EYE ON: Money20/20 Conference from Las Vegas 2025 – Part I

Welcome to the FinWise EYE ON Podcast series, where we bring you the latest insights across the fintech banking, card, payments, and lending industries. In each episode, we sit down with industry insiders and experts and dive into the hottest topics and trends that you need to keep an eye on. Time to take off for another episode of the EYE ON Podcast. 

Nick Chiappetti with FinWise Team and Guests:  Welcome to a special edition of FinWise EYE ON Podcast, coming to you straight from Money20/20 in Las Vegas.

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Karen Schmidt, VP Product & Business Development, Sutton Bank (00:33 – 3:57)

Nathan Mills:  All right, Karen, great to have you. Thanks for being the first to volunteer to be here with us, help us break the ice.

Karen Schmidt:  No problem.

Nathan:  We talked last year, but Karen, could you go ahead and introduce yourself, and tell everyone where you’re from and what you do?

Karen:  Sure. I’m Karen Schmidt, and I head up Product & Business Development for Sutton Bank out of Attica, Ohio.

Nathan:  Awesome. Thanks for joining us again. Well, with Money20/20 just getting started here, there seems to be a theme every year, or one that we think is going to come. What do you think it will be this year?

Karen:  The theme this year has to be stablecoins. Maybe second runner-up would be AI, but still . . .

Nathan:  Oh, AI’s so old.

Karen:  It’s old, but I still think it’s going to be out there. But stablecoins is definitely the theme this year.

Nathan:  You guys have a lot of experience working with fintechs. I wanted to know from you what you think makes a successful fintech-bank partnership, and what in your experience so far?

Karen:  I would say what makes a successful relationship, two components are collaboration and transparency. I think those are really two big factors, as well as willingness to adjust based on feedback from the bank as far as what might be needed from your program.

Nathan:  Yeah. Have you seen changes in that kind of transparency over the last few years, or is that still a challenge?

Karen:  I’ve seen changes. I think both parties understand that you’ve got to come to the table with everything, you know, all your ducks in a row, if you will. Knowing that from a fintech perspective, having a compliance management system, some of those are now just table stakes. I noticed a big change over the last couple years for sure.

Nathan:  Yeah. Are there some things that fintechs can do better that, if there’s a fintech getting ready to approach a bank about a partnership, that might be helpful for them to know?

Karen:  I think just understanding what it means to be bank-ready, having all your policies and procedures ready, documented, approved, in place, because it’s going to be a challenge to move without those. So having that ready before you start those conversations. And I know sometimes it feels a little bit like the chicken before the egg, but in today’s world you’re not going to get too far in those conversations if the bank’s saying what is your compliance management system look like, and you’re either getting a blank look or oh, we’re going to build that. So I think just understanding what bank-readiness means and having all those policies and procedures ready to go.

Nathan:  Yeah. That makes sense. Well, on a fun note, where are you looking forward to eating here in Vegas? So many good choices – you’ve got to have something on your list, right?

Karen:  I think this is a question you asked me last year. You said you couldn’t remember what we talked about.

Nathan:  Oh boy. And you’re still thinking about it?

Karen:  I’m still thinking about it! ‘Cause there’s so many options, and so every year I feel like it’s different restaurants, so there’s no one place that I’m dying to go to. I think at this point in my life it’s about moderation versus looking forward to going to one specific place.

Nathan:  Yeah. Where am I not going to eat this year. Wise, wise. This is a place where you need that kind of self-control.

Karen:  Absolutely, I need to work on that.

Nathan:  We all do. Awesome. Well, thanks, Karen. We hope you enjoy the rest of the show, and thanks for being here with us.

Karen:  Thank you!

Nathan:  Appreciate it.

Karen:  Bye.

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Marc Rehberger, SVP, Head of Tech Enabled Banking, Customers Bank (3:58 – 8:15)

Nathan Mills:  All right, I’m here with Marc from Customers Bank. We’re at Money20/20. Marc, can you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do at Customers Bank, and a little bit about Customers Bank as well.

Marc Rehberger:  Sure. So Customers Bank is a 23-ish, 24-ish billion dollar asset bank based out of eastern Pennsylvania. We’re very much focused on community and commercial banking. My role of the bank is, think of it as innovation. I’m looking for technology that can either incrementally or exponentially change the way banking can be done. So that could be anything from a KYC tool to a fraud tool to a lending program, and everything in between. Anything that changes how a banking trajectory works.

Nathan:  So you have to stay on the cutting edge of everything that’s happening.

Marc:  Correct. And thinking about the future and how it impacts things, then trying to explain how to integrate something, or why we need to think about that. For example, right now at the conference two of the biggest topics are AI and digital assets, either stablecoin or tokenized assets. And if you ask a lot of bankers, they’re not thinking about that yet, or they’re scared of it. And then you just really start to think about it. That’s definitely what I get to do every day, is think about how the technology could change our world in two years, five years, ten years.

Nathan:  Yeah. Always thinking on the road.

Marc:  Yes.

Nathan:  So on that topic, here at Money20/20 obviously there’s going to be a lot of both of those things, about AI and stablecoin and other digital assets. What are you hoping to hear or expecting to hear maybe that we should be listening for?

Marc:  So, a couple things. First off, I have to say anything I say today is my personal opinion only, not the opinion of the bank or my regulators. Just what Marc thinks. I think that really I’m encouraging people to have the conversation and to think about the opportunity. A lot of people think that this is going to break banks, that it’s going to pull money out of the banks. And I don’t know if I’m of that opinion, right. I’m probably not of that opinion. I’m an optimist in this case. But I’m reallly open to have open conversations, meet people who are trying to think differently, and think about how to really empower community banks to be the engine for the economy. If you think about it, if we leave innovation to the top ten banks, innovation dies. Innovation, we need the community banks to thrive, and to do that we need them to adopt technology solutions that allow them to compete outside of their geography or their credit risk, really diversity. So is it stablecoin or tokenized deposits? Maybe. Is it AI? Maybe. But we have to do something different as bankers. And I always say I’m an accidental banker. I’ve only been doing this for five years as a banker, per se. I was always trialed as a non-banking lender. But I’ve come to really appreciate the value of a chartered institution that’s safe and sound, and technology is not to be feared. It needs to be embraced.

Nathan:  Yeah. What do you think some of the things that community banks need to be doing to better prepare themselves to take advantage of these opportunities that are coming?

Marc:  So, I think they need to adopt a little bit of a risk mindset, to take risk, take novel risk and try things, to get out to conferences like this and other ones. And tons of people are doing cool things, right. You think about banks in some small state called Utah, right, they’re doing a lot of great things there. And FinWise is an example. One of the better ones in the states, right. They’re all willing to talk to you, right. You can talk to any one of the FinWise team and they’ll talk to you. Same thing at Customers. Same thing at Celtic. We’re here to protect the industry and grow the industry, and so you have to get out of your midwest bankers group and talk to people who are doing things differently, because there are so many advantages that can be found here. And every year I walk away with a new relationship, a new technology partner, and that’s why I’m here.

Nathan:  This is a great example of that, right. This Themis event. I think this is the fifth year that they’ve been putting it on, and this shows that there is that willingness and desire.

Marc:  Yeah, there’s competitors in the room, but I don’t view any of them as competitors. There’s opportunity for all of us to be successful, and the same thing with technology companies, right. There are companies that do similar things. It could be about stablecoin or loan origination systems. There’s many who do similar things, and there’s room for more than one to be successful. It’s understanding what those are, and then dive in and don’t be afraid to take a risk, right.

Nathan:  Yeah, that’s right.

Marc:  Well, thank you.

Nathan:  Appreciate the time and enjoy the rest of the show.

Marc:  Enjoy the conference. Thank you.

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Chris Rigoni, EVP, Head of Partner Banking & Payments, Axiom Bank (8:16 – 14:33)

Nathan Mills:  All right. I’m here with Chris from Axiom Bank. Chris, welcome and thanks for joining us.

Chris Rigoni:  Thank you. Yeah, absolutely.

Nathan:  Are you having a good time?

Chris:  I actuallly just got here. I got delayed, flights got delayed.

Nathan:  Sounds like a few people are dealing with the same thing. Well, we’re glad you made it. Chris, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Axiom Bank and what you do there as well?

Chris:  Sure. I’ve been in financial services a while. I started my at career at BBVA actually working with Simple Finance, so I’ve been doing partner banking for quite a while now. I’m Head of Partner Banking & Payments at Axiom Bank, so it’s a smaller 800-900 million dollar bank in Orlando, Florida. They really sold out to partner banking, really focused on it, a very innovative bank and a great leadership team there, and so we’re building and scaling that infrastructure and then looking to scale the business.

Nathan:  Oh, fantastic. Well, it looks like this is the right place to be, then, right.

Chris:  Oh yeah.

Nathan:  To have these discussions, so on that note, obviously there’s a lot of talk about the complexitities of navigating fintech-bank partnerships. How are you guys navigating some of those complexities at Axiom?

Chris:  Yeah, I think that obviously the regulatory environment has been a big pendulum swing one way and then the other, right. Over the last five years you had a lot of banks given consent orders and formal agreements and things like that. I think that environment is changing now, with the new administration that’s in and the era of de-regulation, or so they call it. I think there’s a lot of focus on innovation, a lot of focus on what materal risk is to the bank, and really defining that. And I think that’s changing the way that we interact with our partners, but not only interact with our partners, but the way that we structure things internally, and what things we actually pay attention to. So when you’re doing annual due diligence on the partner or you’re onboarding a partner, what are those things that make the most sense and define material risk to the bank? And then you focus on those things and you provide oversight on those things, not that the other things aren’t important; but those other things can be done with audits of the partner or things like that, right. It doesn’t necessarily need to have internal bank oversight on a monthly or quarterly basis. And so it’s really changed, especially in the last 8-12 months, how we think about partner banking and how we think about risk and compliance.

Nathan:  Interesting. Yeah, I think we’re all learning a lot. And at an event like this, I think that people are learning from each other hopefully, right.

Chris:  Oh yeah.

Nathan:  What are some things that, from other banks maybe, that you’ve seen that have helped you guys?

Chris:  I’ve got a little bit of an interesting background because I have been at BBVA, as I mentioned, but I’ve also been at Coastal Community Bank; I’ve been at Sterling National Bank which merged with Webster Bank, and led partner banking there. I’ve also been at Evolve, and now most recently at Axiom. So I’ve seen a lot of banks do it a lot of different ways. Some technologically-advanced ways; some not so much; and then some in good ways and some in bad ways. I think that’s where I think that partnership focus and the way you focus on the right material risk to the bank makes so much sense, because if you put together a framework that really you can explain why you’re focusing on those specific things and be able to explain that to the examiners, but also show that oversight, document that oversight, and this process and that evidence that you’re actually doing it, I think that goes a long way. The other side to that would be if you do find a gap, you realize that gap, document the gap, and have a plan to take care of that.

Nathan:  Yeah, that makes sense. For those who are with a fintech and they’re listening, what are you hoping that more fintechs can do to better prepare themselves to enter into these banking relationships and be more successful from the get-go?

Chris:  I think the one thing that I would say is to understand that the bank’s not here to kill innovation. We want to partner with you to create an innovative environment and to delight customers, whether that be business customers or retail customers, whoever it may be. You just have to bring the mindset that you’re going to partner with us on the risk mitigation side and understand what expectations we have, and meet those expectations on a regular basis. And then when something comes up and it changes, and it will, because the regulators come in and they do an exam quite often, especially on banks that participate in partner banking. Things are going to change, and you have to be agile enough to be able to respond to those with the bank. We’re not coming to you asking for more material or documentation or different reporting or data or whatever it is just because we love to do that and it’s our favorite thing, believe me, we don’t. We don’t love to change things. We would rather keep the status quo of reporting and documentation and have everything run smoothly, but that’s just not the nature of the business. So I would say come with that mindset that you’re going to treat it as an innovative project that we’re going to fill fast, and then we’re going to meet certain criteria every single time with the risk and compliance framework.

Nathan:  That’s fantastic. Well Chris, just a little question for outside the conference here, Vegas is obviously filled with opportunity. Anything that you’re looking forward to doing outside the conference? Any particular food, restaurants . . .

Chris:  I’ve got a few dinners I’ve been invited to, so we’ll see what kind of food they have there. Honestly I’m kind of boring. Vegas is sort of lost on me. I don’t really gamble and so, I don’t have a lot of time at these things to go see shows and stuff like that.

Nathan:  Right, you’re lucky if you see the sun.

Chris:  Yeah. I’m lucky if I leave the Venetian. Mainly I’m looking forward to connecting with friends that I’ve made in the industry. I think that’s the best thing, not only about the fintech segment, but also the financial services in general, is that through the years, man you make a lot of contacts and keep in touch with people you’ve worked with or you’ve met along the way at different conferences, and it’s just a really fun experience at Money20/20 to get to meet all of those people again and see and connect with folks.

Nathan:  Yeah. A class reunion.

Chris:  Absolutely.

Nathan:  Fantastic. Well Chris, enjoy the rest of the event. Thank you for stopping by and we’ll let you get back to the mingling.

Chris:  Awesome. Thank you.

Nathan:  Thanks, Chris.

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Tony McGee, Director of Business Development, Lithic (14:34 – 22:29)

Nathan Mills:  I’m here with Tony McGee from Lithic. Welcome. We’re at the Bankers-Led Forum here with Themis, and the room is popping.

Tony McGee:  The room is popping. I was not on the original list, and was invited by a former co-worker of mine, and wanted to see her. I walk in and I bump into all kinds of people I know, so I’m glad I’m here. So, we’re working together; Lithic’s doing a little bit of partnership with FinWise today, so we’re hoping at some point to do more, need to find a path there.

Nathan:  Yeah. Little by little. Fantastic.

Tony:  Yeah.

Nathan:  So have you been, you haven’t been to this event before?

Tony:  I have not.

Nathan:  What are your thoughts about it? Bankers gathering together, talking.

Tony:  Who would have thought? Who’d of thought it’d be so lively?

Nathan:  Yeah, it is lively in here, isn’t it.

Tony:  I think when you’re talking about fintech and kind of where the industry is going, I think the bank world feels like it’s starting to shift a little. There’s a lot more talk about tech and new infrastructure, and how do banks become more the tip of the spear when it comes to fintech, right. And I’m hearing the talk more and more. How could I innovate? How can I get more involved in taking the lead? The traditional banks are getting involved in these tech-forward initiatives. That’s not to minimize anything that the banks do, but typically in the past it’s been like you’ve got Fintech A that has this great idea that needs a bank, it needs a processor, and now it’s like OK, the banks themselves are starting to buy into that and building new capabilities. So it’s exciting to see. I’ve talked to a few around here that are kind of getting involved in building that API-led infrastructure, kind of creating that layer as the bank, and it’s interesting.

Nathan:  Well, for those who don’t know what Lithic does, why don’t you share a little bit about what Lithic does, and what you do at Lithic?

Tony:  Yeah. So, Lithic is a processing infrastructure, so we’re a payments infrastructure that allows for fintechs, enterprises, banks, to do card issuing. We are working incredibly sophisticated when it comes to our platform, how companies can create on our platform, build new services, take advantage of our really robust APIs. A lot of our DNA, if you will, kind of comes from an engineering background. We’ve got a huge team of engineers that have had a lot of experience in this industry that have taken that experience and worked to build really a leading edge processing infrastructure that has really taken off. We’ve got some really cool customers in our suite, getting a lot of new interest in the industry right now, and honestly it’s an exciting time to be involved in Lithic. I just arrived at the company this summer. Not new to the payments industry, but signed on at Lithic this summer. Couldn’t be more excited to be here. We are in the credit industry; we’re in the debit industry; in the prepaid business as well. But really, if you’re looking for a payments infrastructure, a modern API-led infrastructure, Lithic is a good option. So yeah, it’s just a great time to be here. I’m excited. It’s my first Money20/20 in a while, where I’m starting with a new company and kind of coming out again and telling people where I’m at.

Nathan:  So how have things changed generally in your view at events like these in the last few years? Because they’re different.

Tony:  They’re different. Yeah. It feels like the events are becoming more restaurant-focused, a little bit more low-key, kind of relaxed a little bit now. It feels like everybody’s sort of realizing that they can come to these events now and kind of play inside or outside. You’re starting to see more and more folks who are just coming in and realizing that they can do business and be involved in the events and contribute, but not necessarily have to join all the other things.

Nathan:  What do you think you’re going to hear that’s maybe new or different here? Or maybe it’s expected, right. I think we’re all talking about some of the same themes.

Tony:  Yeah, I mean, I’m guessing we’ll hear a lot about AI and agentic payments, and probably stablecoin. It’s interesting, because Lithic is actually – it’s not a stretch for us to participate in all those segments, because we are an infrastructure and we’re supporting some of those industries. We have partnerships in the stablecoin world. It doesn’t have to be a we are in the stablecoin world. We can support card payments and money movement for the stablecoin industry, so we’ve announced some partnerships in that category. It’s nice to be in an environment where I can say hey, I’m participating in that but not necessarily all the way in. Agentics, Lithic’s kind of becoming an early entry into that industry as well, where our chief warrant officer, Robin [Robin Gandhi], has done some demos and some off-tracks in that category as well. That’s an interesting topic to think about how bots at some point are going to kind of come in and buy things on our behalf.

Nathan:  Is that next year’s big theme: bots? What’s next year, right? Can we even think that far ahead?

Tony:  I don’t know. It’s moving really, really fast, almost to the point where it’s like getting scary, but yes, agentic bots buying things, companies building APIs that can put in a card infrastructure right into the payment flow, so that whole agentic stuff. But I think that AI’s probably the theme that I’m hearing the most hear.

Nathan:  Yeah, I’m hearing that still, stablecoin, we’re hearing that word a lot.

Tony:  A couple years ago I was talking about AI and what it’s going to do, and I was rolling my eyes at the time, so OK, the next blockchain thing, there’s this . . . Now I feel like I can see how that is going to just change our world at this point. I mean, everyone is using AI in some way, shape or form now regularly, whether it’s to research things. . .

Nathan:  Every day, right, it’s replacing things, replacing search.

Tony:  Search? I don’t even use search. I don’t do Google Search. I go to whatever Chat GPT or whatever AI tool I’m using. I’m using it these days to help me sort of think about different concepts in a different way. It is so interesting. It’s basically taking the whole internet and saying you’ll never find this on your own. It’s all right here in front of you.

Nathan:  Right, yeah, just explain it to me, please.

Tony:  Right. But I think of it as more as just another way to research, another way to make things – what companies are doing with AI today in payments and all that is just insane.

Nathan:  I think the lesson learned from that, I think maybe we could relearn this lesson all the time, is we need to not roll our eyes at any of the stuff that’s coming our way, right?

Tony:  It’s coming.

Nathan:  ‘Cause when we roll our eyes we’re going to look back and go why did I do that?

Tony:  Why did I do that. Yeah, and there’s companies that they find, there’s startups that don’t do that. They say yeah, I’m going to capitalize on this. It’s great. Excited about what the banks are doing; thankful to all the people that over the years I’ve gotten to know and recognize around here, and looking forward to seeing lots of them.

Nathan:  Well thanks, Tony. Great to meet you, and enjoy the rest of the event.

Tony:  Yeah. Nice to meet you.

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Joe Morgan, EVP, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Continental Bank (22:30 – 29:52)

Nathan Mills:  I’m here with Joseph Morgan at the Bankers-Led Forum, and we talked last year, Joseph. It’s great to see you again. It’s been a year. Can you believe it? 

Joseph Morgan:  I know. Thanks for having me on again. I’d asked about the EYE-ON Podcast several times, and now I can say I’ve been on the EYE-ON Podcast.

Nathan:  That’s right. You are among the esteemed few that have done it, but a growing list nonetheless. So it’s been a few hours since the show started, but how are things so far?

Joseph:  Great. I mean, this is a fantastic event for bankers, but also anyone who wants to partner with banks. It’s refreshing to be able to talk to people about shared experiences, shared challenges and opportunities, and just be real about what we’re facing together; because at the end of the day we’re not all competitors, but we’re all in the same ecosystem as banks, so this is a great event. And thanks for hosting the podcast.

Nathan:  Absolutely. Well Joseph, you’re with Continental, and I’m curious. We talked about a few questions we might talk about here, but what are some of the key challenges in scaling your business these days?

Joseph:  Scale for a regulated entity like a bank is difficult, because it has to be very thoughtful, forecasted, and that scale has to be predetermined and almost predestined. When we think about scaling our business, it starts with people and a staffing model. We have the staffing model reviewed and approved by the board and by the regulators, and we have dedicated compliance managers and program managers and other people that help us oversee and manage, onboard all of our partners. And the layer on top of the people includes often automated processes, specifically some vendors that can come in and help us do things in ways that we can’t just by throwing more people at problems. We’re able to achieve more effective and faster scale. So we’re really thoughtful about how we scale because we can’t bite off more than we can chew. We don’t want to run the risk of getting ahead of our skis. Our scale is often a little more linear than some of our fintechs in their desires for exponential scale, but at the end of the day the most important piece but oftentimes the hard piece is making sure that the incentives and the goals are aligned between our partners. You see that all the time. Fintech partners understand and respect the regulated environment in which their products have to be offered through the bank, so we can make sure we’re aligned on all things growth, increased risk, etc. It actually allows us to scale better because you can just take steps forward instead of taking two steps or three steps forward really quickly, then having to take a step backward.

Nathan:  OK, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, AI didn’t go away since last year. Still a topic, and so I’m curious now how is Continental leveraging AI to help you scale and do those things we talked about?

Joseph:  All banks are using AI currently, and we are using CoPilot as a Microsoft software and other forms as well, not partnered with a few really important vendors at this stage, but we’ve talked to a few which have been really impressive. Two that just come off the top of my head are Shibboleth AI and Cobalt Labs. Several other Utah banks are partnered with them, but they deploy AI in ways to really help banks.

Shibboleth can help a lot with automating testing, and they can do that on a transaction level or customer level basis. So the bank can write and design and customize tons of scripts to test – not anything – but they have certain regs that they are specialized in, and we upload all those scripts and they run those scripts through AI and it can help in a tremendous way to scale. You might have reviews you have to do now. You might have to do a statistically insignificant amount of like tests and reviews, or you have to do risk-based testing that’s much more targeted, and so Shibboleth can help with – I mean, TILA is a big one, the Reg Z, Truth in Savings has a number of regs that we hope to be able to achieve some scale with in doing real time, potentially even full population testing.

Another one is Cobalt Labs. They have these AI agents that work and coordinate across different LOMs, and they pull in all FSLIC-regulated consent orders in the public domain, and then you can upload the bank’s policies and procedures, risk assessments, and then we can compare those to a reg. Or we can compare those to our partner’s policies and procedures that we’ve been uploading. And it not only identifies gaps, and it not only suggests language, but it will propose generated language that you should have that maybe your policy is leaving out based off the reg. It helps with SOC reviews; it helps with due diligence reviews for reviewing and approving vendors. Cobalt Labs is another one we’ve looked at, but for a bank our size it’s always going to be easier at the beginning to buy versus build, so we really value these partners coming in to assist us with this.

Nathan:  How has that changed what your team does? What their day-to-day work is? Has that effected them at all?

Joseph:  Yeah, it allows a team to be more effective. There’s so many complaints to review and respond to, or so many disputes to disposition, that if we want to do a statistically relevant sample size for reviews and tests or we want to sample for a particular population, being able to rely on this is not just important, but like essential.

Nathan:  Yeah, it makes sense. Well, mind if I ask you one more question? ‘Cause I know you’ve got to get out here and network, right? That’s why we’re here. Just kind of a general question about fintech-bank partnerships, and we probably talked a little bit about this last year, but what do you think makes for the most successful partnerships? I mean, there’s a lot of things, obviously, but what stands out when someone asks that question?

Joseph:  To me it’s all about trust and communication with the leadership between the two parties. There will be problems; there will be issues; there will be disagreements; but at the end of the day, if you have a good working relationship and you really trust your partner and you communicate effectively, you’ll be able to get through these. And when you have that trust and communication, both parties will bring things up earlier and say hey, we’ve identified these issues or that; let’s work together on a remediation plan. And when you want to launch new products, or iterate, or do other things, at the end of the day it’s all about trusting and communicating with people that you know and that you share some aligned right incentive work.

Nathan:  Yeah, makes sense. Well Joseph, I don’t want to keep you from all the fun, ‘cause you can hear it in the background – they’re having fun without you. So we’ll let you go join the rest the party.

Joseph:  Thanks very much, Nathan. Excited to listen to all the other contributors to the podcast.

Nathan:  Fantastic. Thanks, Joseph.

Joseph:  Thanks. Bye.

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Abby Hogan, SVP, Legal & Regulatory Affairs, FairPlay AI (29:53 – 37:09)

Nathan Mills:  I’m here with Abby. Abby’s with FairPlay. Is that right?

Abby Hogan:  Yeah, that’s right.

Nathan:  Well Abby, thank you for joining this crazy party.

Abby:  Of course. Thanks for inviting me.

Nathan:  Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do at FairPlay, and then tell us a little bit about FairPlay.

Abby:  Yeah, of course. So, I’m SVP of Legal & Regulatory Affairs, a kind of Jack Of All Trades doing everything from product development, client delivery, legal, contracting, advising, you name it.

Nathan:  So that is about everything.

Abby:  Not everything. And then my background is originally I was a statistician over at CFPB doing kind of fair lending work, sort of a lot of the early redlining matters we were making, kind of fair lending bottom fodder, and then transitioned to becoming a lawyer and ended up working not only at the bureau doing fair lending work, but then going in-house at a computer firm [indecipherable] at Discover Bank and then City National Bank in Los Angeles working on their consent orders. And so then I get to sort of combine that now in helping our clients at FairPlay. We’re a fairness-first, fairness as a service company, and so we do all sorts of model oversight; so everything from model risk management to finding conflict fairness problems and algorithms and models, and then helping. And then my favorite cool thing that we do is, if we help a client find that they have a fairness issue – so if their algorithm or their model or their process is resulting in some sort of unintended bias towards a certain protected class group – we can often help them kind of alter their model to both be more fair, but also more predictive and therefore more profitable. So what we can do is help tune a model and make it, again, help them find all the customers they’re missing without kind of losing any money in the process.

Nathan:  Interesting. What has that process been like for you, moving from CFPB and that area and moving into what you’re doing now? Has that been a challenge? Fun? Exciting? All the above?

Abby:  I think the whole theme I’ve seen is – I guess two things. First of all, a lot of the regulators, you see all the criticism of the regulators, especially Hill’s list, and I will say some of that criticism is fair in the sense that like, the regulators don’t even know what they don’t know. So many of them have never worked in banking or fintech, and so they don’t even know how these things operate, so it’s been reallly cool to sort of bring together the regulatory and the craftable business know-how, and kind of be able to advise on that now. And then thematically also, whenever we had a failure in the exam or an enforcement action when I was a regulator, that was never the end of the story. If you found a fair lending problem, that was usually just like, you opened the box and there was a world of trouble beneath it, right? Usually it meant there was like a bad model, bad data or compliance underneath it, and so that’s where our work has been informed in seeing if you have a fair lending problem you probably have a model risk or model oversight problem, too.

Nathan:  OK, interesting. Well, it makes me wonder what could banks do better, or what should they know in order to help the regulators? Because, I mean, we’re all kind of learning all this as we go, a little bit, right? Because there’s so much new. But from the bank’s standpoint, like how can we help contribute in that way, do you think?

Abby:  I think use the interactions with your regulator as an opportunity to inform and teach, because the regulator is often going to be too proud to say we don’t know. Like, good luck getting your regulator to say we don’t know how that works! But use the opportunity to say of course you already know this, and show them what you think they probably don’t know. Teach them something cool.

Nathan:  I do that with my kids. Yeah.

Abby:  Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, and make them think it was their idea. That gives you credibility. You can bring them into the fold and make them feel like oh wow, now I’m an expert in this thing, because this person who is the actual expert has taught me how they do it. It puts them in this position where they can look at you a little bit more favorably versus if a regulator comes in and asks their questions, and you’re on your back foot, that’s not a good place to start.

Nathan:  No. I mean, we’re on the same team, right? And we should hopefully feel that way, right? We should hopefully, ideally, feel that way – but it always is going to have that little bit of adversarial, I guess, relationship. Well, is this your first time at Money20/20?

Abby:  It is, yes.

Nathan:  So, what do you think so far? I mean, it hasn’t really started, but this is a unique event.

Abby:  It’s a lot. I think “it’s a lot” is kind of my initial reaction, a lot of events scheduled kind of all around, so I’m excited to get to meet people face-to-face.

Nathan:  Yeah, for sure. What are some other things you’re hoping to hear, or learn about while you’re here? I mean, there’s so much and you won’t get it all, right? But . . .

Abby:  I think my main goal beyond kind of meeting people and learning what folks are struggling with or what’s exciting to them is more on the agentic AI side and this implementation of autonomous and generative AI in the fintech space.

Nathan:  And I imagine that is going to be a hot topic here.

Abby:  Yeah, I saw a few panels on that.

Nathan:  And that was last year, too. That’s one that’s not going away, so that’s great.

Abby:  Yeah, it’s interesting to see who’s the early adopter, who’s the first to market, is anyone using GenAI or AgenticAI for underwriting, or actually like are they spending money using these tools right now? Or are people just using it for these kinds of side functions and then overselling what they’re doing? I’m really excited to hear about that.

Nathan:  That’s awesome. Back to FairPlay for just a second, I’m wondering as you were talking I was curious if in the work you’ve been doing if there’s been an aha! moment for you where you just found something that was like oh my goodness, wow. This is awesome, or this is crazy, or what, I don’t know.

Abby:  I feel like every week we get these aha! moments, ‘cause what we get to do is like, we’re working it’s like hand-in-hand with our clients, right? Like they’re coming to us ‘cause they say like, we want to be the best out there, right? We want to be the most fair, we want to have good models, and so we get to come in and say OK, well here’s what your customer base looks like, and maybe they had no idea. But in order to do the fair lending test saying you get all these insights, and who are your clients, and then we get to dig into the data in a very granular way that would take quite a bit of effort for them, and give them these insights about well, these customers have different credit profiles or asked for very different products, and kind of the push-pull of customer-driven input. So like who’s asking for bigger loans or longer terms versus what’s kind of the bank’s or fintech’s side of what APR you offer. So we can them that push-pull and then show them where they have room to be both like fair and an industry leader and kind of that social justice piece, while also being more profitable. It’s just rad. Yeah.

Nathan:  It’s a win-win. More for everyone. Well that’s fantastic. Well I don’t want to keep you from all of the fun that’s going on here. Everyone can hear, there’s a lot of fun to be had, so Abby, it was great to meet you. Thank you for taking a few minutes to let us know about you and FairPlay, and hopefully next year we can talk again.

Abby:  Perfect. Thank you so much.

Nathan:  Awesome. Thanks. 

«««««««««

Kanishk Mehta, Director, Risk Advisory Services, Kaufman Rossin (37:10 – 46:58)

Nathan Mills:  Well, as you guys can hear, the party’s just getting crazier.

Kanishk Mehta:  There’s more people.

Nathan Mills:  I don’t think they can fit anyone else in the room.

Kanishk Mehta:  Yeah, this is the first happy hour I’ve been to so far. This is just a great way to start of Money20/20.

Nathan:  It’s just happy! That’s awesome. Well, I’m here with Kanishk, and Kanishk, this is the first time we’ve met, but Kanishk is from Kaufman Rossin.

Kanishk:  That’s right.

Nathan:  Who we have worked with and talked with and we love those guys, so Kanishk, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, about what you do at Kaufman Rossin, and maybe for those who don’t know about Kaufman Rossin, what you guys focus on.

Kanishk:  Yeah. So, my name’s Kanishk Mehta; I’m a Director in the Risk Advisory Services specializing in cyber risk management in information security, predominantly in the financial services sector, but we take that learnings from one of the highest-regulated industries and we’re able to carry it on to lower-regulated industries. That’s a really good value add for them, because they’re getting things that they never really really think about or they have to do. ‘Cause no one’s forcing it upon them. To kind of understand the leading practices and some of those types of recommendations to build their program, it goes a long way.

Nathan:  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We were just chatting beforehand about some topics, and deep fakes came up, and that’s obviously an issue. It’s going to become more of an issue, but I know it’s something you guys are focusing on, so tell me a little bit about what you’re seeing, what you learned, and what you think is coming in that area.

Kanishk:  Yeah, right. It’s happening everywhere. Deep fakes are synthetic media copies of yourself, of anyone, right, including voice and face. The more you have an internet presence, the easier it is to have a deep fake made on you, so that’s why you’ll see a lot of celebrities getting deep fakes, because they’re just all over the internet. I think it’s a little bit harder for individuals like us to get deep faked, but it doesn’t mean it’s not impossible.

Nathan:  Yeah, we’ve got to keep our podcast kind of short, right? Not give them a lot of content.

Kanishk:  Right, that’s one of the things we look for is looking to see how susceptible are you as an organization to a deep fake? Take FinWise. I’d call you and we’d go into a little bit of open intelligent searching, find out who does podcasts, and speaking. You need about a good two-three minutes of a recording…

Nathan:  That’s it?

Kanishk:  …to make a deep fake. That’s it. And the technology we’re seeing, it’s going so fast. So with a two or three [minute] clip, the AI models that you generate would start to be able to have conversations with humans, to a point where depending on the question you ask, my model would be able to respond to you directly.

Nathan:  Really.

Kanishk:  It’s not a list of questions and this is the response, it’s dynamic. It’s getting to that point. The audio and the video together, we’re still a little bit far from having that proper good deep fake, but if you’re doing the voice, yeah, that’s like, here.

Nathan:  And at the pace that AI is going, we can’t really compare it to other technological advances at the same rate. I mean, it seems like every day it’s changing.

Kanishk:  Right. It’s changing daily, yes. And more companies are popping up that are trying to get some type of a breakthrough in AI. They’re moving from the LLM, the language model, to the agentic, which is more dynamic. And what we’re seeing is that, like as we’re trying to do some deep fake simulations, it is just that. Like let’s call, let’s pretend we’re the CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer, let’s call the Help Desk and say I forgot my password. The Help Desk is not going to – how good are those other defenses?

Nathan:  Right. Or do they even dare, right? You’re a junior level Help Desk guy who’s getting a call from the CEO.

Kanishk:  Yeah, any C-Suite really, right? And it’s the intimidation factor, the sense of urgency, it’s like I need to do it right now. Did you hear about the bank in Hughes, Hong Kong?

Nathan:  No.

Kanishk:  Amazing! They simulated an entire deep fake meeting, a virtual call, and everybody (it was with multiple C-Suite members) everybody was a hacker.

Nathan:  Really.

Kanishk:  They had this one person transfer a million dollars, some obscene amount, I don’t remember the exact amount, into their account. And they are a lot more funded, a lot more organized, the bad guys, so they were able to pull something like that off. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Nathan:  And it seems to me that the access to the technology is not out of reach to most – I mean, it’s affordable.

Kanishk:  It’s getting affordable, yeah, but I mean, it’s not cheap, right. You still need a fair bit of processing power to be able to do it at scale. But again, the way that technology advances, we have computers in our pockets now. It’s just a matter of time before it becomes accessible for everyone.

Nathan:  So the big question, how do approach this?

Kanishk:  It goes back, a lot of it, it’s back to the basics I say, right? We are the weakest link, we as the bad guy, right, they prey on our emotions and naturally we’re all good people who want to help people. And that’s what they look for. So I soon go back to if it’s urgent, if someone is asking you to do something immediately, don’t. If I get a call from you, I’m going to do this, I’ll call you from a number I have, like your mobile, did you just call me? Do you need this? And the answer’s nine times out of ten, no. Don’t make any abrupt decisions; don’t act hastily; if you get a link, even from a friend, and that’s happening on What’s App now, urging them to do a little bit more of the phishing, but if someone in your contacts sends you a link and you’re like this looks weird, don’t click it. You’re not going to miss anything by not – I just delete it or ask them did you send me this? A lot of time they don’t know, ‘cause their account got hacked and now it’s coming from their account. Be careful, don’t click anything, call the person, and just don’t make any rash decisions. That’s what I would say.

Nathan:  Does it feel a little bit sad that we’re kind of approaching a state of just don’t believe anything? I mean, does it feel like that?

Kanishk:  It does, it does. And I myself, I don’t want to click it. It’s just not worth the risk. And yeah, even my wife, she’ll call me and she’ll send something, did you send this?

Nathan:  You trained her well. It’s the world you live in.

Kanishk:  See, we have to be diligent, like the moment you stop being vigilant is when you become a victim. Just don’t do anything when you’re not thinking about it. In passing, don’t click.

Nathan:  It makes a lot of sense. Well, I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot more about that. There’s going to be a lot more coming. What’s on your mind a lot, especially when you come to an event like Money20/20 and you’re thinking about or hoping to hear about while you’re here?

Kanishk:  You know, I’m just excited to hear about all the different advances in tech, all these different companies that are working with banks and fintechs, how they’re partnering together to make that next evolution of that customer experience, right, at the end of the day. Again, go on your mobile app and you can do so much. It’s so seamless, it’s just easy. Looking up, there’s so much happening in the background that no one understands. To be able to take it and just keep going with it now, again, beating a dead horse like just AI coming in more and more, to keep changing the way that these apps work. It’s going to be interesting and scary. A lot of it is very scary. It’s like, how does the AI know?

Nathan:  I know. Really, that’s like, I don’t think it even knows the answer to that, right?

Kanishk:  Yeah, yeah.

Nathan:  Not even the people who create it.

Kanishk:  Yeah. That’s a good point.

Nathan:  Well, it’s going to keep people like you guys busy and in business, right?

Kanishk:  Yeah. It’s great for us from like an advisory perspective, because we see it in a lot of our different clients, and they all have a different objective to run on. Using the same tech, but it’s a different objective and a different way of doing it. We kind of get to compare it across and see what works, what doesn’t, how you take something that worked well with one client and bring it to another client.

Nathan:  Yeah, in a different scenario, different choice.

Kanishk:  Right. It’s all going to be tailored to that different client and still understand the backing, so that’s going to be a lot of fun.

Nathan:  I mean, the pace that we have to keep up on things, I don’t even know how to do it. Every day there’s new, I mean there’s always new stuff, it just seems to be accelerating. You’ve got to pick your lane.

Kanishk:  There’s not enough time.

Nathan:  No, there’s not. You could do it all day long.

Kanishk:  Yeah. You still can’t. You go on a web site at night, and there’ll be a brand new article.

Nathan:  We live in a strange time. It’s fun.

Kanishk:  It’s a fun time; it’s a scary time; a discovery time; a whole lot of emotions.

Nathan:  Well, this is a great place to be talking about it, having everyone here who’s kind of thinking along those same lines.

Kanishk:  This is awesome. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Nathan:  Absolutely. Well, Kanishk, we don’t want to keep you from the party, ‘cause as you guys continue here, there it’s still going on.

Kanishk:  I appreciate the talk.

Nathan:  Thanks. We’ll talk soon.

«««««««««

Brittany Decker, Head of Sponsor Banks, Visa (46:59 – 59:17)

Nathan Mills:  Well, I’m here with Brittany, and Brittany has been on our podcast before a couple of times, right? So, our old friend, it’s good to be back together again.

Brittany Decker:  We’re getting the band back together.

Nathan Mills:  That’s right, the reunion tour.

Brittany Decker:  It’s going to be a semi-annual, if not more, scenario. Every time you’re doing a podcast, I’m like, I’m coming in.

Nathan:  You show up. We’ll have to get some T-shirts made.

Brittany:  We should, yeah.

Nathan:  I can do that. All right. Well, let’s get down to business here. And here’s the standard question: What are you expecting to hear this year at Money20/20?

Brittany:  OK. We are going to hear inevitably for years to come all about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learnings and Next-Level what is it that we should be doing to like make our jobs easier. And I went to our leadership conference last week, and we did a session that was a sort of hands on learn all about a couple different tools that we could use for different reasons. I had no idea how much time could be saved using some of these AI tools.

Nathan:  You want to spill?

Brittany:  For example, this is an easy one. I would go listen to call-up books, right? It’s your like, I’m listening to the CEO talk, and then you have the analyst ask questions. And now all I have to do is plug into the prompt for the one called Perplexy and say, can you give me a high-level executive-level summary of so-and-so’s call report, and include these details. And it would give you the summary in a very easy, digestible way to sort of absorb the content information, and I didn’t have to go spend an hour-plus listening to that. I got it in a matter of a few minutes. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, something that I need to be on top of to understand where the strategy is going, who’s really focused on what avenues, how do I layer in our strategy to be able to match it. Everybody’s got revenue goals, so then I’ve got to go talk to them about how to help them earn that revenue. And so now I can take all of the data and then ask it that question. Say well now, from a Visa perspective, what can I be doing to be able to accentuate and folks are into these four bullet points that were included in that summary? So I think it’s just a matter of practice and understanding what we can do. So I am very much here for it. I think AI, AI, AI is going to be a lot of it.

Nathan:  And that’s one that, I mean, it seems like every year there’s a theme and it kind of changes but I feel like that’s just going to keep coming back.

Brittany:  Yeah. It’s not going away.

Nathan:  It’ll be different.

Brittany: Well, for sure. It probably is the new normal for many, but for those of us that have yet to really embed it into our day-to-day, it will have to become our new normal in the next year or two, for sure. And so far, so good. I’m a believer.

Nathan:  Good. Well, it’s not going anywhere, so better jump in the boat. We had a few questions here we were going to talk about. What changes have you guys made that you are enhancing that meet increasing regulatory requirements?

Brittany:  As you know far too well, being on the financial charters aligned with me, is that the regulators have had a very focused laser eye on this business for a while. And in a good way. I think let’s give an assumption of best intentions. But what is really highlighted for us is that when we have, in particular, money movement solutions and flows that we want to be able to grow and get embedded across many financial institutions to help us meet our goal, like help us like service the community service businesses primarily, as really a B2B solution, but this push-to-account and push-to-card and push-to-wallet scenario has driven a lot of questions from the regulators about their bank’s ability to be able to know from the regulators’ perspective, we can understand you’re doing everything right, but how do you know the receive bank on the other side is doing everything that’s right. That’s a really tough question to answer. And from a network perspective, we’re one of the few partners that has a relationship on the other side. So what we’ve done intentionally is pull together all the really as policy and procedure type perspective into a digestible format, so that the risk and compliance folks at the banks who are sponsoring these Visas can take a look at how is it monitored? What is Visa doing? In all of the various regions you have to be a member, you need to have a burn solution, in order to receive any funds that go over our networks, and so of course we’ve got our own email chats, we’ve got our own BSA programs, that maybe don’t touch like what a FinWise is doing, in particular to send out. But we’ve really done a lot of listening and then coming back and understanding how can we solve this problem within the best of our ability to give them like your perspective of [indecipherable] what they don’t see in the [indecipherable] in the money movement field. So intentionally we are trying to do a lot of concerting work, I guess, it’s like listening to what the pain points are and coming back with as much data and information as we can in an easy way for the bank to say well that makes sense. I can sit across from my examiner and I can go through this and they’re going to say OK, that sounds good. I got a check mark.

Nathan:  Oh yeah, the examiners have so much more to learn. I mean, there’s so much more coming at everyone than there was before, so if we can make their job easier it makes our jobs easier, too.

Brittany:  That’s right.

Nathan:  We’re all on the same team. Well let’s see, that brings me to crypto and stablecoins. We’re talking about that a lot. So from where you sit, what are we looking at?

Brittany:  If I can use a U.S. perspective, because stablecoins in particular are the next evolution of what digital money movement looks like. It’s just another currency, if you can just boil it down to be that simple. I know it’s complex, but think about it as we once had an ATM card. And then we stopped using it and we went to a debit card. Even before that we had checks and a ledger that we were using to be able to track all of our payments. And then we went to an online bank. I mean, there’s uncomfortable points for like changing the way that we do things. We say well, I need the piece of paper. No, you don’t need the paper any more. It’s going to be like digital. So this is just another evolution of how money moves, and like how we’re accounting for it, and makes it easy to get it into another currency. In particular in the United States, we have a lot of utilitarianism in settlement. And settlement in a couple of different ways. Settlement for making the funds get to the merchant faster, which is [indecipherable] for their capital flow and their money movement stations, of making their liquidity (that’s what I wanted to say)- they have a lot more liquidity when they receive the funds and they convert it to whatever currency that they like. So if it’s the U.S. dollar, and it ends up being cominium or bitcoin, whatever they want to do with it they can. So we’re working really hard on that with a couple of partners to get merchants paid off faster using the ability of stablecoins and everything they bring, and then also settling with the network faster for us. And that’s just a really interesting need for us, because we don’t have a way to recover the funds when the Fed’s not open, and the weekends or holidays. This gives us an opportunity to send and receive funds from our subnet as necessary. Externally, there’s a lot more value to what stablecoins offer because the majority of the information that I see is that these regions and countries and people want to be able to have better accessibility to the dollar. So they’re using the stablecoins to convert to U.S.D. So we already have it, once we’re done reading in, so our opportunity of how we’re using it are a little bit more narrow when you’re sitting in the United States.

Nathan:  Is this the kind of thing that we’re going to see adoption more readily in other places before we see it here?

Brittany:  Already? Already. Yes, yes. This has been something that has been—

Nathan:  ‘Cause the need is greater, right? I mean, there’s such a desire, right? We maybe don’t feel it as much here.

Brittany:  Yeah, yeah. So in the Asia, Simea area, LAC, even in Ukraine, stablecoins has been in for a long time. So just like a lot of other innovations in payments, United States is not always first to market in some ways because we have high entry for regulation, which is OK. But the Genius Act came out and that paved the way for us to have banks that are comfortable in touching this business and growing their own receivers to make sure that this is going to be safe and it can be traceable. So some other regions have got there first, but that’s OK. I sort of think of it as like when I think of the hurdles and the bumps and the lumps a little bit, and so –

Nathan:  And they’re willing to do it.

Brittany:  They’re willing to do it. Exactly. So by the time we have it, it will have been a little more smoothed out. So it’s all good.

Nathan:  Yeah, yeah. It’s exciting. I think people have generally at first been kind of scared, just of stablecoins, just because we don’t understand it that well, but it’s not that complex.

Brittany:  It’s not, but we sort of need to create probably a couple of YouTube videos.

Nathan:  Somebody make that out there.

Brittany:  Maybe SNL could also do like digital shorts on it?

Nathan:  Yes, oh yeah, those are so good.

Brittany:  Yeah. We need them.

Nathan:  Lazy Sunday. Music Video. We need a new version of that with stablecoins.

Brittany:  Yeah. Real good ideas.

Nathan:  I know. We need to start something here. Awesome. Well let’s see, let’s get one more, ‘cause I know the party is starting to wind down. So what else do you want to talk about? We had a few things here. This is one we marked: What makes a successful fintech-bank partnership in your experience?

Brittany:  Communication. Can I just boil it down to that? Yeah. There’s probably a lot of things, but I think if you’re talking to each other and you trust each other, and you’re open to having the hard conversations, or pointing out the needs, whether that’s a fintech needing something from the bank or the bank needing something from the fintech, talking it out and getting on the phone and sorting it quickly will save everybody so much time and money. And we’re all working at this together. You’re not in a partnership because you didn’t want to get the business done. Pick up the phone and just have the conversation. But on the other side, like it doesn’t mean it has to be hard. It just needs to say like OK, we’re ready for the next step and I want to meet this timeline. What do we need to do to make that happen. So just being really clear in your communication and expectations, and that would be my major focus that I give everybody to work on.

Nathan:  Let’s keep the surprises to a minimum.

Brittany:  Yes. Surprises can be good.

Nathan:  Yeah. Is this a good surprise?

Brittany:  I love it when somebody calls me and says they have something to share with you, and it’s good news. I’m like fantastic. What are we doing?

Nathan:  Listening to the tone of their voice as they say that.

Brittany:  Yes. I’ll take good news all day long. Give me that surprise all day long. Oh good – you’re ready to take the next step. OK, we’re on. Let’s do it.

Nathan:  That’s awesome.

Brittany:  I would love to say just thank you for always being a great partner and for being at this event and doing the podcast. I think the information that you pull out here is really meaningful, and I love listening to them, so I’ll be promoting it and telling everybody to listen to FinWise.

Nathan:  Well, you’re an EYE-ON VIP, so—

Brittany:  Ooh, can I have one of the—like on SNL when you’ve hosted seven times—

Nathan:  Yes.

Brittany:  So when I’ve been on the podcast seven times I need like the—

Nathan:  Well, you’ve got a tumbler already, right?

Brittany:  I do have a tumbler.

Nathan:  That’s a first episode, but—

Brittany:  Yeah.

Nathan:  We need to come up with something.

Brittany:  The bar’s got to be a little higher, yeah. So I’ve got to work for it.

Nathan:  Yeah, we’ve got to make you push.

Brittany:  OK.

Nathan:  Yeah, we’ll do it. Thanks, Brittany.

Brittany:  OK.

Thanks for listening.