Fintech Episodes

Ollie Walsh is the co-founder and CEO of Pipit, who are bringing to market the new Konect network that is powering international cash transactions with DeFi and enabling migrants to support their families back home cheaper, safer, and now faster.

Nigel Verdon is the CEO and co-founder of Railsr (formerly Railsbank) and is a 3x fintech founder and ‘Finance 4 Good’ evangelist focused on building great ideas - first with Evolution (exited to BAE Systems), followed by Currency Cloud (exited to Visa), and now with Railsr.

This week, Eoin and Pete riff on crypto asset service provider regulation through the lens of Revolut, the trifecta of crypto market failures in Voyager, Celsius and Terra, how Walmart’s metaverse play with Roblox feels like the right platform vs. Decentraland or Sandbox, credit as a service player Noble coming out of stealth mode, and Goldman Sachs’ next move into retail fintech with mobile network operator T-Mobile.

This week, Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend riff on Pete’s trip to the US last month with the sheer ridiculousness of the 8 different combinations of point-of-sale authorizations he experienced with a single Revolut card, Starling Bank’s re-prioritization of a presence in the Irish banking market, the hunt for crypto talent by EU regulators, Vitalik’s view on giving people what they want in the Metaverse, fintech micro-lender Umba’s deal for Daraja, and Tomo Credit’s big round to make credit scores obsolete.

This week, Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend return from a 2-week hiatus and look at what’s driving Ramp forward so quickly with their $8bn valuation, the JP Morgan deal for western Ireland-based fintech Global Shares, and the latest with ApeCoin, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and Yuga Labs.

Nik Milanović is the founder of This Week in Fintech, a global digest of fintech news, and General Partner at The Fintech Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund. In this episode, Pete Townsend and Eoin Fitzgerald talk to Nik about what influenced his modus operandi, the big opportunity with fintech to provide financial services to even more people around the world, how Nik ramped up from a newsletter to a syndicate to a venture fund, the blurred lines between fintech and crypto…and how Nik managed to make the most of his love of music!

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend riff on what started out as a student lending platform in SoFi now becoming a full-service digital finance player, Circle’s new SPAC deal in the context of stablecoins, advertising and naming rights in crypto and a long-term view on what Apple could be up to with Stripe.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend are back with the first Money Talks segment of 2022 with a big bump in consumers spending crypto on Visa cards, the story of Ireland’s latest unicorn, Wayflyer, the UBS deal for Wealthfront, Walmart doubling down on their superapp strategy and the pummeling of PayPal’s stock price as a bellwether for the post-pandemic era.

This episode is from the second edition of the Finsight Series virtual event that Pete Townsend moderated recently hosted by Navirum and Salesforce. In this conversation, we’ve got an all-star cast with Rory Galvin from Navirum, Kerry Ryan from Salesforce, Christian-Maynard Philipp from Pattern and Joe Parkin from BlackRock.

Suzanna Hayek from Irish Tech News interviews Pete Townsend on Pete Townsend on financial trends, digital finance and investing in startups. This interview was originally aired on Irish Tech News in early September, and they kindly gave us permission to share the content. We also brought Rory Galvin from Navirum back onto the show to give us some quick insights on the next edition of the Finsight Series ‘Beyond WealthTech’ virtual event coming up on November 17th.

Referring to Colm Lyon as an Irish fintech ‘O.G.’ is just the tip of the iceberg, as at the core, he’s an entrepreneur who’s built indigenous Irish businesses into international players. Currently the CEO and Founder of Fire.com, we walk through Colm’s journey from the early days of banking IT to bootstrapping and scaling his first fintech Realex Payments before it was even called fintech, and building a great culture as an Irish company competing globally. We also talk through how successful exits aren’t really exits, what excites Colm about what fintech will become, what he looks for in startup founders…and the wonders of the antediluvial period!

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend dive headfirst into insights from the first AMA session on the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator, then look at Stripe’s re-entry into crypto and what they’d miss if they stayed on the sidelines, Pete shares some stories from the Token 2049 conference last week in London, and Eoin tees up some unique insights on embedded finance through the lens of NerdWallet’s IPO filing and Productfy’s $16mn Series A.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend dive into the big news for Ireland’s startup ecosystem as Techstars come to Ireland with the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator, along with the news on Pete leading the program, then we get into how we think Chase’s digital bank might fare in the UK, and also AngelList’s announcement of AngelList Stack and their opportunity to monetize their massive user base through fintech.

Sophie Guibaud is the Chief Growth Officer at OpenPayd and she’s spent the last 10 years designing and executing the go-to-market of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) and embedded finance propositions in Europe, building teams and operations from scratch, and integrating financial services into customers’ existing products to create new revenue streams. We talk through Sophie’s entrepreneurial journey to date, some real-world applications of embedded finance, the benefits of her extracurricular activities with podcasts and advisory boards feeding her creativity….and her past life as a competitive boxer!

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend walk through Amazon’s new partnership with BNPL (buy-now-pay-later) player Affirm and what this means for the Amazon flywheel, and then answer the question ‘what’s a stablecoin?’ in the context of USD Coin and the Centre Consortium, before diving into the world of NFTs through Visa’s $150,000 purchase of a CryptoPunk NFT and the big opportunity for monetizing the metaverse.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend unpack the shiny new $24bn valuation for Chime in the context of the American neobank landscape, Ron Shevlin’s concept of neobank-driven deposit displacement through the lens of Bank of America, Facebook’s relaunch of their crypto project, the potential impact of Amazon hiring a crypto lead, the LendingClub turnaround and a sampling of Lex Sokolin’s poetic fintech prose.

Recorded during the recent Finsight Series virtual event that Pete Townsend moderated (hosted by Navirum and Salesforce), this episode features an all-star cast with Rory Galvin from Navirum, Bryan Clagett from Moven, Cory Haberkorn from Salesforce and Niall Twomey from Fenergo. The main theme we covered is this: The demand for digital financial services goes far beyond the domain of neobanks - how do we become truly digital upstream of consumer banking, especially in institutional banking and wealth management?

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend dive deep into the annual results from UK neobanks Starling and Monzo and what’s next for both, before getting into Square’s deal for BNPL (buy now, pay later) player Afterpay and how the integration will lead to a ‘fintech flywheel’. They then dive even deeper into their developing fintech flywheel thesis with a look into how Amazon and Shopify built their flywheels around a B2C to B2B bridge and ‘doing one thing well’, before tying it all back together with a look at Revolut’s travel plans.

Eoin and Pete mine a motherlode of fintech hotspots this week starting with insights into Revolut’s latest $33bn valuation, Square’s quest for crossover between creators, crypto and small businesses, then we dive deep into the upcoming Robinhood IPO and our developing thesis on fintech flywheels.

Ankur Mohan, Founder & CEO of MarketXLS, joins the show to share his story on his entry point into Galway in the West of Ireland to launch MarketXLS, how a certain demographic just prefers the simplicity and control of Excel for managing personal and professional portfolios, closing the gap between the haves and the have-nots of the investing world, and the life-long lesson of the benefits of hard work.

In this Money Talks segment, Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend start with some insights on Visa’s deal for Tink and how the European context of Tink differs quite a bit from the US context of Visa’s dead deal with Plaid, then we look at Binance’s recent troubles before rounding out with Revolut’s recent reporting of their 2020 results and the potential to roll Revolut into a Rundle - the recurring revenue bundle.

In this Money Talks segment, Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend start with their insights on what Stripe’s latest product could mean for their long-term plan, then they think through flywheels with Netflix finally getting into merch, before heading south to Miami for the outtakes from Bitcoin 2021.

Mark Boylan, CFO at Trustap, joins the show this week to share his story about his leap out of Big 4 and into startup life, finding the right distribution channels to get Trustap into the end users’ hands, the benefit of strong relationships with your early investors, what’s next for Trustap…and being sports mad!

In this Money Talks segment, we take a deeper look at the startup ecosystem on this island that we call home, then head south to Europe for a constructive look at the European Payments Initiative, and then head further south to Africa for the story of Chipper Cash and the fintech opportunity in Africa.