Financial News Network: Spotlight

In this episode of The Financial News Network: Spotlight, host Jillian Williams sits down with Lightspeed investor Sam Eisler to take stock of where AI and fintech are heading, and which ideas are starting to look more durable as the market matures. Sam traces her path from Google into venture capital and explains how dramatically the fintech investment landscape has changed since 2021. AI has gone from a nice-to-have area of expertise to something that increasingly sits at the center of how ...

In this episode of TWIF Spotlight: Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Kush Bavaria, co-founder of Ornn, to talk about what happens when the explosive growth of AI turns compute into something that starts to look a lot like a commodity. Kush explains Ornn’s thesis that compute will become a core input for businesses across the economy, creating a market where companies increasingly need to buy, sell and hedge access to GPU capacity. Ornn is building both a marketplace for compu...

In this episode of TWIF Spotlight: Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Sophia Goldberg, Head of Payments at Rain and founder of Ansa, which was recently acquired by the stablecoin infrastructure company. Sophia shares what took her from traditional payments into stablecoins, why she believes the technology has finally reached a point where major companies can take it seriously, and how Rain is using stablecoin rails to make global financial products easier to launch. They dig i...

In this episode of TWIF Spotlight: Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Kahlil Lalji, founder and CEO of Natural, just after the company announced a $30 million Series A. Kahlil explains why he believes AI agents will eventually execute the majority of global payment volume, and why the biggest near-term opportunity may be in B2B rather than consumer commerce. Unlike shopping, where taste and preference can make delegation tricky, many business payment flows are much easier to d...

In the first episode of the new season of Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Jesse Pollak, creator of Base and a longtime leader at Coinbase, to talk about what happens when AI agents start spending money. Jesse explains why he believes crypto could become a natural payment rail for AI: Agents are built to interact with software, and stablecoins and crypto wallets give them a programmable way to transact without relying on payment systems designed for humans. They discuss wher...