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Fintech Takes

Fintech Takes

By: Alex Johnson
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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!Copyright 2025 Alex Johnson Economics Personal Finance Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Fintech Takes: Gambling, Finance, and the Fallout

    Fintech Takes: Gambling, Finance, and the Fallout
    May 28 2025
    Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, and today we’re digging into one of the most urgent (and underdiscussed) financial issues in America: gambling. My guest is Alex DeMarco, founder and CEO of MoneyStack, who’s helping reframe gambling addiction not just as a behavioral health issue, but as a financial systems crisis. Since 2018, when the Supreme Court cracked open the door to state-by-state legalization of mobile sports betting, we’ve seen a gold rush in gambling. Operators are now pulling in more than $70B annually (ads are everywhere, the apps are engineered for nonstop engagement, and the harm is rising fast). In NJ, one of the first states to legalize, 6% of adults are already experiencing moderate to severe gambling-related issues (double the national average). We connect the dots between gambling and familiar fintech business models: the same behavioral nudges, same VIP economics, the same revenue dependence on a vulnerable sliver of power users. If overdraft fees and gamified trading feel predatory, this is that (but on steroids). We unpack: Why sports betting apps now hold three times more per wager than old-school sportsbooks How engagement tactics mimic (and often outstrip) the most addictive elements of gamified finance Why we’re watching investing and gambling blur into one screen (and one behavior) What proactive financial intervention might look like, and why most help comes too late How banks and fintechs can step up (detecting risk early, training advisors, and supporting families in recovery) We close with this big question: when gambling is mobile, funded from a checking account, and styled like Robinhood … can the financial industry really say it’s not their problem? Newline™ by Fifth Third is an innovative, API-first platform that enables fintechs to launch embedded payment, card and deposit solutions directly with Fifth Third Bank. Visit Newline53.com to see how Newline can elevate your business. The world needs MoR. With Paddle as your Merchant of Record (MoR), the global growth is yours. The risk, compliance and accountability are ours. Simple. Paddle offers all the benefits of an enterprise-grade billing system but with MoR flexibility, MoR control, and MoR focus on your core product. Visit paddle.com to learn more. Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. Follow Alex (DeMarco): LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexdemarco/ MoneyStack: https://www.linkedin.com/company/moneystack/ Follow Alex (Johnson): YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Not Fintech Investment Advice: Cardamon, Sprive, Figg, & Glide

    Not Fintech Investment Advice: Cardamon, Sprive, Figg, & Glide
    May 21 2025
    Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, the podcast where Simon Taylor and I (Alex Johnson) talk through fintech companies we’re intrigued by, puzzled by, and occasionally want to manifest into existence (but definitely not invest in). First up is Cardamon, the cozy-sounding AI copilot tackling the cold, hard world of compliance. They’re building a regulatory assistant to speed up product launches (a direct threat to $500/hr law firms and a clever way to navigate the compliance iceberg). Their bet is that if you structure regulatory knowledge right, it can accelerate innovation. Which brings us to this question: What if compliance is actually the best place to start when designing financial products? Next is Sprive, a UK app helping homeowners pay off their mortgage faster by redirecting cashback and round-ups toward debt repayment. It’s clever. It’s elegant. But it also risks falling into what Simon calls the “PFM ditch” (the only people who use the tool are the ones already inclined to do the behavior anyway). But is mortgage payoff the product, or a feature? And if the real value is in rerouting savings wherever they matter most, maybe Sprive isn’t a mortgage app at all? Then comes Figg Wealth, the most complete “dashboard of dashboards” net-worth tracker we’ve seen in the UK. It pulls in everything (cars, property, crypto, stocks, bank accounts) and auto-values it all. The real unlock may be pairing that aggregation with AI-driven advice. If AI can widen both the top and bottom of the funnel, Figg might just make wealth management scalable. Last is Glide, which began life as a neobank but pivoted to selling onboarding and lending infrastructure to community banks and credit unions.Now they sit in the middleware layer. But here’s the big question: what can vendors build beyond table stakes that offers these smaller institutions a real shot at differentiation? No end-of-show manifestation this time, unless you count my dream of having agentic private bankers before we have agentic commerce! 00:02:30 – Cardamon 00:17:43 – Sprive 00:29:03 – Figg Wealth 00:40:43 – Glide This episode is brought to you by: Newline™ by Fifth Third is an innovative, API-first platform that enables fintechs to launch embedded payment, card and deposit solutions directly with Fifth Third Bank. Visit Newline53.com to see how Newline can elevate your business. The world needs MoR. With Paddle as your Merchant of Record (MoR), the global growth is yours. The risk, compliance and accountability are ours. Simple. Paddle offers all the benefits of an enterprise-grade billing system but with MoR flexibility, MoR control, and MoR focus on your core product. Visit paddle.com to learn more. Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. Follow Simon: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sytaylor/ Substack: https://sytaylor.substack.com Follow Alex: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson Companies featured: https://cardamon.ai/ https://sprive.com/ https://figgwealth.com/ https://withglide.com/
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    55 mins
  • Fintech Takes: What the Hell’s Going On (Bank Regulation, Stablecoins, and Credit)

    Fintech Takes: What the Hell’s Going On (Bank Regulation, Stablecoins, and Credit)
    May 14 2025
    Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, and joining me for his second spin on the podcast merry-go-round is Rob Blackwell (Chief Content Officer at IntraFi and host of the Banking With Interest podcast). There’s a whole lot of what the hell is going on in D.C. right now, so we’re officially codifying this recurring segment as What the Hell Is Going On, where I throw all my burning questions at Rob Blackwell and he tries to make sense of the madness. First up, the flaming hot potato throw is aimed squarely at D.C. bank regulation, the Treasury power grab under Scott Bessant. Most Treasury Secretaries stay above the regulatory fray, but Bessant? He came armed. Rob breaks down why this Treasury Secretary is ditching the playbook, diving into the weeds, and maybe signaling the end of the “independent agency” era altogether. Then we dig into the stablecoin curveball derailing bipartisan progress: why Democrats are hitting the brakes, what Trump’s meme coin has to do with it, and whether $1 trillion in deposits could vanish into the arms of Amazon, Meta, or anyone else turning payments into loyalty programs. And finally, we dig into open banking and ask whether the CFPB is about to walk back its most important rule in years…plus what that means for competition, community banks, and everyone not named JPMorgan. Plus, a lightning round that includes policy and Star Trek (spoiler: Rob’s a cat guy, and a Wrath of Khan guy)...which ends in a very serious debate about fries. This episode is brought to you by: Newline™ by Fifth Third is an innovative, API-first platform that enables fintechs to launch embedded payment, card and deposit solutions directly with Fifth Third Bank. Visit Newline53.com to see how Newline can elevate your business. The world needs MoR. With Paddle as your Merchant of Record (MoR), the global growth is yours. The risk, compliance and accountability are ours. Simple. Paddle offers all the benefits of an enterprise-grade billing system but with MoR flexibility, MoR control, and MoR focus on your core product. Visit paddle.com to learn more. Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. Follow Rob: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-blackwell-63884826/ X: https://x.com/robblackwellAB Follow Alex: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnsonX: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson
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    1 hr and 1 min

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