Wharton FinTech Podcast

In today’s episode, Joshua Benadiva hosts Asaf Horesh, Managing Partner at Vintage Investment Partners. Asaf recently co-led a $200m raise for Vintage's new growth fund. In this episode, he discusses the importance of building meaningful relationships in venture and the unique structure of Vintage's investment strategies. He explains the structure and metrics of Vintage's data platform and shares insights on trends in early-stage fintech investments. Asaf also discusses the challenges faced by companies with valuation issues and the targeting of specific verticals in the secondary market. He offers advice for those looking to grow their careers in venture and fintech.

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Russell Matambo hosts Wemimo Abbey and Samir Goel, co-CEOs and co-founders of Esusu, a leading Fintech platform that reports on-time rental payments to credit bureaus so renters can build credit while building owners and property managers maximise their portfolio health.

They discuss how Esusu is expanding financial access in the US, Esusu’s growing pains and lessons learnt along the way, Samir and Wemimo’s principled and purposeful leadership as Co-CEOs, and much more!

About Wemimo and Samir:

Wemimo Abbey and Samir Goel are co-CEOs and co-founders of Esusu. Esusu is the leading Fintech platform providing rent reporting, property management analytics, and rental assistance to unlock financial access and stability for renters and property owners in the US. In 2023 alone, Esusu unlocked $21.9 Billion in new credit activity for Esusu renters, by enabling 107,000 renters establish credit score for the first time while helping many more with existing credit scores increase theirs by at least 36 points. Most recently, Esusu was valued at $1 billion in their $130 million Series B round.

Prior to Esusu, both Samir and Wemimo founded social enterprises and had successful corporate careers. Samir Co-Founded Transfernation, a nationally recognized non-profit that used technology to direct over 5 million pounds of excess food to nearly 2.5 million people in underserved communities across New York City. Wemimo on the other hand founded Clean Water for Everyone, a global social venture providing affordable access to clean water for 250,000+ people in six countries. He also founded a data analytics company gathering data on NGOs operating in Africa, which was acquired in 2014.

Collectively Wemimo and Samir have been featured in over a dozen major business publications including but not limited to the 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30, the 2022 Fortune 40 Under 40 and the 2023 TIME 100 lists.

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As always, for more Fintech insights and opportunities to collaborate, please find us below:

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Kailee Costello hosts Jack Zhang, the CEO and co-founder of Airwallex. Airwallex is revolutionizing the way that businesses operate globally; their financial infrastructure provides a modern tech stack for businesses of all sizes to operate internationally without the challenges of the current global financial system.

They discuss:

- Airwallex’s growth story

- How Airwallex built their global money movement infrastructure

- AI opportunities Airwallex is pursuing, including using LLMs to improve KYC and onboarding processes

- Why Jack does not expect crypto to play a significant role in cross-border payments

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In today’s episode, Joshua Benadiva hosts Bobby Morrison, Chief Revenue Officer at Shopify. Bobby was previously the Chief Revenue Officer at Intuit and a Senior Vice President at Verizon.

In this episode you will hear about:

- What makes Shopify unique and so fast-paced

- Bobby's vision for the future of enterprise e-commerce

- Shopify's product-led growth motion with enterprise e-commerce

- Using Shop Pay, highest converting checkout experience, to illustrate the value of Shopify with little integration costs

- How Shopify thinks about partnerships vs. building features themselves, what they call "main quests" vs "side-quests"

- Building out omni-channel features and working alongside ERPs

- Why massive brands are moving over to Shopify

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Matt Watson, Origin Co-Founder and CEO - Financial Advice for Everyone by Wharton Fintech Podcast

In our final episode of 2023, Trevor Prince sits down with Tommy Nicholas, the Co-Founder and CEO of Alloy. Alloy is a platform that provides banks and FinTechs with a unified operating system for risk, fraud, and credit evaluation and monitoring in retail financial services.

In this episode, Tommy discusses his background, Alloy’s business model and what it took to scale the company, Tommy’s outlook on Alloy and FinTech heading into 2024, and much more.

About Tommy Nicholas:

Tommy has served as the CEO of Alloy since co-founding the company in 2015. Prior to Alloy, was the Head of Product at Knox Payments, and spent time as a software developer. He was born and raised in Richmond, VA, and graduated from the University of Virginia, where he received a Bachelor’s in History and African American Studies.

In previous episodes we’ve touched on emerging fintech payments products that are attempting to take a piece of the payments pie. Today, we’re going to talk about Fiserv with Sunil Sachdev on the fintech giants’ approach to Embedded Finance and the changing paradigm in payments.

About Sunil Sachdev:

Sunil is a global fintech executive with a significant breadth of experience in banking, acquiring, DeFi and payments at companies such as American Express, Meed, Pershing and Fiserv. He has worked at Fiserv for nearly a decade in various roles and geographies, including leading the Fiserv payments business in international markets when Fiserv partnered with SWIFT to launch real-time payments in Australia.

In recent years, he headed up the U.S. Community Bank segment for Fiserv before taking on a new role leading the Fintech and Growth segment to build out Fiserv’s self-service, low-code services and extend the dual-core and banking-as-a-service capabilities from Fiserv. These diverse experiences have helped deepen his appreciation for the power of collaboration between financial institutions, fintechs, brands and other businesses looking to extend banking and payment capabilities to their customers around the world.

In 2023, Sunil was tapped to stand up the Embedded Finance business with true horizontal accountability across banking, merchant acquiring and issuing businesses at Fiserv. Sunil and his team leverage the full power of Fiserv for the benefit of its clients, including financial institutions, brands, ISVs, merchants and fintechs.

About Fiserv:

Fiserv, Inc. (NYSE: FI), a Fortune 500 company, aspires to move money and information in a way that moves the world. As a global leader in payments and financial technology, the company helps clients achieve best-in-class results through a commitment to innovation and excellence in areas including account processing and digital banking solutions; card issuer processing and network services; payments; e-commerce; merchant acquiring and processing; and the Clover® cloud-based point-of-sale and business management platform.

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In today’s episode, Kailee Costello hosts David Brear, the CEO and co-founder of 11:FS and one of the hosts of the Fintech Insider podcast.

In today’s episode, David shares his insights on 3 topics:

1. How digital technologies and fintechs have unleashed innovation in commercial banking. We talk about the unmet needs of SMEs and why David expects to see a transition to more service-based models in the future.

2. The banking battlefield. The competitive landscape is shifting from being about the “number of customers you can acquire” to a landscape where digital is increasingly important. We discussed strategies that incumbent banks can take to stay competitive.

3. How fintech and financial ecosystems differ across different global markets. We spoke about the impact of generational and cultural differences, and why David expects there to be different winners in different regions.

Check out the 11:FS podcast ‘Fintech Insider’: https://content.11fs.com/podcasts/fintech-insider

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Russell Matambo hosts Henry Ward, CEO and co-founder of Carta, a global equity management platform on a mission to unlock the power of equity ownership for more people in more places.

They discuss Henry’s entrepreneurial journey, the challenges of simultaneously innovating and scaling a company, Carta’s mission to democratise ownership, and much more!

About Henry:

Henry is the CEO and co-founder of Carta. Carta manages over three trillion dollars in equity for over two million people globally. The company is trusted by more than 40,000 companies, and over 7,000 funds and SPVs to manage cap tables, compensation, valuations, liquidity, and more. Prior to Carta, Henry was founder and CEO of Secondsight, a portfolio optimization platform for retail investors. He also held leadership positions at software companies including Reddwerks Inc. and BetweenMarkets. Henry graduated from the University of Michigan with a BGS in Mathematics and Computer Science and holds an MSC in Market Finance from EDHEC Business School.

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As always, for more Fintech insights and opportunities to collaborate, please find us below:

WFT LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/wharton-fintech-club/

WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech

WFT Blog: medium.com/wharton-fintech

WFT Home: www.whartonfintech.org

Russell's LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/russell-matambo-cfa-a5900039/

Russell Matambo hosts Serigne Dioum, Group CEO of MTN Fintech, an African mobile financial services platform and subsidiary of MTN, Africa’s largest mobile network operator. With a footprint of 16 countries, over 69 million customers, and an annual transaction value of over US$220 billion, MTN Fintech is among the largest mobile financial services platforms in Africa.

They discuss MTN’s ambition to scale Africa’s largest fintech platform, the strategic importance of carving out MTN Fintech and its partnership with Mastercard, and much more!

About Serigne:

Serigne Dioum is the Group CEO of MTN Fintech. Prior to this, Serigne was the MTN Group Executive for Mobile Financial Services. Serigne joined the MTN Group in September 2013, and has since then been responsible for driving MTN Mobile Money (MoMo) and related mobile financial services products and

services across the MTN footprint. Serigne is passionate about financial inclusion and is spearheading MTN’s ambition to build Africa’s largest fintech platform, accelerating economic and social development through digital innovations for the benefit of citizens across the continent and beyond. Prior to joining MTN, Serigne headed Orange Money Skill Centre from 2008 to 2010 where he coordinated the launch of Orange Money in several Orange affiliates. Serigne holds a qualification in Telecommunications Engineering from the French institution ENST Bretagne.

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As always, for more Fintech insights and opportunities to collaborate, please find us below:

WFT LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/wharton-fintech-club/

WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech

WFT Blog: medium.com/wharton-fintech

WFT Home: www.whartonfintech.org

Russell's LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/russell-matambo-cfa-a5900039/