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. Trust, stablecoins, and the AI margin squeeze:What McKinsey and QED's fintech report means for banks

    Jul 1

    Trust, stablecoins, and the AI margin squeeze:What McKinsey and QED's fintech report means for banks

    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.

    40 min
  2. How Figure and Method closed the loop on debt consolidation and cut delinquency in half

    Jun 24

    How Figure and Method closed the loop on debt consolidation and cut delinquency in half

    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.

    23 min
  3. The bank account is the product: Slash's bet on vertical SMB banking

    May 20

    The bank account is the product: Slash's bet on vertical SMB banking

    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.

    26 min
  4. How Kudos built a consumer data moat on top of credit card rewards

    May 13

    How Kudos built a consumer data moat on top of credit card rewards

    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.

    28 min
  5. Stablecoin infrastructure is rewiring cross-border payments

    May 4

    Stablecoin infrastructure is rewiring cross-border payments

    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

    23 min
  6. How Block built a $200 billion credit operation by seeing customers traditional lenders can't

    Apr 22

    How Block built a $200 billion credit operation by seeing customers traditional lenders can't

    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.

    19 min
  7. How Huntington modernized without touching the core ft. Qolo

    Apr 8

    How Huntington modernized without touching the core ft. Qolo

    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.

    25 min
  8. Squarespace's Corey Zettler on building a financial services suite for small businesses

    Apr 7

    Squarespace's Corey Zettler on building a financial services suite for small businesses

    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.

    22 min
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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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