Fintech One-On-One

Kareem Saleh is the CEO and co-founder of FairPlay, an AI enablement platform helping financial institutions test, tune, and monitor AI systems in production. Four years after his first appearance on the show, Kareem returns to discuss how FairPlay has evolved from credit model fairness into a full AI enablement infrastructure layer and why the rise of generative and agentic AI has made that work more consequential than ever.
What We Covered
How generative AI changes the definition of fairness in financial services
The shift from model validation to continuous, system-level testing
FairPlay's three core capabilities: testing, optimizing, and validating AI systems
How one customer added one day to their model development cycle but saved 60–90 days in compliance review
The 25–33% of declined applicants who would have performed as well as the riskiest approvals
Why the question for legacy institutions has flipped, from "is AI safe enough to try?" to "is it riskier not to adopt AI?"
The political environment and how fairness demand reconfigures, not disappears, across administrations
State-level regulatory frameworks filling the federal enforcement gap
Kareem's Congressional testimony on AI and algorithmic bias
The agentic AI opportunity in KYC, BSA, and AML workflows
Regulatory look-back risk and why today's decisions can become 2029's consent orders
Cash flow underwriting risks and climate risk as underappreciated threats to credit portfolios
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Most of us assume that major hotel brands have sophisticated financial systems running behind the scenes. In this episode, Jess Conroy, CEO and co-founder of ROH, explains just how wrong that assumption is — and why she's spent the last several years building the financial core that hospitality never had.
What We Covered:
The manual payments problem hiding in plain sight
Why the biggest hotel brands have the biggest challenges
The hidden complexity of every hotel transaction
Why the hospitality industry was overlooked by fintech
How ROH got its start in meetings and events
What "AI-first" actually means at ROH
How ROH fits into the existing hotel software stack
The go-to-market reality of a franchise-heavy industry
A transaction-based model that aligns incentives
Scale and growth: managing over $1 billion across the portfolio
The stale data problem driving bad hotel decisions
The vision: a financial foundation for every hotel dollar
Key Takeaways
Hotel payments are a solved problem almost everywhere except hospitality itself — the industry's bias toward "human solves" left it behind.
The complexity of hotel transactions (variable pricing, upgrades, OTAs, group contracts) makes automation far more valuable here than in simpler retail or restaurant contexts.
Building something that didn't exist before is the hardest sales motion — you're not replacing a known tool, you're educating a market about a problem they've learned to live with.
Year-over-year expansion within existing hotels is the clearest signal of product-market fit — customers keep expanding their use once they're on the platform.
About Jess Conroy
Jess Conroy is the CEO and co-founder of ROH, a financial infrastructure platform for hotels. A second-time founder, she has spent nearly 15 years building in and around the hospitality industry. ROH is currently managing over $1 billion in hotel transactions across its growing portfolio.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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