Tearsheet Podcast: The Business of Finance Tearsheet Studios

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller.

What I continue to find interesting is that the fintech tech stack peels away like an onion. Even the innovators have 3rd party innovation under the hood.

Joining me on the podcast today is Tim Astanov, SVP, Product Commercialization & Partnerships at TabaPay. TabaPay is one of those companies that power payments for the fintech innovators, like SoFi, Remitly, Melio, and others. It offers direct access to 15 banking partners, 14 networks, multiple geographies, products and features in a unified API.

Tim has an awesome background – previous to his current position, he was head of P2P in North America for Visa Direct and had important roles at Discover and Amex.

We talk about the challenges and opportunities moving money in and out of bank accounts. Tim shares his views on the impact real time payments will have on the industry and its monetization efforts. Lastly we look to some of the biggest trends in the industry as a north star pointing where things are headed.

Tim Astanov is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller, Tearsheet’s editor in chief. On today’s show, we’re going to explore opportunities. These types of opportunities we’ll be talking about don’t come around everyday but when they do, they can be transformative, if you’re able to really step up.

I talk to Jannick Malling, co-CEO and co-founder of investing app, Public. For younger investors, the meme stock rally offered an opportunity to participate, many for the first time, in the stock market. And for Jannick and Public, it offered an even bigger opportunity: to scale rapidly. But this required smart moves – Jannick and team distanced themselves from competitor Robinhood’s revenue model, pay for order flow, which became an important topic as it opened and closed trading windows on popular meme stocks. Jannick recognized the power in this Game Stop moment and shares his thinking that went into strategizing around it.

Last week, Public also released a new generative AI investment research tool called Alpha. It helps people, both newbies and experienced investors, learn more about the investment process and specific investments. Jannick shares his experience working with these new technologies, with a keen eye on how they can be used to service customers, and where they are headed in the future.

Jannick Malling is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.

On our most recent LinkedinLive session, we spoke all about partnerships and how today's environment of higher interest rates, inflation, and less venture money flowing through is impacting how firms collaborate with one another.

Joining me was Sunil Sachdev, head of fintech and growth at Fiserv. Sunil's role cuts across the Fiserv organization as the company aligns the way it works with merchants and banks to the demands of today's customers.

Here's my conversation with Sunil.

Portage is a fintech-focused venture fund that invests globally, with two different strategies: early-stage investing (seed to B) and growth-oriented investing (late stage).

I spoke to Stephanie Choo, general partner at Portage as part of a LinkedIn Live session. She shared the impact that the drop in venture capital funding has had on the sector and fintechs, with fundraising down around 70% year over year and deal volume down 30% to 40%.

But despite the tech recession, the venture capital investor believes that consumer balance sheets are stronger than she expected, opening up new opportunities in the fintech space. Steph also shared that the fall of SVB and First Republic, though disruptive, are catalysts for new firms to step in and serve SMBs and tech companies.

Portage is thematically-driven, investigating and investing along two or three theses at any given time. Steph mentions two interests right now: the intersection between fintech and climate, and artificial general intelligence.

Steph shared several highlights in the Portage portfolio, including Tallied, a modern payment processor, and global investments in investing and insurance.

Here's my conversation with Portage's Steph Choo.

There’s a lot of talk about personalization being the Holy Grail of banking. Some firms even use the terminology hyper-personalization. But to be honest, few banks actually provide deeply personalized products. With all the tech advancements of the past decade, it’s still mostly one-size-fits-all banking.

It’s not necessarily their fault, either. Given the history of banking and data siloed by products, banks can struggle piecing it all together. That’s changing though as creative technology solutions are able to help banks take a more customer centric approach and in doing so, get much better at providing personalized offers and pricing.

For this episode I spoke with Amdocs' Benzium Aviv. Bentzi heads the Financial Services Unit within the Amdocs organization. We talk about the big trends toward personalized financial products, drawing from parallels in the telecommunications industry and the technology and business changes it went through.

When you hear Bentzi speak, you can tell he's passionate about personalization in financial services. He's an optimist and also pragmatic, aware of the challenges banks and other FIs have to get personalization right.

This podcast was produced by Tearsheet Studios. We worked closely with Amdocs, a global technology company with 40 years of experience providing personalized pricing and products to the telecommunications industry. The firm is increasingly active in the financial services industry, too. This is part one of a 2-part podcast series.

There's also a guide available with the best of this interview: Unlock the power of personalized product offerings: 3 approaches for banks to provide the experiences their customers want. Download here: www.library.tearsheet.co/amdocs23

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Tearsheet’s editor in chief, Zack Miller.

On our podcast, we interview some of the top minds at work building the next generation of financial services. In its work with small businesses and consumer payments, Square is definitely one of the companies that matters.

Christina Riechers heads up Square Banking which serves about 1 million small business owners with checking, savings, and loans. She leads engineering, product, design, product marketing, operations & policy, and data science.

For Christina, helping solve liquidity issues runs deeper than just a job. She co-founded and led Evidence Action, a non-profit that addresses health concerns for 200M+ children annually and provides 4M+ East Africans with access to safe water. This work has a direct economic impact on their lives.

Christina’s work doing good informs her professional life and the way she looks at finance. But it also works in reverse – her experiences building at scale have proven helpful in her work building efficient charity organizations, too. It’s clear for her that providing the right tools and opportunities can make a huge difference.

Christina Riechers is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.