We haven't done a whole lot of work on this show regarding chargebacks or the new approaches to authentication. How does fintech improve the conflict resolution process on credit card payments? Total costs associated with chargebacks can add up to nearly 10 percent of a merchant's total payment costs. A recent report published by Javelin tallied that consumer disputes and chargebacks created $31 billion in financial losses in the US, with merchants bearing nearly $19 billion of those costs.

To understand what's happening and what technology can do to improve the chargeback problem, Rick Lynch, senior vice president of business development at Verifi joins me on the podcast. We discuss the issue, the misaligned incentives in the industry, and different approaches to solving the problem

Challenger bank OakNorth launched a mortgage product earlier this month. Just a few years in, the bank uses a different playbook than other challengers. While firms like Revolut and N26 embark on a global expansion strategy by getting local banking licenses, OakNorth spun off its technology and is pursuing a software strategy. While other challengers are hustling to sign up checking accounts, OakNorth is really a lender at heart, providing debt finance to English growth-stage entrepreneurs. It's into this demographic that the challenger banks has now launched a mortgage product.

OakNorth CFO Cristina Alba joins us on the podcast to talk about the consumer finance product and whether it really is a departure from the challenger bank's product strategy. We delve into the core product, its target market and the borrowers it serves. Lastly, we frame out to get a bigger view of where OakNorth is planning for growth in the future.

Back in 2009, it was all the rage to build a direct lender. It didn't matter where the capital came from — it could have been from a marketplace of investors or off a balance sheet. But the idea was that you could build a massive scalable business by going direct. There were some companies that emerged from that time period successful but it proved very hard.

Others like LendKey took a B2B tack. Instead of going out and building a borrower acquisition model, they would work with lending institutions like regional banks and credit unions to power their lending businesses. After growing and exiting Dealertrack, Vince Passione, the former CTO of Citi's US consumer bank, saw an opportunity to found and lead LendKey.

Vince joins us on the show to talk about his partnership model and the challenges and opportunities of working alongside banks and credit unions, which have deployed more than $2 billion in lending capital on the digital platform.

It's not just challenger banks popping up to vie for consumer and business bank accounts. With consumer demand and new empowering technology, It feels like everyone is getting into financial services — from grocery chains to telecom companies. After piloting for half a year, last month, T-Mobile announced a new no-fee, interest-earning, mobile first checking account. Behind that white label offering is BankMobile, a division of Customers Bank.

BankMobile's co-founder, president and chief strategy officer Luvleen Sidhu joins me on the podcast today to talk about why everyone wants to get into banking. We talk about BankMobile's own business, its partnerships with colleges, and how they service students through various lifecycles.

As financial services undergo some transformative changes, we talk a lot about where the puck is headed. The company, product or service or set of technologies that can answer this question is at a huge advantage as incumbents invest in their digital future and tech firms are gunning for their markets.

Nikhil Lele has been thinking about the future of finance a lot. The EY partner leads digital business for the firm's financial services sector. And for the last nine months, he was the lead author and architect of a research study the firm recently published called The Next Wave of Consumer Financial Services.

Nikhil and I discuss how he sees consumer financial services being reframed over the next few years and why the move to subscriptions — like we see with Netflix or other popular consumer services — will likely make a big mark on the industry.

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

International payments and money transfer firms are among the first of this generation's fintech leaders. But even if they offer white-label or API solutions, companies like TransferWise are typically strongly focused on an end customer. Currencycloud takes a different approach, helping other fintechs, community banks and other FIs to offer international payments and FX. Standard Bank, Monese, Starling Bank, Klarna and Travelex are all customers.

Currencycloud Co-founder Richard Arundel moved to the US a couple of years ago to spearhead the UK firm's expansion. We talk about the nature of different geographies approach to fintech and how big tech payment solutions are the biggest threat to banks and fintechs alike.

Richard Arundel is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

We don't talk a lot about investor communications nowadays. As mutual funds and ETFs own massive amounts of stock, small individual investors are mostly sidelined. Tech company Say is trying to change that. The company's regulated business helps provide a better experience of investor communications. But through the unregulated part of its business, Say is turning investor participation on its head. Investors with just fractional ownership in companies can get their voices heard and their questions answered.

On Tesla's last earnings call, using Say and ahead of institutional analysts, CEO Elon Musk took an 18 year old's question — he owned four shares --about whether Tesla would consider launching an insurance product. To the surprise of others on the call, Tesla hadn't only thought about it but is planning to introduce insurance in the near term. Sometimes, Individual investor participation is magical.

Say's COO Byron Sorrells is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

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

If you’re like most people, you have too many cards in your wallet. Fintech entrepreneurs have tried to tackle this problem from a variety of ways — from new hardware solutions to developing reward programs so good that you wouldn’t want to use another card. No one has quite succeeded. In fact with all the challenger banks and metal cards out there, we have more options to weigh down our wallets than ever.

This is exactly the use case and problem Binji tries to solve. It’s hard exactly to describe what Binji is. First and foremost, it’s an innovative Bluetooth-enabled card that can load two dozen other credit cards onto it. And because it’s smart hardware, it can communicate with other apps, your phone and even has a small readout screen on the card itself. Binji’s been in development for over a year and includes a bunch of functionality like P2P payments and early access to paychecks.

Binji launches today and we sit with CEO Ryan Marquis and CTO Joe Callahan to better understand the Binji product and the problems it addresses.

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

Today we dig into affiliate marketing. It's a model that was first made popular by Amazon. A company looking to increase its sales partners with content sites to promote products. If those content sites are successful driving traffic or sales or leads, they get paid. Nowadays, every major credit card player has an affiliate program.

Stephanie Harris is the founder and owner of PartnerCentric, a performance marketing agency. She and her firm work with major card issuers and banks to help them maximize the results from their performance marketing. We talk about why affiliate programs make sense in financial services and Stephanie describes the challenges in running a good affiliate program. Lastly, she gives us some tricks of the trade for financial firms looking to get into affiliate market.

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

We're doing a deeper dive throughout this month on banking as a service. Like our previous exploration into data aggregation, banking as a service underpins much of what's exciting going on right now in financial services. Open banking is happening — it's just not coming from the big name brand banks. Banking as a service firms are opening up the banking technology stack so that any finance, retail, or travel app can offer financial services without the headache of becoming a bank.

Oracle's ERP, Netsuite is also a major player here. As a leading cloud system of record for midmarket and growth businesses, NetSuite has its own banking as a service offering which enables banks to deliver financial services where their customers reside — in the ERP. Major financial institutions like JPMorgan, Visa, and the Marco Polo Network are connected to Netsuite's BaaS offering.

Scott Dersken is the senior director of business development and SuiteCloud evangelist at Oracle's Netsuite. We talk about how finance is everywhere and why banks and their customers are choosing to collaborate on top of NetSuite. Netsuite launched its BaaS solution just a few months ago and Scott shares some of the early work and use cases of the platform.

Scott Dersken is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.