Nico is a wizard when it comes to building fintech solutions, understanding regulation, and navigating difficult partnerships with Sponsor Banks. It was a joy to have him on and to hear how Clair was built from the ground up. Hope you all enjoy the episode. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessbanking.substack.com ..read more

In this episode of The Headless Banking Podcast, Chris interviews Bernardo Brites, co-founder and CEO of trace financial, a company that provides international payments, FX, and multiple use bank accounts to help globalize LATAM businesses. Bernardo talks about his journey through FinTech, starting a money transfer business, and the evolution of their products. This episode was recorded at a very interesting time when SVB had sounded the alarm. Bernardo and his team worked around the clock to help businesses that were stuck during this time. Interestingly enough, SVB banked 90% of LATAM busine ..read more

In this episode of The Headless Banking Podcast, Jeff interviews Brian Karimi-Pashaki, Head of Partnerships at Pinwheel, a company that provides income verification, direct deposit switching, and payroll data connectivity for FinTech & banks. Brian talks about his background in FinTech, starting at Goldman Sachs and buying third-party technology to build a Marcus. He also discusses the challenges of building new products inside a larger company, as well as the importance of AI assistants in the future of the financial industry. Diving into Pinwheel, Brian explains that the company is an AP ..read more

How do international entities allow their customers to get access to the US market? With the uncertainty of markets and currencies, Alpaca is facilitating the pipes for companies to expand their offerings by stretching out their technology globally to give access as they were located in the US. I sat down with Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder and CEO of Alpaca, to discuss how they set this up and tirelessly on the grind to expand into new markets. We discussed why this is important and their vision of globalizing the US market into new regions. Tune in to also hear about the awesome event they threw ..read more

I had the pleasure of speaking with Joseph Akintolayo, Founder and CEO of Deposits, the turn key solution for banks and brands to deliver experiences to customers without the need for technological expertise. Building personalized user experiences do not need to be massive cost and take a year to build. Joseph and his team are helping programs and FI’s get to market quick without breaking the bank (pun intended)! We get into how FI’s can leverage Deposits tech stack, brands can get to market with a partner bank, or not, and the path forward for banks to compete with other Fintech competitors ..read more

Jared Silvers (Fireblocks) & Asaad Faquir (Crowe) both old friends & previous guests on the show join me to unpack what happened with FTX, what it means for the crypto industry in 2023, and why BTC is the only true decentralized currency vs altcoins, CBDCs, etc. . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessbanking.substack.com ..read more

I was fortunate to interview Ben Borodach, Co-Founder, of April and I was amazed by what he and the team have created. The company's vision is to democratize access to the tax code, enabling any company to develop and incorporate tax features and filing into their application. The platform today focuses on helping people file their taxes simply & seamlessly with aims to disrupt the biggest players in the space such as TurboTax and TaxAct that have not innovated much over the last 5 to 10 years. However, April plans to go much further in educating employees on how best to fill in their tax ..read more

Many consumers and small business owners have likely experienced pain and unfair rejections when requesting a line of credit from a traditional bank. Upstart is working to solve this by using machine learning, AI, and tailored risk models that increase loan approval rates. Jeff Keltner & I unpack these issues and what Upstart is doing to solve them. Jeff is SVP of Business Development at Upstart and the fifth employee at the firm. Prior to Upstart, Jeff worked at Google for 6 years. He was the first business person focused on what is now Google Cloud – spending time launching and running ..read more

Stephanie Sample is a serial entrepreneur and franchise owner who just recently decided to jump into fintech after experiencing the troubles firsthand. Fundid enables SMBs to get access to business capital, an expense management card to control cash flow, and all the resources you need to make business finance simple. Stef’s first foray into the SMB world happened when she was 22. Stef & her husband suddenly became the owners of a series of Taco Bell franchises in Montana. Stef was thrown into this world and had to figure out how to manage the books, make payroll, hire & fire, etc. I ..read more

We’ve got another great podcast here. I think it’s clear by now if you are listening that I’m a believer in BTC, DeFi, and all of the great innovations that can come from blockchain technology. In this episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing, Patrick Sells, Chief Innovation Officer at NYDIG. NYDIG is a bitcoin company that’s fusing high tech with institutional-grade finance to usher in a new era of financial products. They make it easy for partners to white label NYDIG solutions and create their own products like bitcoin accounts, rewards, and loyalty programs. Patrick first started his e ..read more