Fintech One-On-One

Ryan Christiansen has had one of the more unusual career trajectories in fintech, from managing credit portfolios during the 2008 financial crisis to leading bank integrations at Finicity during the early days of open banking, helping launch the Financial Data Exchange, and then making an unexpected leap into academia as Executive Director of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.
In this conversation, Ryan explains why the Center takes a unique multidisciplinary approach spanning business, engineering, and law schools, and shares details about their new master's degree program launching this fall. We also dig into why Utah has quietly become one of the country's most important fintech hubs, with over $1 billion in fintech wages and $7 billion in economic impact. We also discuss the upcoming Fintech Xchange conference on February 4-6 in Salt Lake City, which has become a must-attend gathering for fintech and banking executives looking for substantive content and genuine networking opportunities.
In this podcast you will learn:
Ryan’s background building Finicity’s open banking platform.
How and why he went from the corporate world to academia.
The mission of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.
The programs the university offers in fintech for its students.
Details of their Masters in Financial Technology program launching in the fall.
Why the fintech scene in Utah is so robust.
Why they decided to create their own event called Fintech Xchange.
What makes Fintech Xchange different.
What attendees can expect at Fintech Xchange this year.
What is most exciting about the work he is doing at the Fintech Center.
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I don’t know anyone who enjoys filing their taxes. It is something we begrudgingly do every April, or earlier for the well-organized, and it is usually a somewhat painful exercise. What if filing your taxes was easy, taking less than 30 minutes? What if tax planning wasn't a once-a-year chore but an embedded feature in your banking app, payroll platform, or investment account?
In this episode, I sit down with Ben Borodach, founder and CEO of april, the first company to build a nationally licensed tax engine in over 15 years. Ben shares how april is transforming tax from an annual burden into real-time financial intelligence, partnering with banks, fintechs, and payroll platforms to embed tax services directly into the financial tools Americans already use. We discuss the massive technical challenge of building tax infrastructure from scratch, why embedded tax makes sense for financial institutions, and how bringing tax decisions to the point of transaction, whether selling stock, adjusting payroll withholding, or buying a home, can fundamentally change how people manage their financial lives.
In this podcast you will learn:
How he came to the idea of building a fintech company focused on tax.
How april was incubated inside Team8.
Why they decided to create an embedded tax solution rather than go direct to consumer.
What their product offering does.
How they are helping consumers to think about taxes beyond once a year.
The three categories of companies they are focused on.
Why banks should be offering tax services to their customers.
Why being integrated into the banking cores is not a high priority right now.
How april is different to the big tax providers, TurboTax and H&R Block.
How their customers present the tax offerings.
What it means to be a nationally licensed e-file provider.
How they integrate with the IRS and the state tax agencies.
How they are leveraging the growth of embedded finance.
What is involved from a technology perspective to integrate with april.
How he thinks about tax policy, as a tax infrastructure company.
Ben’s vision for april.
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Today, I sit down with Daren Guo, co-founder of Reap, the stablecoin infrastructure company and the world's largest stablecoin card issuer, processing over $6 billion annually. Daren shares his journey from being employee #90 at Stripe to building the next generation of financial rails based on stablecoin infrastructure, serving everyone from neobanks in Brazil and Africa to traditional financial institutions expanding globally.
The conversation explores why stablecoins represent more than just faster cross-border payments, they are the foundation for a fully tokenized economy where FX, bonds, equities, and real estate all move on-chain. Daren discusses Reap's recent MPI license in Singapore, their expansion into the US market, and how programmable money enables entirely new financial products like payroll streaming and on-chain escrow that simply weren't possible with legacy infrastructure.
In this podcast you will learn:
Daren’s background setting up Stripe’s Asia business.
Why he decided to leave Stripe to start his own company.
Their initial product vision.
His thesis around stablecoins and why they represent the future of payments.
Why they decided to start with stablecoin-powered credit card infrastructure.
Where they are a Visa Principal member and the markets they serve.
The types of companies that Reap is working with today.
How the flow of funds work for users of Reap’s credit card.
Who is providing the stablecoin collateral.
Reap’s expansion plans for the US market.
Why they applied for a Major Payment Institution (MPI) license in Singapore.
The product suite that they are working on right now.
The scale that Reap is at today.
How they are serving traditional firms as well as crypto-native companies.
Daren’s vision for the next generation of money movement.
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Today I'm talking with Darragh Buckley, the CEO and co-founder of Increase. If you've been following fintech for a while, you probably know Darragh as employee number one at Stripe, where he built the team responsible for moving money at a massive scale. At Stripe, he learned a crucial lesson about infrastructure: when you're stuck solving business, technical, and risk problems all at once, you need to drop down a layer. That insight led to Increase, which does something quite novel, instead of connecting to banks one by one, they connect directly to the Federal Reserve itself, operating their own banking core that exposes all this functionality through APIs. With a team of less than 20 people, they're now processing over $100 billion annually.
In this conversation, we dig into the lessons Darragh learned scaling Stripe, why he believes compliance and accounting should be built into engineering from day one rather than bolted on later, his vision for a future where community banks serve specific communities like dentists or families managing elderly parents' finances, and why he's personally investing in community banks across the Pacific Northwest. We also get into real-time payments infrastructure, including a great story about buying a car on a Saturday. Now let's get on with the show.
In the podcast, you will learn:
How Increase was born out of early challenges at Stripe.
What he learned about scaling fintech companies at Stripe.
The advantage of dropping down a layer when building fintech infrastructure.
How Increase is able to connect directly to the Federal Reserve.
The concept of a side core and how it integrates with banking cores.
The different types of companies they work with.
A fun story about paying a car dealer with a real time payment on a Saturday.
The scale that Increase is at today.
Why they decided that now is the time to spread with word about Increase.
Why it matters to build compliance into your product very early.
What lessons compliance can learn from software engineering.
How they are managing real time risk.
Why Darragh has personally invested in several community banks.
What will have changed in financial services if Increase is successful.
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Today's guest is Jason Lee, a fintech veteran who has been at the forefront of employee financial wellness innovation for nearly a decade. After co-founding and scaling DailyPay into one of the pioneering companies in earned wage access, Jason went on to launch Salt Labs, an innovative employee rewards platform that Chime acquired just 18 months after its founding. Now, as the leader of Chime Enterprise, Jason is on a mission to make financial health benefits as ubiquitous in the workplace as health insurance.
In this conversation, we explore why he believes every employer will eventually offer these programs, not out of altruism, but because it makes compelling business sense. Jason shares fascinating insights about how financial stress undermines productivity, why employees value Salt's non-dollar rewards even more than cash, and his ambitious vision for building an employer-focused financial health platform that could parallel what Fidelity achieved in retirement. It's a conversation about the intersection of fintech, HR technology, and the future of work – and why the employer may be the most powerful catalyst for improving Americans' financial lives.
In this podcast you will learn:
Jason’s high profile background in fintech.
The origins of Salt Labs and how they became part of Chime.
The premise for Chime Workplace.
Why they are fundamentally in the productivity business.
How they are able to measure financial wellness outcomes.
Why employers are caring more about the financial health of their employees today.
Jason’s prediction for employers and financial wellness.
The target market for Chime Workplace.
What they hear when they first go into a new employer.
Why they don’t charge employers for Chime Workplace.
How their SALT rewards work.
Jason's vision for the future of employer-driven financial wellness.
Connect with Fintech One-on-One:
Tweet me @PeterRenton
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