The neobank space is very competitive. Every company has a solid app with extensive functionality, that is a given these days. But where there is differentiation is how these neobanks are engaging with the customers. Some are focused on optimizing for interchange fees, some are focused on credit products, some on deposit gathering while others provide all of that and more. But there are few companies approaching their customers in completely new ways.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Dee Choubey, the CEO and co-founder of MoneyLion. I last had him on the show six years ago and his company has changed so much since then. They are now a public company (NYSE:ML) and they are approaching their market in a completely different way to other neobanks. What they are doing with media, how they think about customer engagement, how they are using their marketplace - this is quite unique in the entire fintech space.

In this podcast you will learn:

• A profile of the typical MoneyLion customer.
• Where people are spending the most time on MoneyLion.
• How their personalized content helps with financial literacy.
• What Dee means by creating a form factor change in finance.
• The engagement with their app that they are seeing.
• Their view of the American consumer right now.
• The primary use case for crypto and any changes they are seeing there.
• Why they acquired Even Financial and how they are developing that platform.
• What they are doing in media and how they are using AI and ML to optimize it.
• How they will eventually become the search engine for financial products.
• Why they have gone all-in on NASCAR and are also focused on the NBA G-League.
• How they are navigating this bear market in fintech valuations.
• Why Dee has no regrets about becoming a public company when they did.
• What he is most excited about for 2023.

Connect with Dee on LinkedIn
Connect with MoneyLion on Twitter

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More than ever before, people today have different forms of income. They might have a day job but do gig work at night and on weekends. They might have a different side hustle that started out as a hobby but now generates an income. Getting an accurate picture of an individual's income requires sophisticated data engineering but it is something that is becoming increasingly critical.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Kurt Lin, the CEO and Co-Founder of Pinwheel. They make sense of real-time income and employment data to help lenders, fintechs and banks get an accurate financial picture of the people they are dealing with.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The founding story of Pinwheel and the pivot they quickly made.
• Details of their product offerings today.
• How their connectivity works.
• An example of how their figure out someone's true income.
• Why Earned Wage Access is such an important product for consumers.
• What Pinwheel has done with Earned Wage Access that has never been done before.
• Why having read/write access to direct deposit is key for this new product.
• The problem they are solving with their Direct Deposit Switching product.
• The different use cases for Direct Deposit Switching.
• Some of the key findings from their recent survey.
• What the future holds when all this data is connected.
• Why becoming a Credit Reporting Agency was important for Pinwheel.
• Kurt's vision for the future of Pinwheel.

Connect with Kurtis on LinkedIn
Connect with Kurtis on Twitter
Connect with Pinwheel on Twitter

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When we think about cross-border payments, we typically think about consumer payments, people sending money back to their home country. But the business-to-business market for cross-border payments is many times larger and more complex.

Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Patrick Gauthier, the CEO of Convera. Now, you may not have heard of Convera, they used to be Western Union Business Solutions. This business was spun out of Western Union last year and rebranded. Convera is actually the largest non-bank cross-border commercial payment company on the planet.

In this podcast you will learn:

• What he saw as the opportunity with Convera.
• Why they are focused on cross-border payments.
• Convera's core product offerings today.
• Their core technology behind the facilitation of payments.
• The geographic corridors where they see the most activity.
• The largest currency pairs in terms of volume.
• How they make cross-border payments simple and predictable.
• How they quickly reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• How they are able to keep track of regulations in every country.
• Patrick's views on crypto and how it applies to cross-border payments.
• The volume of payments they processed last year.
• What Patrick has brought to Convera from his time at Amazon.
• Their plans for 2023.

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn

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When it comes to the velocity of money in banking in many we are back in the days of the horse and buggy. Whereas communication between banks can move around the world instantly when it comes to transactions most of the banking world is on a two-day settlement window known as T+2. This 48-hour delay means huge liquidity costs for banks.

But we are moving to a world of real-time settlement and one of the global leaders in this movement is Fnality. This organization, based in London, was created by a consortium of banks whose goal is to move the banking system to real-time settlement. At our recent event in London I sat down with Rhomais Ram, the CEO of Fnality, to discuss "Increasing the Velocity of Money with Real-Time Settlement."

In this podcast you will learn:

• How the consortium for Fnality first came together.
• What Fnality is building in layman's terms.
• Why we live in a T+2 settlement world between banks today.
• Why banks want to move to a real time settlement world.
• What are the primary use cases.
• How a transaction will flow within the Fnality system.
• How many banks they have on board today.
• Ram's views on a CBDC and the role of Fnality.
• The different geographies where they are focused today.
• How Fnality will make money.
• The liquidity savings that could be achieved here.
• An example on how this technology could interface with DeFi.
• How a financial institution could manage their liquidity.
• The potential scale of transactions they could hande.
• Rhom's vision for what this can look like in the future.

Connect with Rhomaios on LinkedIn
Connect with Fnality on Twitter

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Before the FTX blowup there was a serious conversation happening around regulation of the DeFi space. During our Merge event in London last month I interviewed Lawrence Wintermeyer, the Chair of the GBBC Digital Finance (and the former chair of Innovate Finance) on the topic, Paving the Way for Web3 Legitimacy.

Given the events of the last couple of weeks this topic has new urgency. For the DeFi industry to scale it must begin a serious and open discussion with regulators and it needs to address some of the thorny issues caused by its decentralized structure. This interview was recorded on October 17 and there was a prescient quote from Lawrence during the interview: "The industry just does not look like a very safe place to put your money right now."

In this podcast you will learn:

• Why people are at war in the digital innovation space.
• Why it is critical for the web3 industry to come together and self-regulate.
• What a co-regulatory model could look like.
• How can approach regulating DeFi where it is by definition decentralized.
• The difficult issues that most need to be addressed.
• Why identity and liability considerations are so important for DeFi.
• How far away we are from effective DeFi regulation.
• His thoughts on permissioned and closed DeFi networks.
• What's the most practical thing that we can do to create Web3 legitimacy.

Connect with Lawrence on LinkedIn
Connect with Lawrence on Twitter

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Someone had to be first. More than a decade before the word fintech became a thing we had the original fintech bank, First Internet Bank.  As the name implies they were the first bank to operate completely online when they launched in 1999. In many ways they have been a trailblazer, paving the way for a new generation of fintechs to thrive.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Nicole Lorch, the President and COO of First Internet Bank. She has been at the bank since the very beginning and has seen it grow to become a successful and profitable online bank. There are many lessons here for the new crop of fintech banks.

In this podcast you will learn:

• What it was like launching an online bank in the dot com era.
• The types of consumers they attracted in the early days.
• How RV and horse trailer loans became a successful niche.
• The different verticals they are involved with today.
• Who they think about as their competitors in banking.
• What they have done to emulate in-person banking in the digital world.
• How they manage their customer service call center.
• Details of their tech stack and their approach to technology.
• Nicole's view on the recent rise of the digital neobank.
• How they are partnering with Treasury Prime for banking-as-a-service.
• Why First Internet Bank has such a deep understanding about fintech-bank partnerships.
• What they are focused on when it comes to growing the bank.
• How she views the moves by big tech into financial services.
• What Nicole is excited about for 2023.

Connect with Nicole on LinkedIn
Connect with First Internet Bank on Twitter

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Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) continue to gain momentum around the world. While we are not exactly leading the way in this country there is important work being done already, work that will help shape how a CBDC will function here.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Daniel Gorfine, the co-founder of the Digital Dollar Project. This organization is doing incredibly important work, combining the efforts of all the existing research that is out there, and helping to create real-world pilots. A U.S. CBDC is most likely coming, and in this interview, you can discover what it will look like and how it will work.

In this podcast you will learn:

• What the Digital Dollar Project is and how it got off the ground.
• The people and organizations that are involved.
• How they work with existing CBDC projects such as Project Hamilton.
• Details of pilots they are involved with right now.
• What they are learning from the CBDCs of other countries.
• How a CBDC could work with a bank-issued stablecoin.
• What the programmable element of digital money could mean.
• Where we are at in Washington when it comes to CBDCs.
• What is the end game for the Digital Dollar Project.
• How a Digital Dollar will actually work and Daniel's best guess on a timeline.

Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn

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The card space (both debit and credit) has seen tremendous innovation over the last decade. Use cases that were inconceivable 10 years ago are now commonplace due to the steady march of fintech innovation. The company that has been at the very center of these developments is Marqeta. They have basically invented a new category of fintech, what they call "modern card issuing".

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Randy Kern, the CTO of Marqeta. He has had a career in enterprise tech, outside of finance, so he brings a fresh perspective to fintech. We delve deeply into the technology that is behind one of the most innovative companies in all of fintech.

In this podcast you will learn:

• What attracted Randy to the CTO position at Marqeta.
• How he describes modern card issuing.
• Some of the use cases of their card technology.
• Their role in the Uber ProCard that was recently announced.
• How Randy's background in enterprise tech helps him at Marqeta.
• A great analogy on the growth of embedded finance.
• How Marqeta thinks of embedded finance.
• How the growth of digital wallets is being fueled by Marqeta.
• Why tokenization of cards is the key to better security.
• How they are helping small business lenders today.
• How open APIs help speed the development of fintech products.
• The challenges of running a tech company across multiple geographies.
• What Randy is excited about for the future of Marqeta and fintech in general.

Connect with Randy on LinkedIn

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• Tweet me @PeterRenton
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The most interesting use cases for DeFi are still being discovered. But tokenization of real world assets, or anything that has an income stream associated with it, is starting to take shape. And there are blockchains being built today with digitization and tokenization of assets as their core use case.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is John Wu, the President of Ava Labs, the organization behind the Avalanche blockchain. John has a deep knowledge of technology as an investor and was early in bitcoin. Now, he is leading Ava Labs and the Avalanche blockchain into becoming a major force in a multi-chain world.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The founding story of Ava Labs and the Avalanche blockchain.
• Why Emin Gün Sirer is so well respected in the crypto space.
• What makes the Avalanche blockchain unique.
• How Ava Labs is working with traditional financial institutions.
• The two core benefits of tokenization.
• What assets lend themselves best to tokenization.
• The interesting use cases for tokenization getting traction now.
• The benefits of Avalanche over private blockchains.
• What it will take for tokenization to become mainstream.
• How programmable money fits into the Avalanche vision.
• How fintech and TradFi should think about web3 disruption.
• How the downturn in crypto has affected Ava Labs (or not).
• What John would like the TradFi world to understand about DeFi.
• The role of Ava Labs in the future of crypto.

Connect with John via LinkedIn
Connect with John via Twitter

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The rise of Chinese fintech in the 2010s is one of the most exciting and intriguing stories in all of fintech. This has been followed in this decade by a government crackdown on fintech and technology more broadly. But everyone should understand the innovations that led China to become the most advanced country in the world when it comes to fintech.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Martin Chorzempa who I got to know in 2014 when I started visiting China. He is now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and he has written a very important book on Chinese fintech called "The Cashless Revolution: China's Reinvention of Money and the End of America's Domination of Finance and Technology." This is a must-read for anyone in fintech, not just for those people who follow China, as there are lessons here for us all.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How Martin found his way to work at a Chinese think tank, CF40.
• The work he did at CF40.
• What he is focused on today at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
• How he was able to become fluent in Mandarin.
• The state of financial technology when Martin arrived in China in 2012.
• How Tencent and Ant Financial became critically important fintech companies.
• Why the rise of the Super App was the key to the rise of these two companies.
• How the Chinese government enabled this rise.
• What propelled the growth of peer-to-peer lending in China.
• The amazing rise of Sesame Credit, Ant Financial's official credit bureau.
• The government's approach to the huge amounts of data these companies generated.
• The stunning fall of the peer-to-peer lending platform Ezubao.
• How Ant's money market fund, Huabao, became the largest in the world.
• How one speech from Jack Ma become the “The Costliest Speech in History”.
• The lessons the U.S. and the West can take from the rise and fall of fintech in China.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

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