Payments Episodes

This week, I caught up with Jesse Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Trustware, and one of the most quietly determined founders I’ve ever backed. I invested in Jesse and his co-founder Jonathan Frazier through the Techstars Web3 accelerator in 2023, and since then, Trustware⁠ have done what most early-stage startups only dream of—shipping a real product, signing real customers, and generating real revenue… all on just $400K in capital and a team of six. In this conversation, Jesse and I get i...

Niall Dennehy is an Irish entrepreneur and the co-founder and COO of AID:Tech, who are bringing traceability and transparency to the flow of funds for governments, NGOs and charities with their payments and digital identity infrastructure bridging web2 to web3.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend look at the outsized gender gap in web3, then riff on the realities of venture capital ‘dry powder’ and crypto VCs, before stepping through what’s wrong with Revolut’s neo-profitability, an unfortunate slip switch for railsr and WhatsApp B2B payments in Brazil as a WeChat-like foundation.

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.

Eoin and Pete dive into the shortcomings of Metaverse graphics through the lens of Metaverse deep-thinker Matthew Ball and his new book on the Metaverse, what’s up with the Ethereum Merge, the big fundraisings of Irish unicorn Wayflyer and Techstars grad Alloy, the death of ING’s Yolt, Block’s Cash App’s small-dollar lending milestone, and old friend Bradley Tusk takes his super-charged regulatory advisory into crypto and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

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.

Adam Bialy is the founder and CEO of Fiat Republic, the compliance-first, API-driven and highly secure and scalable bridge between banks and crypto. In this episode, Adam and Pete Townsend talk through the Fiat Republic vision, the current state of play between banks and crypto platforms that make Fiat Republic such a strong proposition, Adam’s unique leadership style, raising a $3.5mn seed round…and a little something about Taylor Swift!

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.

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.

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!

Oli Cavanagh and Charles Dowd, the co-founders of Strike, tell the story of the confluence of experiences and ideas that brought them together to launch Strike, getting a product live and raising an angel round in less than 3 months, the benefit of having done it before when you need to build a team swiftly, and the big road ahead for Strike.

This is a special bonus episode welcoming back Ollie Walsh, co-founder and CEO of Pipit Global, a for-profit social impact fintech based in Galway here in Ireland. Ollie was on the show back in July 2019 in episode 52, and as Pipit's crowdfunding campaign on the Spark Crowdfunding platform here in Ireland is about to go live to the public, we brought him back to bring us all up to speed on Pipit and share his story on the campaign.

SOUND QUALITY WARNING:  You know how Marc Andreessen said 'software is eating the world'? Well, software ate this episode, please excuse the underwater sound and we'll be back to normal next week! In this Money Talks segment, Pete and Eoin trade ideas on the impact of Ireland’s investment in Stripe, Revolut’s American dream, the season of the SPAC with eToro, Bakkt and Kraken and thoughts on DeFi vs. mainstream crypto.

This week, Pete and Eoin dive into the curious deal brewing between Microsoft and TikTok, a crystal ball view into what's going on with the challenger bank Monzo, all topped off with the recent news on Square and piped-in crowd noise for Pete's beloved Boston Red Sox.

Elaine Deehan is back on the show with Pete Townsend to talk about "the trilogy" of her earlier career as the perfect foundation for her well-timed leap into Starling Bank, analogies to chocolate, startups, the London Underground and big bank tech and the benefit of talking to customers at 2am.

On this week's episode, Pete and Eoin dive into payments on WhatsApp, the paradox between investing in underrepresented founders and the current demographics of venture capital, and getting digitally closer to your spending through Revolut and Olivia.

We once again get inside the minds of entrepreneurs by diving deep into a recent piece of content that struck a chord, and Chris Skinner's recent blog post on Starling's Anne Boden and her recent talk on the myths of fintech.

Elaine Deehan from Pocketwire joins us on the show this week to talk about her soon-to-be launched money management product, her journey from banker to entrepreneur...and being fluent in Spanish!