Fintech One-On-One

Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr, an AI-driven valuation platform for asset-backed lending. He spent his early career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA, where he grew comfortable with the challenge of pricing hard-to-value assets. That thread ran through every role he held until it crystallized into a company built around a simple but structural problem: in asset-backed lending, appraisers give you a price and then spend the rest of their report telling you they're not responsible for it. Barkr is built to change that.

What We Covered

• Thomas's background in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA
• How a common thread across luxury assets led to founding Barkr
• Starting with fine art and private jets before expanding to other asset classes
• The two-part failure in traditional appraisals: accuracy and absence of liability
• How Barkr pairs an AI valuation with a contractual performance warranty
• The progression from Lloyd's of London to AXA to Munich Re
• $2 billion in covered valuations and what patience actually means in this business
• GPUs as a surprisingly durable and long-lived collateral asset class
• How Barkr finds clients, from pavement pounding to Nvidia referrals
• Monthly mark-to-market on hard assets throughout a loan's life
• Building a domain-specific LLM with human review in the loop
• Plans to build an in-house insurance vehicle to unlock capacity

Key Takeaways

Traditional appraisal firms hedge their liability by design. Page one is the price; the rest of the report is the disclaimer. Barkr's contractual warranty flips that model by standing behind the number.

Barkr's data on GPU durability challenges the conventional narrative. Chips five and seven years old are still generating revenue and still have meaningful resale value, which changes the risk calculus for lenders considering AI infrastructure as collateral.

Augmenting, not replacing, is the right positioning for valuation technology. Barkr actively encourages clients to keep using their existing appraisers and treats third-party appraisals as additional data inputs that improve their own accuracy.

Building a reinsurance relationship takes years. Barkr worked through Lloyd's, then AXA, before landing Munich Re, and each step required demonstrating proof of concept at the prior level first.

About Thomas Galbraith

Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr. He began his career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA before founding Barkr to bring accountability and AI-driven accuracy to asset valuation in the lending market. Barkr has covered approximately $2 billion in valuations across art, private jets, vehicles, and GPUs.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Patricia Montesi didn't start her career in payments, she started it in car rental. After nine years at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car, she was recruited into fintech with zero industry experience. That outsider perspective became her edge, and she never let go of it. Today, she's the CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure platform that combines card issuing, money movement, and a bank-grade ledger on a single API-first stack.

What We Covered

• How nine years in car rental shaped Patricia's outsider approach to payments
• Getting recruited into Wild Card Systems with no payments background, and why that fresh lens became an advantage
• The fragmentation problem at the heart of payments infrastructure and why point products create hidden complexity
• Qolo's three-product suite: Quantum Ledger, Qascade money movement, and Qinetic card issuing
• Why Qolo isn't quite a side core, it overlays and integrates with existing bank cores rather than running in parallel
• Rail agnosticism and why Qolo still supports checks in 2026
• The dual go-to-market: commercial banks and B2B fintechs, same platform, different vernacular
• How the Synapse collapse changed the ledger conversation for banks and fintechs alike
• Winning KeyBank in a competitive RFP against much larger players, and launching virtual account management in nine months
• How banks are using Qolo to protect commercial deposits from modern non-bank competitors
• AI inside Qolo: from Glean to Claude, and their internal "Turning Hours into Minutes" program
• 130% year-over-year growth and 142% net revenue retention

Key Takeaways

The moat problem: Patricia set out to build a company where customers stay because of the value delivered, not because switching is too painful. That philosophy shaped every product decision at Qolo.

Ledger first: Most point-product fintechs have basic ledgers that only support one rail. Qolo's bank-grade dual-entry forward-posting ledger underpins every rail, making reconciliation and real-time money visibility a solved problem rather than a vendor management challenge.

Synapse's legacy: The debacle forced banks and fintechs alike to ask harder questions about who actually owns the ledger and where money sits at any given moment. Qolo had been making that argument for years before the market was ready to hear it.

Bank as distribution: KeyBank and Huntington aren't just clients — they're strategic investors using Qolo to defend their commercial deposit base against modern non-bank alternatives.

About Patricia Montesi

Patricia Montesi is CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure company she built from the ground up after more than 20 years in the industry. She started her career at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car before being recruited into fintech with zero payments background — an outsider perspective she has held onto ever since. At Qolo, she and her team built the ledger, money movement, and card issuing stack as first-party infrastructure, without relying on third-party processors underneath.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, one of the largest financial software companies in the world, serving over 7,000 banks globally including 45 of the world's top 50. He joined the company a little over a year ago, bringing an unusually broad background spanning consulting, Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and several other technology businesses. This is a wide-ranging conversation about where Finastra is headed and why the conventional narrative around AI and software disruption misses something important.

What We Covered

• Chris's path from consulting to Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and beyond
• What attracted him to Finastra and the perception versus reality gap he set out to close
• How he spent his first 90 days listening to customers and internal teams before deciding direction
• The portfolio narrowing strategy, including divestitures of Treasury, Capital Markets, and student lending
• Finastra's core focus areas: lending, payments, and universal banking
• Growth vectors within an existing base of 7,000+ banks, including geography expansion, cross-sell, and data
• The AI center of excellence and why dedicated ownership changes the pace of deployment
• Internal AI use cases: an HR chatbot and automated sales approvals
• Operator Assist, a new product that uses AI to surface and resolve failed payments
• Agentic AI in mortgage origination, targeting documentation discrepancies
• Why Finastra views AI as a growth accelerant, not a cost-cutting tool, and why not all software faces the same disruption risk
• Community bank caution around modernization and why the economics will eventually force full core replacements

Key Takeaways

Companies that are systems of record with long-duration enterprise agreements are far less exposed to AI disruption than the public markets currently assume. The distinction matters, and Chris makes a clear case for why Finastra sits in the less-exposed category.

Dedicated AI ownership changes everything. Spreading AI enthusiasm across everyone's partial attention generates ideas but not scalable execution. The center of excellence model exists precisely to fix that.

Community bank core modernization is inevitable but slow. The banks most likely to win that market are those that can make transitions nearly frictionless, not those with the most advanced technology.

At $7 trillion in daily payments routed through Finastra's systems, the probabilistic nature of LLMs is not a minor technical detail. Chris's post-recording observation about where AI fits and where it doesn't is one of the more clear-eyed takes you'll hear from a CEO in this space.

About Chris Walters

Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, which he joined a little over a year ago. Before Finastra, he held CEO and COO roles at a range of public and private technology companies, including The Weather Company and a public wealth management and software business. He also spent seven years in consulting and held senior roles at Bloomberg.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Ali Niknam is one of fintech's most unconventional founders. He built multiple unicorns before turning his attention to banking, then self-funded Bunq with nearly €100 million of his own money before taking a single outside investor. That conviction paid off: Bunq posted €85 million in profit in 2024, putting it in rare company among European neobanks. Now, having applied for a US national bank charter, Ali is setting his sights on the most competitive banking market in the world.

What We Covered

• Ali's background as a three-time unicorn founder
• Self-funding Bunq with nearly €100M before taking outside investment
• Pursuing a greenfield banking license, the first granted in the Netherlands in 35 years
• Why Bunq launched with a paid subscription model when everyone else was going free
• Bunq's core user base: digital nomads and cross-border travelers
• International expansion across the European Union
• Applying for a US national bank charter and dealing with three regulators
• The philosophy behind building a bank people actually trust for day-to-day use
• How AI powers transaction monitoring, real-time translation, and marketing at Bunq
• Why Bunq describes itself as the first Gen AI-powered bank
• The personal CFO vision for the future of banking
• What an AI-native bank looks like five years from now

Key Takeaways

Starting with a paid subscription meant Bunq only attracted users who genuinely valued the product, building real engagement rather than vanity metrics — and better unit economics from the outset.

Pursuing a full greenfield banking license from the start, while far harder than working around incumbents, lets Bunq compete directly with the largest banks on equal regulatory footing.

AI at Bunq isn't a marketing term. It powers transaction monitoring, real-time multilingual customer support, and marketing automation in ways that materially reduce costs and improve security.

The vision for the AI-native bank is a personal CFO that makes abstract financial goals tangible — connecting daily spending habits to the things users actually want in their lives.

About Ali Niknam

Ali Niknam is the founder and CEO of Bunq, the Dutch neobank. A serial entrepreneur with three unicorns to his name, Ali was born in Canada to Iranian parents and has been based in the Netherlands for most of his life. Before Bunq, he founded TransIP, now rebranded as Team Blue, the world's third-largest domain name and web hosting provider. He is also the author of a book on entrepreneurship.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Timothy Li, CEO and Co-Founder of LendAPI, has spent nearly a decade trying to solve the same problem: launching a lending product takes too long and costs too much. With LendAPI, he's built a no-code platform that lets banks, credit unions, fintechs, and retailers go from idea to live lending product in weeks, not months or years. Think of it as a GoDaddy-style experience for financial services. Timothy joined me again on the show (he was last on in 2017) to talk about what's under the hood, what the Sunglass Hut deal reveals about embedded finance, and where he thinks AI is actually useful in lending today.

What We Covered

• Timothy's path from the Fluid college credit app to building LendAPI
• How the drag-and-drop product builder works for non-technical users
• Python model deployment for credit risk officers inside the same platform
• Winning Best in Show at Finovate
• The Sunglass Hut deal and how it came together in three months
• Why retailers are moving away from pure-play BNPL providers
• Integration options: bank cores, side cores, and direct e-commerce embed
• The 300-plus partner marketplace and the SEO strategy behind it
• Doc AI and single-task AI agents for document processing and underwriting
• Timothy's experience in the CURQL accelerator and how credit unions differ
• Teaching FinTech Fundamentals at USC
• The five consumer verticals with the most opportunity in fintech

Key Takeaways

The build vs. buy debate is essentially over. When Timothy talks to bank CTOs today, the conversation is "can you launch this next week?" not "should we build this ourselves?" Speed to market has become the dominant concern.

Pure-play BNPL approval rates are outside a retailer's control and can swing 10 points overnight. Private label embedded finance, built on infrastructure like LendAPI, lets retailers and banks own the underwriting criteria and the customer experience, which matters especially for high-ticket items where the financing decision happens in-store.

Single-task AI agents are the near-term opportunity in lending, not fully automated credit decisions. Automating document verification, data extraction, and intake workflows saves minutes per application, and at scale, that compounds quickly.

The five consumer fintech verticals worth building in: mortgages, auto, credit cards and personal loans, payments, and bank accounts. If it's in someone's wallet, there's still work to do.

About Timothy Li

Timothy Li is the CEO and co-founder of LendAPI, a no-code lending platform that launched in 2024 and won Best in Show at Finovate. He previously built Fluid, a credit-building app for college students, and has been building lending infrastructure across multiple ventures over the past decade. He also taught FinTech Fundamentals at the University of Southern California.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Kareem Saleh is the CEO and co-founder of FairPlay, an AI enablement platform helping financial institutions test, tune, and monitor AI systems in production. Four years after his first appearance on the show, Kareem returns to discuss how FairPlay has evolved from credit model fairness into a full AI enablement infrastructure layer and why the rise of generative and agentic AI has made that work more consequential than ever.

What We Covered

• How generative AI changes the definition of fairness in financial services
• The shift from model validation to continuous, system-level testing
• FairPlay's three core capabilities: testing, optimizing, and validating AI systems
• How one customer added one day to their model development cycle but saved 60–90 days in compliance review
• The 25–33% of declined applicants who would have performed as well as the riskiest approvals
• Why the question for legacy institutions has flipped, from "is AI safe enough to try?" to "is it riskier not to adopt AI?"
• The political environment and how fairness demand reconfigures, not disappears, across administrations
• State-level regulatory frameworks filling the federal enforcement gap
• Kareem's Congressional testimony on AI and algorithmic bias
• The agentic AI opportunity in KYC, BSA, and AML workflows
• Regulatory look-back risk and why today's decisions can become 2029's consent orders
• Cash flow underwriting risks and climate risk as underappreciated threats to credit portfolios

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Most of us assume that major hotel brands have sophisticated financial systems running behind the scenes. In this episode, Jess Conroy, CEO and co-founder of ROH, explains just how wrong that assumption is — and why she's spent the last several years building the financial core that hospitality never had.

What We Covered:

• The manual payments problem hiding in plain sight
• Why the biggest hotel brands have the biggest challenges
• The hidden complexity of every hotel transaction
• Why the hospitality industry was overlooked by fintech
• How ROH got its start in meetings and events
• What "AI-first" actually means at ROH
• How ROH fits into the existing hotel software stack
• The go-to-market reality of a franchise-heavy industry
• A transaction-based model that aligns incentives
• Scale and growth: managing over $1 billion across the portfolio
• The stale data problem driving bad hotel decisions
• The vision: a financial foundation for every hotel dollar

Key Takeaways

• Hotel payments are a solved problem almost everywhere except hospitality itself — the industry's bias toward "human solves" left it behind.
• The complexity of hotel transactions (variable pricing, upgrades, OTAs, group contracts) makes automation far more valuable here than in simpler retail or restaurant contexts.
• Building something that didn't exist before is the hardest sales motion — you're not replacing a known tool, you're educating a market about a problem they've learned to live with.
• Year-over-year expansion within existing hotels is the clearest signal of product-market fit — customers keep expanding their use once they're on the platform.

About Jess Conroy

Jess Conroy is the CEO and co-founder of ROH, a financial infrastructure platform for hotels. A second-time founder, she has spent nearly 15 years building in and around the hospitality industry. ROH is currently managing over $1 billion in hotel transactions across its growing portfolio.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Leif Abraham, the co-CEO of Public.com. Public has been carving out a really interesting niche in the brokerage space. They're not trying to be another discount broker competing on free stock giveaways. Instead, they're building what Leif calls the first truly agentic brokerage, where AI agents can actually help you construct and manage your portfolio.

In this episode, we discuss Public's decision to move away from payment for order flow and why trust and transparency are so central to their strategy. We also talk about their fascinating Generated Assets product that lets you essentially prompt your own personalized ETF, their nuanced take on prediction markets and why they're drawing a clear line between portfolio tools and sports betting, and how AI agents are starting to take on work that has traditionally been done by financial advisors.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The opportunity that Leif saw when he started Public.
• How the dynamic works between Leif and his co-CEO, Jannick Malling.
• How he describes Public today.
• How their Generated Assets offering allows investors to create custom ETFs.
• Why their decided to move away from Payment for Order Flow.
• How they are marketing themselves directly to the consumer.
• What Leif thinks about prediction markets and how Public will offer them.
• What they are planning when it comes to AI agents for wealth management.
• How Leif views the rollover market for retirement accounts.
• Their plans for the Crypto market.
• What success will look like for Public over the next five years.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

My guest today is Denada Ramnishta, the Chief Revenue Officer at Efficient Capital Labs. I've known Denada for over a decade, having first met her during her time at American Express where she was part of the early team building out merchant financing. She's been a consistent champion for democratizing capital access for small and medium-sized businesses, and now she's doing that at ECL, which provides non-dilutive funding and cross-border payment infrastructure for AI and SaaS companies.

In this episode, we dig into how ECL approaches revenue-based financing differently from others in the space, their AI-driven underwriting system called Aura, the fascinating origin story behind their cross-border payments product ECL Flow, why VCs are actually their top referral source, and how they're adapting their underwriting as SaaS pricing models shift from recurring revenue to usage-based models. We also discuss the so-called SaaS apocalypse and what Denada is actually seeing on the ground from the founders she works with every day.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Her journey from American Express to Efficient Capital Labs.
• What her time at Amex taught her about building responsible lending products.
• What ECL does exactly.
• What has been learned from the high profile stumbles in revenue based financing.
• How debt funding has been misunderstood by founders.
• Why VCs are the number one deal source for ECL.
• Their underwriting system called Aura and why it is unique.
• How Aura has allowed them to evolve their underwriting process.
• Why they decided to expand to underwriting companies that operate cross border.
• Why they created ECL Flow and expand into cross border money movement.
• Where they will be expanding this new infrastructure.
• Denada’s thoughts on the SaaS apocalypse.
• As pricing models change for SaaS, how they are adapting their underwriting models.
• How they are able to grow fast with very low charge off rates.
• What is next for ECL.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Payment declines happen millions of times a day, but how a financial institution handles that moment of failure can define the entire customer relationship. My guest on this episode is Amir Wain, the Founder and CEO of i2c, a global payments and banking infrastructure company he has been building for more than 25 years. Amir is a serial entrepreneur who made a foundational architectural bet early on: that a single, customer-centric, composable platform built for all products and all geographies would ultimately win over the industry's prevailing approach of stitching acquisitions together.

That bet has paid off. Today, i2c powers card and banking programs across 200-plus countries for financial institutions, fintechs, and governments alike. In our conversation, we dig into how modern unified payments infrastructure enables real-time contextual decisioning, why the moment of a payment decline is actually an opportunity to build customer trust, how i2c thinks about balancing fraud prevention with false positives, and what the rise of agentic AI means for the authorization process, and for keeping the human customer at the center of it all.

In this podcast, you will learn:

• The evolution in Amir’s thinking that led to the founding of i2c.
• When he realized that architecture will determine the destiny of the business.
• How i2c has evolved over the last 25 years.
• How contextual decisioning in the authorization process has become a differentiator for i2c.
• Where traditional infrastructure falls short in authorization decisions today.
• What fraud signals are the most important when balancing friction and user experience?
• How the industry can balance personalization and data privacy.
• The three segments of the market that i2c is focused on.
• How they are thinking about moving beyond payments.
• How they are planning for the world of autonomous AI agents making transactions.
• How far away we are from agentic commerce having significant scale.
• What keeps Amir excited today about the future.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes