Fintech One-On-One

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Leif Abraham, the co-CEO of Public.com. Public has been carving out a really interesting niche in the brokerage space. They're not trying to be another discount broker competing on free stock giveaways. Instead, they're building what Leif calls the first truly agentic brokerage, where AI agents can actually help you construct and manage your portfolio.
In this episode, we discuss Public's decision to move away from payment for order flow and why trust and transparency are so central to their strategy. We also talk about their fascinating Generated Assets product that lets you essentially prompt your own personalized ETF, their nuanced take on prediction markets and why they're drawing a clear line between portfolio tools and sports betting, and how AI agents are starting to take on work that has traditionally been done by financial advisors.
In this podcast you will learn:
The opportunity that Leif saw when he started Public.
How the dynamic works between Leif and his co-CEO, Jannick Malling.
How he describes Public today.
How their Generated Assets offering allows investors to create custom ETFs.
Why their decided to move away from Payment for Order Flow.
How they are marketing themselves directly to the consumer.
What Leif thinks about prediction markets and how Public will offer them.
What they are planning when it comes to AI agents for wealth management.
How Leif views the rollover market for retirement accounts.
Their plans for the Crypto market.
What success will look like for Public over the next five years.
Connect with Fintech One-on-One:
Tweet me @PeterRenton
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

My guest today is Denada Ramnishta, the Chief Revenue Officer at Efficient Capital Labs. I've known Denada for over a decade, having first met her during her time at American Express where she was part of the early team building out merchant financing. She's been a consistent champion for democratizing capital access for small and medium-sized businesses, and now she's doing that at ECL, which provides non-dilutive funding and cross-border payment infrastructure for AI and SaaS companies.
In this episode, we dig into how ECL approaches revenue-based financing differently from others in the space, their AI-driven underwriting system called Aura, the fascinating origin story behind their cross-border payments product ECL Flow, why VCs are actually their top referral source, and how they're adapting their underwriting as SaaS pricing models shift from recurring revenue to usage-based models. We also discuss the so-called SaaS apocalypse and what Denada is actually seeing on the ground from the founders she works with every day.
In this podcast you will learn:
Her journey from American Express to Efficient Capital Labs.
What her time at Amex taught her about building responsible lending products.
What ECL does exactly.
What has been learned from the high profile stumbles in revenue based financing.
How debt funding has been misunderstood by founders.
Why VCs are the number one deal source for ECL.
Their underwriting system called Aura and why it is unique.
How Aura has allowed them to evolve their underwriting process.
Why they decided to expand to underwriting companies that operate cross border.
Why they created ECL Flow and expand into cross border money movement.
Where they will be expanding this new infrastructure.
Denada’s thoughts on the SaaS apocalypse.
As pricing models change for SaaS, how they are adapting their underwriting models.
How they are able to grow fast with very low charge off rates.
What is next for ECL.
Connect with Fintech One-on-One:
Tweet me @PeterRenton
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Payment declines happen millions of times a day, but how a financial institution handles that moment of failure can define the entire customer relationship. My guest on this episode is Amir Wain, the Founder and CEO of i2c, a global payments and banking infrastructure company he has been building for more than 25 years. Amir is a serial entrepreneur who made a foundational architectural bet early on: that a single, customer-centric, composable platform built for all products and all geographies would ultimately win over the industry's prevailing approach of stitching acquisitions together.
That bet has paid off. Today, i2c powers card and banking programs across 200-plus countries for financial institutions, fintechs, and governments alike. In our conversation, we dig into how modern unified payments infrastructure enables real-time contextual decisioning, why the moment of a payment decline is actually an opportunity to build customer trust, how i2c thinks about balancing fraud prevention with false positives, and what the rise of agentic AI means for the authorization process, and for keeping the human customer at the center of it all.
In this podcast, you will learn:
The evolution in Amir’s thinking that led to the founding of i2c.
When he realized that architecture will determine the destiny of the business.
How i2c has evolved over the last 25 years.
How contextual decisioning in the authorization process has become a differentiator for i2c.
Where traditional infrastructure falls short in authorization decisions today.
What fraud signals are the most important when balancing friction and user experience?
How the industry can balance personalization and data privacy.
The three segments of the market that i2c is focused on.
How they are thinking about moving beyond payments.
How they are planning for the world of autonomous AI agents making transactions.
How far away we are from agentic commerce having significant scale.
What keeps Amir excited today about the future.
Connect with Fintech One-on-One:
Tweet me @PeterRenton
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

In banking, we often talk about the "front end" customer experience or the "back end" systems of record. But according to S.P. “Wije” Wijegoonaratna, the founder of Aliya, the real revolution is happening right in the middle. From his early days in the UK to his time in the high-stakes world of New York hedge funds and his role as an early investor at SoFi, Wije has consistently found himself at the intersection of financial data and decision-making.
At its core, Aliya is an operational intelligence layer that sits between a bank's customer-facing front end and its core system of record, what Wije calls "the middle." It combines transaction categorization trained on 1.5 trillion transactions from nearly 1,500 banks, dynamic risk segmentation, and real-time post-origination monitoring into a single microservices platform.
In our conversation, we discuss why Aliya went after the largest banks first, how their approach to post-origination risk management drives charge-off rates as low as 2.5%, why Wije believes Nubank poses an existential threat to regional and community banks, and why he thinks the biggest opportunity in banking today lies in transforming that middle layer.
In this podcast, you will learn:
How meeting Mike Cagney and the founders of Palantir was the catalyst for the birth of Aliya.
Why they decided to start with helping banks with lending.
The two core offerings Aliya has today.
Why the cumulative losses on their portfolio is far better than most lenders.
How they decide when to take action on a consumer that may be having problems.
Why they chose to focus on selling to the large banks first.
What they are providing to the large banks exactly.
Why Aliya doesn’t fit into any fintech category.
Where the biggest opportunity for Aliya is today.
Why Wije believes Nubank is going to be successful in the US.
What is next for Aliya.
Connect with Fintech One-on-One:
Tweet me @PeterRenton
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

My latest guest is Chris Black, CEO of Thread Bank, a Nashville-based community bank that has been purpose-built around embedded banking. Chris came to banking by way of a career as an Air Force pilot, followed by time on Wall Street analyzing banks during the financial crisis, before eventually making his way into community banking in Nashville. He partnered with fintech investor Joe Maxwell of Fintop Capital to recapitalize a small Tennessee bank and transform it into an embedded banking platform focused on vertical software companies serving small businesses.
In our conversation, Chris talks about how Thread navigated the BaaS regulatory storm of 2023 and 2024, what they look for in fintech partners, and how their fiduciary-first philosophy was already in place long before regulators came calling. We also discuss the wave of fintechs now seeking bank charters, the future of community banking in America, and what Thread has on the horizon with the launch of embedded lending and merchant acquiring.
In this podcast you will learn:
Lessons Chris learned during his time in the Air Force.
How the idea for Thread Bank came together.
How they took the acquired bank and made it ready for embedded banking.
When they took on their first fintech partner.
What they are looking for in a fintech partner.
Where Chris sees the biggest opportunity for Thread.
How Thread navigated the BaaS regulatory hurricane of 2023 and 2024.
Why the shift in regulatory focus with the Trump Administration has not changed their thinking.
What Chris thinks about all the fintechs that are now acquiring bank charters.
What it takes for a new fintech to be onboarded with Thread.
The process when a fintech wants to do something that Thread does not think is reasonable.
The key to a thriving community bank sector over the next decade.
What exciting developments are coming down the pipe.
Connect with Fintech One-on-One:
Tweet me @PeterRenton
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes