Welcome back to the Fintech AI Series!

Today’s episode dives deep into one of the most critical topics in both Fintech and AI—Compliance. We’re joined by two amazing guests: Reggie Young, Chief of Staff at Lithic, and Jesse Reiss, CTO and Co-founder of Hummingbird.

Between Reggie’s legal background and Jesse’s technical expertise, this episode offers a unique and practical look at how regulated companies are approaching AI, from internal tooling to external regulation, and everything in between.

Whether you’re building in Fintech, managing risk, or just trying to make sense of your company’s AI policy, you’re going to get a ton out of this one. Don’t forget to rate, follow, and share wherever you get your podcasts. Let’s get into it!

Thanks to And thanks to ⁠Paddle⁠ and ⁠Fundbox⁠ for sponsoring this episode!

Paddle operate as the Merchant of Record (MoR) for digital products, managing payments localization, fraud prevention, retention logic, customer billing support, and complying with every local privacy law and sales tax rule on your behalf.

And with over a decade of experience, Fundbox delivers customizable credit solutions including invoice financing, lines of credit, term loans, payroll protection, and more.

In March, we traveled to the inaugural HumanX conference in Las Vegas to meet founders, builders, and investors at the bleeding edge of AI. The conference was a great success, and we're excited for it to relocate to San Francisco next April.

While at the conference, I had the chance to sit down with Shannon Scott, SVP and Global Head of Product at Airwallex. Airwallex is the global payments and financial platform for modern businesses. Founded in Melbourne in 2015, Airwallex has become a dominant global player in financial infrastructure, serving some of the world's largest cross-border companies like Canva, Brex, Navan, Rippling, SHEIN, and more. Airwallex was last valued at $5.6Bn in 2022 and is backed by investors such as Sequoia, Index, Tencent, Salesforce Ventures, Lone Pine, Greenoaks, Mastercard, and more.

In this episode, Shannon and I discuss:

• His transition from Palantir to Airwallex and lessons learned from Silicon Valley culture
• Airwallex's global product suite and vision for building a global financial platform through products like multi-currency wallets and the new 'Airwallex Spend'
• Airwallex's use of AI in fraud management, customer onboarding, and process automation
• Scaling great teams in fintech

And much more. Enjoy the show.

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Airwallex is a leading global payments and financial platform for modern businesses, offering trusted solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, treasury, and spend management to embedded finance. With our proprietary infrastructure, Airwallex takes the friction out of global payments and financial operations, empowering businesses of all sizes to unlock new opportunities and grow beyond borders. Proudly founded in Melbourne, Airwallex supports over 150,000 businesses globally and is trusted by brands such as Brex, Canva, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more.

Shannon Scott is SVP, Global Head of Product at Airwallex. Shannon is responsible for product strategy and delivery across all Airwallex domains including card issuing, online payments, business accounts, and platform infrastructure. He was an early employee of Palantir Technologies, where he founded Palantir's international operations in both Australia-New Zealand and Europe. He was responsible for building out the initial business development and delivery teams in both regions, where clients spanned both government and large commercial enterprises. Shannon has a combined degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University or Melbourne and has focused on the intersection of software engineering and technical business development throughout his career, including in an advisory capacity to numerous Australian startups.

Ryan Zauk is the Host of the This Month in Fintech Podcast and Bay Area lead for the broader This Week in Fintech platform. In his day job, Ryan is an investor at OMERS Ventures, the direct investing arm of one of the world’s largest pension plans with over $130Bn in net assets. Prior to OMERS, he worked in Morgan Stanley’s Tech Investment Banking team focused on M&A and capital markets. He is based in the Bay Area. You can find him on Linkedin or Twitter.

In March, we traveled to the inaugural HumanX conference in Las Vegas to meet founders, builders, and investors at the bleeding edge of AI. The conference was a great gathering of AI leaders, and we're excited for it to relocate to San Francisco next April.

While at the conference, I had the chance to sit down with May Habib, Co-Founder and CEO of Writer. If you've been around AI x FS over the last few years, or drive the 101, you've likely come across Writer.

Writer is the leading Gen-AI platform for enterprises, and has been one of the few AI companies to find repeatable, scaled success with the enterprise. They help large enterprises deploy secure + reliable AI applications and agents that transform mission-critical workflows.

Writer’s platform is supported by Palmyra – Writer’s state-of-the-art family of LLMs – alongside its industry-leading graph-based RAG, customizable AI guardrails, and suite of development tools. Palmyra LLMs include one of the world’s highest-benchmarked frontier models, topping leaderboards for natural language understanding and generation, as well as top specialized models in finance and healthcare.

Their customer list speaks for itself, including household names like Vanguard, Salesforce, Qualcomm, Accenture, Franklin Templeton, Intuit, Dropbox, Hubspot, Prudential, L'Oreal, and the list goes on...

When you meet May, you can see why. She is a phenomenal leader, communicator, and executor who lays out why Writer's full-stack technology and deep appreciation for how large enterprises function allow them to have such success.

Writer is fresh off a $200M Series C valuing the company at $1.9Bn. They are supported by investors including ICONIQ, Radical, Premji Invest, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, Workday Ventures, Insight, Vanguard, and others...quite a long list of strategics.

Enjoy the show.

Writer is the full-stack generative AI platform delivering transformative ROI for the world’s leading enterprises. Its fully integrated solution makes it easy to deploy secure and reliable AI agents that automate mission-critical work. Writer’s suite of development tools is supported by Palmyra – Writer’s state-of-the-art family of LLMs – alongside its industry-leading graph-based RAG and customizable AI guardrails. Hundreds of customers like Accenture, Intuit, L’Oreal, Salesforce, Uber, and Vanguard trust Writer to transform the way they work. Founded in 2020, Writer is backed by world-leading investors, including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Insight Partners, Balderton, B Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, WndrCo, and others.

Ryan Zauk is the Host of the This Month in Fintech Podcast and Bay Area lead for the broader This Week in Fintech platform. In his day job, Ryan is an investor at OMERS Ventures, the direct investing arm of one of the world’s largest pension plans with over $130Bn in net assets. Prior to OMERS, he worked in Morgan Stanley’s Tech Investment Banking team focused on M&A and capital markets. He is based in the Bay Area.

You can find him on Linkedin or Twitter.

TWIF founder Nik Milanovic talks to Bits About Money writer ⁠Patrick McKenzie⁠, on topics ranging from agentic payments, to generative AI-enabled fraud, to deposit insurance and the banking crisis of 2023, to the epistemology of synthetic IDs.

The intersection of AI and traditional finance (TradFi) is an angle we haven't explored yet in our AI series. Today, we change that by taking a deep dive into how AI is transforming large financial institutions. Jillian and I are joined by two experts shaping the future of AI in finance:

Stevi Petrelli – Head of Blackstone Innovations Investments, where she leads early-stage strategic investments in cutting-edge financial technology.

John Nay – Founder & CEO of Norm Ai, a company pioneering the use of AI in regulatory compliance and policy automation.

Together, they discuss the real-world applications of AI in financial services, what it takes to successfully sell AI solutions to financial institutions, and why workflow integration, compliance, and data infrastructure are critical to adoption.

They also tackle common misconceptions, explore overhyped vs. underhyped AI trends, and share their insights on where the fintech and AI landscape is headed in 2025.

This is an episode you don’t want to miss. Let’s dive in!

On March 4th, This Week in Fintech had their debut event in Canada, bringing together hundreds of people across the tech ecosystem for an evening of networking, food and drinks, panels from local leaders, and even a magician working the crowd. We had nearly 500 people register when it was all said and done, showing the enthusiasm and depth of the Toronto tech ecosystem.

We don’t know how it took us this long to get to Canada, but we’re glad we did. This will be the first of many…

This episode is the recorded version of our panel featuring Rasha Katabi, Founder & CEO of Brim Financial.

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Brim is a leading fintech infrastructure company transforming the credit card platform and payment automation space. Brim's modular platform and highly scalable product suite fully empowers financial institutions, fintechs, and large international brands to run / evolve their product platforms to meet their customer and market needs. Brim Financial is one of the fastest growing enterprise technology companies, according to Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 in North America. Brim's Credit-Card-as-a-Service platform has been recognized as best-in-class for product capabilities by Aite-Novarica Group in their analysis of global CCaaS providers.

Ryan Zauk is the Host of the This Month in Fintech Podcast and Bay Area lead for the broader This Week in Fintech platform. In his day job, Ryan is an investor on the Ventures team at OMERS, the direct investing arm of one of the world’s largest pension plans with over $130Bn in net assets. Prior to OMERS, he worked in Morgan Stanley’s Tech Investment Banking team focused on M&A and capital markets. He is based in the Bay Area.

You can find him on Linkedin or Twitter.

On March 4th, This Week in Fintech hosted their debut event in Canada, bringing together 150+ people across the tech ecosystem for an evening of networking, panels from local leaders, and even a magician working the crowd.

We had nearly 500 people register, showing the enthusiasm and depth of the Toronto tech ecosystem.

We don’t know how it took us this long to get to Canada, but we’re glad we did. This will be the first of many…

Headlining the event was a live podcast with Adyen’s Head of Canada, Sander Meijers, and Notch CEO Jordan Huck.

Sander, Jordan, and I discussed their rich product offerings for Canadian businesses, how Adyen’s platform has provided Notch with unique structural advantages, how each leader balances local and global perspectives when scaling teams, and more.

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Adyen is a global financial technology platform helping the world’s leading businesses achieve their ambitions faster. Since its founding in 2006, Adyen has built one of the world's leading platforms to help enterprises accept payments, protect revenue, and control their finances. Adyen processed ~$1Tn in transaction volume last year across for companies like Microsoft, McDonalds, Uber, Loreal, Spotify, eBay, Gap and more.

Notch is an accounts receivable automation software, designed to simplify managing invoices and payment collection. With Notch you can automate the entire AR process from invoice creation to payment processing speeding up payment collection (up to 3x faster) and improving cash flow.

Ryan Zauk is the Host of the This Month in Fintech Podcast and Bay Area lead for the broader This Week in Fintech platform. In his day job, Ryan is an investor on the Ventures team at OMERS, the direct investing arm of one of the world’s largest pension plans with over $130Bn in net assets. Prior to OMERS, he worked in Morgan Stanley’s Tech Investment Banking team focused on M&A and capital markets. He is based in the Bay Area.

You can find him on Linkedin or Twitter.

In my latest interview, I spent some time with North's SVP of Product, Preet Patel, to talk about his journey from Citi to AmEx to North, what's changed in the company since he joined (hint: they were previously known as NAB), and how he takes a consumer products mentality to his merchant payments product work at North.

Preet Patel has served as the Senior Vice President of Product Management at North since September 2019, after previously holding the position of Vice President of Product Management.

Prior to his tenure with North, Patel worked at Yapstone, where he led product strategy for significant marketplace partnerships, most notably with HomeAway, enhancing client relations in Austin, TX.

His career also includes high-profile roles with American Express, where Preet held the position of Senior Manager of Product Development, focusing on the development of consumer co-brand card relationships while leading partner negotiations. Additional prior employers also include Elavon and Citi.

Founded in 1992, North builds frictionless payment processing designed to simplify and grow business. They offer comprehensive solutions, from the front door to the back office, that include point of sale (POS) hardware, a fully integrated payment platform, and comprehensive merchant services to manage inventory, employees, and more.
North is re-imagining the payment experience. As a leading payment technology innovator, North has a diversified product platform that provides a modern end-to-end infrastructure to enable globally-preferred payment types. North’s superior solutions deliver seamless payments experiences in mobile, ecommerce, and in-store environments. Serving hundreds of thousands of businesses and with over $100 billion per year in electronic transaction volume, North delivers functional, feature-rich, and frictionless solutions for the evolving merchant economy.

Enjoy the conversation!

In this episode of our Fintech and AI series, Julie and Jillian dive into the evolving world of lending with two industry leaders shaping the space. Tim Li, CEO of LendAPI, and Justin Potts, CTO of Canopy Servicing, break down AI’s impact on everything from underwriting and fraud detection to loan servicing and borrower experience. They explore the regulatory shakeups affecting fintech, the rise of cash flow-based lending, and where AI is still underutilized in credit decisioning. Plus, they share insights on the future of lending, from data portability to fractionalized assets.

And thanks to Method Financial and Fundbox for sponsoring this episode!

Method is an account connectivity solution that powers seamless checkout and loyalty experiences. Visit methodfi.com to learn more!

And with over a decade of experience, Fundbox delivers customizable credit solutions including invoice financing, lines of credit, term loans, payroll protection, and more.

In today's episode, ⁠Ryan Zauk⁠ sits down with global fintech legend Oliver Hughes, Chief International Growth Officer at TBC Bank Group, a London-listed financial + banking services provider in Georgia in Uzbekistan.

Before TBC, Oliver was the CEO of Tinkoff and Head of Russia for Visa. He is also on the Board of Tabby, a leading shopping and financial services player in the Middle East that is allegedly eyeing an IPO after a $160M Series E.

After 25 years at the cutting edge of international fintech, Oliver is taking on what he hopes is his final fintech chapter - scaling TBC Bank Group internationally, starting with Uzbekistan.

I'm sure many of our readers + listeners may be scratching their heads...a fintech pioneer who could choose anywhere in the world to work...chose to dedicate the next decade of his life to TBC Bank Group and Central Asia?

However, as shown throughout his career, Oliver can spot and act on massive trends early. So what does he see here?

TBC Bank Group's momentum in recent years has been remarkable, and the market opportunity in Uzbekistan is much larger than it appears from afar.

Let's take a brief look at the company before getting to the episode:

TBC is the parent co of TBC Bank Georgia and TBC Uzbekistan (where Oliver focuses). 

In Georgia, TBC is the leading financial services group, with almost 40% market share for customer loans and deposits.

Kind of like the traditional bank that helps fund the Uzbekistan story...

Uzbekistan is where the fintech story emerges. In just ~2 years since launch, TBC Uz has reached:

• 50% of the Uzbekistan population
• >100% loan portfolio growth for 2 straight years
• Strong profitability with $41M(!) in net income in 2 years (nearly unbelievable for US fintech)
• A rich product ecosystem (debit card, credit card, MSME banking, etc.)
• Eyes on a third market in the future
• Is fresh off a $37 million raise to continue its push into AI and new product development. The investment came just months after it raised $38.5 million in July

The profitable growth is stellar - one that you don't see replicated elsewhere.

What really interested me was a crude TAM comparison to another notable fintech in the region, Kaspi, which had a major US IPO on the NASDAQ in 2024.

Kaspi is a superapp from Kazakhstan and in 2024 produced roughly $4Bn in revenue growing 30% YoY with 40% net income margin. Those are numbers and scale few companies in the world can manage...and Kazakhstan is a country of only 20 million people.

Uzbekistan's population is nearly 40M people, and Georgia's around 11M - when combined are well over double Kazakhstan's.

As Oliver points out in the episode:

“I'm someone who believes in the thesis that there are overlooked, underloved countries that deserve a lot more attention - You can build viable, scalable businesses with the right execution. It's all down to execution. It's not down to the number of people in the country.”

I think the stage is set...I'll let Oliver share the rest.

Episode Highlights

3:48 Oliver's background and path from Visa to Tinkoff to TBC

6:41 The problems Tinkoff was solving, why it got so large, and the key lessons he learned from scaling it

8:50 An overview of TBC Bank Group: What it does, how it operates, and its key products

13:51 Why Uzbekistan has probably the greatest open banking system in the world, and a fun fact about Uzbekistan's most popular messaging app

20:19 The complementary nature of the 2 Uzbekistani apps: TBC Uz and PayMe

24:20 The near-unbelievably high NPV his team uses to underwrite projects and why it's so effective

27:03 His thoughts on the new wave of mobile sim card efforts / MVNOs by firms like Nubank and Revolut, and infrastructure players like Gigs

31:20 The "Fintech Perplexity" idea and other creative ways his team is experimenting with + deploying in AI

34:17 What their 3rd market might be, and what's ahead for his great team

37:15 Rapid fire round