Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

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  How BILL is rebuilding for the Fortune 5 million and gearing up to take big swings on AI 13.07.2026 29min

  For most small and midsize businesses, financial operations still look a lot like they did a decade ago. Bills get keyed in manually. Receipts pile up. W-9s get chased down at tax time. While the tools have multiplied, the work hasn't gone away. “Most finance teams work in an incredibly manual way,” says Michael Cieri, Chief Product Officer at BILL. “There's a ton of work done by finance professionals that could be automated, and could actually be done better through the use of technology.” The gap between the promise of modern financial software and the day-to-day reality of running the books at a small business is something BILL has spent nearly two decades trying to close. The company processes over 1% of US GDP in payments and has moved more than a trillion dollars across its platform – a scale that gives it both a data advantage and a particular sense of accountability. When you're handling that volume of transactions for the long tail of American businesses, the stakes of getting automation wrong are very high. Cieri joins us on the show to talk through where BILL's product thinking stands today: how Cieri's team decides when to take big swings versus make incremental improvements, how it builds and validates AI features for a high-trust domain.
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  Trust, stablecoins, and the AI margin squeeze:What McKinsey and QED's fintech report means for banks 01.07.2026 39min

  Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast, where we explore financial services together with an eye on technology, innovation, emerging models, and changing expectations. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. Fintech just lived through four distinct ages — pioneers, growth-at-all-costs, the 2021-22 hype cycle, and the brutal reset that followed. Now we're in a fifth: bigger, more profitable, and more disciplined than any version that came before it. Stripe's reportedly eyeing a six-figure-billion IPO. Fintech listings tripled investor appetite this year. And yet talk to anyone who lived through 2021 and they'll tell you this doesn't feel anything like that boom. To make sense of that contradiction, I sat down with the authors of a new joint report from McKinsey and QED Investors — two firms that sit on opposite sides of the table from the fintechs they study. Max Flötotto is a senior partner at McKinsey, where he leads the firm's global retail banking practice and coordinates its fintech work across Europe. Mike Packer is a partner at QED, leading growth-stage investing globally for a firm that's been backing fintech since its earliest days, nearly two decades now. We dig into the report's biggest findings: why the simplest version of banking — collecting deposits, making loans — is structurally at risk if customers start letting their own AI agents shop for the best rate; why fintechs have, for the first time, actually overtaken incumbents on trust in Europe, even as banks have closed much of the product gap; and the massive spread in how seriously banks are actually taking AI, from "talking about thinking about it" to rebuilding their entire operating model around it. We close with each of them picking the one trend, out of six in the report, they think matters most for the next decade. Max, Mike, welcome to the show.
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  How Figure and Method closed the loop on debt consolidation and cut delinquency in half 24.06.2026 23min

  Debt consolidation has always rested on a promise lenders couldn't verify. A borrower takes out a HELOC, says they'll pay off their credit cards, and the lender hands over the cash and hopes for the best. Credit bureau data lags by 30 days. There's no mechanism to confirm the debt actually got retired. And a significant share of consolidation borrowers end up re-accumulating balances — leaving lenders with paper that performed worse than expected and borrowers worse off than before. Figure and Method set out to close that loop. Figure is the largest non-bank HELOC originator in America, a public company on the Nasdaq running a two-sided capital marketplace on blockchain rails. Method is a financial connectivity API that gives lenders real-time access to a borrower's full liability picture — and the ability to pay those liabilities off directly at the moment of funding. Together, they've built what they're calling verified debt consolidation: a closed-loop system where the lender doesn't hope the debt will be paid — they know it will be. Today I'm joined by Mit Shah, co-founder and COO of Method, and Rod Albuyeh, who leads AI at Figure and is something of a boomerang — he was at Figure from 2020 to 2022, left, and returned in January to a company that had transformed around him. We talk about what the data actually shows, what happens when this capability travels across Figure's 380 white-label partners, and whether verified debt consolidation is a premium feature or the future of the category.
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  The bank account is the product: Slash's bet on vertical SMB banking 20.05.2026 26min

  Small business banking has always had a structural problem: the companies that hold your money and the companies that build your financial software have been two different things. One moves the money, the other tracks it, and small business owners are stuck in the gap between them. A new generation of fintechs has been trying to fix that, but most are still building horizontal tools for every business everywhere. The more interesting bet is vertical, going deep into the specific workflows of a particular industry and automating them completely. My guest today is Victor Cardenas, co-founder and CEO of Slash, a business banking platform that started with teenage sneaker resellers and has grown into a $1.4 billion company by doing exactly that — building industry-specific financial products that legacy banks will never prioritize. Slash processes nearly $3 billion in stablecoin payment volume annually, and the company has been doing serious work rethinking how AI fits into both how they operate internally and what their customers experience.
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  How Kudos built a consumer data moat on top of credit card rewards 13.05.2026 28min

  Most people leave money on the table every time they swipe — not because they're careless, but because the credit card rewards ecosystem is genuinely complicated. Thousands of cards, millions of merchants, shifting bonus categories, buried benefits. The promise of AI is that it can do that optimization work invisibly, in the background. Today I'm joined by Tikue Anazodo, co-founder and CEO of Kudos — an AI-powered smart wallet that tells you which card to use at checkout, recommends cards based on your spending habits, and layers on additional rewards on top of what your cards already earn. Kudos has raised over $17 million, is backed by QED Investors, and was named to Forbes' Fintech 50. Tikue, welcome to Tearsheet.
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  Stablecoin infrastructure is rewiring cross-border payments 04.05.2026 23min

  Unlock how stablecoin infrastructure is transforming cross-border payments, global treasury, and enterprise fintech strategy. In this episode, Avinash Chidambaram, Founder & CEO of Cybrid, breaks down how stablecoin rails are becoming production-ready payment infrastructure for fintechs, neobanks, and enterprises seeking faster settlement, lower fees, and programmable global money movement. Discover why regulatory clarity through frameworks like the GENIUS Act and MiCA is accelerating stablecoin adoption, how compliance APIs are simplifying implementation, and why CFOs, treasury leaders, and product teams are shifting from exploration to execution. Key topics include: Stablecoin-powered cross-border supplier payments Real-time global contractor payouts Treasury liquidity management Compliance, KYC, AML, and custody infrastructure Embedded finance and programmable ERP workflows The future of sovereign stablecoins and digital asset regulation How fintechs can operationalize stablecoin strategy today If you're a fintech operator, payments executive, CFO, or enterprise product leader, this conversation offers critical insights into the next generation of international payments infrastructure. Subscribe for more conversations on fintech innovation, digital assets, embedded finance, banking infrastructure, and the future of money. #Stablecoins #CrossBorderPayments #Fintech #DigitalAssets #PaymentsInfrastructure #BlockchainPayments #EmbeddedFinance #TreasuryManagement #Neobanks #CryptoRegulation #GENIUSAct #MiCA #EnterprisePayments #GlobalPayments #Cybrid
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  How Block built a $200 billion credit operation by seeing customers traditional lenders can't 22.04.2026 18min

  The credit system in the US was built on a fundamental assumption: that past borrowing behavior predicts future risk. That assumption has left roughly 100 million Americans essentially invisible to lenders — no score, thin file, or a history that doesn't reflect who they actually are financially today. The result is a system that compounds exclusion, requiring debt to unlock debt, and pricing risk so conservatively for anyone outside the norm that the cost of capital itself becomes a barrier. Juan Hernandez has spent the last decade at Block building lending products for exactly those customers. As head of credit and underwriting, he leads the teams behind Cash App Borrow, Square Loans, and Afterpay — three distinct products serving consumers and small businesses that traditional underwriting models consistently misread or ignore. Block recently crossed $200 billion in credit extended to customers globally. The engine behind that number is a data advantage. By underwriting from first-party signals native to the Cash App and Square ecosystems rather than relying on sparse bureau data, Block has built models that are both more accurate and more inclusive. Hernandez sat down with Tearsheet to talk about how they built a credit operation at that scale, what it takes to serve the underserved responsibly, and where the product suite is heading next.
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  How Huntington modernized without touching the core ft. Qolo 08.04.2026 24min

  The pressure building on commercial banks today comes from several directions at once. Corporate treasurers are younger, more digitally native, and less tolerant of manual reconciliation. Business structures are more complex: A franchisee group running fifty locations needs fifty entities managed cleanly, not fifty separate bank accounts generating a month's worth of reconciliation work. And the banking core, the ledger system that underpins it all, was never designed to flex at this pace. The standard prescription for this problem is core replacement. However, banks are increasingly moving toward augmentation. Rather than replacing the core, banks are building around it, layering modern infrastructure above it to deliver capabilities the core was never meant to provide. Huntington National Bank's connected deposits product, built in partnership with payments infrastructure provider Qolo, is one example of that approach in practice. For Deepak Kapoor, Huntington's H ead of Payment Products, the realization was straightforward: "We quickly realized we don't have all the Lego pieces in place to build the card that we want to build, and the ledger and the virtual account provide us with that missing Lego piece that we needed." The result is a virtual account structure that sits above the core and behaves, externally, like a real bank account, complete with routing numbers, inbound wires, and automated reconciliation, without requiring banks to touch the underlying system of record.
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  Squarespace's Corey Zettler on building a financial services suite for small businesses 07.04.2026 22min

  For two decades, Squarespace has been the platform entrepreneurs turn to when they want to build something that looks like they hired a designer. But over the past few years, something has changed. Squarespace has been building a financial stack. Payments launched in 2023. Capital followed in 2025, offering merchants flexible financing based on their sales history. And just two weeks ago, Squarespace launched Balance, a native business financial account integrated directly with Squarespace Payments, giving merchants a business Visa card, cash rewards, and faster access to their funds, all without leaving the platform. It's a familiar playbook, Shopify has run it, Stripe has run it, but Squarespace is doing it for a specific kind of entrepreneur: the creative, the maker, the small business owner who wants to run their whole business from one place. Today I'm joined by the person architecting that vision. Corey Zettler is Director of Product, Financial Solutions at Squarespace, where he leads strategy across Payments, Capital, and Checkout. Before Squarespace, Corey spent more than 15 years at companies like Shutterstock, MakerBot, and Chief, and before that he was a wealth planner, which means he came into product from the money side, not the tech side, which makes him an interesting person to think about what financial services actually needs to do for real people.
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  How Paze is betting bank trust can crack the digital wallet market 01.04.2026 28min

  Early Warning built Zelle into the dominant peer-to-peer payments network in the U.S. — processing over a trillion dollars in yearly transactions. Paze is their next bet: a bank-backed digital wallet for e-commerce checkout, backed by the same seven major banks, designed to bring that same institutional trust to online shopping. Serge Elkiner came on as GM in late 2024, brought over from Visa where he ran product for money movement globally. His mandate is to unlock what that network can do at checkout — with 165 million eligible cards now in place and distribution deals closing with Fiserv, Worldpay, and ACI. Today we talk about what it takes to convert infrastructure into consumer behavior, and whether the banks can do for e-commerce what they did for P2P.
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  How KeyBank and Qolo are modernizing corporate treasury without ripping out the core 26.03.2026 16min

  A mid-market company with dozens of bank accounts shouldn't have to deploy a small army to figure out where its money is. But for most commercial banking clients, that's still the reality because the systems tracking it haven't kept up. Banks know this. Most of their commercial clients know this. The gap between what legacy infrastructure can deliver and what today's treasury teams actually need has been widening for years, and the banks that aren't solving it are starting to lose ground to those that are. KeyBank and Qolo are building a way out of that problem. Bennie Pennington, Head of Embedded Banking at KeyBank, and Patricia Montesi, CEO of Qolo, joined Tearsheet to talk about how they designed and launched a real-time virtual account management platform together — and what it's already proving in the market.
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  How Modern Treasury is building a payments platform for a hybrid money world 10.03.2026 34min

  For years, companies that needed to move money at scale faced the same frustrating tradeoff: build their own bank integrations and compliance infrastructure — a process that could take months — or stitch together a patchwork of specialized vendors, each covering a different rail. Modern Treasury has spent years sitting inside that problem, providing software infrastructure to help companies integrate with their banks, track funds, and manage ledgering at scale. Now, the founders have taken the company a significant step further, launching Payments, an integrated PSP that handles onboarding, KYB, and banking infrastructure on a client's behalf, compressing what used to be a six-month setup into days. Stablecoins are built in natively from day one, powered by Modern Treasury's acquisition of Beam, a stablecoin infrastructure company founded by Dan Mottice, who previously led crypto products at Visa and now heads stablecoin strategy at Modern Treasury. The result is what the company calls a "forever payments platform," designed to let companies start with fiat or stablecoin payments quickly with a single integration and expand over time, without the painful migrations that have historically defined scaling a payments stack. Listen to the podcast to learn about how Modern Treasury is thinking about fiat rails and stablecoins as complementary infrastructure, how the Beam acquisition shaped the new product, and why President Dimitri Dadiomov and Mottice believe the most significant near-term stablecoin opportunity lies in how companies manage working capital.
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  Truist's Dontá Wilson: 'Innovation without empathy is empty’ 04.03.2026 24min

  There's a tension at the heart of modern banking that technology doesn't seem to totally resolve: how do you be both, digitally excellent and deeply human at the same time? Most banks have picked a lane: either betting on digital efficiency or doubling down on relationship banking. But consumers aren't asking for one or the other. They want both. They want their banking app to work flawlessly when they need it, and they want someone who actually knows them when it matters. My guest today is Dontá Wilson, Truist's Chief Consumer and Small Business Banking Officer. He leads 20,000 teammates serving clients through both digital channels and more than 1,900 community banking branches. His portfolio spans core deposits and loans to mortgage, auto, credit cards, and the full stack of consumer products. He also oversees Truist's multi-year growth plan that's reimagining both their digital experience and their physical branches using insights and AI. We talked about how AI is redefining consumer expectations and trust, what it takes to innovate inside a highly regulated industry while keeping client purpose at the center, and why Dontá believes innovation without empathy is empty.
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  Pathward's Anthony Sharett on why sponsor banking's future is about evolution, not revolution 11.02.2026 23min

  Sponsor banking has become one of the most scrutinized business models in financial services. The headlines focus on enforcement actions and regulatory pressure, but behind that noise is a more interesting question: when done right, how do bank-fintech partnerships actually expand financial access to people the traditional system has left behind? My guest today is Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward. Before joining Pathward he led Nationwide Pet Insurance and served as Interim President of Nationwide Bank. At Pathward, his mission is powering financial inclusion through partnerships with fintechs and platform companies. We're going to talk about how the sponsor banking model actually works, what makes these partnerships succeed or fail, and why Anthony believes these relationships are essential to expanding financial access beyond what traditional banks can reach on their own.
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  Why banks need to adopt a product mindset for their digital channels 14.01.2026 31min

  Digital banking has become the largest branch of modern banking, yet most banks and credit unions still aren't approaching these experiences with a product mindset. They're managing digital channels the way they've always managed technology: as IT projects, rather than products that need constant refinement based on user behavior. The result is an ecosystem where institutions miss opportunities to serve different customer segments effectively and struggle to demonstrate ROI on their digital investments. "Banks sell rails, and fintech sells outcomes," said Dados’ Christine Berry, a quote that Anthony Ianniciello, VP of Product Management at Q2, says encapsulates the fundamental shift that needs to happen. "That really gets to the heart of how you shift that mindset away from, I have this thing, and I have it for you, as opposed to, here's what I really want to drive for your success." Q2 has partnered with Pendo, a product experience platform, to help regional and community financial institutions make this transition. Trisha Price, Field Chief Product Officer at Pendo and host of the Hard Calls podcast, brings a cross-industry perspective on how companies leverage behavior data and analytics to build better products. Listen to this podcast to learn how banks and credit unions are using product management principles, user behavior data, and in-app guidance to transform their digital channels from cost centers into strategic growth drivers. And for a deeper dive into how Software Experience Management can boost banker productivity and drive measurable ROI.
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  How TruStage Ventures built connective tissue between fintechs and credit unions 22.12.2025 24min

  Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast, where we explore financial services together with an eye on technology, innovation, emerging models, and changing expectations. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. For fintechs, cracking the credit union market is notoriously difficult. It's relationship-based, insular, and requires a fundamentally different approach than banking. Many try and fail. But when done right, it opens up distribution to institutions serving over 140 million Americans. Today I'm joined by Brian Kaas, president and managing director of TruStage Ventures, the corporate VC arm of TruStage—a $5.5 billion annual revenue insurer that works with 92% of credit unions nationwide. Since 2016, TruStage Ventures has deployed $400 million across 50 portfolio companies and facilitated over 3,000 partnerships between credit unions and fintechs. We first spoke with Brian in 2021 when the fund was just gaining traction. Four years later, the portfolio has matured with companies like Ethos, Current, and SmartAsset, and Brian's team has become essential connective tissue between innovative fintechs and credit union distribution. We'll dig into what makes credit union partnerships different, why so many fintechs struggle to break in, and why stablecoin solutions have become the number one request Brian's hearing from credit union CEOs.
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  How FIS is helping financial institutions evolve loyalty beyond rewards 18.12.2025 14min

  Financial institutions are rethinking loyalty at a critical moment. Credit card spending sits at record highs, but economic uncertainty looms. For banks aiming to stay relevant, loyalty can no longer be an afterthought – it needs to be embedded into every customer experience from the start. At FIS's Emerald 2025 conference in Orlando, Mladen Vladic, general manager of loyalty services at FIS, sat down to discuss how the loyalty industry is evolving beyond traditional card-based rewards. His central argument: Financial institutions need to shift from chasing share of wallet to capturing share of mind first.
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  Banks reclaim commercial lending through technology and strategic partnerships 15.12.2025 21min

  Commercial banks are confronting a rapidly shifting landscape as private credit markets grow toward $3.5 trillion and fintech competitors accelerate their offerings with AI-powered tools. Rather than retreating, traditional institutions are doubling down on technology investments and reimagining their commercial lending strategies to compete in this new environment. "Banks are not short-term thinkers," says Héctor Pagés, SVP and Head of Global Commercial Lending at FIS. "We're not seeing a slowdown in terms of interest or investment from our institutions, in terms of advancing and changing the ways that they're working." The response from banks has been multifaceted, according to Pagés. Some retail-focused institutions are shifting resources toward commercial lending, while smaller commercial banks are expanding into more complex lending products. Others are adopting an "originate to distribute" model, partnering with private credit firms to spread risk while generating fee income. This strategic evolution is happening against a backdrop of regulatory uncertainty, tariff fluctuations, and the continued expansion of non-bank lenders into territory traditionally dominated by banks. Listen to the podcast to learn about how banks are transforming their commercial lending operations through unified technology platforms, the role of AI in automating credit decisions and underwriting processes, and why cloud infrastructure is becoming essential for global scalability.
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  How community banks are balancing urgent pressures with long-term modernization 09.12.2025 21min

  Community and regional banks operate in an environment of perpetual tension. They need to grow deposits and drive lending profitability while managing operating costs that threaten to overwhelm smaller institutions. They must also prevent increasingly sophisticated fraud while delivering customer experiences that match Amazon and Netflix. And they need to do all of this while building technology foundations that won't become obsolete before the implementation is complete. At FIS's Emerald 2025 conference in Orlando, Peter Boyer, head of banking at FIS, and Craig Focardi, principal analyst at Celent, discussed how financial institutions are navigating these competing demands. Focardi and Boyer discuss how modernization is now a continuous process of adaptation, and that the institutions most likely to succeed will focus on enabling agility rather than chasing specific technologies. "If you really take a step back and think about regional and community banking, there's a couple headwinds or tailwinds, that are driving how banks are thinking about the market," Boyer explained. "One is deposit growth and profitability growth through lending. Every bank right now is thinking, how do I grow? What is my sweet spot in my segment? Thing two is operating costs. How do they continue to drive a more efficient bank? AI is a big topic on that particular solution. And thing three is fraud. How do you protect the banking ecosystem? You put those three together and you've got a meaningful amount of where the energy is in the market today."
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  Why every bank now needs a stablecoin strategy (whether they like it or not) 08.12.2025 29min

  The GENIUS Act brings regulatory clarity to stablecoins, but Conduit CEO Kirill Gertman argues that clarity alone won't guarantee success. Banks face a choice between building their own infrastructure or becoming the pipes for others. Kirill Gertman has watched the stablecoin industry evolve from multiple angles. He spent nearly two decades in financial services before founding Conduit in 2021, including six years in crypto and a stint as VP of product at BRD, which became Coinbase Wallet. His company grew 16x in 2024 by solving a practical problem: businesses in emerging markets were accumulating stablecoins to hedge against local currency volatility but couldn't use those balances in their day-to-day operations. Conduit now works with tier-one banks and multinational corporations, processing billions in cross-border payments. And with the GENIUS Act bringing the first comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins in the United States, Gertman argues the legislation's passage raises as many strategic questions as it answers—particularly for banks that have been sitting on the sidelines. Today, we'll explore why the GENIUS Act matters, the critical difference between stablecoins and deposit tokens, what strategy banks should actually pursue, and where Gertman sees the industry heading as major players race to build vertically integrated stacks.