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

November 5, 202625 min

What Bluevine learned from $2 billion in mobile check deposits and a growing partner stack

A $2 million general contractor pays subcontractors, invoices clients, issues employee cards, and keeps its own books. Most banks still serve this business the way they serve a consumer, just with a larger balance. Owners fill the gaps by stitching together a dozen or more apps. Digital banks competing for this market are pulling more of these jobs into the banking experience, building some tools themselves and embedding partners for the rest. Bluevine, which began in small business lending, has spent the last six years building a broader suite of banking products around its checking account. On the Tearsheet podcast, Kyle Cooper, Bluevine's SVP and GM of Checking and Payments, said small business owners’ underlying needs have stayed consistent even as the products around them have changed. "Business owners always care about saving themselves a headache, getting more financial value," he said. But the bar for delivering both keeps moving. "We are seeing that expectations are constantly rising from small businesses in terms of the quality of the offering they have in front of them." Cooper walked through how Bluevine decides what to build, what to embed, and what to leave to others, as well as what the company has learned about running a bank without branches.

November 4, 20267 min

If you disappeared tomorrow, would your customers care?

For Episode 3, we asked a simple question: Which fintechs would we genuinely miss if they disappeared tomorrow? Millions of users don't necessarily mean a company has built a bomb product or something people can't live without. Customers might stay for convenience, better pricing, or simply because switching hasn't crossed their minds. Zack chose PayPal, drawing on his own experience with the company. Sara picked Wise and Stripe, pointing to two sources of lasting value: solving a specific problem well and becoming difficult to replace within a business.

November 3, 202633 min

Banks look to close the expectation gap with data, real-time infrastructure, and human judgment

Customers hold their banks to a standard they learned somewhere else. Brian DuVal, President of North America at Temenos, points to the speed and ease of use they have become accustomed to booking a hotel, renting a car or buying with one-click on Amazon. Yet their banking experiences don’t always measure up. This distance is the subject of “The Banking Expectation Gap: U.S. Consumer Edition,” research commissioned by Temenos. It points to a widening gap between what consumers expect and what many institutions can deliver, particularly in personalization, trust, digital experience, and timely human support. Paul Weiss, Chief Transformation Officer at Regions Bank, doesn’t expect the gap to stop widening on its own. “I don’t see the pace of change that has driven that gap slowing down,” he said. For Dan Massey, Chief Enterprise Operations and Technology Officer at Regions, the starting point is the information banks already hold. “Data is at the heart of that,” he said, referring to helping clients build financial confidence. Closing the gap depends on whether a bank can put that data to work on a client’s behalf. In a recent Tearsheet podcast, Massey, Weiss, and DuVal discussed how this plays out in practice, from core platform investment and AI governance to personalization and payments.

October 22, 20266 min

Why small businesses hesitate on AI in finance, and how BILL is addressing it

Why small businesses hesitate on AI in finance, and how BILL is addressing it by Tearsheet

October 21, 202612 min

Why B2B payments are a whole-journey problem ft. TreviPay

Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at TreviPay, argues that a new generation of digital-native buyers is the biggest force reshaping how businesses buy and pay. Accustomed to frictionless consumer experiences, they expect the same convenience and omnichannel consistency from their suppliers. They are also more open to alternatives like stablecoins, net terms modeled on consumer BNPL, and AI as a co-creator. Sellers, meanwhile, are working to retain and keep their best customers happy in a tight macro environment, where the cost of capital puts pressure on businesses to extend credit and get paid faster.

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.