Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

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500

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Oct 2026

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About the show

Tearsheet is news, opinion, and analysis on the business of finance. Candid conversations with senior executives, fintech entrepreneurs, investors, industry experts -- all weigh in on the trends impacting the industry and the disruptive impact technology is having on the business. Where social media, technology and finance intersect.

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60 recent

October 13, 202625 min

Why Salient bet everything on auto lending and never looked back

Most AI startups chase breadth. They build a capable, general-purpose product and sell it across as many industries as are willing to buy it. Ari Malik, CEO of Salient, took the opposite approach. He picked one vertical, auto lending, and went deep enough that he eventually moved his company's headquarters to Los Angeles to be closer to a single customer, Westlake Financial. Two years later, Salient is live inside roughly half of the top 20 auto lenders in the country. By Malik's account, the company has never lost one. In today’s episode, he walks us through how a decision that "wasn't really ideological" turned into a full-stack servicing layer now handling collections, total loss, compliance, and loss recovery for some of the largest lenders in the U.S. The origin story is less a strategic plan than lived experience. Malik came to the problem through the finance side of a prior company, Tesla, where he got a close look at how tangled loan servicing had become. “The workflows in this hyper-regulated part of the economy were so tangled with compliance obligations, state-specific regulations, legacy systems that weren't API-friendly or real-time,” he said, “that we sort of felt like you could build something generic and horizontal, and actually have it work.” Malik’s conviction has only hardened as horizontal AI tools have tried to move into consumer lending and run headlong into compliance violations. For Malik, the read was simple: a market this large and this regulated was ripe for going deep.

September 29, 202629 min

Nubank's Ethan Eismann: 'You have to love your customers fanatically for them to love you fanatically'

Nubank spent thirteen years building one of the most loved financial brands in Latin America, growing past 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. This month, that brand entered the US for the first time, launching Nu Global alongside a dedicated US product built around a Nu Account and a no-annual-fee credit card. Ethan Eismann is the executive tasked with making that experience work. As Nubank's first Chief Design Officer, reporting directly to founder and CEO David Vélez, Eismann oversees design strategy across the company's entire product ecosystem. He joined Nubank in mid-2025 after two decades leading design at Google, Adobe, Uber, Airbnb, and Slack.

September 16, 202615 min

Over and Underhyped: The banking trends we’re getting wrong

For the second episode of The Editors’ Room, we flipped the format around. One trend we think the industry is overhyping, and one that isn’t getting nearly enough attention. Managing Editor Sara took the overhyped side: the race to become a customer’s primary financial relationship. Founding Editor Zack’s underhyped pick was something that gets little attention in the larger scheme of things: the continued importance of bank branches.

September 8, 202624 min

Venture banking 3.0: How Stifel is rebuilding trust after Silicon Valley Bank

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023, it took with it a bank that had quietly become infrastructure for the startup ecosystem, holding the majority of the venture debt market and serving as the one relationship founders and fund managers trusted for everything from a wire transfer to an introduction. Bigger banks and a wave of neobanks moved fast to fill the void. Three years later, the question is whether either one actually replaced what SVB was. Today I'm joined by Katya Kohen, managing director at Stifel, where she leads investor coverage nationally for the firm's venture and fund banking group. Katya's path into banking runs through venture, not around it. She built and exited a tech company, invested as an angel in immigrant founders, built her own accelerator, and spent years at Techstars before joining Stifel as, in her words, its first non-traditional banker. That mix of operator, investor, and now banker shapes what she calls venture banking 3.0, a founder-first model built after the SVB meltdown. We get into what actually broke in the founder-bank relationship, how Stifel has grown its venture banking book toward $12 billion in commitments, and why venture debt has become essential capital for AI companies given how capital intensive the category has become. Let's get into it.

August 26, 202623 min

Live Oak Bank's BJ Losch on why AI is an accelerant, not a strategy

Most banks seem to chase small business customers as one segment among many. Live Oak Bank was built around a bet that specializing beats generalizing — and it started about as narrow as a bank can start, lending only to veterinarians. Today, Live Oak has grown that thesis into 40 verticals, holds the top spot among all SBA 7(a) lenders by dollar volume, and has done it all without a single branch. My guest is BJ Losch, president of Live Oak Bank. Live Oak has never had a physical location, yet its people travel the country to sit across the table from customers a branch down the street never would. Now the bank is layering AI onto that model, cutting loan approval-to-close timelines from over 100 days toward a two-week target, and thinking hard about what it means to stay high-touch while going high-tec. We talk about the theory of verticality, where automation should and shouldn't touch the credit decision, and why BJ sees AI as an accelerant of Live Oak's strategy rather than the strategy itself.

August 24, 202635 min

“Amy has the what. I help with the how”: Inside Bank of America's data and AI partnership

Amy Avery, Managing Director, Analytics, Modeling and Insights, took her job at Bank of America because of a number. When she interviewed at Bank of America, she was told that the bank interfaced with, at the time, 67 million clients. "Gosh, that's so much information," she remembers thinking. "Think about what you could do with that.” She started in January 2020. Two months later, the pandemic made that abstraction very literal: the bank suddenly needed to know, in real time, how its customers were doing, thinking, and coping. Avery's job was to figure out how to answer that. Michelle Boston, Head of Data Management Technology & Enterprise Architecture, arrived by a different route entirely. She built her career in enterprise technology, rose to CIO of a startup that was eventually built and sold, and came to Bank of America first as a contractor to lead an information architecture practice. “Data has always kind of been in my blood,” she said. At Bank of America, she works at a scale few other organizations have and builds the platforms that serve as the enabling force for Avery's work. Despite a very different set of starting points, the two describe a partnership that has essentially erased the line between their jobs. "We probably know each other's jobs better now than before generative AI showed up”, Avery said, because the pace of the last two years has forced her strategy team and Boston's engineering team to make decisions in near lockstep. Listen to the full episode to hear how Avery and Boston have built a shared language across the two functions, and how they're stress-testing it against a technology cycle that seems to wait for no one.

August 19, 202630 min

How enterprise AI is moving up the stack in 3 layers

Welcome to The Editors’ Room, a new Tearsheet Podcast series where Editor-in-Chief Zack Miller and Managing Editor Sara Khairi take the conversations that usually happen behind the scenes about our biggest stories and put them on the record. There isn’t a rehearsed interview or carefully choreographed panel answers. It’s just two editors comparing notes, challenging each other’s takes and trying to make sense of what is actually happening in financial services. Think of it as pulling up a chair after the meeting ends. It's the stuff we usually debate after the calls end: what a new product actually means, which industry trends have legs, and where the hype gets ahead of reality. Raw, conversational, and occasionally accompanied by a blooper. For our inaugural conversation, the topic was AI and, more specifically, what would you happily delegate to AI and what would you never hand over? From there, we got into the bigger question of how enterprise AI is taking shape. On that first question, Zack’s line is creativity. AI can handle planning and logistics, and he uses it as a kind of editorial sparring partner, asking questions, challenging ideas, and pushing him to dig deeper. But the creative judgment stays human. Sara draws the line at decision-making. Take an expensive laptop: she'll happily let AI compare the options, but she wants to be the person who clicks buy. It turns out that tiny distinction – AI can help make the decision, but shouldn't necessarily make it – is becoming a much bigger question in financial services.

August 5, 202620 min

Mastercard's Marc Pettican on the road to a $17.4 trillion virtual card market

Every account payable and account receivable department runs on the same friction: invoices chased four or five times, payments late more than 30% of the time, and credit control teams that can run 20, 30, even 50 people deep at a mid-sized corporate. Virtual cards were built to solve exactly that problem, and the growth numbers show it — spend is projected to hit $17.4 trillion by 2029, according to Juniper Research. Today I'm joined by Marc Pettican, global head of corporate solutions at Mastercard, who's spent decades working both sides of the payments ecosystem, from the merchant acquiring side to leading commercial cards. We get into what's really driving virtual card growth beyond the macro tailwinds, how MasterCard balances network economics between buyers and suppliers, and the build-versus-partner calculus behind expanding from travel into verticals like fleet and logistics, healthcare, insurance, and marketplaces. We also dig into embedded finance and the challenge of staying visible in the stack even as payments become invisible to the end user — plus where Mastercard sees its right to win in agentic payments, account-to-account transfers, and stablecoins. Marc closes with his advice for commercial card heads at mid-sized banks over the next twelve months.

July 13, 202629 min

How BILL is rebuilding for the Fortune 5 million and gearing up to take big swings on AI

For most small and midsize businesses, financial operations still look a lot like they did a decade ago. Bills get keyed in manually. Receipts pile up. W-9s get chased down at tax time. While the tools have multiplied, the work hasn't gone away. “Most finance teams work in an incredibly manual way,” says Michael Cieri, Chief Product Officer at BILL. “There's a ton of work done by finance professionals that could be automated, and could actually be done better through the use of technology.” The gap between the promise of modern financial software and the day-to-day reality of running the books at a small business is something BILL has spent nearly two decades trying to close. The company processes over 1% of US GDP in payments and has moved more than a trillion dollars across its platform – a scale that gives it both a data advantage and a particular sense of accountability. When you're handling that volume of transactions for the long tail of American businesses, the stakes of getting automation wrong are very high. Cieri joins us on the show to talk through where BILL's product thinking stands today: how Cieri's team decides when to take big swings versus make incremental improvements, how it builds and validates AI features for a high-trust domain.

July 1, 202639 min

Trust, stablecoins, and the AI margin squeeze:What McKinsey and QED's fintech report means for banks

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. Fintech just lived through four distinct ages — pioneers, growth-at-all-costs, the 2021-22 hype cycle, and the brutal reset that followed. Now we're in a fifth: bigger, more profitable, and more disciplined than any version that came before it. Stripe's reportedly eyeing a six-figure-billion IPO. Fintech listings tripled investor appetite this year. And yet talk to anyone who lived through 2021 and they'll tell you this doesn't feel anything like that boom. To make sense of that contradiction, I sat down with the authors of a new joint report from McKinsey and QED Investors — two firms that sit on opposite sides of the table from the fintechs they study. Max Flötotto is a senior partner at McKinsey, where he leads the firm's global retail banking practice and coordinates its fintech work across Europe. Mike Packer is a partner at QED, leading growth-stage investing globally for a firm that's been backing fintech since its earliest days, nearly two decades now. We dig into the report's biggest findings: why the simplest version of banking — collecting deposits, making loans — is structurally at risk if customers start letting their own AI agents shop for the best rate; why fintechs have, for the first time, actually overtaken incumbents on trust in Europe, even as banks have closed much of the product gap; and the massive spread in how seriously banks are actually taking AI, from "talking about thinking about it" to rebuilding their entire operating model around it. We close with each of them picking the one trend, out of six in the report, they think matters most for the next decade. Max, Mike, welcome to the show.