Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller.

As an early online lender, Avant built a consumer lending business. And as the market evolved, Al Goldstein’s company found itself being better situated to also help banks enter digital lending. So, in addition to Avant, the firm launched a B2B service. Initially called Powered by Avant, Amount works with banks like Regions, HSBC, and TD Bank to handle end to end or modular services for things like personal loans, credit cards, deposit accounts, and point of sale loans.

Al joins us on the podcast to talk about the evolution from B2C lender to B2B service provider. We discuss what he’s hearing from banks about their biggest challenges in digital lending and we hear from Al about his own challenges working with large banks.

Al Goldstein is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast.

Having a kid encourages a lot of families to start thinking differently about their finances. Sure, life insurance is a part of that discussion, but so is creating a will and getting your financial info secured in one place.

Adam Erlebacher is co-founder and CEO of Fabric which provides sort of this organic experience around getting a new family’s finances in order. Adam joins us on the podcast to talk about his own personal experience with life insurance and how that inspired what Fabric is building.

Adam was formerly COO at Simple, an early digital bank, and we discuss how that experience influences the way he looking at fintech and digital finance.

Adam Erlebacher is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller.

It feels like everyone is talking about how cool the Apple Card looks. But Apple is just a beautiful example of a new type of credit card. Alongside the evolution of digital payments, something interesting is happening with physical credit and debit cards. From design, orientation, colors, and materials, physical cards are seeing a significant makeover.

Tearsheet's Sara Toth Stub recently wrote a story on the aesthetic innovations in credit and debit cards. It's not just challenger banks coming out with sleek metal cards in lots of new colors, either. Digital payment players like Venmo and PayPal have issued innovative cards. Wells Fargo and Citi are good examples of incumbents that are also pushing the envelope on the physical design of cards.

Sara Toth Stub is my guest today for a deep dive podcast to discuss the innovations happing in the physical world of payments.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller.

In this episode, we’re announcing the winner of our first annual bank - fintech partnership award here at Tearsheet. I’m happy to say that TD Bank and Hydrogen won this year’s award. To talk about the partnership and how the two firms created a solid foundation for collaboration we have Jacob Matthews, AVP head of digital continuum, sales and client engagement and US wealth technology at TD Bank joining us, as well as Mike Kane, co-founder of Hydrogen.

I’ll let them tell the story of the genesis of the partnership, the nature of the collaboration, and the success factors that have both firms looking out into the future with deeper work. I’d like to thank TD and Hydrogen, everyone else who applied for the award, and our industry judges that helped make this happen.

Here’s Jacob and Mike.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller.

One of the themes we’ve explored on Tearsheet and here on the podcast is vertical payments. As tools become more flexible and companies and solutions providers target niche problems, we’re seeing more and more companies focus on payments as a strategic advantage.

That’s definitely happening in travel. And beyond rewards programs, the travel industry has needed to pay particular attention to payments. Global customers expect global options and providing a good payment experience can mean the difference between booking a vacation or not. Ingenico’s head of travel Eric Liebman joins me on the podcast to talk about the travel industry’s specific needs when it comes to payments and the role payments play in a customer centric strategy.

Eric Liebman is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller.

Banks talk about deriving insights from their customer data. They want to provide actionable automated advice to their clients but they struggle just wrangling the data together.

Flybits wants to help banks by taking their proprietary customer data — like the activities a customer has done in her account — and adding in machine learning and external contextual data — like her risk profile or her consumption preferences. The goal is to deliver relevant and timely recommendations to FI cusotmers.

The technology and vision behind Flybits was born in a university lab. Founder and CEO Hossein Rahnama’s PhD was about understanding context in large data sets. He spun out his tech to launch the company. He’s also a professor of computer science at Toronto’s Ryerson University and a visiting prof at MIT’s Media Lab in Cambridge.

Hossein Rahnama is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

We’d like to thank our sponsor MX for supporting Tearsheet’s work. MX is the leading data platform for banks, credit unions and fintechs, enabling its clients and partners to easily collect, enhance, analyze, present and act on financial data.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller.

We’ve been covering the data aggregation industry because it’s our contention that getting this right is one of the underpinnings of modern finance. Sharing clean data between banks and apps may be somewhat of a boring business but it’s an important one. Plaid recently launched Liabilities, a product that gives PFMs and student loan providers and refinancers access to the liabilities side of their potential clients’ balance sheets. This is a very active area of fintech and this should help to propel things forward.

Plaid’s Lowell Putnam joins us on the podcast to talk about the new product and how clients are using it in their applications. Lowell was also the founder of Quovo, a data agg competitor with strength in the investment industry, that Plaid acquired earlier in 2019. He talks about the combined entity and provides some insight into the product roadmap the company plans to execute on.

Lowell Putnam is my guest on the Tearsheet Podcast.

We’d like to thank our sponsor MX for supporting Tearsheet’s work. MX is the leading data platform for banks, credit unions and fintechs, enabling its clients and partners to easily collect, enhance, analyze, present and act on financial data.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller.

I really enjoyed the recording of today’s episode. It’s different than what you’ve heard before. On today’s show we have Dennis Budinich, chief culture officer at $20 plus billion Investors Bank with 160 branches and nearly 2000 employees. Joining us is Patrick Brigger, co-founder and chairman of getAbstract, an educational platform that provides summaries of non-fiction books.

What I liked so much about this conversation was that we talked about people — real people with real needs in the workplace. We frequently talk about financial services employees as numbers, as cogs in a massive wheel. But of course, they have desires, fears, and needs. They have a desire to connect to their co-workers and their organizations and feel wanted, like they’re contributing.

Dennis and Patrick describe the magic that can go on inside an organization if you empower people to learn, to strive to be better, to improve themselves and their colleagues. In essence, free them up to be human and to bring their best to work.

We’d like to thank our sponsor MX for supporting Tearsheet’s work. MX is the leading data platform for banks, credit unions and fintechs, enabling its clients and partners to easily collect, enhance, analyze, present and act on financial data.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller.

A lot of the discussion on this show centers around customer acquisition. You may have a great product or service but if you can’t profitably acquire new customers at scale, you run the risk of being dead in the water. So, many of our fintech and a growing number of our financial services guests turn to advertising — specifically, Facebook. It’s on the social platform that you can target down to niche interests and geographies. And our audience spends lots of money there.Overall, $200B will be spent on acquiring customers this way.

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But what if there was a better way specifically for retailers to acquire customers. Dosh may very well be that better way. Instead of spending money with an intermediary like Facebook or Google, retailers put money directly in their prospects’ wallets through cash back campaigns. Consumers use Dosh to find good deals at stores. Stores use Dosh to acquire good customers based not on cohorts but on their individual buying behaviors.

Dosh CEO Ryan Wuerch is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

We’d like to thank our sponsor MX for supporting Tearsheet’s work. MX is the leading data platform for banks, credit unions and fintechs, enabling its clients and partners to easily collect, enhance, analyze, present and act on financial data.

Welcome to The Challengers podcast episode number 10.

Your hosts Zack and Josh talk about Aussie challenger bank Judo and its success in raising a war chest of capital ($400 million). Unlike other challengers, the founders are in their fifties and are from the industry.

Next up, Zack mentions Zerocard and its creative approach to providing debit card control with the rewards program of a credit card. It launched recently.

Josh dug into the Apple Card launch a bit as a prelude to discussing the move in the industry to launch multiple color cards made out of cool metals. He's surprised it matters to some people but admits that it does influence their decisions.

Next up, your hosts discuss Starling Bank and its growth -- the company is on its way to hitting £1B in deposits and profitability.

Lastly, media firm Fox surprised everyone with an entrance into fintech with an acquisition of Credible, an online loan marketplace. Does this mean more media firms make strategic moves in the space?

We’d like to thank our sponsor MX for supporting Tearsheet’s work. MX is the leading data platform for banks, credit unions and fintechs, enabling its clients and partners to easily collect, enhance, analyze, present and act on financial data.