Fintech Takes

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

We kick things off with Bilt 2.0. After Wells Fargo pulled the plug on a partnership costing the bank reportedly $10M a month, Bilt rebuilt its stack with Column as the bank partner, Cardless as issuer processor, and Fidem Financial as the capital provider. The transition was not smooth. Picture a free-for-all of declined applications; lower credit limits; missed, failed, or duplicated rent payments; fraud; and an AI customer support bot looping without resolution. My read: Bilt 1.0 worked because Wells Fargo absorbed everything. Bilt 2.0 jerry-rigged a multi-vendor solution and asked customers not to notice.

From there, we get into what I'm calling the “graduation problem” in BaaS. As fintech companies like Mercury pursue charters (and deals like Capital One acquiring Brex reshape the landscape), the same partners that fueled growth for sponsor banks are now leaving or vertically integrating. We debate whether BaaS was ever an enduring model or a toll on regulatory scarcity. What happens when that scarcity disappears?

From there, we turn to New York’s proposed financial data rights law, which mirrors and extends the CFPB’s 1033 rule. It’s the most ambitious open banking legislation ever introduced in the U.S. It covers consumers and small businesses, applies to every bank serving New Yorkers regardless of charter type, and explicitly bans fees for data access. 

We close with two Can't Let It Gos: Elizabeth Warren's letter to MrBeast, which resurfaced deleted Step videos coaching teenagers on how to convince their parents to let them invest in crypto, and the prediction market industry's very aggressive March Madness push from Coinbase and Kalshi.

This episode is brought to you by Persona. 

Persona is the identity verification platform trusted by fintech's fastest-growing teams, from YC-backed startups to publicly traded companies. Build your identity program with enterprise-grade tools, starting at $0 with Persona's Startup Program.

Fintech Takes listeners can get a full free year through Persona’s Startup Program at withpersona.com/ftt

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/

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

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

Welcome to Credit Without Constraints, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, presented with our friends at Spinwheel.

The series revolves around one question: how do we make the best possible credit decisions for the benefit of both the consumer and the lender?

In Episode 4, my cohost Tomás Campos, Co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel, and I sit down with Rich Franks, a fintech advisor who previously worked at Capital One, PayPal, and Credit Karma, including on products like Lightbox and Easy Apply that helped reshape how consumers discover and access credit.

This final episode is about context: how people actually shop for credit, the data that shapes those decisions, and where AI may take the process next.

Consumers are never shopping for credit in the abstract. They’re trying to buy a car, finance a renovation, consolidate debt, or solve some other concrete problem. Each of those decisions comes with its own timing, tradeoffs, and limitations.

Rich pushes against the industry’s habit of treating lending as separate from the outcome the consumer actually cares about. His argument is that underwriting works better when it stays connected to timing and real-world intent.

That perspective has implications across the full customer journey, from product discovery and application design to consumer-permissioned data, adverse action, and AI-assisted shopping.

What if the real edge in lending is not more offers, but a better understanding of what the borrower is trying to achieve?

What if the assumptions the industry and regulators have inherited about how lending is supposed to work are wrong?

Spinwheel helps financial innovators instantly verify and act on consumer credit using just a phone number and date of birth. Real-time, consented credit data and embedded payments—no passwords, no friction. 

Learn more at https://spinwheel.io

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 Tomás:

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

Follow Rich:

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

Learn more about Spinwheel here: https://spinwheel.io

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Kiran Aware (Chief Consumer Credit Officer at LendingClub) and Michelle Young (Credit Product Lead at Plaid) for our new series Facing Credit, where we unpack what’s happening in credit and lending right now.

Today’s conversation explores credit underwriting as a system, and why more lenders are finally starting to treat it that way.

First, we zoom out to the macro picture and ask how lenders are navigating a market full of uncertainty and changing consumer behavior. Kiran explains how LendingClub thinks about borrower stability, while Michelle shares what lenders across the market are looking for in a more complete picture of risk.

Next, we focus on credit underwriting as a system. Kiran breaks down how LendingClub has built a full decisioning operating system across underwriting, pricing, verification, fraud, servicing, and collections. Michelle explains why alternative data is no longer a useful label, and why user-permissioned cash flow data has become more important across origination, verification, and monitoring.

Finally, we tackle AI in credit, near-term and long. Explainability requirements mean LLMs won't land in core underwriting tomorrow, but AI’s already changing what's possible in verification and fraud workflows. The longer horizon points toward credit systems that identify new signals autonomously and self-optimize in real time. But what happens when consumers have AI agents making decisions on their behalf, and fraudsters are using the same technology to attack the system?

Tune in for a rich conversation about what lenders are really building when they underwrite credit (and why the industry is more open than ever to reimagining the system itself).

This episode is brought to you by Plaid. 

Plaid helps lenders approve more creditworthy borrowers without taking on more risk, combining real-time cash flow data with behavioral insights. It’s a fast, familiar experience people trust, and that actually converts. Learn more at www.plaid.com/ftt

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 Kiran

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiran-aware-6491984/ 

Follow Michelle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-boros-young-5a586983/

Follow Alex Johnson: 

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

Welcome to Credit Without Constraints, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, presented with our friends at Spinwheel.

The series orbits around one core challenge: how do we make the best possible credit decisions for the benefit of both the consumer and the lender?

In Episode 3, my cohost Tomás Campos (Co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel) and I sit down with Lamine Zarrad, Founder and CEO of StellarFi, to talk about trust.

We start with a deceptively simple idea: credit is trust, and trust is contextual. Everything we do in lending (gathering data, building models, designing decisioning rules) is fundamentally about finding a way to extend trust in the form of credit to people we don't know.

There's more than one way to scaffold that trust. StellarFi's approach pushes against the industry's habit of treating underwriting like a one-time approve or decline decision. Instead, it treats credit like an iterative game. That philosophy shapes everything from how StellarFi thinks about spending limits and security deposits to its product roadmap.

That reframe, from single decision to iterative game, has consequences that run through every layer of how consumers access and shop for financial products today.

What if the right goal isn't approving only the cleanest borrowers upfront, but creating a system where more people can start somewhere and prove their way forward?

What if better underwriting comes from combining fragmented signals into a more living, contextual picture of trust?

What if the biggest constraint is that consumers' financial lives are still spread across too many accounts to be understood in one clear view?

Subscribe now to catch what’s next.

Spinwheel helps financial innovators instantly verify and act on consumer credit using just a phone number and date of birth. Real-time, consented credit data and embedded payments—no passwords, no friction. 

Learn more at https://spinwheel.io

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 Tomás:

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

Follow Lamine:

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

Learn more about Spinwheel here: https://spinwheel.io

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

First up is Rhythmic, stablecoin-powered embedded wallets for brands (think Ansa but stablecoins). We unpack why payments nerds are now building in stablecoins, what OCC guidance means for yield on stored balances, and why this may be one of the clearest domestic stablecoin use cases yet.

Next up is AgentCard, prepaid virtual cards for AI agents. Simon's framing: if Stripe was built for developers, AgentCard is built for agents. We talk about what it means to build for agents as customers, and whether virtual cards are already good enough for a large share of agentic commerce.

Then there’s Rowspace, which uses AI to codify institutional knowledge for bespoke risk decisions inside private credit and private equity firms. The pitch is a virtual partner sitting on a junior analyst's shoulder, guiding deal decisions in real time. But when AI starts nudging high-stakes decisions, how do you know when it’s wrong? Could this become the Harvey of financial services? And will firms trust an outsider to live inside their secret sauce?

Finally, we close with Burst, an API layer for HSA and FSA reimbursement. Simon's analogy: if Honey and Plaid had a healthcare baby, it would be Burst. We discuss why FSA dollars usually sit there unspent, why the merchant integration is the piece nobody else has cracked, and how consumer permissioning can retrain people to think of that money as theirs.

Plus, Simon's manifestation to the universe: simplicity. You've got a new customer. Are you building for them?

This episode is brought to you by Plaid. 

Most lenders see the value of cash flow data. The hard part is getting started—and knowing what to do with it once you have it. Plaid makes it easy to access real-time cash flow and behavioral insights in seconds, through a familiar experience borrowers already trust. No heavy lift. No added friction. Learn more at www.plaid.com/ftt

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 Simon:

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

Substack: https://sytaylor.substack.com

Follow Alex: 

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

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

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

Companies featured:

https://rhythmic.io/

https://agentcard.sh/

https://www.rowspace.ai/

https://getburst.com/

Welcome to Credit Without Constraints, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, presented with our friends at Spinwheel.

The series orbits around one core challenge: how do we make the best possible credit decisions for the benefit of both the consumer and the lender?

We’re living through an abundance era for credit data. Today’s challenge is getting the most value out of that abundance.

In Episode 2, my cohost Tomás Campos (Co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel) and I sit down with Chris Hansen, GM of Cash Atlas Solutions at Nova Credit. 

We start with the U.S. credit data system itself (built around a monthly furnishing cycle that made sense at the time). From there, we get specific about what consumer-permissioned cashflow data actually changes in practice.

Lenders are using it to approve more people at the same marginal rate, but the use cases run deeper: second look, pricing and terms, credit line increases, collections, prequalification, and continuous portfolio monitoring (to name a few). 

Now’s the time to think more carefully about how these data sources work together.

What if the easiest point of entry isn’t the initial approval decision, but deeper in the workflow?

What if the real challenge is aligning infrastructure, analytics, compliance, model risk, product, and consumer trust around a better underwriting decision?

What if the biggest constraint holding lenders back is perfection being the enemy of progress?

Subscribe now to catch what's next.

Spinwheel helps financial innovators instantly verify and act on consumer credit using just a phone number and date of birth. Real-time, consented credit data and embedded payments—no passwords, no friction. 

Learn more at https://spinwheel.io

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 Tomás:

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

Follow Chris:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishansen10/

Learn more about Spinwheel here: https://spinwheel.io

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined again by Carlos Caro (author of the Free Toaster newsletter and host of the Free Toaster podcast) to continue the conversation we started on Carlos’s podcast about MrBeast's acquisition of Step and what it means for the fintech ecosystem.

This episode picks up where we left off, by looking to the past. 

If you think you’ve found a new idea in financial services, you probably just haven’t done enough research yet. Celebrity fintech, especially fintech built for underserved consumers, is no exception. 

In this Part 2 episode, Carlos and I explore three celebrity-backed fintech products from the 2010s era that failed in ways worth understanding for the present: The Kardashian Kard, Justin Bieber's BillMyParents prepaid card, and The Approved Card from Suze Orman.

Across all three, similar questions keep popping up: 

What happens when a celebrity brand collides with the realities of financial services economics? 

How far can a celebrity brand take a product if the product itself doesn’t make sense for consumers? 

How much does product-market fit matter if the fee structure feels exploitative? 

And what can MrBeast learn from the celebrities who tried this before?

Tune in for a tour through recent fintech history as we dust off a few forgotten celebrity card experiments from the sands of time, and wonder whether a celebrity brand can succeed in financial services without repeating the same mistakes.

This episode is brought to you by Plaid. 

Most lenders see the value of cash flow data. The hard part is getting started—and knowing what to do with it once you have it. Plaid makes it easy to access real-time cash flow and behavioral insights in seconds, through a familiar experience borrowers already trust. No heavy lift. No added friction. Learn more at www.plaid.com/ftt

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 Carlos Caro:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-carlos-caro/

Follow Alex Johnson: 

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

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson
X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

Welcome to Credit Without Constraints, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, presented with our friends at Spinwheel.

The series orbits around one core challenge: how do we make the best possible credit decisions for the benefit of both the consumer and the lender?

Data is one of the biggest constraints. Credit outcomes sit downstream of credit data, and today that data is fragmented and inconsistent. 

The solution is a deliberately unopinionated approach: put consumers in control, and make data sharing easier than most providers do today (all while delivering the highest-fidelity data possible).

In Episode 1, I sit down with Tomás Campos, Co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel.

We start with Spinwheel's origin, a founding team obsessed with the liability side of the household balance sheet, and dig into where the traditional credit data system falls short. 

We get specific about the gaps: credit bureaus are the original aggregators, but real-time balances, payoff quotes, BNPL trade lines, and the granular detail buried inside a mortgage payment don’t fit neatly into today’s structures. Tomás says the average lender is running about 14 separate data integrations just to close those gaps.

The answer is not to replace what exists. It is to say “yes and.” 

What if identity could be the unlock for frictionless data access (versus credentials)?

What if consumer permissioning and the spirit of the FCRA pointed toward the same destination all along?

What if closing the data gaps was actually good for both lenders and consumers?

This episode sets the stage for the entire series. 

A "yes and" approach to credit data is a very different way of building fintech infrastructure, but it's starting to change. The rest of the series explores that change, across acquisition, underwriting, and servicing. 

Subscribe now to catch what's next.

Spinwheel helps financial innovators instantly verify and act on consumer credit using just a phone number and date of birth. Real-time, consented credit data and embedded payments—no passwords, no friction. 

Learn more at https://spinwheel.io

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 Tomás:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/theinnovativeone/ 
Learn more about Spinwheel here: https://spinwheel.io

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

We kick things off with Block’s move into credit scoring. Block stitched together data across Cash App and Afterpay into a proprietary score it’s now surfacing to consumers and selling to other lenders, claiming auto lenders could approve 30% more borrowers at identical loss rates using the Cash App score. We dig into adverse selection when consumers choose what to share, where this fits in lender workflows, and the FCRA wrinkle that “transactions and experiences” data can fall outside the definition of a consumer report…

Then, we dive into stablecoins. Jason walks through the rebirth of “no KYC” crypto-funded spending cards, including testing several of these services himself (tune in to discover the pattern!). The core mechanic Jason flags is a corporate card loophole: KYB the company, then issue incremental “employee” cards with no legal or regulatory requirement to verify the person behind each card.

From there, we zoom out to Bridge, Stripe’s stablecoin infrastructure subsidiary. Bridge got conditional OCC approval to form a national trust bank and moved jurisdictions (which include Russia, Belarus, Gaza, South Sudan, and Venezuela) from “controlled” to “prohibited,” while still defining “prohibited” with an “extraordinary situations” carveout.

Plus, in our Can’t Let It Go corner: prediction markets. 

CFTC Chair Mike Sig told the Senate during his nomination hearing that he’d defer to the courts on sports betting and prediction markets. But early this year, he reversed course, asserting the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction and filing amicus briefs against state prohibitions aimed at sports betting. Kalshi and Polymarket loved it, and I’m sure that’s unrelated to the fact that Sig’s boss’s son is an advisor to both.

We close with Substack’s new partnership with Polymarket to embed prediction markets into journalism, set against a real-world example of the incentive problem: Israeli authorities investigated and arrested military reservists and a civilian for allegedly using classified information to place bets on Polymarket.

This episode is brought to you by Plaid. 

Most lenders see the value of cash flow data. The hard part is getting started—and knowing what to do with it once you have it. Plaid makes it easy to access real-time cash flow and behavioral insights in seconds, through a familiar experience borrowers already trust. No heavy lift. No added friction. Learn more at www.plaid.com/ftt

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 in this episode by two guests, Steve Boms (Executive Director at FDATA) and Dan Murphy (Founder of Sunset Park Advisors; formerly CFPB).

We're talking about Canada, and why a country that has spent the better part of a decade moving at a pace I have occasionally made fun of in the newsletter is now arguably ahead of the U.S. on open banking regulation.

Dan and Steve walk through how Canada deliberately corrected what other countries got wrong, and how timing and learning play a role, too. Canada watched the BPI lawsuit play out in the U.S. They saw the gap between banks' stated preferences and revealed preferences once implementation became real. They built voluminous, specific legislation partly because they learned what happens when you leave room for interpretation.

The conversation explores the global policy learning ecosystem, the cultural conservatism baked into Canadian financial services (Steve calls it "conservatism with the lowercase c"), and how a Big Five oligopoly holding 90% of consumer deposits accidentally created conditions for comprehensive reform when external pressure finally arrived.

Highlights include:

Steve's argument that write access might actually solve liability problems by creating traceable ledgers of who changed what and when

Dan's observation about the Amazon Perplexity lawsuit and how it echoes every open banking access fight 

The distinction between domestic competition policy and international competitiveness policy, and why they usually point in opposite directions

This episode is brought to you by Plaid. 

Most lenders see the value of cash flow data. The hard part is getting started—and knowing what to do with it once you have it. Plaid makes it easy to access real-time cash flow and behavioral insights in seconds, through a familiar experience borrowers already trust. No heavy lift. No added friction. Learn more at www.plaid.com/ftt

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 Steve:

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

Follow Dan:

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

Follow Alex Johnson: 

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

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

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