The Headless Banking Podcast

Nico is a wizard when it comes to building fintech solutions, understanding regulation, and navigating difficult partnerships with Sponsor Banks. It was a joy to have him on and to hear how Clair was built from the ground up. Hope you all enjoy the episode.

In this episode of The Headless Banking Podcast, Chris interviews Bernardo Brites, co-founder and CEO of trace financial, a company that provides international payments, FX, and multiple use bank accounts to help globalize LATAM businesses. Bernardo talks about his journey through FinTech, starting a money transfer business, and the evolution of their products.

This episode was recorded at a very interesting time when SVB had sounded the alarm. Bernardo and his team worked around the clock to help businesses that were stuck during this time. Interestingly enough, SVB banked 90% of LATAM businesses holding USD accounts.

Tune in to hear how they accomplished this and much more!

In this episode of The Headless Banking Podcast, Jeff interviews Brian Karimi-Pashaki, Head of Partnerships at Pinwheel, a company that provides income verification, direct deposit switching, and payroll data connectivity for FinTech & banks. Brian talks about his background in FinTech, starting at Goldman Sachs and buying third-party technology to build a Marcus. He also discusses the challenges of building new products inside a larger company, as well as the importance of AI assistants in the future of the financial industry.

Diving into Pinwheel, Brian explains that the company is an API layer that sits in front of payroll systems, similar to Twilio and Plaid for telecommunications and banking data, respectively. By making payroll data accessible through their API, Pinwheel enables developers to build products and services that utilize this information. Examples include early access to wages, income and employment verification for loans and apartments, and more efficient and secure data sharing between employers and landlords.

Overall, Pinwheel is changing the way payroll data is accessed and utilized, opening up new possibilities for the industry and beyond.

How do international entities allow their customers to get access to the US market? With the uncertainty of markets and currencies, Alpaca is facilitating the pipes for companies to expand their offerings by stretching out their technology globally to give access as they were located in the US.

I sat down with Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder and CEO of Alpaca, to discuss how they set this up and tirelessly on the grind to expand into new markets. We discussed why this is important and their vision of globalizing the US market into new regions. Tune in to also hear about the awesome event they threw down here in Austin that included real life Alpacas!

Thanks Yoshi!

In a world dominated by traditional brokerage firms, eToro stands out as a disruptor in the financial services industry. Founded in 2007, eToro offers a unique social trading platform that has attracted millions of users worldwide. The company's co-founder, Ronen Assia, has been instrumental in shaping eToro's vision and growth.

eToro's rise is a testament to the power of disruption and innovation in the financial services industry. By putting the user experience at the forefront and making trading a social experience, eToro has transformed the way people invest and trade.

It was a joy to speak with Ronen in this episode, hope you enjoy it!

I had the pleasure of speaking with Joseph Akintolayo, Founder and CEO of Deposits, the turn key solution for banks and brands to deliver experiences to customers without the need for technological expertise. Building personalized user experiences do not need to be massive cost and take a year to build. Joseph and his team are helping programs and FI’s get to market quick without breaking the bank (pun intended)! We get into how FI’s can leverage Deposits tech stack, brands can get to market with a partner bank, or not, and the path forward for banks to compete with other Fintech competitors.

Tune in and enjoy!

If you haven’t yet heard of Sardine or you have but you aren’t sure what they do then you need to listen to this episode where I chat with Aditya Goel, Co-Founder of Sardine. Essentially Aditya & team have built the one-stop shop for creating the foundation of a Fintech company. They are tackling the most difficult problems that many folks consider boring but are absolutely foundational to the success of a Fintech. The key pillars of any great fintech are Onboarding, Risk, Fraud, and Payments Ops. Rather than building these all yourself or blending together 2, 3, or 4 partners a founder can get a rapid start by just using Sardine.Hope you all enjoy it!

A good friend and former colleague, Chris D’Antuono, will be hosting new episodes of the Pod. Can’t wait for his interviews with some great thought leaders in the Fintech world! In this episode, we give a brief background on Chris, talk about the stealth fintech he is building, some of the challenges he faced, and how he was able to overcome them.

Jared Silvers (Fireblocks) & Asaad Faquir (Crowe) both old friends & previous guests on the show join me to unpack what happened with FTX, what it means for the crypto industry in 2023, and why BTC is the only true decentralized currency vs altcoins, CBDCs, etc.

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I was fortunate to interview Ben Borodach, Co-Founder, of April and I was amazed by what he and the team have created. The company's vision is to democratize access to the tax code, enabling any company to develop and incorporate tax features and filing into their application. The platform today focuses on helping people file their taxes simply & seamlessly with aims to disrupt the biggest players in the space such as TurboTax and TaxAct that have not innovated much over the last 5 to 10 years. However, April plans to go much further in educating employees on how best to fill in their tax forms, specifically the black box that is a W-4, where everyone has anxiety. “Wait do I fill in a 0 or a 1? Maybe I should file my dependents!?! AHHHHH!” We’ve all had this feeling. April will provide tax estimates so that employees will be able to optimize their W-4 withholdings for their situations. Whether that is reducing withholdings so they can keep more money in their pocket or in the odd case maybe they want to increase their withholdings as a savings mechanism. In either case, April is providing a huge leap forward for consumer tax filing experiences. Hope you all enjoy the episode.

About Ben:

Ben has spent his career working at the intersection of finance and technology. He helped scale Team8 Group into a multi-hundred million AUM fund, and initiated and helped sell several FinTech companies to PayPal and BitSight, among others. During his tenure at Team8, Ben also spearheaded the firm's strategy arm and its US office as well as launched an award-winning cyber ETF and Ph.D. program. He has also been an advisor and contributor to the World Economic Forum on issues relating to central bank digital currencies. Before joining Team8, Ben was a FinTech strategist at Deloitte Consulting, where he advised the largest US banks and insurers on their business, technology, M&A, and venture strategies. .