Fintech Takes

Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.

We open with a tangled story that you should absolutely read Jason’s reporting* on. Trump-linked World Liberty Financial poured $1.5B into a crypto treasury company called Alt5 Sigma, whose token plummeted from ~20¢ to ~5¢. Buried inside that detritus, Jason uncovered a Canadian subsidiary issuing crypto-funded cards with no identity verification at all (confirmed after he posed as a prospective customer himself).

From there, we widen out to a troubling trend. Charters increasingly seem to flow toward companies with the right political connections. Erebor, Augustus, and a pending application from World Liberty Financial are receiving the royal treatment. What does that mean for the OCC's long-term institutional credibility?

Next, we chat about Darragh Buckley’s Increase, which built banking infrastructure for Ramp and Stripe, and just bought a tiny Washington bank to become one itself (a real-time test of whether BaaS middleware is dead).

Finally, we go deep on Fed master accounts, and why Kraken's recent approval left Fed officials scrambling to explain a decision that wasn't really theirs to make (the regional Reserve Banks making these calls basically answer to no one).

Plus, in our Can't Let It Gos: Erebor's reported talks to double its valuation without having proven it can run like a real bank, and Delta's new in-flight DraftKings prediction game (apparently even a flight isn't safe from the gambling-ification of everything).

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This episode is brought to you by Ocrolus. 

Better lending starts with better intelligence. A borrower's cash flow only tells half the story, so Ocrolus fills in the rest with behavior signals and industry benchmarking. Visit https://www.ocrolus.com/ for more. 

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Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

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Follow Alex: 

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson

X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

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Follow Jason:

Newsletter: https://fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmikula/

*And read Jason's reporting on Alt5 Sigma and MSwipe: https://fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com/p/trump-linked-fintech-tied-to-no-kyc 

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined again by James Wester (co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research), who I’ve come to think of as our resident stablecoin correspondent to make sense of the biggest stablecoin news of the summer.

In July, Stripe organized a consortium called Open Standard, backed by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Coinbase, among others, to launch a dollar-backed stablecoin called OUSD. Within days, some of the smaller companies on that list said they hadn't agreed to what was being described. There's still no white paper, nor clarity on governance.

So, what’s the Open Standard consortium building?

We dig into:

Tune in for James's read on whether Open Standard becomes infrastructure or the next entry in the consortium graveyard.

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This episode is brought to you by Ocrolus. 

Better lending starts with better intelligence. A borrower's cash flow only tells half the story, so Ocrolus fills in the rest with behavior signals and industry benchmarking. Visit https://www.ocrolus.com/ for more. 

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Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

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Follow Alex: 

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X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

Follow James:

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Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by two of my favorite repeat guests: Steve Boms (Executive Director of FDATA North America) and Dan Murphy (Founder of Sunset Park Advisors; formerly CFPB).

We set aside Section 1033 for an hour to talk about agentic finance; what happens when AI agents don't just read your financial data, but act on it.

First up, the question any skeptical consumer would ask: robo-advisors already exist, so what's new here? Dan's answer took the conversation back further than I expected, to a pre-fintech era of credit counselors, financial advisors, and deposit brokers who worked the phones shopping a client's savings around for a better CD rate.

Then, Dan and Steve walk me through a framework from FDATA's forthcoming white paper splitting agentic finance into three layers: read, instruct, and transact. We get into what each layer actually requires on liability, consent, and fiduciary duty, and what the UK, Australia, and Brazil have already built in this space that the US hasn't.

We also dig into the use cases that could change someone's day, like an "anti-inertia" tool that moves your savings the moment your bank stops paying a competitive rate.

Tune in for a conversation about what it means to give an AI permission to spend your money, and why the rulebook we already have may be more ready for this than anyone expects.

FDATA North America published a white paper on this exact topic, which you should read here: https://bit.ly/4wiB0a4 

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This episode is brought to you by Ocrolus. 

Every small business is different — but most lenders only see a snapshot. Ocrolus gives SMB lenders the cash flow analytics, borrower behavior and peer context to fund more, faster, with confidence. Visit https://www.ocrolus.com/ for more. 

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Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

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Follow Steve:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenboms/

Follow Dan:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieljmurphy01/

Follow Alex: 

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Welcome to Lending, Unbundled, a new series from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at TruStage.

The series traces how consumer lending went from a single institution that handled everything to a modular value chain of specialized providers, each owning one piece of the loan, and asks what lending, unbundled, has cost the industry along the way.

In Episode 3, my cohost Bjoern Nordmann (VP of New Market Development at TruStage) and I sit down with Aditya Khandekar, CRO of Corridor Platforms, to explore what happens when lending goes modular, but accountability still needs to be end-to-end (not just owned at one point in the loan lifecycle).

When a borrower hits hardship, the originator, servicer, and funding source may all have different incentives. But the borrower doesn’t care who technically owns the loan; they blame the brand they can see.

That’s why governance can’t sit at the end of the process, waiting to validate what already happened. Aditya’s argument is that governed decisioning can become the connective tissue: a shared evidence layer across acquisition, servicing, delinquency management, compliance, and customer management.

Credit risk can move downstream. Reputation risk cannot.

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This episode is brought to you by TruStage.

TruStage is a financially strong insurance and financial services provider, built on the philosophy of people helping people, meeting the needs of middle-market consumers and the businesses that serve them since day one. 

We believe a brighter financial future should be accessible to everyone, and our products and solutions help people confidently make financial decisions that work for them at every stage of life. Visit https://trustage.com for more information.

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Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

Follow Alex: 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

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Follow Bjoern: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjoernnordmann/

Follow Aditya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adityakhandekar/

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm your host, Alex Johnson, and today one of our favorite guests is back: Frank Rotman, founding partner of 37Maru and co-founder and partner emeritus at QED Investors.

First, we chat about what happens to an entire industry once its customers have concluded the game is rigged, which is why financial nihilism now shows up everywhere from ETFs built on sports bets to DeFi products costumed as savings accounts. Frank has a theory he calls p(win)=0; once someone concludes their probability of winning is zero, walking away from the game is rational. 

From there, we separate the AI use cases ready for prime time from the ones that aren’t. Back office work like AML documentation and exception processing is ripe for automation. A bank chatbot delivering flawless, compliant financial advice is a different proposition. In financial services, 98% accuracy can still equal zero.

Finally, we close on student lending, an area where Frank has firsthand experience (having built a student lending company before QED), and firsthand ideas (having spent the better part of a year making the case for reform to the Department of Education and the IRS). His proposal for how the government could build a “truth file" on which degrees pay off is one of the more concrete policy ideas we discuss.

Expect a wide-ranging conversation. Frank has a gift for making financial nihilism, AI, and student loan policy sound like one continuous argument, and by the end, I’m convinced that it is.

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This episode is brought to you by Ocrolus. 

Every small business is different — but most lenders only see a snapshot. Ocrolus gives SMB lenders the cash flow analytics, borrower behavior and peer context to fund more, faster, with confidence.

Visit ⁠https://www.ocrolus.com/⁠ for more. 

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Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday:⁠ https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/⁠

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my⁠ YouTube page⁠.

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Follow Frank:

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-rotman/⁠

X: ⁠https://x.com/fintechjunkie⁠

Follow Alex: 

YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@FintechTakes⁠

LinkedIn:⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson⁠

X:⁠ https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson⁠

Welcome to Lending, Unbundled, a new series from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at TruStage.

The series traces how consumer lending went from a single institution that handled everything to a modular value chain of specialized providers, each owning one piece of the loan, and asks what lending, unbundled, has cost the industry along the way.

In Episode 2, my cohost Bjoern Nordmann (VP of New Market Development at TruStage) and I sit down with Taylor Nelms, VP of Research & Insights at the Financial Health Network to untangle why consumer confidence is sitting about as low as it's ever been on record,

Financial health challenges show up across the income spectrum, driven by volatility on both sides of the household ledger: 7 in 10 households report a significant unexpected expense each year, and recent labor market research shows unpredictable income is now the norm for most workers (not just those with unpredictable hours). 

As Taylor puts it, the job of a lender isn't just extending credit. It's selling certainty against volatility.

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This episode is brought to you by TruStage.

TruStage is a financially strong insurance and financial services provider, built on the philosophy of people helping people, meeting the needs of middle-market consumers and the businesses that serve them since day one. 

We believe a brighter financial future should be accessible to everyone, and our products and solutions help people confidently make financial decisions that work for them at every stage of life.

Visit ⁠https://trustage.com⁠ for more information.

---

Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday:⁠ https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/⁠

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my⁠ YouTube page⁠.

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Follow Bjoern on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjoernnordmann/

Follow Taylor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-nelms/ 

Follow Alex: 

YouTube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos⁠

LinkedIn:⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson⁠

Twitter:⁠ https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about companies we're absolutely not giving investment advice on.

First up is Primitive, an agent control plane for large financial institutions trying to figure out what to do with AI agents. We get into why regulated institutions need infrastructure that sits above any one model provider, token budgets, and why AI labs deploying engineers into financial institutions should be treated less like a gift and more like a Trojan horse.

Next is Exponent, a finance platform for franchisees. Franchises are one of the most reliable (and overlooked) paths to wealth building. We talk about why franchisees are hard to underwrite, how SBA lending fits in, and why a platform that helps both the borrower and lender could become the financial operating system for multi-location franchise entrepreneurs.

Then there's Prime Intellect, which helps companies train, deploy, evaluate, and improve their own models. This leads us into one of our favorite nerd corridors: what happens when you train transformer models on financial events instead of language? Financial data may have its own syntax, and the models that understand it may be far more useful than the ones that chat well.

We close with Covered, a gamified credit card that uses variable rewards and sweepstakes to make cash back feel like a chance to win big. Customer acquisition is brutal, top-of-wallet even harder, and in a casino economy, nudging people toward something marginally better is at least honest about the stakes.

Plus, the most important question in the episode: is Anna or Elsa the real protagonist of Frozen?

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This episode is brought to you by Ocrolus. 

Every small business is different — but most lenders only see a snapshot. Ocrolus gives SMB lenders the cash flow analytics, borrower behavior and peer context to fund more, faster, with confidence. Visit https://www.ocrolus.com/ for more. 

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Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

Follow Alex: 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

Follow Simon:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sytaylor/

Substack: https://sytaylor.substack.com

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Companies featured:

https://primitive.com/

https://exponentfi.com/

https://www.primeintellect.ai/

https://www.coverd.us/

Welcome to Lending, Unbundled, a new series from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at TruStage.

The series traces how consumer lending went from a single institution that handled everything to a modular value chain of specialized providers, each owning one piece of the loan, and asks what lending, unbundled, has cost the industry along the way.

In Episode 1, I sit down with my co-host for the series, Bjoern Nordmann (VP of New Market Development at TruStage), and special guest Rodney Hood, former NCUA Chairman and Acting Comptroller of the Currency, to talk about why a regulatory framework built for vertically integrated lenders no longer matches an industry where origination, underwriting, funding, and servicing rarely sit under one roof.

For most borrowers, that fragmentation shows up as a simple question: who do you call when something goes wrong? 

Rodney traces the shift to two forces: policy, including the compliance burden that followed Dodd-Frank, and specialization (as fintech entrants and consumer expectations for speed reshaped what lenders had to offer). Rodney also makes the case that AI can help correct for bias baked into older credit models and catch hardship before it becomes delinquency.

As Rodney puts it: risk doesn't disappear because it moves, it simply changes addresses.

—

This episode is brought to you by TruStage.

TruStage is a financially strong insurance and financial services provider, built on the philosophy of people helping people, meeting the needs of middle-market consumers and the businesses that serve them since day one. 

We believe a brighter financial future should be accessible to everyone, and our products and solutions help people confidently make financial decisions that work for them at every stage of life. Visit https://trustage.com for more information.

---

Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

Follow Alex: 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

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Follow Bjoern: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjoernnordmann/

Follow Rodney: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodneyhood1/

Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.

We start with Parker Card, an SMB charge card startup that abruptly shut down in early May. The failure itself wasn't the story. The SVB lawsuit against issuing partner Patriot Bank is, and what it reveals about $21 million in receivables that fell into contested no-man's-land when Parker's acquisition talks collapsed. If Synapse taught us anything, we apparently didn't learn it.

Then prediction markets, a topic Jason forced me to cover. Fake Polymarket videos, Zuckerberg's play-money prediction app called Arena, and the CFTC’s proposed rule, which would give the industry nearly everything it wants (while drawing the line at contracts on assassination). We examine a specific loophole in that last point very carefully …

From there, we get into debanking. A cluster of recent developments (from the DOJ investigating big banks and reputation risk being formally eliminated as a supervision tool to Lead Bank CEO Jackie Reses calling the whole narrative an absolute crock of shit) gave us enough to work with. Jason and I have both written extensively on this topic, and we land somewhere that might surprise some listeners.

Finally, in our Can't Let It Gos: incomplete charter applications and a credit card pulled directly from my fintech nightmares.

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This episode is brought to you by Ocrolus. 

Every small business is different — but most lenders only see a snapshot. Ocrolus gives SMB lenders the cash flow analytics, borrower behavior and peer context to fund more, faster, with confidence. Visit https://www.ocrolus.com/ for more.

Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ 

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

Follow Jason:

Newsletter: https://fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmikula/

Follow Alex: 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Andrew DiMattina, Product Architect at Persona (and expert in all things fraud and compliance, especially AML compliance), to explore the changing state of compliance in the U.S. and around the globe.

The expectation going into this administration was deregulation. What banks and fintech companies have discovered over the last 18 months is that deregulation isn't less risk; it's a transfer of risk. The checklist era was expensive but legible. This era is cheaper on paper and harder in practice, especially when it comes to fraud and compliance. 

When rules stop telling you exactly what to do, "compliance" collapses back into its actual substance: Can you really tell who your customer is and stop the bad ones?

We get into:

Why most organizations are staying the course on compliance programs even as the federal floor recedes

What the OCC's consent order against Community Federal Savings Bank reveals about when a fintech program grows faster than its controls

Why getting a charter doesn't mean your risk profile matches your size

What "know your agent" actually means when a bot might be transacting on behalf of a legitimate customer (and why it adds a new question to KYC)

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This episode is brought to you by Persona. 

The best fintechs expand what's possible for users. Persona does that for fraud prevention. Their recently upgraded link analysis tool surfaces connections in real time, letting you spot deepfakes, identity farms, and fraud rings during onboarding and investigations. 

They just published their Fraud Leader's Guide to Link Analysis, a practical look at today’s top risk signals, automating decisions, and scaling link analysis for fraud prevention. Download it now: http://withpersona.com/ftt-fraud 

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Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/

And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page.

Follow Alex: 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

Follow Andrew:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-dimattina-4a3b0414/