Fintech moves fast. But here at Fintech Takes, Alex Johnson and his rotating panel of guests move faster so that you can stay on top of the latest and greatest news in the industry without breaking a sweat.
Welcome to Fintech Takes—the place where fintech’s biggest nerds come to sit back, relax, and completely geek out.
Join Alex and a lineup of fintech’s brightest minds as they dissect what’s happening in fintech and banking.
Each week, Alex and his guests recap the most interesting developments in fintech and explore the industry’s most pressing questions, diving headfirst into the intricate workings of some of the industry’s most ground-breaking business models and unpacking the emerging players that promise to shape fintech’s future.
From riveting conversations with fintech’s most relevant operators to comprehensive recaps of the month's most compelling news stories and in-depth analyses of the latest regulatory developments, Fintech Takes is your one-stop-shop for navigating the fintech universe.
Subscribe now to join fintech’s nerdiest podcast around!
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Fintech moves fast. But here at Fintech Takes, Alex Johnson and his rotating panel of guests move faster so that you can stay on top of the latest and greatest news in the industry without breaking a sweat.
Welcome to Fintech Takes—the place where fintech’s biggest nerds come to sit back, relax, and completely geek out.
Join Alex and a lineup of fintech’s brightest minds as they dissect what’s happening in fintech and banking.
Each week, Alex and his guests recap the most interesting developments in fintech and explore the industry’s most pressing questions, diving headfirst into the intricate workings of some of the industry’s most ground-breaking business models and unpacking the emerging players that promise to shape fintech’s future.
From riveting conversations with fintech’s most relevant operators to comprehensive recaps of the month's most compelling news stories and in-depth analyses of the latest regulatory developments, Fintech Takes is your one-stop-shop for navigating the fintech universe.
Subscribe now to join fintech’s nerdiest podcast around!
Fintech Recap: Plaid Pays Chase, FBI Circles BaaS, and FICO Tries AI
Fintech Takes
1 hour 5 minutes
1 month ago
Fintech Recap: Plaid Pays Chase, FBI Circles BaaS, and FICO Tries AI
Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined (as always) by my partner-in-recapping, Jason Mikula.
First up: the uneasy détente in open banking is over. Jason and I haven’t had a chance to debrief on Plaid’s deal with JPMorgan Chase to pay for API access (so we do). Payments use cases remain the most expensive, Plaid is eating the fees (at least for now), and Chase looks like it’s succeeded in hobbling Pay by Bank. We unpack why Plaid did the deal, what it means for other aggregators.
Next up, color us nostalgic; back to BaaS Island we go! The FBI is probing Evolve. The scope reportedly extends to board members (including a16z), and new details suggest international money movement in Southeast Asia (tied to a $15M pig-butchering scheme). As the saying goes, bankers almost never go to jail; will this time be any different?
Then, we turn to AI. FICO has announced a new product called a foundation model for financial services. The idea is to build smaller, domain-specific models that are cheaper, faster, and more reliable than generic LLMs, while adding predictive lift on top of existing analytics. The open questions: is this hype dressed up for Wall Street, or a clever way to squeeze extra predictive power out of structured financial datasets? And most of all: who is this really for?
Plus, in our Can’t Let It Go corner, Jason bristles about being labeled as “partisan” (in response to his response about the “Debanking” Executive Order) while I puzzle over Tether reportedly raising at a $500B valuation (the same as OpenAI, except Tether’s core product is…not getting audited and telling everyone to “just trust us.”)
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Fintech Takes
Fintech moves fast. But here at Fintech Takes, Alex Johnson and his rotating panel of guests move faster so that you can stay on top of the latest and greatest news in the industry without breaking a sweat.
Welcome to Fintech Takes—the place where fintech’s biggest nerds come to sit back, relax, and completely geek out.
Join Alex and a lineup of fintech’s brightest minds as they dissect what’s happening in fintech and banking.
Each week, Alex and his guests recap the most interesting developments in fintech and explore the industry’s most pressing questions, diving headfirst into the intricate workings of some of the industry’s most ground-breaking business models and unpacking the emerging players that promise to shape fintech’s future.
From riveting conversations with fintech’s most relevant operators to comprehensive recaps of the month's most compelling news stories and in-depth analyses of the latest regulatory developments, Fintech Takes is your one-stop-shop for navigating the fintech universe.
Subscribe now to join fintech’s nerdiest podcast around!
