Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Tearsheet Studios

Tearsheet is news, opinion, and analysis on the business of finance. Candid conversations with senior executives, fintech entrepreneurs, investors, industry experts -- all weigh in on the trends impacting the industry and the disruptive impact technology is having on the business. Where social media, technology and finance intersect.

  1. 8h ago

    At Stellar's Meridian conference, Anthony Scaramucci tells banks to "kill the iPod in your business"

    Anthony Scaramucci bought his first bitcoin at about $6,000. In October 2020, he bought nine figures' worth for himself and his clients, and some of those clients fired him for it. He had been a skeptic, and he had already missed the run from $500 to $2,000. What changed his mind was working out what money is, and he now runs SkyBridge Capital as a crypto and late-stage private equity firm managing a couple of billion dollars. He also runs the SALT conference series, which began in 2009 and has held roughly 30 events worldwide. His current bet is tokenization. Tokenized assets are growing, and he wants stocks to be the next wave. He argues that putting the 10 largest U.S. stocks on chain would draw the most attention, and that once a few work without glitches, competing CEOs will have to match them. The sequence starts with SEC guidance from Chair Paul Atkins, since the Clarity Act has stalled, and continues with a name like Larry Fink or Jamie Dimon moving first. In his view, the industry has about two years to build that momentum. His advice to bank product leaders is blunt: kill your own iPod before a competitor does. Scaramucci spoke with Tearsheet at Stellar's Meridian conference in Lisbon. He covers what stands in the way of tokenization, why settlement can shrink from days to minutes, how SkyBridge runs tokenized and traditional funds side by side, and what Wolfgang Puck taught him about rebuilding a business that is already working.

    At Stellar's Meridian conference, Anthony Scaramucci tells banks to "kill the iPod in your business"

  2. 5d ago

    What Bluevine learned from $2 billion in mobile check deposits and a growing partner stack

    A $2 million general contractor pays subcontractors, invoices clients, issues employee cards, and keeps its own books. Most banks still serve this business the way they serve a consumer, just with a larger balance. Owners fill the gaps by stitching together a dozen or more apps. Digital banks competing for this market are pulling more of these jobs into the banking experience, building some tools themselves and embedding partners for the rest. Bluevine, which began in small business lending, has spent the last six years building a broader suite of banking products around its checking account. On the Tearsheet podcast, Kyle Cooper, Bluevine's SVP and GM of Checking and Payments, said small business owners’ underlying needs have stayed consistent even as the products around them have changed. "Business owners always care about saving themselves a headache, getting more financial value," he said. But the bar for delivering both keeps moving. "We are seeing that expectations are constantly rising from small businesses in terms of the quality of the offering they have in front of them." Cooper walked through how Bluevine decides what to build, what to embed, and what to leave to others, as well as what the company has learned about running a bank without branches.

    What Bluevine learned from $2 billion in mobile check deposits and a growing partner stack

  3. 6d ago

    If you disappeared tomorrow, would your customers care?

    For Episode 3, we asked a simple question: Which fintechs would we genuinely miss if they disappeared tomorrow? Millions of users don't necessarily mean a company has built a bomb product or something people can't live without. Customers might stay for convenience, better pricing, or simply because switching hasn't crossed their minds. Zack chose PayPal, drawing on his own experience with the company. Sara picked Wise and Stripe, pointing to two sources of lasting value: solving a specific problem well and becoming difficult to replace within a business.

    If you disappeared tomorrow, would your customers care?

  4. Nov 3

    Banks look to close the expectation gap with data, real-time infrastructure, and human judgment

    Customers hold their banks to a standard they learned somewhere else. Brian DuVal, President of North America at Temenos, points to the speed and ease of use they have become accustomed to booking a hotel, renting a car or buying with one-click on Amazon. Yet their banking experiences don’t always measure up. This distance is the subject of “The Banking Expectation Gap: U.S. Consumer Edition,” research commissioned by Temenos. It points to a widening gap between what consumers expect and what many institutions can deliver, particularly in personalization, trust, digital experience, and timely human support. Paul Weiss, Chief Transformation Officer at Regions Bank, doesn’t expect the gap to stop widening on its own. “I don’t see the pace of change that has driven that gap slowing down,” he said. For Dan Massey, Chief Enterprise Operations and Technology Officer at Regions, the starting point is the information banks already hold. “Data is at the heart of that,” he said, referring to helping clients build financial confidence. Closing the gap depends on whether a bank can put that data to work on a client’s behalf. In a recent Tearsheet podcast, Massey, Weiss, and DuVal discussed how this plays out in practice, from core platform investment and AI governance to personalization and payments.

    Banks look to close the expectation gap with data, real-time infrastructure, and human judgment

  5. Oct 22

    Why small businesses hesitate on AI in finance, and how BILL is addressing it

    Why small businesses hesitate on AI in finance, and how BILL is addressing it by Tearsheet

    Why small businesses hesitate on AI in finance, and how BILL is addressing it

  6. Oct 21

    Why B2B payments are a whole-journey problem ft. TreviPay

    Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at TreviPay, argues that a new generation of digital-native buyers is the biggest force reshaping how businesses buy and pay. Accustomed to frictionless consumer experiences, they expect the same convenience and omnichannel consistency from their suppliers. They are also more open to alternatives like stablecoins, net terms modeled on consumer BNPL, and AI as a co-creator. Sellers, meanwhile, are working to retain and keep their best customers happy in a tight macro environment, where the cost of capital puts pressure on businesses to extend credit and get paid faster.

    Why B2B payments are a whole-journey problem ft. TreviPay

  7. Oct 13

    Why Salient bet everything on auto lending and never looked back

    Most AI startups chase breadth. They build a capable, general-purpose product and sell it across as many industries as are willing to buy it. Ari Malik, CEO of Salient, took the opposite approach. He picked one vertical, auto lending, and went deep enough that he eventually moved his company's headquarters to Los Angeles to be closer to a single customer, Westlake Financial. Two years later, Salient is live inside roughly half of the top 20 auto lenders in the country. By Malik's account, the company has never lost one. In today’s episode, he walks us through how a decision that "wasn't really ideological" turned into a full-stack servicing layer now handling collections, total loss, compliance, and loss recovery for some of the largest lenders in the U.S. The origin story is less a strategic plan than lived experience. Malik came to the problem through the finance side of a prior company, Tesla, where he got a close look at how tangled loan servicing had become. “The workflows in this hyper-regulated part of the economy were so tangled with compliance obligations, state-specific regulations, legacy systems that weren't API-friendly or real-time,” he said, “that we sort of felt like you could build something generic and horizontal, and actually have it work.” Malik’s conviction has only hardened as horizontal AI tools have tried to move into consumer lending and run headlong into compliance violations. For Malik, the read was simple: a market this large and this regulated was ripe for going deep.

    Why Salient bet everything on auto lending and never looked back

  8. Sep 29

    Nubank's Ethan Eismann: 'You have to love your customers fanatically for them to love you fanatically'

    Nubank spent thirteen years building one of the most loved financial brands in Latin America, growing past 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. This month, that brand entered the US for the first time, launching Nu Global alongside a dedicated US product built around a Nu Account and a no-annual-fee credit card. Ethan Eismann is the executive tasked with making that experience work. As Nubank's first Chief Design Officer, reporting directly to founder and CEO David Vélez, Eismann oversees design strategy across the company's entire product ecosystem. He joined Nubank in mid-2025 after two decades leading design at Google, Adobe, Uber, Airbnb, and Slack.

    Nubank's Ethan Eismann: 'You have to love your customers fanatically for them to love you fanatically'
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4.9
out of 5
30 Ratings

About

Tearsheet is news, opinion, and analysis on the business of finance. Candid conversations with senior executives, fintech entrepreneurs, investors, industry experts -- all weigh in on the trends impacting the industry and the disruptive impact technology is having on the business. Where social media, technology and finance intersect.

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