Fintech Takes
Fintech Takes is a podcast hosted by Alex Johnson that covers the latest news and trends in the fintech and banking industries. Each week, Alex and his guests discuss the most interesting developments, explore pressing questions, and analyze business models and emerging players. The show features conversations with fintech operators, recaps of compelling news stories, and in-depth analyses of regulatory changes. It aims to help listeners stay informed about the fast-moving fintech universe.
Episodes
Anatomy of an Agentic Transaction
Welcome back to Fintech Takes! I’m Alex Johnson, joined once again by Dan Murphy (partner at Allon Advisors and former CFPB official who worked on the Section 1033 open banking rule) to ask some annoying questions about agentic finance.
We start in Toronto, at the FDATA Global Summit, where AI agents effectively hijacked an open banking conference and screen-scraping veterans began to recognize
Fintech Recap: Whop, Revolut, and Chime Buys Stride
Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.
We kick things off with Whop, a creator marketplace that announced last week that anyone can launch a neobank on its platform in 15 minutes. Jason tried it. I unpack why a self-custody wallet built to function like a bank account opens a new kind of regulatory arbitrage.
Next, we get i
Fintech Takes x C&R Software Presents: Fintech’s Next Test Across the U.S. and U.K.
Welcome to Season 2 of Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software.
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether.
In Episode 1, I sit down with Luke Broadhurst, CEO of Credit Strategy, w
The Investor Diaries
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Tim Flacke (Co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth) to unpack The Investor Diaries, their 15-month research project on how low-to-moderate income Americans invest.
This is a different kind of episode, one where you’ll hear select voice diaries from the consumers themselves, representing households earning between $25,000 and $80,000 a year.
Under the Hood of Fintech Products
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Jas Shah, fintech product consultant and author of one of my favorite newsletters, Fintech: Under the Hood, which gets into serious detail from a builder's perspective.
Jas has built a range of fintech products and consulted for fintech companies and banks, so we spend this episode in the gloriously granular trenches of Fintec
A Crisis of Confidence: This Has Happened Before
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. Diehard listeners may remember my first and second audiobook experiments. By popular demand, here's a third.
I’m turning my recent deep dive, “A Crisis of Confidence: This Has Happened Before,” into a podcast episode for your listening pleasure(s).
I wrote it back in May after attending Emerge, the Financial Health Network's annual event, where wandering around
Can You Standardize Bank-Fintech Risk?
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by two of my favorite Jasons (Jason Mikula of Fintech Business Weekly and Jason Henrichs of Alloy Labs) to go deep on the FDIC's very early effort to create standards for third-party risk management (particularly for bank-fintech partnerships).
Banking didn't get here by accident. FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry ran the market for decades. Lon
Fintech Recap: Risk, Standards, and Double Standards
Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.
We open with Coastal Community Bank, which swung from a $12M in profit in Q1 to a $42M loss in Q2 after recording a $68.8M credit provision on $530M of loans originated by its fintech lending partner, LendingPoint. Coastal held the loans on its own balance sheet, but relied on LendingPoin
Fintech Takes x Nova Credit Presents Cash Flow Conversations Ep 7: A Traveling Credit Score
Hello, and welcome back to Cash Flow Conversations, a podcast series sponsored by Nova Credit.
If you've followed my work, you'll know that I'm obsessed with cash flow data because it has enormous potential to positively reshape consumer lending in the U.S.
Cash Flow Conversations tracks that shift, from theory to practical use across the lending lifecycle.
In Episode 7, I’m joined by Jua
Premium Cards Get Weird
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined again by fellow fintech creator Matthew Goldman, founder and managing member of Totavi, and author of one of my favorite newsletters on cards and payments, Cards for the Win.
We cover a lot of ground, like whether fintech’s premium-card obsession is distracting from what customers need, why building a card program is getting mo
The SMB Context Margin Paradox
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by David Snitkof (GM of SMB at Ocrolus) to explore one of my all-time favorite topics in financial services: small business lending.
Consumer lending is basically homogeneous. People move through predictable life stages, and underwriting comes down to assessing reliability and capacity. Small business lending is nothing like that. Understa
Not Fintech Investment Advice: Natural, Sky Fusion, Quarters, El Dorado
Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about companies we're absolutely not giving investment advice on!
First up is Natural, an AI agent orchestration layer for payments that just raised a $30M Series A. We explore its wallet architecture (which uses account structure itself as a guardrail for what agents can and can't do), and why a liab
Fintech Recap: No-KYC Cards and Political Bank Charters Aplenty
Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.
We open with a tangled story that you should absolutely read Jason’s reporting* on. Trump-linked World Liberty Financial poured $1.5B into a crypto treasury company called Alt5 Sigma, whose token plummeted from ~20¢ to ~5¢. Buried inside that detritus, Jason uncovered a Canadian subsidiar
Inside Stripe's Open Standard
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined again by James Wester (co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research), who I’ve come to think of as our resident stablecoin correspondent to make sense of the biggest stablecoin news of the summer.
In July, Stripe organized a consortium called Open Standard, backed by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Coinbase, among othe
The Rules for Self-Driving Money
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by two of my favorite repeat guests: Steve Boms (Executive Director of FDATA North America) and Dan Murphy (Founder of Sunset Park Advisors; formerly CFPB).
We set aside Section 1033 for an hour to talk about agentic finance; what happens when AI agents don't just read your financial data, but act on it.
First up, the question any skept
Fintech Takes x TruStage presents Lending, Unbundled Ep 3: Revenue at Stake
Welcome to Lending, Unbundled, a new series from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at TruStage.
The series traces how consumer lending went from a single institution that handled everything to a modular value chain of specialized providers, each owning one piece of the loan, and asks what lending, unbundled, has cost the industry along the way.
In Episode 3, my cohost Bjoern Nordmann (
Retuning the Math of Life
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm your host, Alex Johnson, and today one of our favorite guests is back: Frank Rotman, founding partner of 37Maru and co-founder and partner emeritus at QED Investors.
First, we chat about what happens to an entire industry once its customers have concluded the game is rigged, which is why financial nihilism now shows up everywhere from ETFs built on s
Fintech Takes x TruStage presents Lending, Unbundled Ep 2: The Confidence Gap
Welcome to Lending, Unbundled, a new series from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at TruStage.
The series traces how consumer lending went from a single institution that handled everything to a modular value chain of specialized providers, each owning one piece of the loan, and asks what lending, unbundled, has cost the industry along the way.
In Episode 2, my cohost Bjoern Nordmann (VP o
Not Fintech Investment Advice: Primitive, Exponent, Prime Intellect, Coverd
Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about companies we're absolutely not giving investment advice on.
First up is Primitive, an agent control plane for large financial institutions trying to figure out what to do with AI agents. We get into why regulated institutions need infrastructure that sits above any one model provider, token bu
Fintech Takes x TruStage presents Lending, Unbundled Ep 1: Financial Accessibility and Inclusion
Welcome to Lending, Unbundled, a new series from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at TruStage.
The series traces how consumer lending went from a single institution that handled everything to a modular value chain of specialized providers, each owning one piece of the loan, and asks what lending, unbundled, has cost the industry along the way.
In Episode 1, I sit down with my co-host
Fintech Recap: Failures, Prediction Markets, & Debanking
Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.
We start with Parker Card, an SMB charge card startup that abruptly shut down in early May. The failure itself wasn't the story. The SVB lawsuit against issuing partner Patriot Bank is, and what it reveals about $21 million in receivables that fell into contested no-man's-land when Parker
The End of the Checklist Era
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Andrew DiMattina, Product Architect at Persona (and expert in all things fraud and compliance, especially AML compliance), to explore the changing state of compliance in the U.S. and around the globe.
The expectation going into this administration was deregulation. What banks and fintech companies have discovered over the la
B2B Marketing Sucks & Can Be Better
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, and today's episode is a little different.
Before I wrote a newsletter for a living, I spent the beginning of my career working in B2B marketing in fintech and financial services. So this episode is built around the provocation that B2B marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to.
First up, Cokie Hasiotis (Head of Vertical Marketing at Socure and
Facing Credit: Pessimism and Performance
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Dave Wasik, Partner at 2nd Order Solutions, for another episode of Facing Credit, our series on everything credit and lending.
Dave comes armed with 2nd Order Solutions' new credit trends report, and the headline is: things are surprisingly OK, albeit there are yellow flags. Bankruptcies are up 14% year over year. New credit
Fintech Recap: Charters, BaaS & the Fed
Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.
We kick things off with the accelerating trend of fintech companies becoming banks. Chime's CEO confirmed it's a matter of when, not if — reversing their "we're a software company" stance. Mercury got conditional OCC approval for a national bank charter the same week it raised $200M at a
Fintech Takes x Chime presents Banking on Primacy Episode 4: The AI Episode
Welcome to Banking on Primacy, a four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by Chime.
The series orbits one question that has become the most contested in consumer finance: what does it take to earn (and hold) the most important relationship in someone's financial life?
In Episode 4, I sit down with Ryan King, technical Co-Founder at Chime, to explore what AI means for the pr
Who Pays for Open Finance?
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Rafe Mazer, researcher and author of the excellent report "Who Pays for What? Pricing and Monetization Options in Open Finance."
This episode is a deliberate step back from the U.S. open banking soap opera I've been living inside for the past year or so.
The question of who pays for open finance isn't one the U.S. gets t
Fintech Takes x Nova Credit Presents Cash Flow Conversations Episode 6: Living Out on the Edge
Hello, and welcome back to Cash Flow Conversations, a podcast series sponsored by our friends at Nova Credit.
We've spent a lot of time in this series focused on the mainstream adoption of cash flow data within consumer lending: where to get started, the challenges you can expect to face.
Episode 6 leaves that territory behind for the open frontier, where the conversations aren't about oper
Fintech Takes x Chime presents Banking on Primacy Episode 3: Banking at Work
Welcome to Banking on Primacy, a four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by Chime.
The series orbits one question that has become the most contested in consumer finance: what does it take to earn (and hold) the most important relationship in someone's financial life?
In Episode 3, I sit down with Jason Lee, Chief of Chime Enterprise. We unpack fintech as an employee benefi
Losing Big
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Jonathan Cohen, Policy Lead at the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.
In keeping with a theme that we've been building on around here, today's episode is about sports betting, gambling, prediction markets, and the infiltration of all of these activities in
Fintech Takes x Chime presents Banking on Primacy Ep 2: The Bifurcation of Rewards
Welcome to Banking on Primacy, a four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by Chime.
The series orbits one question that has become the most contested in consumer finance: what does it take to earn (and hold) the most important relationship in someone's financial life?
In Episode 2, I sit down with Vineet Mehra, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Chime, to dig into the re
The Rise of Sports Gambling
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Danny Funt, author of the book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling.
This episode isn’t really about sports. It’s about how sports gambling evolved in the U.S. from a patchwork of legal quirks, a highly coordinated state-by-state lobbying campaign, and a set of product dynamics that, over time, be
Fintech Takes x Chime presents Banking on Primacy Ep 1: The Fight for Primacy
Welcome to Banking on Primacy, a four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by Chime.
The series orbits one question that has become the most contested in consumer finance: what does it take to earn (and hold) the most important relationship in someone's financial life?
In Episode 1, I sit down with Mark Troughton, President at Chime, to dig into primacy.
We kick things of
Fintech Recap: PFM's AI Moment, Super Apps, and the PACE Act
We kick things off with personal financial management, a category I've been following through three distinct generations. From Mint and Credit Karma to newer subscription tools, the core problem hasn’t changed; most folks don’t want to manage their money. Now, with OpenAI acquiring Hiro and Perplexity AI partnering with Plaid, PFM is shifting from dashboards to AI agent interfaces. But is this sol
Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Ep 8: The AI Execution Gap
Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software.
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether.
In Episode 8, I sit down again with Ed Wallen, CEO of C&R Software, for a b
The Historical Roots of Stablecoins
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Mike Hsu, former Acting Comptroller of the Currency.
I recently crossed paths with Mike at the Bank of North Dakota's fintech and stablecoin event in Fargo, where he led a 90-minute session on stablecoins from a policymaker's perspective. It was so impressive I wanted an interactive version for the podcast.
In this episod
Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 7: Collections Without Borders
Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software.
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections: what it enables, what it complicates, and why it may force the industry to retire the word "collections" altogether.
In this episode, I sit down with Chris Smith, VP of Product at C&R Software to discuss wh
Facing Credit: The Credit Score After FICO
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Rich Franks (a fintech advisor and consultant with 20+ years in credit risk across both the bank and fintech sides), for a new episode of Facing Credit.
This one's about credit scoring. And it’s about why the market has changed more in the last year than in the prior 30.
The FICO monopoly has cracked. Federal regulators o
Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 6: Humans in the Fintech Loop
Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software.
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether.
In Episode 6, I sit down with Pedro Maya, Head of Collections and Credit Ri
Not Fintech Investment Advice: monk, MKIII, Wealth Architect, & CloutScore
Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about fintech startups we're absolutely not giving investment advice on.
First up is monk, an accounts receivable AI that helps small businesses get paid faster. Accounts payable has been well-served by spend management tools. Accounts receivable for small businesses is still stupidly hard. We dig i
Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 5: The Missed Payment Is Not the Problem
Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software – now with a fresh batch of episodes!
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether.
In Episode 5, I sit down with Rochelle
The Great Bank-Fintech Partnership Reset
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Jason Henrichs, CEO of Alloy Labs and co-host of the Breaking Banks podcast.
This episode is structured in two parts.
In part one, Jason and I zoom out on bank-fintech partnerships (once we get a rant out of our system; the Treasury Department announced who’d run Trump accounts as we recorded, and we had feelings).
We’
Fintech Recap: Bilt Breaks, BaaS Unbundles, and NY Flexes
Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.
We kick things off with Bilt 2.0. After Wells Fargo pulled the plug on a partnership costing the bank reportedly $10M a month, Bilt rebuilt its stack with Column as the bank partner, Cardless as issuer processor, and Fidem Financial as the capital provider. The transition was not smooth.
Fintech Takes x Spinwheel presents Credit Without Constraints Episode 4: Context
Welcome to Credit Without Constraints, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, presented with our friends at Spinwheel.
The series revolves around one question: how do we make the best possible credit decisions for the benefit of both the consumer and the lender?
In Episode 4, my cohost Tomás Campos, Co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel, and I sit down with Rich Franks, a fintech a
Facing Credit: Credit Underwriting as a System
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Kiran Aware (Chief Consumer Credit Officer at LendingClub) and Michelle Young (Credit Product Lead at Plaid) for our new series Facing Credit, where we unpack what’s happening in credit and lending right now.
Today’s conversation explores credit underwriting as a system, and why more lenders are finally starting to treat it
Fintech Takes x Spinwheel presents Credit Without Constraints Episode 3: Acquisition
Welcome to Credit Without Constraints, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, presented with our friends at Spinwheel.
The series orbits around one core challenge: how do we make the best possible credit decisions for the benefit of both the consumer and the lender?
In Episode 3, my cohost Tomás Campos (Co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel) and I sit down with Lamine Zarrad, Found
Not Fintech Investment Advice: Rhythmic, AgentCard, Rowspace, & Burst
Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about fintech startups we’re absolutely not giving investment advice on.
First up is Rhythmic, stablecoin-powered embedded wallets for brands (think Ansa but stablecoins). We unpack why payments nerds are now building in stablecoins, what OCC guidance means for yield on stored balances, and why this
Fintech Takes x Spinwheel presents Credit Without Constraints Episode 2: Underwriting
Welcome to Credit Without Constraints, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, presented with our friends at Spinwheel.
The series orbits around one core challenge: how do we make the best possible credit decisions for the benefit of both the consumer and the lender?
We’re living through an abundance era for credit data. Today’s challenge is getting the most value out of that
Celebrity Fintech, Before MrBeast
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined again by Carlos Caro (author of the Free Toaster newsletter and host of the Free Toaster podcast) to continue the conversation we started on Carlos’s podcast about MrBeast's acquisition of Step and what it means for the fintech ecosystem.
This episode picks up where we left off, by looking to the past.
If you think you’ve found a new i
Fintech Takes x Spinwheel presents Credit Without Constraints Episode 1: The "Yes And" Approach to Credit Data
Welcome to Credit Without Constraints, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, presented with our friends at Spinwheel.
The series orbits around one core challenge: how do we make the best possible credit decisions for the benefit of both the consumer and the lender?
Data is one of the biggest constraints. Credit outcomes sit downstream of credit data, and today that data is f
Fintech Recap: Block, Crypto Cards, and Prediction Markets Split the Right
Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I'm Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula.
We kick things off with Block’s move into credit scoring. Block stitched together data across Cash App and Afterpay into a proprietary score it’s now surfacing to consumers and selling to other lenders, claiming auto lenders could approve 30% more borrowers at identical loss rates using the
Canada Leapfrogs on Open Banking
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined in this episode by two guests, Steve Boms (Executive Director at FDATA) and Dan Murphy (Founder of Sunset Park Advisors; formerly CFPB).
We're talking about Canada, and why a country that has spent the better part of a decade moving at a pace I have occasionally made fun of in the newsletter is now arguably ahead of the U.S. on
Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 4: Collections at the Edge
Welcome to the finale of Collections Conversations, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software.
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether.
In Episode 4, I sit down with Dave Wasik, Partne
Not Fintech Investment Advice: Kairos, Vault, Vennre, & Buy Now Pay Maybe
Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about fintech startups we’re absolutely not giving investment advice on.
First up is Kairos, a multi-prediction market trading platform giving traders a single terminal to buy and sell event contracts across Kalshi, Polymarket, and all the other emerging platforms. Their pitch: what the Bloomberg te
Fintech Takes: Super Bowl Edition
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast, where I’m welcoming back Jane Barratt, Chief Advocacy Officer at MX, to talk about Super Bowl commercials and advertising ( and how it overlaps with data privacy, data ownership, open banking, and AI).
Fun fact: Jane had a previous career in advertising. What I didn’t know is that Jane used to go on live television and review ads from the Super Bowl t
Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 3: The System Behind Collections
Welcome to Collections Conversations, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software.
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether.
In Episode 3, I sit down with John McNamara, Chief Growth Offi
Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 2: When Customer Centricity Breaks
Welcome to Collections Conversations, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software.
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether.
In Episode 2, I sit down with Ed Wallen, CEO of C&R Software.
Fintech Recap: Clarity Crumbles, Charters Multiply, and Brex Gets Bought
Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula. Even if we aren’t sailing to BaaS Island, the news keeps flooding in.
We kick off with crypto market structure, which nearly cleared Congress before imploding. The Clarity Act would’ve locked in broad crypto rules, including limits on stablecoin yield. Banks had momentum to close a key
Inside Net Interest
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Marc Rubinstein, author of the fantastic Net Interest newsletter.
In this episode, we bounce through some of Marc’s most insightful writing from the past year (linked below) to spotlight the structural forces shaping 2026.
We explore why the U.S. has thousands of community banks, the idiosyncrasies of our 30-year mortgag
Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 1: Collections in the Age of AI
Welcome to Collections Conversations, a new four-part podcast miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software.
The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether.
In Episode 1, I sit down with Naeem Abraham, Senior Director o
Fintech Recap (Bonus): The Rise and Fall of Kontigo
Welcome back to Fintech Takes for a special bonus episode of Fintech Recap with Jason Mikula; Latin American sanctions evasion expert and author of a splendid ~5,500 word investigation on Kontigo that demands its own episode.
If you haven’t yet read Jason’s piece, “Kontigo: Y Combinator's Venezuelan Sanctions Evasion Startup” in Fintech Business News Weekly – the spine of this episode – you sho
Fintech Takes x Nova Credit Presents Cash Flow Conversations Episode 5: Underwriting Was Just the Beginning
Hello, and welcome back to Cash Flow Conversations, a miniseries sponsored by our friends at Nova Credit.
If you’ve followed my work, you’ll know that I’m obsessed with cash flow data (and underwriting more specifically) because it has enormous potential to positively reshape consumer lending in the U.S.
Cash Flow Conversations tracks that shift, from theory to practical use across the lend
Not Fintech Investment Advice: Kontigo, Givefront, Beycome, & Cash App
Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about fintech startups we’re absolutely not giving investment advice on.
First up is stablecoin banking startup Kontigo, whose founder declared: “Kontigo is not a bank. Banking services are provided by the freaking blockchain.” We unpack the very fast arc that followed: getting deplatformed through
Fintech Recap: The 2025 Themes That Will Define 2026
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) by my partner in Fintech Recapping, Jason Mikula. In our first episode of the new year, we recap all of 2025 — through the big themes that shaped the industry and set the stage for 2026 (you’ll want to catch our predictions at the end).
First up, Regulation in the Upside Down. We dig into Trump’s second-term reshuffle which rep
Diving Deep with Max Levchin
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. Today’s episode kicks off a new long-form interview format I’m calling Diving Deep.
And in this episode, that’s exactly what we do with Max Levchin, co-founder and former CTO of PayPal and co-founder and the current CEO of Affirm.
This is what makes Max one of the most influential people in the history of fintech.
We start with Max’s early PayPal
A Very Die Hard Christmas
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Kiah Haslett, Jason Mikula, and Jason Henrichs. Four people. Two Jasons. It’s been a while!
Our group text has been arguing about the same thing for years, so we finally took it to the mic: is Die Hard a Christmas movie?
The plan is simple. We spend an hour talking about Die Hard and pull it apart using ten questions I r
Not Fintech Investment Advice: Trudenty, Tidalwave, Kaaj, & FinReach Solutions
Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about fintech startups we’re absolutely not giving investment advice on.
First up is Trudenty, a fraud intelligence network tackling first-party fraud. It uses federated learning to let issuers, PSPs, and merchants identify repeat abusers without sharing raw data. They’re starting with Worldline, JP
Facing Credit: Pressure Points
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Dave Wasik (Partner at 2nd Order Solutions) for our new series, Facing Credit, where we unpack what’s happening in lending right now.
First, we kick off with the big picture in December 2025, starting with delinquency rates. TL;DR: Things don’t appear to be improving, and if you squint, they may be eroding.
Next, credit c
Fintech Recap: Open Banking, Digital IDs, and Green Dot’s Split
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) by my Jason Mikula, my partner in recapping — who I’ve been lucky to see a lot of lately, which makes recording this over the internet feel oddly impersonal?
First up, open banking updates. JPMC has updated data-access contracts with Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar, and Akoya; covering, reportedly, 95% of data pulls on its systems (
Fintech Takes x Fundbox presents Engineering the SMB Capital Stack Episode 4: The Role of Banks (with Jackie Reses at Lead)
Welcome back to our Engineering the SMB Capital Stack, sponsored by our friends at Fundbox.
In this four-part series, we’re exploring small businesses, small business lending, and the forces shaping how small businesses access capital. I’m joined by Prashant Fuloria, CEO of Fundbox, as cohost.
In Episode 4 (our finale!), we turn to the role of banks (and how they fit into an increasingly unb
Facing Credit: When AI Broke the Marketing Machine
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Carlos Caro (author of the Free Toaster newsletter and host of the Free Toaster podcast) for the second episode of Facing Credit, where we unpack what’s really happening in lending right now.
This one’s about marketing; the overlooked starting point of every loan.
Everything in lending sits downstream of how you acquire
Fintech Takes x Fundbox presents Engineering the SMB Capital Stack Episode 3: Data & Underwriting with Bernardo Martinez (SoFi)
Welcome back to our Engineering the SMB Capital Stack, sponsored by our friends at Fundbox.
In this four-part series, we’re exploring small businesses, small business lending, and the forces shaping how small businesses access capital. I’m joined by Prashant Fuloria, CEO of Fundbox, as cohost.
In Episodes 1 and 2, we explored the state of small business lending and how capital actually reach
The Future of Issuing with Marqeta’s CEO
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Mike Milotich, CEO of Marqeta (who stepped into the role after serving as CFO,) and now leads a cloud based issuing platform approaching 400B in annual payment volume.
First up, we focus on Marqeta’s platform. It’s built out of configurable building blocks, and Mike gets specific about what that means in practice; walking u
The $455B Reality of Financial Health
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Jennifer Tescher, founder and CEO of the Financial Health Network (who’s spent the last two decades measuring, defining, and holding the industry accountable for consumers’ financial well-being).
We dig into the latest FinHealth Spend Report, which found that U.S. households paid $455B in interest and fees last year (a $100B
Fintech Takes x Fundbox presents Engineering the SMB Capital Stack Episode 2: Distribution (with Tanay Jaeel at Stripe)
Welcome back to our Engineering the SMB Capital Stack, sponsored by our friends at Fundbox.
In this four-part series, we’re exploring small businesses, small business lending, and the forces shaping how small businesses access capital. I’m joined by Prashant Fuloria, CEO of Fundbox, as cohost.
In Episode 1, we explored why small business lending is so distinctly challenging. Now, in Episode
Fintech Recap: AI, Stablecoins, and Live Money20/20 Energy!
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) by my Jason Mikula, my partner in recapping, but this time we recorded live from the floor of Money20/20 in Vegas!
Expect a shorter and more caffeinated episode where we riff topic to topic, grab bag style.
First up, no surprise that AI was the buzzword, especially agentic AI. Conversations this year felt more grounded (not
Fintech Takes x Fundbox presents Engineering the SMB Capital Stack Episode 1: The State of SMB Lending
Welcome to our new miniseries, Engineering the SMB Capital Stack, sponsored by our friends at Fundbox.
This four-part series digs into small businesses, small business lending, and the forces reshaping how small businesses access capital.
In Episode 1, I sit down with Prashant Fuloria, CEO of Fundbox (and my cohost for the episodes that follow).
We kick things off with The State of SMB L
Risk, Rules, and the Gaps in Open Banking
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined in this episode by three guests — Steve Smith (Co-founder and CEO of Invela; former Co-founder of Finicity and Founder of the Financial Data Exchange), Todd Taylor (Co-head of Intellectual Property; Co-head of Commercial & Technology Transactions at Moore & Van Allen), and Dan Murphy (Founder of Sunset Park Advisors; former CFPB O
Fintech Takes x Pipe Vertical SaaS: Fintech Disruption by a Thousand Cuts Episode 6: Scaling Up
In the finale of our new miniseries, Vertical SaaS: Fintech Disruption by a Thousand Cuts (sponsored by our friends at Pipe), we confront the biggest questions yet, like:
How can maturing vertical SaaS companies scale without losing the obsessive focus that made them indispensable?
Should they expand into adjacent markets, or double down on their niche?
And, as AI transforms oversight fr
The Launch of Facing Credit
Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Kevin Moss (Senior Advisor at Baselayer, former CRO) to help launch Facing Credit, a new series where we unpack what’s happening in lending right now.
We start with student loans. Repayment data is finally flowing back to credit bureaus after years of paused reporting (which have inflated credit scores; lenders need to recal
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