Fintech One-On-One

Peter Renton
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Fintech is eating the world. Join Peter Renton, Co-Founder of Fintech Nexus and now an independent fintech media and events consultant, every week as he interviews the fintech leaders who are leading the transformation of financial services. If you want to understand what the future will look like for lending, payments, digital banking and more, tune in to Fintech One-On-One.

  1. How Figure Is Cutting Mortgage Costs from $12,000 to $1,000, with CEO Michael Tannenbaum

    HACE 16 H

    How Figure Is Cutting Mortgage Costs from $12,000 to $1,000, with CEO Michael Tannenbaum

    Michael Tannenbaum became CEO of Figure in early 2024, taking over from founder Mike Cagney and leading the company through its September 2025 IPO. In this conversation, we get into the mechanics of how Figure's blockchain-based platform competes with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, what it actually takes to cut mortgage origination costs from $12,000 to $1,000, and where the real opportunities in tokenization lie. What We Covered Taking over as CEO from Mike Cagney and the Big Rocks frameworkHow Figure describes itself: building the future of capital markets on blockchainThe B2B partner network and how it compares to Fannie Mae's functionCutting mortgage origination costs from $12,000 to $1,000 and 45 days to fiveWhy Figure competes directly with Fannie Mae and Freddie MacHow blockchain eliminates third-party diligence and prevents loan double-pledgingThe Figure Connect marketplace and its rapid growth since June 2024Where tokenization adds real value — and where it doesn'tYLDS: Figure's SEC-registered yield-bearing stablecoin and its role in capital marketsThe timing and mechanics of Figure's September 2025 IPOBuilding a rate-agnostic business across different macro environmentsThree growth areas: consumer mortgages, Democratized Prime, and on-chain equitiesKey Takeaways Figure's origination platform and its capital market are the same system — you can't separate them, and that's the competitive moat. Tokenization only creates liquidity when the underlying assets are standardized and fungible; putting unique assets on a blockchain doesn't conjure buyers. The recent fraud cases involving double-pledged loans (Tricolor, First Brands, MFS) have turned blockchain's immutability from a skeptic's objection into a selling point. And Figure is running at what Michael calls the rule of 150 — 100% year-over-year growth at 50% margins — in one of the most rate-sensitive and entrenched markets on earth. About Michael Tannenbaum Michael Tannenbaum is the CEO of Figure, a blockchain-based capital markets company he took public on Nasdaq in September 2025. Before Figure, he was an early executive at both SoFi (Chief Revenue Officer) and Brex (COO), and sat on the Brex board when it was acquired by Capital One. He began his career in investment banking at J.P. Morgan. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

    35 min
  2. Fixing the Broken Appraisal Model in Asset-Backed Lending With Thomas Galbraith, CEO of Barkr

    14 MAY

    Fixing the Broken Appraisal Model in Asset-Backed Lending With Thomas Galbraith, CEO of Barkr

    Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr, an AI-driven valuation platform for asset-backed lending. He spent his early career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA, where he grew comfortable with the challenge of pricing hard-to-value assets. That thread ran through every role he held until it crystallized into a company built around a simple but structural problem: in asset-backed lending, appraisers give you a price and then spend the rest of their report telling you they're not responsible for it. Barkr is built to change that. What We Covered Thomas's background in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXAHow a common thread across luxury assets led to founding BarkrStarting with fine art and private jets before expanding to other asset classesThe two-part failure in traditional appraisals: accuracy and absence of liabilityHow Barkr pairs an AI valuation with a contractual performance warrantyThe progression from Lloyd's of London to AXA to Munich Re$2 billion in covered valuations and what patience actually means in this businessGPUs as a surprisingly durable and long-lived collateral asset classHow Barkr finds clients, from pavement pounding to Nvidia referralsMonthly mark-to-market on hard assets throughout a loan's lifeBuilding a domain-specific LLM with human review in the loopPlans to build an in-house insurance vehicle to unlock capacityKey Takeaways Traditional appraisal firms hedge their liability by design. Page one is the price; the rest of the report is the disclaimer. Barkr's contractual warranty flips that model by standing behind the number. Barkr's data on GPU durability challenges the conventional narrative. Chips five and seven years old are still generating revenue and still have meaningful resale value, which changes the risk calculus for lenders considering AI infrastructure as collateral. Augmenting, not replacing, is the right positioning for valuation technology. Barkr actively encourages clients to keep using their existing appraisers and treats third-party appraisals as additional data inputs that improve their own accuracy. Building a reinsurance relationship takes years. Barkr worked through Lloyd's, then AXA, before landing Munich Re, and each step required demonstrating proof of concept at the prior level first. About Thomas Galbraith Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr. He began his career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA before founding Barkr to bring accountability and AI-driven accuracy to asset valuation in the lending market. Barkr has covered approximately $2 billion in valuations across art, private jets, vehicles, and GPUs. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

    28 min
  3. Building the Bank-Grade Ledger That Payments Infrastructure Was Missing With Patricia Montesi, CEO of Qolo

    7 MAY

    Building the Bank-Grade Ledger That Payments Infrastructure Was Missing With Patricia Montesi, CEO of Qolo

    Patricia Montesi didn't start her career in payments, she started it in car rental. After nine years at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car, she was recruited into fintech with zero industry experience. That outsider perspective became her edge, and she never let go of it. Today, she's the CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure platform that combines card issuing, money movement, and a bank-grade ledger on a single API-first stack. What We Covered How nine years in car rental shaped Patricia's outsider approach to paymentsGetting recruited into Wild Card Systems with no payments background, and why that fresh lens became an advantageThe fragmentation problem at the heart of payments infrastructure and why point products create hidden complexityQolo's three-product suite: Quantum Ledger, Qascade money movement, and Qinetic card issuingWhy Qolo isn't quite a side core, it overlays and integrates with existing bank cores rather than running in parallelRail agnosticism and why Qolo still supports checks in 2026The dual go-to-market: commercial banks and B2B fintechs, same platform, different vernacularHow the Synapse collapse changed the ledger conversation for banks and fintechs alikeWinning KeyBank in a competitive RFP against much larger players, and launching virtual account management in nine monthsHow banks are using Qolo to protect commercial deposits from modern non-bank competitorsAI inside Qolo: from Glean to Claude, and their internal "Turning Hours into Minutes" program130% year-over-year growth and 142% net revenue retentionKey Takeaways The moat problem: Patricia set out to build a company where customers stay because of the value delivered, not because switching is too painful. That philosophy shaped every product decision at Qolo. Ledger first: Most point-product fintechs have basic ledgers that only support one rail. Qolo's bank-grade dual-entry forward-posting ledger underpins every rail, making reconciliation and real-time money visibility a solved problem rather than a vendor management challenge. Synapse's legacy: The debacle forced banks and fintechs alike to ask harder questions about who actually owns the ledger and where money sits at any given moment. Qolo had been making that argument for years before the market was ready to hear it. Bank as distribution: KeyBank and Huntington aren't just clients — they're strategic investors using Qolo to defend their commercial deposit base against modern non-bank alternatives. About Patricia Montesi Patricia Montesi is CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure company she built from the ground up after more than 20 years in the industry. She started her career at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car before being recruited into fintech with zero payments background — an outsider perspective she has held onto ever since. At Qolo, she and her team built the ledger, money movement, and card issuing stack as first-party infrastructure, without relying on third-party processors underneath. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

    31 min
  4. The Case for AI as a Revenue Driver in Financial Infrastructure with Chris Walters, CEO of Finastra

    30 ABR

    The Case for AI as a Revenue Driver in Financial Infrastructure with Chris Walters, CEO of Finastra

    Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, one of the largest financial software companies in the world, serving over 7,000 banks globally including 45 of the world's top 50. He joined the company a little over a year ago, bringing an unusually broad background spanning consulting, Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and several other technology businesses. This is a wide-ranging conversation about where Finastra is headed and why the conventional narrative around AI and software disruption misses something important. What We Covered Chris's path from consulting to Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and beyondWhat attracted him to Finastra and the perception versus reality gap he set out to closeHow he spent his first 90 days listening to customers and internal teams before deciding directionThe portfolio narrowing strategy, including divestitures of Treasury, Capital Markets, and student lendingFinastra's core focus areas: lending, payments, and universal bankingGrowth vectors within an existing base of 7,000+ banks, including geography expansion, cross-sell, and dataThe AI center of excellence and why dedicated ownership changes the pace of deploymentInternal AI use cases: an HR chatbot and automated sales approvalsOperator Assist, a new product that uses AI to surface and resolve failed paymentsAgentic AI in mortgage origination, targeting documentation discrepanciesWhy Finastra views AI as a growth accelerant, not a cost-cutting tool, and why not all software faces the same disruption riskCommunity bank caution around modernization and why the economics will eventually force full core replacementsKey Takeaways Companies that are systems of record with long-duration enterprise agreements are far less exposed to AI disruption than the public markets currently assume. The distinction matters, and Chris makes a clear case for why Finastra sits in the less-exposed category. Dedicated AI ownership changes everything. Spreading AI enthusiasm across everyone's partial attention generates ideas but not scalable execution. The center of excellence model exists precisely to fix that. Community bank core modernization is inevitable but slow. The banks most likely to win that market are those that can make transitions nearly frictionless, not those with the most advanced technology. At $7 trillion in daily payments routed through Finastra's systems, the probabilistic nature of LLMs is not a minor technical detail. Chris's post-recording observation about where AI fits and where it doesn't is one of the more clear-eyed takes you'll hear from a CEO in this space. About Chris Walters Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, which he joined a little over a year ago. Before Finastra, he held CEO and COO roles at a range of public and private technology companies, including The Weather Company and a public wealth management and software business. He also spent seven years in consulting and held senior roles at Bloomberg. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

    31 min
  5. Building a Profitable Neobank by Doing Everything the Hard Way With Ali Niknam, CEO of Bunq

    23 ABR

    Building a Profitable Neobank by Doing Everything the Hard Way With Ali Niknam, CEO of Bunq

    Ali Niknam is one of fintech's most unconventional founders. He built multiple unicorns before turning his attention to banking, then self-funded Bunq with nearly €100 million of his own money before taking a single outside investor. That conviction paid off: Bunq posted €85 million in profit in 2024, putting it in rare company among European neobanks. Now, having applied for a US national bank charter, Ali is setting his sights on the most competitive banking market in the world. What We Covered Ali's background as a three-time unicorn founderSelf-funding Bunq with nearly €100M before taking outside investmentPursuing a greenfield banking license, the first granted in the Netherlands in 35 yearsWhy Bunq launched with a paid subscription model when everyone else was going freeBunq's core user base: digital nomads and cross-border travelersInternational expansion across the European UnionApplying for a US national bank charter and dealing with three regulatorsThe philosophy behind building a bank people actually trust for day-to-day useHow AI powers transaction monitoring, real-time translation, and marketing at BunqWhy Bunq describes itself as the first Gen AI-powered bankThe personal CFO vision for the future of bankingWhat an AI-native bank looks like five years from nowKey Takeaways Starting with a paid subscription meant Bunq only attracted users who genuinely valued the product, building real engagement rather than vanity metrics — and better unit economics from the outset. Pursuing a full greenfield banking license from the start, while far harder than working around incumbents, lets Bunq compete directly with the largest banks on equal regulatory footing. AI at Bunq isn't a marketing term. It powers transaction monitoring, real-time multilingual customer support, and marketing automation in ways that materially reduce costs and improve security. The vision for the AI-native bank is a personal CFO that makes abstract financial goals tangible — connecting daily spending habits to the things users actually want in their lives. About Ali Niknam Ali Niknam is the founder and CEO of Bunq, the Dutch neobank. A serial entrepreneur with three unicorns to his name, Ali was born in Canada to Iranian parents and has been based in the Netherlands for most of his life. Before Bunq, he founded TransIP, now rebranded as Team Blue, the world's third-largest domain name and web hosting provider. He is also the author of a book on entrepreneurship. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

    30 min
  6. No Code Infrastructure and the Future of Lending with Timothy Li, CEO of LendAPI

    16 ABR

    No Code Infrastructure and the Future of Lending with Timothy Li, CEO of LendAPI

    Timothy Li, CEO and Co-Founder of LendAPI, has spent nearly a decade trying to solve the same problem: launching a lending product takes too long and costs too much. With LendAPI, he's built a no-code platform that lets banks, credit unions, fintechs, and retailers go from idea to live lending product in weeks, not months or years. Think of it as a GoDaddy-style experience for financial services. Timothy joined me again on the show (he was last on in 2017) to talk about what's under the hood, what the Sunglass Hut deal reveals about embedded finance, and where he thinks AI is actually useful in lending today. What We Covered Timothy's path from the Fluid college credit app to building LendAPIHow the drag-and-drop product builder works for non-technical usersPython model deployment for credit risk officers inside the same platformWinning Best in Show at FinovateThe Sunglass Hut deal and how it came together in three monthsWhy retailers are moving away from pure-play BNPL providersIntegration options: bank cores, side cores, and direct e-commerce embedThe 300-plus partner marketplace and the SEO strategy behind itDoc AI and single-task AI agents for document processing and underwritingTimothy's experience in the CURQL accelerator and how credit unions differTeaching FinTech Fundamentals at USCThe five consumer verticals with the most opportunity in fintechKey Takeaways The build vs. buy debate is essentially over. When Timothy talks to bank CTOs today, the conversation is "can you launch this next week?" not "should we build this ourselves?" Speed to market has become the dominant concern. Pure-play BNPL approval rates are outside a retailer's control and can swing 10 points overnight. Private label embedded finance, built on infrastructure like LendAPI, lets retailers and banks own the underwriting criteria and the customer experience, which matters especially for high-ticket items where the financing decision happens in-store. Single-task AI agents are the near-term opportunity in lending, not fully automated credit decisions. Automating document verification, data extraction, and intake workflows saves minutes per application, and at scale, that compounds quickly. The five consumer fintech verticals worth building in: mortgages, auto, credit cards and personal loans, payments, and bank accounts. If it's in someone's wallet, there's still work to do. About Timothy Li Timothy Li is the CEO and co-founder of LendAPI, a no-code lending platform that launched in 2024 and won Best in Show at Finovate. He previously built Fluid, a credit-building app for college students, and has been building lending infrastructure across multiple ventures over the past decade. He also taught FinTech Fundamentals at the University of Southern California. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

    35 min
  7. Building the AI Enablement Layer for Financial Services with Kareem Saleh, CEO of FairPlay

    9 ABR

    Building the AI Enablement Layer for Financial Services with Kareem Saleh, CEO of FairPlay

    Kareem Saleh is the CEO and co-founder of FairPlay, an AI enablement platform helping financial institutions test, tune, and monitor AI systems in production. Four years after his first appearance on the show, Kareem returns to discuss how FairPlay has evolved from credit model fairness into a full AI enablement infrastructure layer and why the rise of generative and agentic AI has made that work more consequential than ever. What We Covered How generative AI changes the definition of fairness in financial servicesThe shift from model validation to continuous, system-level testingFairPlay's three core capabilities: testing, optimizing, and validating AI systemsHow one customer added one day to their model development cycle but saved 60–90 days in compliance reviewThe 25–33% of declined applicants who would have performed as well as the riskiest approvalsWhy the question for legacy institutions has flipped, from "is AI safe enough to try?" to "is it riskier not to adopt AI?"The political environment and how fairness demand reconfigures, not disappears, across administrationsState-level regulatory frameworks filling the federal enforcement gapKareem's Congressional testimony on AI and algorithmic biasThe agentic AI opportunity in KYC, BSA, and AML workflowsRegulatory look-back risk and why today's decisions can become 2029's consent ordersCash flow underwriting risks and climate risk as underappreciated threats to credit portfoliosConnect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

    33 min
  8. Jess Conroy, CEO of ROH, on Building the Financial Core Hotels Never Had

    2 ABR

    Jess Conroy, CEO of ROH, on Building the Financial Core Hotels Never Had

    Most of us assume that major hotel brands have sophisticated financial systems running behind the scenes. In this episode, Jess Conroy, CEO and co-founder of ROH, explains just how wrong that assumption is — and why she's spent the last several years building the financial core that hospitality never had. What We Covered: The manual payments problem hiding in plain sightWhy the biggest hotel brands have the biggest challengesThe hidden complexity of every hotel transactionWhy the hospitality industry was overlooked by fintechHow ROH got its start in meetings and eventsWhat "AI-first" actually means at ROHHow ROH fits into the existing hotel software stackThe go-to-market reality of a franchise-heavy industryA transaction-based model that aligns incentivesScale and growth: managing over $1 billion across the portfolioThe stale data problem driving bad hotel decisionsThe vision: a financial foundation for every hotel dollarKey Takeaways Hotel payments are a solved problem almost everywhere except hospitality itself — the industry's bias toward "human solves" left it behind.The complexity of hotel transactions (variable pricing, upgrades, OTAs, group contracts) makes automation far more valuable here than in simpler retail or restaurant contexts.Building something that didn't exist before is the hardest sales motion — you're not replacing a known tool, you're educating a market about a problem they've learned to live with.Year-over-year expansion within existing hotels is the clearest signal of product-market fit — customers keep expanding their use once they're on the platform.About Jess Conroy Jess Conroy is the CEO and co-founder of ROH, a financial infrastructure platform for hotels. A second-time founder, she has spent nearly 15 years building in and around the hospitality industry. ROH is currently managing over $1 billion in hotel transactions across its growing portfolio. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

    32 min
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Información

Fintech is eating the world. Join Peter Renton, Co-Founder of Fintech Nexus and now an independent fintech media and events consultant, every week as he interviews the fintech leaders who are leading the transformation of financial services. If you want to understand what the future will look like for lending, payments, digital banking and more, tune in to Fintech One-On-One.

Ficha técnica

  • Creado por
    Peter Renton
  • Años en activo
    2013 - 2026
  • Episodios
    633
  • Clasificación
    Apto
  • Derechos de autor
    © 2026 © 2025 Renton & Co. LLC
  • Sitio web del podcast
    Fintech One-On-One

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