now pay later
• How essential workers during the pandemic led to fleet payments
• Why fintech left the physical economy behind
• The problems with closed-loop fuel cards
• Interchangeable cards and SMS check-ins instead of PIN pads
• Using telematics data to block fuel fraud in real time
• Expanding from fuel into expense management and bill pay
• Why Coast targets light and medium duty fleets, not over-the-road trucking
• The AI data center build-out and demand for skilled trades
• Going deep on vertical needs versus horizontal expense platforms
• Embedded partnerships and the five-year vision

Key Takeaways

• The phone in the driver's pocket changes everything. Legacy fuel cards rely on PINs and odometer readings typed into a pump, which drivers share and fudge. Coast sends interchangeable cards that drivers check into by text message, so every transaction is tied to the right person and the right vehicle.
• Vehicle data plus transaction data stops fraud. By merging telematics GPS and fuel gauge readings with line item data from Visa, Coast can decline a purchase when the vehicle is nowhere near the pump, or cap a fill-up at what the tank can actually hold.
• Fuel is the wedge, not the business. Customers spend 3 to 5% of revenue on fuel but 15 to 30% on things they already put on cards. That is why Coast has expanded into expense management and bill pay, with working capital, business banking and more on the roadmap.
• The AI boom has a physical side. Data centers need electricians, plumbers and HVAC crews, and every business in the trades is now competing for the same workers. That makes control and visibility over a growing field workforce more valuable than ever.

About Daniel Simon

Daniel Simon is the founder and CEO of Coast, which he started in 2020. He began his career as a software engineer at a boutique technology consultancy, leading teams that built systems for investment banks, asset managers and hedge funds. He then went to Yale Law School, where he co-founded Bread, a consumer credit and payments company that was sold in 2020 for around $500 million.

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Wade Arnold is the CEO and co-founder of Moov, the payments infrastructure company that brings every US payment rail together under a single contract and API. Last month Moov launched Moov Money, a real-time P2P product built with Visa and Mastercard that lets anyone with a debit card receive money, and a week earlier it announced a Coinbase partnership for stablecoin acceptance and settlement. We talk about why Wade sees a big opening for P2P outside the existing networks, how Moov tackles scams at the network level, and why he thinks the most important payments changes will be the ones consumers never notice.

What We Covered

• From Macromedia and Adobe to Banno and Jack Henry
• How an open source ACH library became a payments company
• Moov as a network of networks payment processor
• Why P2P in the US has been limited to "pay me back"
• Moov Money as a complement to Zelle
• How a Moov Money payment flows, step by step
• Solving the two-sided network problem with Visa and Mastercard
• Fighting scams at the network level with 55 scam pattern agents
• Using the existing text message relationship as a trust channel
• The economics for community banks
• The Coinbase partnership and stablecoin settlement for small businesses
• Why Moov runs Fintech DevCon, and its move to Boulder
• Cross-border payments and the plumbing changes ahead

Key Takeaways

• Ubiquity comes from the card, not the app. Nine out of ten Americans already carry a Visa or Mastercard debit credential. By building on those networks, and embedding the sending experience in the bank's own app, Moov Money avoids the usual chicken and egg problem of getting both sides to download and fund a new app.
• There is a large market Zelle does not serve. Around 6,000 financial institutions are not on Zelle, and neobanks, brokerages and reloadable prepaid cards cannot buy it. Wade positions Moov Money as a lower cost alternative for those institutions, starting at $500 a month and 75 cents a transaction with fraud included, and says Moov still has to prove its fraud performance before anyone would switch.
• Fraud is better fought at the network level. Rather than leaving each institution to catch scams on its own, Moov watches for money from many institutions concentrating in a single recipient. Add in on-device prompts, existing debit dispute tools and end of day settlement, and there are several chances to stop a scam before the money is gone.
• Stablecoins are about liquidity, not crypto. For a small business, the value is getting paid over the weekend and being able to restock without a line of credit. As Wade puts it, the plumbing will change underneath consumers without them ever knowing.

About Wade Arnold

Wade Arnold is the CEO and co-founder of Moov. He describes himself as a computer scientist at heart, and he started his career at Macromedia, staying on through its acquisition by Adobe, where he did his first fintech work on account opening and loan origination. He then founded Banno, a digital banking platform for community banks and credit unions that was acquired by Jack Henry in 2014.

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Omer Ismail is the CEO of OnePay, the consumer fintech majority-owned by Walmart and backed by Ribbit Capital, which now serves more than 7.5 million customers. He was last on the show in 2017, when he was running Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot has changed since then: we talk about why he left Goldman to start again from scratch, how OnePay turns Walmart shoppers and associates into banking customers, and why he thinks the next chapter of fintech belongs to platforms that can manage a customer's whole financial life.

What We Covered

• The 2019 dinner that started OnePay
• Why Omer left Goldman Sachs
• Three lessons from Marcus
• The rabbit in the New York office and what it says about culture
• Fintech 1.0 versus fintech 2.0
• The front door products: digital banking and credit
• How OnePay acquires customers inside Walmart
• Why more than 80% of banking spend happens outside Walmart
• Hiring a first CMO and taking the playbook to UKG, Workday and ADP
• Apple Pay and the checkout
• Why OnePay has no plans for a bank charter
• Penny, the AI financial assistant
• The new teen banking product

Key Takeaways

• Distribution and structure are the two things Marcus did not have. Omer says customer access is "incredibly hard and incredibly expensive." OnePay gets customers through Walmart at effectively zero acquisition cost, but it sits outside Walmart's four walls, so it can hire, incentivize and move like a startup.
• Fintech 2.0 is about single platforms, not single products. Fintech 1.0 companies each did one thing. Omer argues customers do not want to manage 15, 20 or 30 financial relationships, so OnePay acquires through high TAM, high engagement products (digital banking and credit) and then offers the next best product.
• A Walmart customer is not a Walmart-only customer. Only around 17% to 18% of OnePay banking card spend happens at Walmart. The goal is to be the primary financial relationship and top of wallet everywhere, which is why the company has hired its first CMO and is now acquiring through HR platforms and direct channels.
• AI changes personal financial management only when it can act. Mint stopped at insights. Omer's case is that a platform with both the customer's data and the products can complete the action for the customer, and that the winner will be whoever customers trust to do that.

About Omer Ismail

Omer Ismail is the CEO of OnePay, a role he took on in 2021 when the joint venture between Walmart and Ribbit Capital was being formed. Before that he had a long career at Goldman Sachs, where he ran the consumer business that included Marcus. He moved to the US at 18 and has spoken about how that shaped his interest in helping people build healthy financial habits early.

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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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