Wharton FinTech Podcast Wharton Fintech Podcast

Zoey Tang sat down with serial Investor, VC, Former Techstars Exec Jon Zanoff.

Previously featured on the Wharton Fintech Podcast before, Jon is the founder of Empire Startups, one of the the largest FinTech communities of entrepreneurs, investors, bank innovators, and operators.

As a fintech legend in New York, Jon is back on the show to share latest updates about Empire Startup and the New York Fintech Week on Apr. 8th - Apr. 12th.

For more FinTech insights, follow us on:
WFT Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech
WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech
WFT Instagram: instagram.com/whartonfintech
Zoey's LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/zoeytang1007/

Previous episode with Jon: https://bit.ly/3VBahpY

In today's episode, Wesley Aster and Djavaneh Bierwirth host Graham Weaver, the founder and managing partner of Alpine Investors, a people-driven private equity firm that invests in software and services businesses.

Tune in to hear about:

- Graham's journey from starting Alpine in his Stanford dorm room to growing the firm to $16B in AUM
- Graham's personal growth and investment philosophies, as well as how he thinks about driving long-term impact
- Alpine's latest $4.5B fund 9, and Graham's experience fundraising in a challenging market

Trevor Prince sits down with John Beccia, the Co-Founder and CEO of FS Vector, and Edin Trto, a Managing Director at Canaccord Genuity. FS Vector is a strategic consulting firm in the FinTech industry, focused on regulatory issues and other critical functions.

In this episode, John and Edin discuss how their teams prepared FS Vector for its first institutional capital raise, how they navigated market volatility during their process, their outlook on the FinTech regulatory landscape, and much more.

In today's episode, Wesley Aster hosts Justo Benetti, SVP Head of Americas at dLocal. Justo formerly served as VP of Strategic Solutions at Worldpay.

In this episode you will hear about:

- Justo's background and new role at dLocal
- Payment processing in emerging economies
- Managing regulatory complexity across emerging markets
- dLocal's $100M investment in Argentina, and how Argentina's new presidential administration will impact the fintech sector
- Global fintech trends

In today’s episode, Joshua Benadiva hosts Irana Wasti, Chief Product Officer at BILL. Irana was previously the Chief Product Officer at Typeform and President of GoDaddy EMEA.

In this episode you will hear about:
- How to be a successful product manager in fintech
- How Irana measures and implements successful strategies for building for small businesses
- Best practices for managing product organizations in fintech
- BILL's strategy to provide value as a full-stack financial operations platform
- How BILL leverages machine learning and AI throughout its product
- How to lead a product-led growth team and how to measure success, activation rates, and customer value

For more FinTech insights, follow us on
WFT Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech
WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech
WFT Instagram: instagram.com/whartonfintech
Josh's Twitter: @josh_benadiva
Josh’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jbenadiva/

Rhea Advani Bobba hosts Tess Bloch, co-founder and Head of Operations of Spade, a fintech startup reshaping the card ecosystem with real-time merchant intelligence. They delve into how Spade is revolutionizing transaction data clarity, enabling FIs to enhance fraud detection, authorize more transactions, and foster innovation in financial products and services. They discuss the journey of Spade from its inception and path to product-market fit. The conversation also covers the challenges and successes faced in expanding globally, the importance of a clear ROI for financial institutions, and Spade's ambitious plans for the future.

About Tess
Tess Bloch is the co-founder and Head of Operations of Spade. In her current role as Head of Operations, Tess leads Spade’s operations, finance, sales, and people teams, and grew the employee headcount 5x. Before co-founding Spade, Tess spent two years at the leading income and employment connectivity API, Pinwheel, where she started as the Chief of Staff before becoming its Head of Operations. In these roles, she helped scale the Pinwheel team 14 to 100 employees and supported growth that helped the company raise a $50M Series B. Previously, Tess also worked for McKinsey & Company in London, where she focused on payments, private equity, and public and social sector work, but her passion for fintech didn’t start there. Already, before graduating from Stanford, she realized her interest in the financial services ecosystem early on in her career, starting an internship at Venmo in her freshman year and taking time off during her junior year to work there full time.

About Spade
Spade provides real-time merchant intelligence for the card ecosystem. Spade leverages its ground truth database to link any card transaction to a real merchant identity – providing granular merchant, category, and geolocation information. Spade leads the market in terms of merchant coverage, geolocation matching accuracy, and speed of transaction enrichment. Customers such as Mercury, Sardine, Ramp, and Unit trust Spade's data to authorize more transactions, prevent fraud, and build more innovative features.

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As always, for more Fintech insights and opportunities to collaborate, please find us below:
WFT LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/wharton-fintech-club/
WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech
WFT Blog: medium.com/wharton-fintech
WFT Home: www.whartonfintech.org
Rhea’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rheaa/