Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

My guest today is Mathias Wikstrom, CEO of Doconomy. Doconomy provides data services that help businesses monitor and assess their environmental footprint based on transactional and financial data. Consumers can find out the footprint of their lifestyle choices, brands can calculate their product’s footprint. And they’re also working to develop a tool that enables banks to aggregate the information provided to their consumers – this is really important because it means helping banks report on their ESG impact, by harnessing the data and insights from their total consumer credit portfolio. Me and Mathias had a really awesome conversation, so tune in for more on climate data, how it helps us understand our impact on the world and how the financial system can facilitate a net zero economy

Today we’re talking about how banks are digitizing their commercial lending operations. If consumer lines took the front seat when it comes to innovation and digitization, commercial lines have been waiting quietly in the backseat but are now next to be brought forward with the latest technologies and underwriting efficiencies. My guests today are Dan O’Malley, CEO of Numerated, a SaaS digital loan origination system, and Peter Grant, the President of OakNorth, which aims to transform commercial lending with its Credit Intelligence software product.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. I find it fascinating to hear how some of the largest FIs handle emerging technologies. Fidelity, for example, has the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, where it tests and assesses new tech, like the metaverse and blockchain. It’s almost like Fidelity’s skunkworks R&D arm. Today on our program I have Adam Schouela, the head of emerging technology at the center. Our discussion spans different technologies, emerging use cases, and sheds some light on how Fidelity thinks about its priorities and customers out into the future. We talk about the experiments Adam and Co. have done around blockchain technology, around the metaverse, and where it sees opportunities and just as importantly, where it doesn’t see opportunities. Adam Schouela is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Power of Payments podcast. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and as you’ve probably noticed by now, we decided to do a rebrand! We think this new title for the podcast is shorter and snappier, and it also matches the name of our upcoming Power of Payments conference, which will be Tearsheet’s first conference on payments, as well as our first-ever in-person event. It’ll be held in New York on September 15. Today, I’m speaking with Bar Geron, co-founder and CEO at Balance. Balance is an Israeli startup that claims to be the first B2B ecommerce payments platform that offers a consumer-like checkout experience for merchants and marketplaces. In our conversation, Bar touched upon a number of topics, including the importance of bringing B2B payments online and how that’s linked with global supply chain issues, BNPL for business, as well as other B2C trends that are slowly being adopted in B2B transactions.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller, Tearsheet's editor in chief. For this episode, I’m joined by Darren Parslow, global head of Visa Business Solutions.  Darren and I chat about the innovation in the B2B payments space over the last few years. We discuss how Visa helps SMBs enhance their money flow operations. Lastly, we look to the future and I ask Darren what advice he would give to small businesses looking to digitize operations to better manage cashflow and expand payments beyond the point of sale to grow their businesses. Here's my conversation with Darren.

On today’s episode I’ve got the pleasure of speaking to a company I’ve been fangirling over for quite a while (who even fangirls over a company in the financial space? but it’s true). When I first heard of Earnin, a simple Google search led me to their many Facebook groups featuring a huge community of everyday people sharing their financial struggles and supporting one another in ways big and small –- despite being total strangers on the internet. I invited Brittanie Williams, Earnin’s CMO, to talk to us about building a strong and truly community-based brand, building with customers for customers, and flipping the script on what we think when we talk about the millions of people who live paycheck to paycheck.

Today we’re talking about banks and their role in the climate crisis. Big banks historically supported the global fossil fuel industry through massive amounts of funding, and now they’re being pressured to change. To help me unpack this I’ve called Chris Skinner, a financial technology expert, global commentator, bestselling author of multiple books and the website The Finanser. Chris is out with a new book, called Digital For Good, which explores how financial systems influence the economy, the purpose of banks, and how they impact society and the planet.

Banks and fintechs are looking to improve their lending operations - and increasingly, this means focusing on their customer relationship, while leaving the math to external partners. These partners offer lending software-as-a-service, and that's what we'll be talking about this episode. Joining our conversation we have Adam Huges, who’s the CEO of Amount and Rohit Mittal, the chief executive of Stilt.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. Tearsheet's Iulia Ciutina and Rebecca Cohen both traveled to Money 20/20 Europe earlier this month. They sat down with editor Zack Miller to discuss what they saw, learned, and experienced.

Welcome back to Power of Payments. I’m your host Ismail Umar, and in today’s episode, we talk about Klarna and the future of BNPL, PayZen’s ‘Care Now, Pay Later’ solution, and Mastercard’s recently announced ‘Smile to Pay’ system.

On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Scott Goodson, founder and CEO of StrawberryFrog, a marketing agency that works with some of the largest financial brands in the industry. I invited Scott to talk to us about his recent book: Activate Brand Purpose: How to Harness the Power of Movements to Transform Your Company. Ultimately, though, our conversation ended up covering much more: doing marketing with soul and intention, the shifting pyramid of power where the boss is no longer God, and the power of truly taking on corporate responsibility.

Green finance is not just about investing in clean energy or carbon sequestration. The core of the problem is sustainability - how to create financial systems that enable people to thrive over the long term. A lot of the focus today goes to the E in ESG investing, which represents the environmental factor, and the latter two parts - Social and Governance - are often overlooked. Today I’d like to explore what the S in ESG stands for. My guest is Timothy Flacke, who is the co-founder and executive director of Commonwealth, a national nonprofit helping the financially vulnerable build security.

Today we’ll be talking about the small and medium sized business sector and how it’s becoming increasingly supported by digital lenders. Securing loans from traditional banks is very tough for SMBs – it’s a long and complicated process and it’s not that likely they’ll get the cash they need – only 15% of small business applications get approved at big banks, for example. This is another reason why digital players like Square and PayPal are able to be some of the largest SMB lenders in the US, giving out billions of dollars in loans to the small business sector in 2021. And THAT is a reason why the two companies are my guests today - I talk to Luke Voiles, general manager at Square Banking, and Bernardo Martinez, vice president of Global Merchant Lending at PayPal - to hear their thoughts on small business lending.

Today’s guest is Nikhil Behl – the CMO of FICO. FICO was founded way back in 1956, making it one of the oldest standing firms in the financial industry. Today we’ll talk about how it manages to keep its relevance and purpose in today’s world. Every American knows about FICO scores, and most of us are usually confused, and potentially worried, by our three-digit score. But it wasn't meant this way. The credit scoring system, the lending landscape around it, and the financial systems at large have been changing and will continue to change. And FICO is not planning to stay behind.

Green finance is all about what the finance industry is doing to address climate change - we know business as usual isn’t sustainable, so we are essentially in the middle of a transition towards reaching net zero. But this is not an easy thing to do, it involves collaborations between many institutions, companies and people - so let’s talk about how to get there. In light of this, my very first guest on this podcast is Aspiration CEO Andrei Cherny. Aspiration is a fintech that wants to help customers use their deposits for sustainable investments and gives them the option to offset their carbon footprint - a fundamentally different strategy from traditional banks.