Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

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.

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.

Early Warning built Zelle into the dominant peer-to-peer payments network in the U.S. — processing over a trillion dollars in yearly transactions. Paze is their next bet: a bank-backed digital wallet for e-commerce checkout, backed by the same seven major banks, designed to bring that same institutional trust to online shopping. Serge Elkiner came on as GM in late 2024, brought over from Visa where he ran product for money movement globally. His mandate is to unlock what that network can do at checkout — with 165 million eligible cards now in place and distribution deals closing with Fiserv, Worldpay, and ACI. Today we talk about what it takes to convert infrastructure into consumer behavior, and whether the banks can do for e-commerce what they did for P2P.

A mid-market company with dozens of bank accounts shouldn't have to deploy a small army to figure out where its money is. But for most commercial banking clients, that's still the reality because the systems tracking it haven't kept up. Banks know this. Most of their commercial clients know this. The gap between what legacy infrastructure can deliver and what today's treasury teams actually need has been widening for years, and the banks that aren't solving it are starting to lose ground to those that are. KeyBank and Qolo are building a way out of that problem. Bennie Pennington, Head of Embedded Banking at KeyBank, and Patricia Montesi, CEO of Qolo, joined Tearsheet to talk about how they designed and launched a real-time virtual account management platform together — and what it's already proving in the market.

For years, companies that needed to move money at scale faced the same frustrating tradeoff: build their own bank integrations and compliance infrastructure — a process that could take months — or stitch together a patchwork of specialized vendors, each covering a different rail. Modern Treasury has spent years sitting inside that problem, providing software infrastructure to help companies integrate with their banks, track funds, and manage ledgering at scale. Now, the founders have taken the company a significant step further, launching Payments, an integrated PSP that handles onboarding, KYB, and banking infrastructure on a client's behalf, compressing what used to be a six-month setup into days. Stablecoins are built in natively from day one, powered by Modern Treasury's acquisition of Beam, a stablecoin infrastructure company founded by Dan Mottice, who previously led crypto products at Visa and now heads stablecoin strategy at Modern Treasury. The result is what the company calls a "forever payments platform," designed to let companies start with fiat or stablecoin payments quickly with a single integration and expand over time, without the painful migrations that have historically defined scaling a payments stack. Listen to the podcast to learn about how Modern Treasury is thinking about fiat rails and stablecoins as complementary infrastructure, how the Beam acquisition shaped the new product, and why President Dimitri Dadiomov and Mottice believe the most significant near-term stablecoin opportunity lies in how companies manage working capital.

There's a tension at the heart of modern banking that technology doesn't seem to totally resolve: how do you be both, digitally excellent and deeply human at the same time? Most banks have picked a lane: either betting on digital efficiency or doubling down on relationship banking. But consumers aren't asking for one or the other. They want both. They want their banking app to work flawlessly when they need it, and they want someone who actually knows them when it matters. My guest today is Dontá Wilson, Truist's Chief Consumer and Small Business Banking Officer. He leads 20,000 teammates serving clients through both digital channels and more than 1,900 community banking branches. His portfolio spans core deposits and loans to mortgage, auto, credit cards, and the full stack of consumer products. He also oversees Truist's multi-year growth plan that's reimagining both their digital experience and their physical branches using insights and AI. We talked about how AI is redefining consumer expectations and trust, what it takes to innovate inside a highly regulated industry while keeping client purpose at the center, and why Dontá believes innovation without empathy is empty.

Sponsor banking has become one of the most scrutinized business models in financial services. The headlines focus on enforcement actions and regulatory pressure, but behind that noise is a more interesting question: when done right, how do bank-fintech partnerships actually expand financial access to people the traditional system has left behind? My guest today is Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward. Before joining Pathward he led Nationwide Pet Insurance and served as Interim President of Nationwide Bank. At Pathward, his mission is powering financial inclusion through partnerships with fintechs and platform companies. We're going to talk about how the sponsor banking model actually works, what makes these partnerships succeed or fail, and why Anthony believes these relationships are essential to expanding financial access beyond what traditional banks can reach on their own.

Digital banking has become the largest branch of modern banking, yet most banks and credit unions still aren't approaching these experiences with a product mindset. They're managing digital channels the way they've always managed technology: as IT projects, rather than products that need constant refinement based on user behavior. The result is an ecosystem where institutions miss opportunities to serve different customer segments effectively and struggle to demonstrate ROI on their digital investments. "Banks sell rails, and fintech sells outcomes," said Dados’ Christine Berry, a quote that Anthony Ianniciello, VP of Product Management at Q2, says encapsulates the fundamental shift that needs to happen. "That really gets to the heart of how you shift that mindset away from, I have this thing, and I have it for you, as opposed to, here's what I really want to drive for your success." Q2 has partnered with Pendo, a product experience platform, to help regional and community financial institutions make this transition. Trisha Price, Field Chief Product Officer at Pendo and host of the Hard Calls podcast, brings a cross-industry perspective on how companies leverage behavior data and analytics to build better products. Listen to this podcast to learn how banks and credit unions are using product management principles, user behavior data, and in-app guidance to transform their digital channels from cost centers into strategic growth drivers. And for a deeper dive into how Software Experience Management can boost banker productivity and drive measurable ROI.

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. For fintechs, cracking the credit union market is notoriously difficult. It's relationship-based, insular, and requires a fundamentally different approach than banking. Many try and fail. But when done right, it opens up distribution to institutions serving over 140 million Americans. Today I'm joined by Brian Kaas, president and managing director of TruStage Ventures, the corporate VC arm of TruStage—a $5.5 billion annual revenue insurer that works with 92% of credit unions nationwide. Since 2016, TruStage Ventures has deployed $400 million across 50 portfolio companies and facilitated over 3,000 partnerships between credit unions and fintechs. We first spoke with Brian in 2021 when the fund was just gaining traction. Four years later, the portfolio has matured with companies like Ethos, Current, and SmartAsset, and Brian's team has become essential connective tissue between innovative fintechs and credit union distribution. We'll dig into what makes credit union partnerships different, why so many fintechs struggle to break in, and why stablecoin solutions have become the number one request Brian's hearing from credit union CEOs.

Financial institutions are rethinking loyalty at a critical moment. Credit card spending sits at record highs, but economic uncertainty looms. For banks aiming to stay relevant, loyalty can no longer be an afterthought – it needs to be embedded into every customer experience from the start. At FIS's Emerald 2025 conference in Orlando, Mladen Vladic, general manager of loyalty services at FIS, sat down to discuss how the loyalty industry is evolving beyond traditional card-based rewards. His central argument: Financial institutions need to shift from chasing share of wallet to capturing share of mind first.

Commercial banks are confronting a rapidly shifting landscape as private credit markets grow toward $3.5 trillion and fintech competitors accelerate their offerings with AI-powered tools. Rather than retreating, traditional institutions are doubling down on technology investments and reimagining their commercial lending strategies to compete in this new environment. "Banks are not short-term thinkers," says Héctor Pagés, SVP and Head of Global Commercial Lending at FIS. "We're not seeing a slowdown in terms of interest or investment from our institutions, in terms of advancing and changing the ways that they're working." The response from banks has been multifaceted, according to Pagés. Some retail-focused institutions are shifting resources toward commercial lending, while smaller commercial banks are expanding into more complex lending products. Others are adopting an "originate to distribute" model, partnering with private credit firms to spread risk while generating fee income. This strategic evolution is happening against a backdrop of regulatory uncertainty, tariff fluctuations, and the continued expansion of non-bank lenders into territory traditionally dominated by banks. Listen to the podcast to learn about how banks are transforming their commercial lending operations through unified technology platforms, the role of AI in automating credit decisions and underwriting processes, and why cloud infrastructure is becoming essential for global scalability.

Community and regional banks operate in an environment of perpetual tension. They need to grow deposits and drive lending profitability while managing operating costs that threaten to overwhelm smaller institutions. They must also prevent increasingly sophisticated fraud while delivering customer experiences that match Amazon and Netflix. And they need to do all of this while building technology foundations that won't become obsolete before the implementation is complete. At FIS's Emerald 2025 conference in Orlando, Peter Boyer, head of banking at FIS, and Craig Focardi, principal analyst at Celent, discussed how financial institutions are navigating these competing demands. Focardi and Boyer discuss how modernization is now a continuous process of adaptation, and that the institutions most likely to succeed will focus on enabling agility rather than chasing specific technologies. "If you really take a step back and think about regional and community banking, there's a couple headwinds or tailwinds, that are driving how banks are thinking about the market," Boyer explained. "One is deposit growth and profitability growth through lending. Every bank right now is thinking, how do I grow? What is my sweet spot in my segment? Thing two is operating costs. How do they continue to drive a more efficient bank? AI is a big topic on that particular solution. And thing three is fraud. How do you protect the banking ecosystem? You put those three together and you've got a meaningful amount of where the energy is in the market today."

The GENIUS Act brings regulatory clarity to stablecoins, but Conduit CEO Kirill Gertman argues that clarity alone won't guarantee success. Banks face a choice between building their own infrastructure or becoming the pipes for others. Kirill Gertman has watched the stablecoin industry evolve from multiple angles. He spent nearly two decades in financial services before founding Conduit in 2021, including six years in crypto and a stint as VP of product at BRD, which became Coinbase Wallet. His company grew 16x in 2024 by solving a practical problem: businesses in emerging markets were accumulating stablecoins to hedge against local currency volatility but couldn't use those balances in their day-to-day operations. Conduit now works with tier-one banks and multinational corporations, processing billions in cross-border payments. And with the GENIUS Act bringing the first comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins in the United States, Gertman argues the legislation's passage raises as many strategic questions as it answers—particularly for banks that have been sitting on the sidelines. Today, we'll explore why the GENIUS Act matters, the critical difference between stablecoins and deposit tokens, what strategy banks should actually pursue, and where Gertman sees the industry heading as major players race to build vertically integrated stacks.

The venture capital world has a liquidity problem. With IPOs scarce and M&A exits few and far between, investors have been stuck in positions for years, unable to return capital to their LPs or move into new opportunities. But while traditional exit doors have stayed shut, technology has opened up new ones—specifically, platforms that make it possible to create and trade Special Purpose Vehicles at scale, something that used to require armies of lawyers and fund administrators. Today I’m joined by Nik Talreja, the CEO and co-founder of Sydecar, a platform that’s turned what used to be a manual, months-long process into something you can do in days. He started his career as a securities attorney at firms like Weil Gotshal and Cooley, where he spent his days drafting the same documents over and over for venture deals. That experience showed him that much of what venture capitalists were paying lawyers to do could be standardized and automated, which led him to found Sydecar in 2021. In our conversation, he explains how technology is reshaping private market infrastructure, what gets automated and what still needs human expertise, and how software is changing who can participate in venture investing.

Some partnerships in financial services begin with a handshake and end with a contract dispute. Others start with a Sunday morning LinkedIn message and evolve into something that transcends the typical vendor-client relationship. The collaboration between Cross River Bank and Best Egg falls firmly into the latter category. "When we first got into the business, we met several new companies, and some of them were like three guys in a garage," recalls Adam Goller, EVP and Head of Fintech Banking at Cross River.  An impromptu conversation in 2013 between Best Egg's founder and Cross River's CEO would eventually grow into a partnership that has facilitated nearly $35 billion in loans and 2.5 million customers – reshaping the lives of people and communities who were previously underserved by traditional FIS and had limited access to credit. What began as basic loan origination has evolved into sophisticated closed-loop capital market solutions, including the development of Best Egg's "BEAST" securitization platform, which uses Cross River’s CRB Securities to package assets for sale to institutional investors. The progression reflects Cross River’s willingness and ability to help fintechs climb the rungs of product expansion as they grow: "We have so many use cases where a partner came to us for lending, and that ultimately expanded to a deposit product, a payment service, and a card product," Goller notes. Although partners that offer point solutions can help fintechs get started, they don’t set them up for the future. The Cross River - Best Egg partnership shows how the right BaaS and bank partner helps fintechs move beyond the start up mindset with more sophisticated financial support as they mature.  Listen to this conversation to learn about the blueprint fintechs should use to identify the right banking partners at the start and how Cross River can help fintechs look beyond isolated business cases and build long term product road maps, with the support of a large financial institution and the agility of a fintech.

CFOs are abandoning quarterly planning cycles for week-by-week assessments as trade tensions, tariff uncertainty, and supplier volatility force a new short-term reality onto financial leadership. Seamus Smith, EVP and Group President of Automated Finance at FIS, and Chrissy Wagner, SVP of GTM at FIS, break down how finance leaders can balance urgent risk management with strategic growth positioning through data quality, automation, and AI. Smith and Wagner reveal that cybersecurity tops the list of CFO concerns, but inefficient processes and lack of visibility into money flows are the real operational killers, particularly as organizations grow through M&A. They explain how FIS helped clients navigate recent tariff disruptions through better data visibility, why paper checks remain one of the biggest fraud vectors in modern finance, how supply chain finance is underutilized in the US compared to Europe, and why AI is already delivering $3.70 in returns for every dollar invested in credit underwriting and collections.

Welcome to a special 4dFi podcast exploring the latest trends and technologies reshaping finance. I'm Zack Miller, Tearsheet's Editor in Chief. Today, we're unpacking the rise of AI agents and their potential to transform how consumers interact with financial services. I'm joined by my partners Russell Weiss, an AI expert and startup builder, and Josh Liggett, a seasoned fintech investor. Together, we'll bring a multidimensional view to this complex space. We'll dive into real-world examples like Capital One's Chat Concierge, which has driven a 55% boost in customer engagement by automating key tasks across thousands of auto dealer sites. Looking ahead, we'll consider the implications for traditional banks. Will they invest billions in proprietary AI models, or cede ground to big tech and infrastructure players increasingly embedding financial services? We don’t have all the answers but want to open up with good questions and thinking about where things are headed. We'll also explore how the evolution of AI agents could intersect with web3, crypto, and asset tokenization to enable digital transactions. Russell and Josh will weigh in on which players are poised to thrive in this new era of AI-powered finance. There's a lot to cover, but one thing is clear: AI is no longer a far-off possibility for banks. It's a present-day reality redefining what's possible. Stay tuned for a thought-provoking discussion of the opportunities and challenges ahead.

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. We've been covering AI in financial services for a while now—chatbots, generative AI, fraud detection models. But something fundamental is shifting. We're moving beyond AI as a tool that assists humans to AI as an actor that takes action on our behalf. Agentic AI is no longer a research project. It's live. Capital One has AI agents helping consumers buy cars. Visa is letting AI agents spend your money. RBC has agents executing trades, learning and adapting in real-time to market conditions. It's already here. The question is: what does it take to make this work at scale? What infrastructure do you need when an AI agent is handling real financial transactions at 2 AM? How do you architect for reliability when there's no human in the loop? My guest today is Kevin Levitt, who leads global business development for financial services at Nvidia. Before Nvidia, Kevin spent years inside fintechs like Credit Karma and Roostify. At Nvidia, he's working with firms like Capital One, Visa, and RBC as they deploy agentic AI in production—not pilot programs, actual live systems processing real transactions. We're digging into the case studies, the computational demands of multi-agentic systems, the security challenges when agents control money, and what financial institutions need to be thinking about now. Nvidia's Kevin Levitt is my guest today on the podcast.

Banks dramatically underestimate how their customers share financial data, and most of it happens through insecure screen scraping that creates fraud vulnerabilities and slows performance. Shane McWilliams, Head of Retail Digital Banking at FIS, breaks down the three critical challenges separating thriving institutions from those being left behind: serving small and medium businesses as a central financial hub, enabling secure data sharing through APIs, and moving beyond product-centric thinking to build sticky customer relationships. McWilliams reveals that when he asks bank executives to guess what percentage of their customers are sharing data with third parties, "they're not even close" to reality. He explains how modern SMBs expect their banks to integrate everything from cash flow monitoring to accounting systems, why personalization needs to go beyond UX optimization, and how banks that orient around customer needs rather than products will win in today's competitive environment.

Although every company is becoming a fintech now, Wix didn’t set out to do so – the firm’s entry into financial services started from observing what millions of small business owners actually needed when building their online presence. For Amit Sagiv and Volodymyr Tsukur, co-heads of payments at Wix, the path to serving these SMB customers well was paved through financial products: Wix had to take the payment infrastructure it had built for itself and transform it into tools that could help merchants manage their businesses. The foundation was already there. Wix had developed sophisticated billing systems to support its freemium model, accumulating deep expertise in payment routing, risk management, and global processing. "We built tremendous payment capabilities," Sagiv explained. "The billing manager of Wix wanted to take that offering and build a service for our users." What started as a small project evolved into a comprehensive financial platform serving businesses across the globe. The company now processes over $3 billion per quarter with a team of 160 people, covering payments, checking accounts, and capital lending. Listen to the podcast to hear how a chance collaboration between Wix's billing team and gateway developers turned into a fintech operation processing billions quarterly. Sagiv and Tsukur discuss why they deliberately avoided becoming a full-fledged bank, and how website data reveals creditworthiness before transaction history does. It’s a conversation that dives deep into what it means to be serving SMB customers digitally and how firms can do embedded finance right.