Fintech Coffee Break

Hi guys, welcome to the Fintech Coffee Break. I'm your host, Isabelle Castro. This week I shared my coffee break with Don Muir, CEO and founder of Arc. This episode was a special one. It was the last one of a very busy year and I wanted to kind of take stock of what had happened and how it had affected the fintech ecosystem.Arc works closely with startups and fintechs and has h

Hi guys, welcome to the Fintech Coffee Break. I'm your host, Isabelle Castro. This week, I joined Dani Fava, Group President of Product Innovation at Envestnet, for my coffee break to talk about the promise of generative AI for financial advisory.With AI being one of the topics of the year for finance, I wanted to ask her how she sees the technology impacting financial advisors

Hi Guys, welcome to the Fintech Coffee Break, I'm your host, Isabelle Castro. This week, I shared my coffee break with Nico Simko, CEO and founder of Clair, an earned wage access and banking app. Now, I’ve covered earned wage access before, but Clair is a different player within the space. The company approaches earned wage access like a loan, also offering employees other ba

Hi guys, welcome to the Fintech Coffee Break. I'm your host, Isabelle Castro. This week I shared my coffee break with Alana Levine and Nikki Senyard from Fintel Connect to talk about affiliate marketing and the role of the influencer in building big name financial brands. We spoke about what it takes to scale customer acquisition and how technology feeds into the process as more co

Hi guys, welcome to the Fintech Coffee Break. I'm your host, Isabelle Castro. This week, I shared my coffee break with Ed Mallon, Chief Investment Officer at Pagaya.This year has been difficult for lenders and the consumers they serve. Rates are at record highs, and ratings agencies are applying added pressure. Meanwhile, the heightened cost of living has increased the need for

Hi guys, welcome to the Fintech Coffee Break. I'm your host Isabelle Castro. This week I shared my coffee break with Andrew Jamison, co-founder and CEO of Extend. SMBs have continued to be underserved by the banking ecosystem, and have been hit with even more challenges as the year has rolled out. I spoke to Andrew about why the sector is still an area ripe with opportunity and

This year DeFi seems to be going through a bit of a dip. Amid regulatory concerns of the crypto industry and the broken trust following the failure of large Cefi players last year, it looks like development has slowed. However, large financial institutions and fintechs are still engaging in the blockchain space, which had me wondering what is going on with crypto and DeFi? Is it ov

This week, I sat down with Andrew Davies, global head of regulatory affairs at ComplyAdvantage. Fraud levels continue to affect the financial industry with statistics showing the estimated money laundering as a percentage of global GDP remaining the same for years. However, Andrew said now is a better time than any for that to changeComply advantage recently released a new tool tac

This week I spoke to Chirag Shah, CEO and founder of Nucleus Commercial Finance. Nucleus has been in the fintech space for some time, providing financing solutions for Small and medium businesses with a tech-focused vision. I caught up with him to get his views on the prospect of a super app for SMBs and how embedded finance, and particularly innovation in embedded financ

This week, I spoke to Laura Merling, Chief transformation and operations officer at Arvest Bank. Community banks have faced a difficult environment, and there have been concerns in the media about whether there still is a place for them in the banking ecosystem. We spoke about the idea of the community bank and how they can approach the digital age, still keeping their en