Fintech One-On-One

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 job
Why the LendingClub name no longer fit the business
The customer research behind the Happen Bank brand
How they will measure whether the rebrand is working
What it took to get a bank charter six years ago
Shepherds, not sheriffs: building the risk and governance team
LevelUp Savings, LevelUp Checking and DebtIQ
Innovating on the loan product with their own balance sheet
The balance sheet and marketplace mix
The switch to fair value accounting
How AI is changing operations and discovery
Getting ready for AI agents that shop on consumers' behalf
Home improvement lending and home equity
Key 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.
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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 InComm
Piloting one of the first WeChat top-up tests at 7-Eleven in 2017
Why she concluded the future of finance was being built in Asia
Surviving crypto winter at a blockchain startup
Winning Money20/20 RiseUp and starting Finavator in 2019
How Finavator works with banks, fintechs, and corporates
The masterclass that led to a Wiley book deal
The nine elements of the future of finance across data, trust, and technology
Open banking, open finance, and open data explained
The case for a human data right
Keeping the AI chapter relevant as agentic payments took off
Ending each chapter with a subject matter expert interview
Key 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).
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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 Sokin
Watching his father fill out the same compliance forms on every remittance
Why a consumer subscription app was the wrong business to be in
The 2021 decision to go all in on B2B
Sitting underneath the payments, treasury and FX providers
One integration across 170 countries and 70 currencies
Enterprise direct versus the embedded partner channel
Embedded going from zero to 40% of projected US revenue in a year
Why most of the world is not card first
Owning the stablecoin stack instead of renting it
The MCP connector and agent-prepared, human-approved payments
Nine dollars of revenue for every dollar of net cash burned
The Series B, the Oxford Finance debt facility and the licensing build-out
What the Manchester United partnership actually delivers
Key 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.
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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 class
What D.E. Shaw taught him about applying quant techniques to personal finance
The income share agreement idea that brought the co-founders together
What changed when he took over as CEO on May 1
Losing the balance of a three-founder culture, for better and worse
The core personal loan business and the future prime borrower
The trifecta of growth, profitability and credit performance
Auto and home, and the race to contribution margin positive
What conditional approval from the OCC actually means
Why a de novo charter rather than acquiring a bank
Where the existing bank and credit union partners land after Upstart Bank opens
AI in loan verification and servicing, beyond the underwriting model
What happens when AI agents start applying for loans on people's behalf
Ninety-one percent automation and whether 100% is reachable
The case that fixing the cost of credit makes most Americans 10% wealthier
Key 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.
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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 Delhi
Why he calls himself an "ignorant" founder rather than an experienced one
The nine-months-to-two-weeks wedge that built Gamma, and why Root uses the same one
Discovering the payments inefficiency by reading through ADP's 10-K
Why 40% of US SMBs don't accept cards, and it isn't about the fees
The dual pressure of RTP and FedNow that made 2024 the right moment to start Root
The heart, arteries, and capillaries analogy for how Root fits into the banking system
What actually happens to money in the five seconds between sender and receiver
Why reliability, not transaction scale, is the hard engineering problem in payments
How Root handles banks that can't receive RTP or FedNow
Where stablecoins fit into a bank-rail-agnostic platform
Why Root wants to be the pipes underneath the industry, not the brand
Key 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.
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