One of the hottest areas of fintech today is anti-fraud. It has never been more challenging to stop fraudsters and for most fintechs this is not a core competency. Thankfully, new companies are arriving on the scene with deep experience to help fintechs combat the increasing fraud threats.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Soups Ranjan, the CEO and Co-Founder of Sardine. They have combined risk, compliance, and payment protection into one platform and they have started in the most challenging of all sectors when it comes to fraud: crypto. And they are about to move into mainstream fintech later this year.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The founding story of Sardine.
• Why they called the company Sardine.
• The biggest fraud and compliance challenges today in fintech.
• The different types of scams that are most popular today.
• Why combatting social engineering is all about education.
• What Sardine does exactly.
• How they are using behavioral biometrics.
• The three different products they offer.
• Where the most fraud is coming from today.
• How they are preparing for a world of real-time payments.
• Details of the new consortium they are getting ready to launch.
• How they are leveraging the expertise from the big name VCs on their board.
• What is next for Sardine.

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When an immigrant first arrives in the U.S. they face a myriad of challenges. One of those core challenges is getting a bank account and becoming part of the financial system. Traditional banks find it very difficult to deal with these populations so, not surprisingly, fintech has come to fill in the gap.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Magnus Larsson, the CEO and co-founder of MAJORITY. It is a fintech company founded by immigrants for immigrants that offers an all-in-one mobile banking solution tailored for new arrivals in this country. As you will find out they are offering far more than just a bank account.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The founding story of MAJORITY.
• Why Magnus moved back to the US.
• The mistake that big brands make when dealing with immigrants.
• Why traditional banks find it so hard to serve immigrants.
• MAJORITY's core product offerings.
• Why they work hard to build a community as well as a digital app.
• How they customize their products to serve each country's diaspora.
• Why they have opened physical locations in select cities.
• How they can open bank accounts without a social security number.
• Why they spent so much time choosing their bank partners.
• Details about their bank partnerships.
• The key to success as a niche digital bank.
• What it was like raising equity capital in 2022.
• The scale that MAJORITY is at today.
• Where they are on the journey to profitability.
• Their different sources of revenue.
• Magnus's vision for MAJORITY.

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Max Levchin is one of the giants of the fintech space. He was a co-founder and CTO of the original fintech, PayPal, and now he leads Affirm, the company that is reinventing how we pay for things at the point of sale.

The buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) space continues to be hot. Consumers love it and so the volume of merchandise funded in this way keeps growing every year. But what is behind that growth and why is BNPL so much better for consumers than credit cards? We delve into a detailed discussion of this and more in the latest episode of the Fintech One-on-One podcast.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The catalyst for the founding of Affirm.
• Why they decided to start in point-of-sale lending.
• Why transparency was integral to their offering.
• Why Max thinks credit cards have a lot in common with payday loans.
• How the CFPB views BNPL.
• The types of loans Affirm offers and the different ways they make money.
• How Peloton became such a big part of their business.
• The key to landing partnerships with both Walmart and Amazon.
• How they are adapting their credit models to drive lower delinquencies.
• Max's thoughts on their recent layoffs.
• How they have engaged with the CFPB.
• Why there has been a bunch of fintech startups by ex-Affirm execs.
• His surprising view on the future of cards as a payment vehicle.

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The payments space continues to see innovation, probably more so than any other area of fintech today. Payments is a complex business, particularly when you are talking international payments, but technology has taken away a lot of the complexity. Now, with the movement towards embedded payments, nearly any company can offer payments services to their clients.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Ralph Dangelmaier, the CEO of BlueSnap. They are a leader in the payments space, offering an all-in-one Payments Orchestration platform as they call it. They are able to offer local payments in 47 countries and they have an embedded payments platform that allows their customers to offer their own global customized payment experience.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The origins of BlueSnap.
• How Ralph describes BlueSnap today.
• The biggest mistake merchants make when accepting international payments.
• The two trends that have benefited BlueSnap recently.
• The different payment types they can work with.
• How they consult with their partners as to the optimal payment methods.
• How they are different to Stripe and Adyen.
• Ralph's thoughts on the impact of Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• How they handle account-to-account payments.
• His perspective on supporting the new, alternative payments rails.
• The use cases for stablecoin payments.
• How BlueSnap operates its embedded payments platform.
• How the economics work for embedded payments.
• The definition of a PayFac (payments facilitator)
• What Ralph does for the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA).
• His vision for the future of payments.

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The crypto space continues to evolve and grow, despite the challenges of the past nine months. Companies continue to build new infrastructure and products that are being adopted around the world. This work is ongoing and independent of the price of crypto.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Edward Woodford, the CEO and Co-Founder of Zero Hash. His company provides embedded crypto infrastructure to fintechs and brands, allowing these companies to buy, sell, hold, pay and earn rewards with crypto. They have taken a conservative and compliance-first approach which put them in a good position to weather the crypto storm.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How Edward first became passionate about infrastructure companies.
• The founding story of Zero Hash.
• How he describes their core offerings.
• Where Zero Hash fits in the crypto ecosystem.
• The breadth of their service offerings.
• How the money flows through their system.
• How they navigated the very turbulent last year in crypto.
• Why it was easy to say no to the products that caused others' downfall.
• What the crypto industry needs to do to regain the trust it once had.
• How he views the trend towards embedded finance.
• How their partnership with Stripe came about.
• Why interest in crypto has been decoupled from crypto prices.
• How web3 is going to transform web2 companies.
• What it will take for crypto to become a mainstream payments mechanism.
• The crypto use cases Edward is most excited about.
• What is coming down the pipe at Zero Hash.

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Since the start of the pandemic there has been a surge of new fintech companies coming to market from a number of different niches. Most of these fintech companies need access to the banking system in some way and they need help in figuring out which banks to partner with and how to structure these partnerships.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Peter Hazlehurst, the CEO and co-founder of Synctera. They have placed themselves at the center of the fintech ecosystem, helping fintechs build, launch and scale new financial products. They work with a number of banks and have quickly become one of the leading banking-as-a-service platform in the industry.

In this podcast you will learn:

• What it was like growing up with a famous aunt in Australia.
• The groundbreaking work Peter did at Google and Uber.
• The founding story of Synctera and the opportunity Peter saw.
• The number of banks they have on their platform.
• The kinds of use cases that Synctera is built for.
• Some of the more edge cases that Synctera has helped bring to market.
• How their APIs work for these edge cases.
• How they work with non-fintech companies.
• How they help their clients navigate any regulatory uncertainty.
• What capabilities a bank needs to be part of their marketplace.
• Peter's view of the competitive landscape for banking-as-a-service.
• How they are able to help fintechs as they scale.
• Peter's advice for fintech founders navigating today's environment.
• What they are seeing when it comes to demand for lending products.
• Peter's vision for the future of banking-as-a-service.

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Every lender has to process documents from their borrowers during the application process. Often, there is a large number of these documents from a wide variety of sources. What lenders need is a way to process all of these documents that provides a uniform set of data regardless of where the document came from.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One is Sam Bobley, the CEO and Co-founder of Ocrolus. They have become the standard when it comes to document automation in the small business lending space and they are now tackling consumer lending and the incredibly complex mortgage lending process.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The founding story of Ocrolus.
• What their technology actually does.
• How their waterfall of automation techniques allows them to review any financial document.
• Why it is so important to have humans involved in this process.
• The percentage of documents they can process instantly.
• Why they decided to start in small business lending.
• The number of small business lenders they have on their platform today.
• How their technology helped power many PPP lenders.
• Sam's view of the small business lending landscape today.
• How their fraud detection processes work.
• Details of their business model.
• How they approached the fundraising process.
• What Sam is most excited about right now.

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This country has a savings problem. We have heard it so many times: the average person cannot afford a $400 emergency expense. While fintech has made some inroads here the problem is worse that it has ever been. What we need is a fintech that is laser-focused on this problem, working to create a simple and effective solution to truly address it.

I am delighted to welcome my next guests on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast. Suze Orman needs no introduction, she has been providing personal finance advice for decades with her own TV show, many bestselling books and more. Devin Miller is the CEO and Co-Founder of SecureSave and he and his co-founder have teamed up with Suze Orman to address the emergency savings problem once and for all.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The sorry state of emergency savings today in the U.S.
• The founding story of SecureSave.
• How Suze came to be involved.
• Why she hates celebrity endorsers and what she is bringing to the table.
• How she helped the company get to the right product market fit.
• How SecureSave is actually changing people's savings habits.
• The level of adoption they are getting with the average company.
• How people are accessing their emergency savings account.
• What people are withdrawing money for.
• Why they focus so much on the emergency part.
• Why they don't really focus on the demographics of their users.
• Their vision for the future of SecureSave.

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We are revisiting the venture capital space today because we are at such an interesting inflection point. Some VC firms took a very cautious approach amid the tumultuous market of 2022 but things might be turning around albeit slowly.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Clara Sieg, a partner at Revolution, the venture capital firm started by AOL founder Steve Case. Clara has been investing in fintech for many years and has an interesting take on the space today.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The origins of Revolution Ventures.
• What attracted Clara to come on board at Revolution.
• Why they actively look to invest outside of the hot tech locations.
• How the geographic shift over the last three years has changed venture capital.
• How Revolution navigated the lofty valuations of 2021 and early 2022.
• Why they didn't do a single deal in 2022.
• The range of check sizes they are doing.
• Why they decided to invest in Sila and Paro.
• The different segments within fintech they are most interested in.
• Clara's perspective on the lack of capital flowing to women-led companies.
• Why she thinks this year will lead to more consolidation in fintech.
• Their expectation to do more deals in 2023.

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While there has been a lot of fintech innovation in small business lending, it has mostly been focused on loans of $500,000 or less. When it comes to loans of $1 million to $50 million there has been less innovation and it is still very much a manual, relationship-based process. But that is changing.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Blair Silverberg, the CEO and founder of Hum Capital. He looked at that market and realized a data-driven process could vastly improve efficiency so he has created a platform that intelligently pairs growth companies with investors and lenders. He calls Hum the world's only intelligent capital market.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How Blair started his entrepreneurial journey at the age of six.
• The short term and long term opportunity that Blair saw that led to Hum Capital.
• Examples of how their platform works.
• Why they are focused purely on quantitative data.
• How they meet the demands of different types of investors.
• Why they are focused on private debt over equity.
• The range and average loan sizes
• How they have challenged the relationship-based approach to mid-market lending.
• The compelling pitch they make to businesses seeking capital.
• What types of data they are working with.
• The two simple calculations they use to help businesses compare lending products.
• How they have removed bias from the lending process.
• How Blair feels about the impact of the changing macroeconomic environment.
• The different risk appetites of their investors.
• His vision for the future of Hum Capital.

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