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Wade Arnold is the CEO and co-founder of Moov, the payments infrastructure company that brings every US payment rail together under a single contract and API. Last month Moov launched Moov Money, a real-time P2P product built with Visa and Mastercard that lets anyone with a debit card receive money, and a week earlier it announced a Coinbase partnership for stablecoin acceptance and settlement. We talk about why Wade sees a big opening for P2P outside the existing networks, how Moov tackles scams at the network level, and why he thinks the most important payments changes will be the ones consumers never notice. What We Covered From Macromedia and Adobe to Banno and Jack HenryHow an open source ACH library became a payments companyMoov as a network of networks payment processorWhy P2P in the US has been limited to "pay me back"Moov Money as a complement to ZelleHow a Moov Money payment flows, step by stepSolving the two-sided network problem with Visa and MastercardFighting scams at the network level with 55 scam pattern agentsUsing the existing text message relationship as a trust channelThe economics for community banksThe Coinbase partnership and stablecoin settlement for small businessesWhy Moov runs Fintech DevCon, and its move to BoulderCross-border payments and the plumbing changes aheadKey Takeaways Ubiquity comes from the card, not the app. Nine out of ten Americans already carry a Visa or Mastercard debit credential. By building on those networks, and embedding the sending experience in the bank's own app, Moov Money avoids the usual chicken and egg problem of getting both sides to download and fund a new app.There is a large market Zelle does not serve. Around 6,000 financial institutions are not on Zelle, and neobanks, brokerages and reloadable prepaid cards cannot buy it. Wade positions Moov Money as a lower cost alternative for those institutions, starting at $500 a month and 75 cents a transaction with fraud included, and says Moov still has to prove its fraud performance before anyone would switch.Fraud is better fought at the network level. Rather than leaving each institution to catch scams on its own, Moov watches for money from many institutions concentrating in a single recipient. Add in on-device prompts, existing debit dispute tools and end of day settlement, and there are several chances to stop a scam before the money is gone.Stablecoins are about liquidity, not crypto. For a small business, the value is getting paid over the weekend and being able to restock without a line of credit. As Wade puts it, the plumbing will change underneath consumers without them ever knowing.About Wade Arnold Wade Arnold is the CEO and co-founder of Moov. He describes himself as a computer scientist at heart, and he started his career at Macromedia, staying on through its acquisition by Adobe, where he did his first fintech work on account opening and loan origination. He then founded Banno, a digital banking platform for community banks and credit unions that was acquired by Jack Henry in 2014. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Omer Ismail is the CEO of OnePay, the consumer fintech majority-owned by Walmart and backed by Ribbit Capital, which now serves more than 7.5 million customers. He was last on the show in 2017, when he was running Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot has changed since then: we talk about why he left Goldman to start again from scratch, how OnePay turns Walmart shoppers and associates into banking customers, and why he thinks the next chapter of fintech belongs to platforms that can manage a customer's whole financial life. What We Covered The 2019 dinner that started OnePayWhy Omer left Goldman SachsThree lessons from MarcusThe rabbit in the New York office and what it says about cultureFintech 1.0 versus fintech 2.0The front door products: digital banking and creditHow OnePay acquires customers inside WalmartWhy more than 80% of banking spend happens outside WalmartHiring a first CMO and taking the playbook to UKG, Workday and ADPApple Pay and the checkoutWhy OnePay has no plans for a bank charterPenny, the AI financial assistantThe new teen banking productKey Takeaways Distribution and structure are the two things Marcus did not have. Omer says customer access is "incredibly hard and incredibly expensive." OnePay gets customers through Walmart at effectively zero acquisition cost, but it sits outside Walmart's four walls, so it can hire, incentivize and move like a startup.Fintech 2.0 is about single platforms, not single products. Fintech 1.0 companies each did one thing. Omer argues customers do not want to manage 15, 20 or 30 financial relationships, so OnePay acquires through high TAM, high engagement products (digital banking and credit) and then offers the next best product.A Walmart customer is not a Walmart-only customer. Only around 17% to 18% of OnePay banking card spend happens at Walmart. The goal is to be the primary financial relationship and top of wallet everywhere, which is why the company has hired its first CMO and is now acquiring through HR platforms and direct channels.AI changes personal financial management only when it can act. Mint stopped at insights. Omer's case is that a platform with both the customer's data and the products can complete the action for the customer, and that the winner will be whoever customers trust to do that.About Omer Ismail Omer Ismail is the CEO of OnePay, a role he took on in 2021 when the joint venture between Walmart and Ribbit Capital was being formed. Before that he had a long career at Goldman Sachs, where he ran the consumer business that included Marcus. He moved to the US at 18 and has spoken about how that shaped his interest in helping people build healthy financial habits early. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Scott Sanborn is the CEO of Happen Bank, the company known until this summer as LendingClub. He is the first guest to appear on the show four times, and each visit has caught the company at a turning point. This time it is the rebrand: we talk about why the LendingClub name no longer fit, what six years of running a chartered bank has taught him, and how he is preparing for a world where AI agents shop for financial products on a consumer's behalf. What We Covered Ten years as CEO and why it has never been the same jobWhy the LendingClub name no longer fit the businessThe customer research behind the Happen Bank brandHow they will measure whether the rebrand is workingWhat it took to get a bank charter six years agoShepherds, not sheriffs: building the risk and governance teamLevelUp Savings, LevelUp Checking and DebtIQInnovating on the loan product with their own balance sheetThe balance sheet and marketplace mixThe switch to fair value accountingHow AI is changing operations and discoveryGetting ready for AI agents that shop on consumers' behalfHome improvement lending and home equityKey Takeaways A brand is a promise, and the old name could not carry it. Customers told the company two things: they did not know it was a bank, and they did not want the word "lending" on a debit card that holds their own money. The rebrand waited until the product suite, and the financial returns, were there to back it up.The charter let them innovate more, not less. With its own balance sheet and a direct line to regulators, the company can test new loan terms and features like TopUp on its own portfolio, then bring investors the results a year later. It holds about 40% of originations on balance sheet.Simple incentives drive engagement. LevelUp Savings pays a 100 basis point rate kicker for depositing $250 a month. It has gathered billions in deposits, 20% of accounts come from borrowers, and borrowers who have paid off their loan hold an average balance of around $19,000 to $20,000.Agentic shopping favors lenders who already compete on value. Most Happen Bank customers already arrive through comparison sites, so Scott sees agents hunting for the best deal as a tailwind. The open questions are legal, such as what happens when an agent signs a loan disclosure.About Scott Sanborn Scott Sanborn has been CEO of Happen Bank, formerly LendingClub, since 2016, having joined the company in 2010 as Chief Marketing Officer. He led the acquisition of Radius Bank, the first time a fintech bought a chartered bank, and the 2026 rebrand to Happen Bank. Before LendingClub he held senior marketing and revenue roles at eHealth, RedEnvelope and the Home Shopping Network. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Michelle Beyo is the founder and CEO of Finavator, a consultancy that helps banks, fintechs, and corporates step into the future of finance. Her new book, Mastering the Future of Finance, just published this week by Wiley, breaks the industry into nine elements across data, trust, and technology. We talk about why she wrote it, why she believes there should be a human data right, and how she kept the AI chapter current in a market that moves every month. What We Covered Michelle's path from telco and online shopping to prepaid infrastructure at InCommPiloting one of the first WeChat top-up tests at 7-Eleven in 2017Why she concluded the future of finance was being built in AsiaSurviving crypto winter at a blockchain startupWinning Money20/20 RiseUp and starting Finavator in 2019How Finavator works with banks, fintechs, and corporatesThe masterclass that led to a Wiley book dealThe nine elements of the future of finance across data, trust, and technologyOpen banking, open finance, and open data explainedThe case for a human data rightKeeping the AI chapter relevant as agentic payments took offEnding each chapter with a subject matter expert interviewKey Takeaways Number portability is the template for open data. Your phone number was the first piece of data you could take with you when you switched providers. Michelle sees open banking, open finance, and eventually open data as the same right extended to your financial life, and she wants it codified as a human data right at the ISO level, including the right to delete consented data.Trust is the core layer. In Michelle's framework, open data, digital identity, and cybersecurity with AML compliance sit at the center. Get that trust layer right and fintech, BaaS, and embedded finance can accelerate on top of it.Agentic payments are moving faster than the internet ever did. Memory, auditability, liability, and returns are still open questions. Until credential tokenization matures, Michelle suggests giving AI agents prepaid credentials rather than your core credential.Frameworks outlast specifics. Michelle finished writing in May and agentic payments had already moved by publication. The nine elements are built to hold up even as individual examples date.About Michelle Beyo Michelle Beyo is the founder and CEO of Finavator, which she started in 2019 after winning Money20/20 RiseUp. Before that, she spent six years in telco, eight years running online shopping and affiliate marketing programs for major airlines, led sales, marketing, distribution, and innovation for InComm Canada, and worked at a blockchain startup focused on digital identity and consent. She is the author of Mastering the Future of Finance: How Data, Trust, and Technology Are Reshaping the Global Economy (Wiley). Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Vroon Modgill spent two decades in payments as an accountant, finance director and CFO before founding Sokin in 2019. The company launched as a subscription-based consumer remittance app and is now a B2B payments and treasury platform running across 170 countries and 70 currencies, growing 100% a year while staying profitable. We talk about the pivot out of consumer, where stablecoins actually earn their place, and why he thinks the moat in agentic finance sits in the regulated plumbing rather than in the agent. What We Covered Twenty years in payments before founding SokinWatching his father fill out the same compliance forms on every remittanceWhy a consumer subscription app was the wrong business to be inThe 2021 decision to go all in on B2BSitting underneath the payments, treasury and FX providersOne integration across 170 countries and 70 currenciesEnterprise direct versus the embedded partner channelEmbedded going from zero to 40% of projected US revenue in a yearWhy most of the world is not card firstOwning the stablecoin stack instead of renting itThe MCP connector and agent-prepared, human-approved paymentsNine dollars of revenue for every dollar of net cash burnedThe Series B, the Oxford Finance debt facility and the licensing build-outWhat the Manchester United partnership actually deliversKey Takeaways The defensible layer in agentic finance is not the model. An agent that decides to fund payroll still needs an account, a license and a rail, which is why the licensing build-out matters more than the AI demo.Stablecoins work best treated as a rail rather than a religion. Sokin bought the engineering DNA, runs fiat and stable through the same licensed infrastructure, and lets the route decide.Consumer remittance is a price and marketing game. Being right about the problem does not make it the right business, and the enterprise version of the same friction is where the money is.Profitable growth is a capital strategy, not just discipline. It let Sokin raise equity into strength and add debt at a lower cost than dilution.About Vroon Modgill Vroon Modgill is the founder and CEO of Sokin, a global business payments and treasury platform he launched in 2019. He trained as an accountant and spent roughly 20 years in payments and finance leadership roles, including finance director positions at startups and, from 2017 to 2019, North America CEO and global CFO of a crypto payments company. Sokin closed a Series B led by Prysm Capital with Morgan Stanley returning, followed by a debt facility from Oxford Finance, and is the official payments partner of Manchester United. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Paul Gu dropped out of Yale in 2010 to join the first class of Thiel Fellows, spent time at the quant fund D.E. Shaw, and then co-founded Upstart on a simple premise: the techniques Wall Street uses to price corporate risk should work at least as well on consumer credit. Fourteen years later, he took over as CEO from co-founder Dave Girouard, and six weeks after that, the OCC granted conditional approval for Upstart Bank. This conversation covers what has actually changed at the top of the company, why Upstart went for a full de novo national charter rather than buying an existing bank, and where AI is reshaping the parts of lending that nobody talks about. What We Covered Dropping out of Yale for the first Thiel Fellowship classWhat D.E. Shaw taught him about applying quant techniques to personal financeThe income share agreement idea that brought the co-founders togetherWhat changed when he took over as CEO on May 1Losing the balance of a three-founder culture, for better and worseThe core personal loan business and the future prime borrowerThe trifecta of growth, profitability and credit performanceAuto and home, and the race to contribution margin positiveWhat conditional approval from the OCC actually meansWhy a de novo charter rather than acquiring a bankWhere the existing bank and credit union partners land after Upstart Bank opensAI in loan verification and servicing, beyond the underwriting modelWhat happens when AI agents start applying for loans on people's behalfNinety-one percent automation and whether 100% is reachableThe case that fixing the cost of credit makes most Americans 10% wealthierKey Takeaways Upstart went de novo rather than buying a bank because acquiring one means inheriting someone else's loan book, underwriting practices and operational history, and the whole pitch depends on being able to stand behind every decision inside the bank when a regulator asks.The bank changes who originates, not who funds. Upstart Bank will become the principal originator, but Gu is explicit that the company is not becoming a large, equity intensive balance sheet business, and the bank and credit union partners keep buying the assets.The next AI wins are in verification rather than underwriting. A HELOC can carry several thousand dollars of human verification cost because county property records are non-standard and non-deterministic, which is exactly the kind of work a generalized reasoning agent is suited to.Gu welcomes a world where AI agents apply for loans on borrowers' behalf, because agents have unlimited time to search and no brand loyalty to defend, which favors the lender with the best rate rather than the biggest marketing budget.About Paul Gu Paul Gu is co-founder and CEO of Upstart, the AI lending platform he started in 2012 after dropping out of Yale as one of the first Thiel Fellows and spending time at the quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw. He spent most of his career as the technical half of the founding partnership, running product, engineering and machine learning before taking general management of the auto and home businesses. He succeeded co-founder Dave Girouard as CEO on May 1, 2026. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Arpit Goel built his first company, Gamma, on a simple pitch: legacy data-loss-prevention tools took nine months to show value, and Gamma got customers there in two weeks. Palo Alto Networks acquired Gamma in 2021. Now Goel is running the same play in a completely different industry. Root is a payments orchestration layer that lets enterprises move money bank-to-bank in about five seconds, with no intermediary ever holding the cash. In this conversation, Arpit explains why he thinks the US is finally close to a tipping point on instant payments, why Root never takes custody of the money it moves, and how the company handles banks that can't yet receive instant payments. What We Covered Growing up in India, and the ADHD diagnosis that pushed him toward IIT DelhiWhy he calls himself an "ignorant" founder rather than an experienced oneThe nine-months-to-two-weeks wedge that built Gamma, and why Root uses the same oneDiscovering the payments inefficiency by reading through ADP's 10-KWhy 40% of US SMBs don't accept cards, and it isn't about the feesThe dual pressure of RTP and FedNow that made 2024 the right moment to start RootThe heart, arteries, and capillaries analogy for how Root fits into the banking systemWhat actually happens to money in the five seconds between sender and receiverWhy reliability, not transaction scale, is the hard engineering problem in paymentsHow Root handles banks that can't receive RTP or FedNowWhere stablecoins fit into a bank-rail-agnostic platformWhy Root wants to be the pipes underneath the industry, not the brandKey Takeaways SMBs refuse cards mostly because of settlement delay, not fees — restaurants earning their week's cash on a Saturday night don't see it until Tuesday, right when they need it most to restock.Root never takes custody of funds. Money moves directly between the sender's and recipient's own bank accounts, and Root charges a fee on top rather than earning float.Reliability, not transaction volume, is the hard engineering problem — Root has built retry and fault-tolerance systems, using the workflow engine Temporal, so a bank outage doesn't have to mean a failed payment.Arpit sees instant payments as a market that hasn't tipped yet but is close — RTP and FedNow now operating together create sustained pressure that neither rail created alone.About Arpit Goel Arpit Goel is the founder and CEO of Root. He holds a computer science degree from IIT Delhi and a PhD from Stanford, and previously founded Gamma, a data-security company acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2021, where he went on to lead product for the data-security business. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

René Saúl spent seven years running an offline agricultural lending business in Mexico before selling it and pouring the proceeds into Kapital, a bet that the future of B2B fintech in Latin America belonged to companies willing to become regulated banks. Today Kapital is the largest B2B fintech in the region, and René is the only founder in the space who has bought not one but two banks, one of the deals agreed to on a napkin. What We Covered Why the future of fintech is regulated, and why that was a contrarian call in 2021René's seven years running an offline agricultural lending business in MexicoThe founding thesis behind Kapital's one-stop B2B banking ecosystemHow Mexico's electronic invoicing system became Kapital's underwriting moatThe "red car theory" of spotting opportunities before they arriveBuying Banco Autofin on a napkin, and growing its deposits from $150 million to $400 million in three monthsAcquiring the banking, brokerage and payments assets of Grupo Financiero IntercamBuilding instant, 24/7 cross-border payment rails on top of SWIFTClosing the small business financing gap with AI-native underwritingWhy Mexico is becoming a cornerstone of America's AI manufacturing boomThe limits of banking an economy that still runs largely on cashKapital's growth numbers and its path to a dual listing in New York and MexicoKey Takeaways Mexico's electronic invoicing mandate hands Kapital more than 50,000 data points per customer, a seven-year head start on underwriting that competitors using third-party providers cannot easily close.For large enterprises and cash-strapped SMBs alike, a banking license, not a slicker app, is what earns the trust needed to hold their money and their cash flow.Opportunities have to be hunted, not waited for. Kapital tracked potential bank acquisitions for years so it could move in days when the Autofin deal appeared.Staying liquid and profitable before either acquisition is what let Kapital move fast when the opportunity came, rather than scrambling to raise capital under pressure.About René Saúl René Saúl is the co-founder and CEO of Kapital, which he built after selling an offline agricultural lending business that financed berry and avocado exporters in Mexico and Peru. Under his leadership, Kapital has grown into a licensed financial group serving more than 300,000 customers across Latin America, with more than $5.3 billion in assets and two bank acquisitions behind it. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Enova International has spent two decades using machine learning underwriting to serve consumers and small businesses who sit outside prime bank criteria, and its pending $369 million acquisition of Grasshopper Bank would give it a national charter for the first time. Steve Cunningham became CEO in January 2026 after nearly a decade as the company's CFO, following earlier stops as a bank regulator at the FDIC and as chief risk officer at Discover. He joins the show to explain what a fully digital lender looks for in a nonprime borrower, why credit quality looks solid in his portfolio right now, and how he's answering the senators and state attorneys general who want regulators to block the Grasshopper deal. What We Covered Steve's path from FDIC regulator to Capital One, Harley-Davidson, and DiscoverMoving from the CFO chair to the CEO chair six months inEnova's brand portfolio: CashNet, NetCredit, and OnDeckUnderwriting nonprime and near-prime consumers versus underwriting small businessesThe lift Enova's proprietary models get over a plain FICO or VantageScoreWhy all their products use different underwriting modelsWhat Enova's weekly vintage data shows about the health of the consumerWhy gas prices matter less to consumer spending than headlines suggestHow Enova is using generative and agentic AI across the businessThe real thesis behind the Grasshopper Bank acquisition (see my podcast with CEO Mike Butler)Steve's response to the senators and state attorneys general opposing the dealWhat banking-as-a-service adds to Enova's roadmapWhere Enova wants to be by 2030Key Takeaways Enova's NetCredit yields and losses aren't outliers when benchmarked against what banks themselves report to the FDIC each quarter, Cunningham argues, pushing back on the "predatory" framing critics apply to the company.The Grasshopper deal is primarily about simplifying a patchwork of direct state licenses and bank partnership arrangements, not chasing cheap deposits, though the deposit base is a welcome bonus.Because Enova's consumer loans repay every two weeks or faster, the company sees shifts in borrower behavior in its own vintage data well before those shifts show up in macro statistics.Small business underwriting at Enova is built around the health of roughly 900 different industry codes rather than a borrower's personal credit, making it a fundamentally different discipline than consumer underwriting.About Steve Cunningham Steve Cunningham is CEO of Enova International, a role he took on in January 2026 after nearly a decade as the company's CFO. He previously served as chief risk officer and treasurer at Discover, CFO of Harley-Davidson Financial Services, held senior finance roles at Capital One, and began his career as a bank regulator at the FDIC. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Very few people in this industry have sat in all three of the seats that matter in the bank-fintech story. Amanda Swoverland started as a compliance examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spent nine and a half years at Sunrise Banks rising to Chief Risk Officer, then joined Unit as its fourth employee and Chief Compliance Officer. Six months ago she became President of Hatch Bank, a California-chartered ILC that works exclusively with fintech lending partners. She still describes herself as a banker at heart, and this conversation is a good explanation of why that matters more now than it did five years ago. What We Covered From Fed compliance examiner to bank presidentWhy she was never the department of noLearning product and sales inside a fintech infrastructure companyHatch Bank's credit-only model, with no depositsThe five lending verticals Hatch focuses onGoing deep with a few partners instead of diversifying across 30What a fintech gets from a small sponsor bank that scale cannot offerLifting a BSA/AML consent order in under a year"Maturing for scale" as the theme of her first six monthsUsing AI internally without sending agents out into the wildWhy the quality of founders approaching sponsor banks has gone upThe direct versus not direct debate after SynapseWhy every fintech should have a second bank partnerWhere AI is genuinely working in compliance todayDIDMCA, state charters and the usury patchworkWhat separates the sponsor banks that survive the next cycleKey Takeaways The "direct versus not direct" framing that took hold after Synapse is, in Amanda's view, a distraction. If a bank has a program, the bank is in charge of it, whatever technology sits in the middle and whoever is acting as program manager. Everything else is a question of how you oversee it, not who is accountable.The next failure will not look like Synapse, because that particular gap has been closed. What worries her is banks that never learned the fundamentals: liquidity, credit oversight, BSA/AML, and how a multi-party lending program behaves when the cycle turns and payments stop arriving on time.A second bank partner is good for the fintech and good for the bank. Concentration risk cuts both ways, and Amanda actively introduces her own clients to other banks she trusts, and is happy to be someone else's second bank.Compliance is heading toward 100 percent sampling. Amanda thinks the days of testing a selected sample of transactions or complaints are ending, provided you test the system, watch the outputs, and keep a human in the loop.About Amanda Swoverland Amanda Swoverland is President of Hatch Bank, a San Marcos, California ILC that works exclusively with fintech lending partners across home improvement, small business, clean energy, student lending and healthcare financing. She began her career as a compliance examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spent nine and a half years at Sunrise Banks where she became Chief Risk Officer, and then five and a half years at Unit as Chief Compliance Officer, joining as the company's fourth employee. She was named to Forbes' 2026 list of the women shaping fintech infrastructure and banking strategy. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Mike de Vere runs Zest AI, a company that has been applying machine learning to credit underwriting for over two decades, starting with some of the largest banks on the planet and now serving a large share of the credit union market. Since his last appearance on the show three years ago, Zest has expanded well past underwriting into fraud detection and portfolio management, tied together by an intelligence layer and a generative AI companion called LuLu. Mike makes a specific argument in this conversation: machine learning still makes the credit decision, generative AI makes the feedback loop faster, and the real advantage available to community financial institutions is a willingness to pool what they know. What We Covered Zest today, from underwriting to fraud to portfolio managementWhy the intelligence layer is what makes an ecosystemStarting with Discover, Citi and Freddie Mac, then moving down marketLuLu, named after a corgi, and what she actually doesSafety and soundness as the first use case for most institutionsReplacing quarterly reports that used to take weeksPeer benchmarking versus building your own data lakeCollective intelligence across 2,000 credit models in productionWhy generative AI has no role in making the credit decisionShrinking model refit cycles from 18 months to daily evaluationZest customers versus non-customers on growth, delinquency and efficiencyCash flow underwriting, and why generic national models failZest Protect and fighting AI-powered fraud with AIThe two objections that come up most in sales conversationsTakeaways from the IQ AI Lending Forum in Santa FeKey Takeaways The performance gap is measurable. Comparing Zest customers to non-customers across 2024 and 2025, Mike says his customers grew 16 times faster, ran roughly 20 points lower on delinquency, and were 501 basis points better on efficiency ratio.Generative AI belongs around the credit decision, not inside it. Zest still uses supervised, locked-down machine learning models for underwriting, because a regulator will ask you to explain the decision. What generative AI changes is the speed of evaluation, from an 18-month refit cycle to daily.Comparison is where the value sits. A lender looking only at its own data lake has visibility on itself and nothing else. LuLu is built to normalize performance data across institutions so a chief lending officer's instinct can be checked against thousands of real policy instances rather than one career's worth of experience.Community lenders have a structural advantage they underuse. The credit union industry holds roughly $2.4 trillion in assets. If it acted as one institution, it would be bigger than Wells Fargo, and unlike the big banks these institutions are actually willing to share.About Mike de Vere Mike de Vere is the CEO of Zest AI, the AI lending technology company that has been doing machine learning in credit since well before AI became a standard fintech conference track. He came to Zest from a career in data and consumer insights, with leadership roles at J.D. Power, The Harris Poll and Nielsen. Zest now touches $5.6 trillion in assets under management, and by the end of this year expects one in three credit union members to have their consumer loans decisioned with its technology. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Nandan Sheth has spent 25 years in payments, building three growth companies along the way, including Harbor Payments (sold to American Express) and Acculynk (sold to First Data/Fiserv). He now runs Splitit, which takes a different path than most buy now, pay later providers: instead of originating a new loan, it turns the credit a consumer already has on their existing card into an installment plan, with no underwriting, no social security number, and no new debit card for repayments. With agentic commerce infrastructure being built in real time, Nandan argues that a frictionless installment option is exactly what merchants need to avoid being commoditized on price inside an LLM shopping platform. What We Covered Three growth companies across 25 years in paymentsWhat attracted Nandan to Splitit from FiservCard-linked installments with no underwriting or new loanThe card loyalist versus the credit needy$3.5 trillion of unused credit sitting on US cardsMerchant-funded 0% economics and where the budget comes fromA $1,300 average order value versus $250 to $300 for standard BNPLPoint of sale through the Samsung Wallet integrationBacking Google's Universal Commerce ProtocolThe overlooked small business to large supplier B2B use caseChargebacks, repudiation, and who carries the risk in agent-led purchasesSplitit Go for the face-to-face services economyKey Takeaways BNPL is really two markets, not one. Card loyalists want rewards, protections, and habit, while the credit needy want a new line of credit. Nandan thinks both get served, but by different products.The economics work because the merchant treats it as marketing spend. About 98% of Splitit's volume is a merchant-funded 0% plan, priced comparably to a percentage-off promotion, and it lifts average order value roughly four times over standard BNPL.In agentic commerce, price and delivery speed are the easiest things for an LLM to compare. A 0% installment option gives merchants a third lever that is not pure price competition.The B2B version may be the stronger use case. Small business owners face both a time problem and a working capital problem, which is a sharper reason to hand off buying to an agent than a consumer shopping for a polo shirt.About Nandan Sheth Nandan Sheth is the CEO of Splitit, the card-linked installments platform. He moved to the US from the UK 25 years ago and has spent his entire career in payments and fintech, including running e-commerce and omni-channel commerce at Fiserv. He previously built Harbor Payments, acquired by American Express, and Acculynk, acquired by First Data/Fiserv. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Escheatment is a $70 billion problem hiding in plain sight: every state, territory, and dozens of countries have laws that hand dormant and unclaimed accounts over to the government after three to five years of inactivity. Allen Osgood, co-founder and CEO of Eisen, left a five-and-a-half-year run as a payments product manager at Coinbase to build the compliance infrastructure that helps banks, brokerages, and crypto platforms reunite customers with their money before the states ever claim it. In this conversation, Allen makes the case that crypto is about to collide with escheatment rules written in the 1960s, and that most institutions have no idea how large their own dormant balances really are. What We Covered What escheatment actually is and how the state-by-state rules workThe $70 billion states are holding for more than one in seven AmericansMissingmoney.com and what happens after money is remittedOhio's fight over using unclaimed property to fund a football stadiumThe Walter story: an E-Trade Amazon account liquidated to DelawareWhat counts as a "dormant" account and why logins matterWhere Eisen plugs into the escheatment processWhy reactivation beats remittance, and the Binance.US 48% case studyWhy institutions are blind to their largest dormant balancesThe 12-to-24-month gap where accounts just age untouchedDisplacing big-four spreadsheets with a single pane of glass, forecasting, and access controlsData volume as the hardest engineering problem, and where AI earns its keepThe Claims Portal and QR-code reactivationWhy crypto makes escheatment far more painful, from volatility to dustThe coming wave of crypto liquidations and the tax problemChannel strategy with the cores like Fiserv, and the road to 1099 and tax reportingKey Takeaways The best escheatment outcome is no escheatment at all. Eisen's real value is retention: keeping customers, deposits, and assets in the institution rather than shipping them to the state.Institutions routinely underestimate their exposure. One prospect thought it had 10,000 accounts about to escheat, the real number was 100,000. The disconnect sits between the compliance team and the data on the ground.Crypto changes the stakes. States generally require liquidation, so a dormant token gets sold, creating an unwanted taxable event and, if the market rips afterward, another Walter waiting to happen.Stale data is the enemy. The information that comes due for escheatment is by definition three to five years old, so address enrichment (LexisNexis, Socure, USPS NCOA) and early engagement are what actually move the reactivation numbers.About Allen Osgood Allen Osgood is the co-founder and CEO of Eisen, a compliance operations platform that automates escheatment and account offboarding for financial institutions. Before founding Eisen, he spent about five and a half years as a payments product manager at Coinbase, where he first ran into the strange world of unclaimed property and stayed through the company's IPO. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Accounts payable has produced multiple billion-dollar companies, yet its mirror image, accounts receivable, remains almost entirely manual at most enterprises despite decades of software spend. In this episode, Caitlin Leksana, co-founder and CEO of Fazeshift, explains why AR has remained unsolved and how her company's AI agents are changing that. A mechanical engineer turned BCG consultant turned founder, Caitlin came to the problem the hard way, doing her own AR by hand at a previous startup, and her outsider's view of a stubborn back-office chore is exactly what makes the conversation worth your time. What We Covered A million AR analysts doing manual work in the USWhy accounts payable got solved and AR did notThe leverage imbalance between AP and AR departmentsThe swivel chair problem and fragmented data$200 million in unapplied cash on one balance sheetFazeshift as a context layer, not a rip-and-replaceWhy traditional SaaS and if-then logic could never scale ARThe collections, cash application, and AR inbox modulesHuman in the loop and building trust when AI touches moneyTraining agents on historical data and tribal knowledgeFrom Y Combinator to a Series A led by F-PrimeThe vision for the context layer and autonomous financeKey Takeaways AR is the inverse of AP, and every bill is someone else's invoice, so the market is at least as large and mostly uncaptured.The real unlock is not the AI model but unifying fragmented data across the ERP, bank, CRM, and inbox into a single context layer.Human in the loop with full auditability is what earns risk-averse finance teams' trust, and it is how agents move toward full automation over time.Some of the best unsolved startup problems are the ones furthest removed from an engineer, because no one with the tools to fix them ever felt the pain.About Caitlin Leksana Caitlin Leksana is the co-founder and CEO of Fazeshift, a San Francisco startup building AI agents for accounts receivable. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, advised Fortune 500 companies at BCG, and earned her MBA at Harvard Business School before founding a crypto marketing startup and then Fazeshift. The company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, raised a $4M seed led by Gradient Ventures, and announced a Series A led by F-Prime in 2026. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Sahej Suri is the founder of Blue Dot Investors, a late-stage growth equity firm that invests exclusively in fintech across both primaries and secondaries. Before Blue Dot, he built his career at J.P. Morgan, TPG, and as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors. In this conversation, Sahej explains the scrappy origin story of the firm, the overlooked opportunity in fintech secondaries, and his new report with FT Partners on the coming fintech liquidity supercycle, including the finding that the top 100 private fintechs now out-earn the top 100 public ones. What We Covered Sahej's path from J.P. Morgan to TPG to QEDThe 2008 recession and why access to financial services stuck with himThe happenstance origin story of Blue DotWhy fintech is closer to biotech than to generalist techThe gap in the market for late-stage fintech specialistsWhy the top 10 names dominate secondary market activityFinding undervalued companies outside the marquee namesThe "Liquidity Supercycle" report with FT Partners and how it came togetherWhy the top 100 private fintechs out-earn the top 100 public onesThe state of the IPO window and the SpaceX bellwetherWhy the 2025 IPO cohort cleared a much higher barThe have versus have-nots dynamic in fintech fundraisingThe Blue Dot dinner series and building communityHis AI thesis and where the value creation will landA 10-year view on fintech as an asset classKey Takeaways The best fintech companies are now private, and on the top 100 they out-earn their public peers on revenue, a finding Sahej says had never been put on paper before.Fintech rewards specialists. Banking, payments, capital markets, and insurance are almost different worlds, and most investors who piled in during 2021 without that depth are no longer around.The IPO window is real but conditional. The 2025 cohort was roughly three times the size on revenue and more profitable than historical norms, and the near-term window hinges on how bellwether listings perform.Sahej's bet on AI value creation is not the startups or the large AI labs, but the scaled fintechs that already own distribution and customer trust.About Sahej Suri Sahej Suri is the founder and Managing Partner of Blue Dot Investors, a New York-based late-stage growth equity firm investing exclusively in fintech across primaries and secondaries. He previously worked at J.P. Morgan in the financial institutions group, at TPG in growth equity and buyouts, and as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors. Blue Dot came out of stealth in early 2026 and manages roughly $100M in assets, with a team of six and around 30 advisors. Peter is an advisor to Blue Dot Investors. Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes