Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Climate change awareness is growing, and it’s starting to bring more capital along with it. New investment prospects, paired with pressures coming from the public and regulators, are driving up interest in sustainable investing. Today we are chatting with Trenton Allen, CEO of Sustainable Capital Advisors, a DC-based financial advisory firm serving the sustainable infrastructure industry. Trenton is an expert in energy and capital markets, and leads the firm's efforts behind connecting developers and capital providers to support global sustainable infrastructure projects. He has lots of insightful things to share with us, so let’s dive right in.

With consumers continuing to take a digital-first approach to everything from shopping to dating and investing, fraudsters are finding new and innovative ways to commit fraud. Traditionally, when a person would walk into a bank branch to open an account, they would need multiple forms of identification. But online, customer onboarding has turned into a riskier process for banks and consumer fintechs, with fraudsters trying to take advantage of their systems. Reducing the stress of fraud allows for a more streamlined application process, making it easier for consumers to get approved for a loan or bank account. This aspect also has implications for groups of consumers that previously had a hard time accessing credit or other types of financial products and services, as banks can verify the applicant in a way they weren’t able to before. I talk about this today with my guests Kimberly Sutherland, vice president of fraud and identity strategy at LexisNexis Risk Solutions and John Buzzard, Lead Analyst, Fraud & Security at Javelin Strategy & Research.

The following was produced by Tearsheet Studios. We worked with payments provider Fiserv to create a podcast series about open finance and the work of empowering fintechs, brands, and FIs to collaborate and innovate together. In our second conversation in the series, we’re speaking with Frank Sanchez, vice chairman of Fiserv, and co-founder of Finxact. We talk about the promise and challenges with next generation cores, how fintechs are leveraging them in pushing open finance forward, what sets them apart from legacy banking cores, and what innovations we can anticipate in the near future.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m your host, Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller. There’s a reason B2B payments hasn’t been solved. It’s so complicated – the need for different terms, payment forms, approvals and workflows makes it damn hard to automate and digitize. So to really get at the heart of B2B payments, you have to first start with the quoting and invoicing process – payments come later. That’s just what Jiga is doing for the manufacturing sector. The SaaS company has zeroed in on improving the work that goes into everything that comes before payments in manufacturing – embedded payments is just the next piece. Jiga’s co-founder and CEO Adar Hay joins us on the podcast today to discuss the evolution of his early stage company. From the pandemic-era genesis story, we move on to how the firm’s product supports the different players in the manufacturing value chain through payments. Adar Hay is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Last week we wrapped our first Banking on the Planet conference, we had a great lineup and it was really a lot of fun. If you missed it, all the session videos are available to watch for free here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHAcPK-SOiNXjjUtN4qmQmfcL1XWApQdK. And now we’re on to our next event, this time finally in person! We are holding Tearsheet's Power of Payments Conference on September 15th, 2022 at Current, Chelsea Piers, NYC We will bring together the top professionals and brands in the payments space to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by an undeniable need to stay ahead of the curve of a rapidly changing landscape. We have a great lineup here as well, so make sure to check it out by clicking on this link: https://bit.ly/3b1pyLF Moving on to today’s podcast episode, we are talking about financial equity and how today’s system is simply still discriminatory. Sustainable finance means inclusive and non-biased finance, allowing equal opportunities for everyone, which is why I want to explore this topic today. My guest is Seke Ballard the founder and CEO of BetaBank, a digital black-owned bank built to serve SMBs equally, aiming to fill the gap left behind by traditional banks.

This week is episode 15 of the Acquire Podcast, where I’m speaking with a company who managed to make the impossible possible, and by that I mean – make taxes fun and dare we say, sexy. I have with me Matthieu Silberstein, VP of creative marketing at Lili -- a banking provider for freelancers, from side hustlers to small businesses. I invited Matthieu to speak to us about launching the campaign for Lili’s Tax Optimizer, their latest product, that helps freelancers understand and manage the annual tax filing process. Listen to our conversation about the creative and marketing thought process in the before, during, and now after the launch of the campaign and a truly remarkable effort to make taxes fun, and of course – how all of this plays into Lili’s brand at large. Oh, and coming up next month, September 15th, is our first in-person event in a long time, Tearsheet's Power of Payments Conference at Current, Chelsea Piers, NYC. Register here: https://bit.ly/3vhaL6v

Happy to introduce Tearsheet's Power of Payments Conference on September 15th, 2022 at Current, Chelsea Piers, NYC. We will bring together the top professionals and brands in the payments space to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by an undeniable need to stay ahead of the curve of a rapidly changing landscape. To be among those few special decision makers, click here to apply for tickets: https://bit.ly/3PyR56l Increasing competition is incentivizing banks to digitize and upgrade their commercial and SMB infrastructure, and various companies are coming in with software products to help them bridge this gap. Listen in for a conversation on how banks can effectively compete in the SMB sector currently, and the role of digitization in this whole equation. Joining me today are Paul Margarites, Head of U.S. Commercial Digital Platforms at TD Bank and Kirk Coleman, Chief Banking Officer at Q2.

For today's episode, I’m speaking with Matt Oppenheimer, co-founder and CEO of Remitly, an online remittance service based in Seattle that offers international money transfers to over 135 countries. He talks about the evolution of the remittance industry over the last decade, the changing needs of Remitly's customers, the potential role of crypto in remittances, and the future of global money movement. Oh, and we’re finally out of Zoom and back into the real world. We’re holding Tearsheet’s Power of Payments Conference on September 15 this year at Current, Chelsea Piers, New York City. Register here: https://bit.ly/3cEIG2G

The following was produced by Tearsheet Studios. We worked with payments provider Fiserv to create a podcast series about open finance and the work of empowering fintechs, brands, and FIs to collaborate and innovate together. In our first conversation in the series, we’re speaking with Sunil Sachdev, SVP and head of fintech at Fiserv, about where we are on the open finance journey, the technologies under the hood that are helping to enable the evolution, the potential hurdles to look out for, and what’s next.

This week on the Acquire Podcast, we’re joined by Erika White, VP of marketing and communications at Affirm. We spoke about building out a cheeky millennial-esque ad campaign, creating the flywheel effect through strong partner marketing, and some of the challenges and opportunities that come with marketing BNPL. Oh, and after two long years of pandemic, isolation, and general social weirdness –- Tearsheet is finally getting out of the screens and coming into the real world. Come September 15th, we’ll be holding our first in-person event in a long time, Tearsheet's Power of Payments Conference at Current, Chelsea Piers, NYC. Spaces are limited, register here: https://bit.ly/3vhaL6v

Patch is an API-based solution enabling companies to embed carbon footprint estimation and removal directly into their digital products and experiences. Today I’m talking to its CEO Brennan Spellacy to tell us how Patch works, as well as his insights on the whole carbon offsetting market, which has grown tremendously over the past few years, attracting a lot of interest. While it’s not a central solution to the wider problem of climate change, carbon offsetting an important piece of the puzzle, so tune in to find out how it all works.

The following was produced by Tearsheet Studios in partnership with embedded finance platform Helix by Q2. In our conversation with Ahon Sarkar, GM of Helix, we talk about what it takes for companies to succeed in offering Banking as a Service today. We break down all the important questions they must ask themselves, like: How to make sure your company should even be thinking about doing banking; Five core traits common to all the companies that succeed in Banking as a Service; How to prepare for jumping into the process and be ready for the expected unknowns; What to consider when choosing the right technology and banking partners; And, we wrapped up with a sneak peak of what Helix is busy doing and will be getting into the rest of the year.

Today we’re talking about crypto lending – many crypto holders out there don’t plan on spending it or cashing out, and now they can earn pretty high yields on their crypto assets, which baffle many folks in traditional finance. My guests today are Matt Ballensweig, managing director and co-head of trading and lending at Genesis, and Shannon Allmon, General Manager of Retail at BlockFi. Genesis and BlockFi are both some of the biggest centralized lending platforms out there, so tune in to find out how the crypto market evolved into offering retail and institutional investors the possibility to lend with crypto assets as collateral.

Today’s episode is about building financial literacy, both as a solution to a financially stressed America, and as a medium for branding and marketing. A few fintechs do this well, and Stash is one of them. Stash is a personal finance app that aims to make investing accessible to the 99% (of Americans). And to get people investing, they need to first understand the basics of their financial picture. I’ve got the chance to virtually sit down with Stash’s CMO, Dale Sperling, to pick her brain about how, without needing to spend huge budgets, Stash uses creativity, data, and the right partnerships, to develop and strengthen Stash’s brand mission of financial literacy across America – in their campaign Stash101 and beyond.

Welcome back to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and in today’s episode, we discuss how digital payments are making it easier for young consumers to overspend, and how the global microchip shortage is affecting the payments industry. We also talk about Revolut’s first venture into in-store payments with the Revolut Reader, as well as recent research from Marqeta that shows a growing level of consumer trust in mobile wallets.