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Editor’s Note — This article is sponsored by SOLO (and just so you know, I also do some advising work for them, which is totally unrelated to this piece, but just FYI.) As with all sponsored content in Fintech Takes, this article was written, edited, and published by me, Alex Johnson. I hope you enjoy […] The post How Would You Design a Credit Bureau in 2025? appeared first on Fintech Takes.| Fintech Takes
Editor’s Note — This article is sponsored by Byline Bank. As with all sponsored content in Fintech Takes, this article was written, edited, and published by me, Alex Johnson. I hope you enjoy it! Five years ago, fintech founders treated the search for bank partners the same way that they treated the search for every […]| Fintech Takes
Last month, I spoke at an event hosted by the Federal Reserve. The theme of the event was “Unleashing a Financially Inclusive Future”. Within the first 15 minutes of my panel, we hit upon a key idea: “inclusion” might not be the right word to describe the problem that we are dealing with. After all, […]| Fintech Takes
Editor’s Note — This article is sponsored by Marqeta. As with all sponsored content in Fintech Takes, this article was written, edited, and published by me, Alex Johnson. I hope you enjoy it! The interesting thing about embedded finance is that not all aspects of embedded finance are created equal. Take payments as an example. […]| Fintech Takes
Stablecoins are the topic du jour in fintech (or the topic du semestre, to be more precise). I usually try not to follow the crowd when it comes to topic selection for the newsletter. However, as I wrote about a month ago, crypto enthusiasts are starting to use the reputation of stablecoins (safe! low cost!) […]| Fintech Takes
Lending is a relationship business. However, I believe one of the enduring frustrations in lending is that consumers and lenders are rarely in the same place in the relationship at the same time. Think about the consumer credit lifecycle. You start out in marketing. Consumers sift through a range of similar-looking options via comparison sites […]| Fintech Takes
Embedded lending (delivering a loan in the context of the transaction that the borrower is trying to complete) usually wins over direct lending (requiring a borrower to proactively seek out a loan) because most borrowers value convenience in lending above everything else. A loan is a means to an end, not an end in and […]| Fintech Takes
If you were going to loan someone money and you wanted to predict if they were going to pay you back or not, what pieces of information would you most want to see? This isn’t a trick question. When I used to teach financial literacy to high school students, I’d ask them this question and […]| Fintech Takes
We should start by saying the use of cash flow data in lending is not new. Perhaps the two most obvious questions to ask when considering whether or not to loan someone money are, “How much money do you have today?” and “How much money will you have in two weeks?” Lenders have been asking […]| Fintech Takes
I am obsessed with this question. The reason I am obsessed is because, despite what the proponents and detractors would have you believe, this is not an easy question to answer! Pay-in-4 BNPL (which is the flavor of BNPL that most folks, including me, focus on) enables consumers to finance small purchases (usually between $100 […]| Fintech Takes
3 Fintech News Stories #1: Bilt isn’t a Unicorn What happened? Bilt is in talks to raise a new round of funding at a $10 billion valuation. Lucinda Shen at Axios reports: Rent rewards startup Bilt is in talks to raise at a roughly $10 billion valuation, in a round likely to be led by […] The post Bilt isn’t a Unicorn appeared first on Fintech Takes.| Fintech Takes
I love disaster movies. I love them so much. I love them to the degree that my wife mocks me for it, which is fair because some of them are truly terrible (looking at you, Moonfall). But many of them are good! And very entertaining! And one has become an annual tradition in my household: […] The post Independence Day appeared first on Fintech Takes.| Fintech Takes
3 BIG IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST Jason Mikula and I kicked off the 12th season of the Fintech Takes podcast with a deceptively simple question: What happens when you try to modernize a 36-year-old credit score with data the credit bureaus don’t actually have? If you’ve been watching the credit bureaus’ pursuit of BNPL data […] The post BNPL, FICO, and the Data That Isn’t There appeared first on Fintech Takes.| Fintech Takes
3 Fintech News Stories #1: The Revenue-Based Financing Space Grows Up What happened? Capchase is acquiring a company called Vartana: Capchase acquired Vartana to accelerate the product roadmap and market expansion of its tech-powered vendor financing offerings. The acquisition brings together Vartana’s vendor financing platform and Capchase’s vendor financing for B2B software and hardware […]| Fintech Takes
Editor’s Note — This article is sponsored by BILL. As with all sponsored content in Fintech Takes, this article was written, edited, and published by me, Alex Johnson. I hope you enjoy it! It’s universally acknowledged that running a small business is difficult. What’s less well-understood is why. Listening to the often-grim discourse around entrepreneurship […]| Fintech Takes
There’s something poetic about Chime’s newest commercial, featuring former NBA star, coach, and TV announcer Mark Jackson. Depending on your point of view, you might think of Mark Jackson as an indelible part of recent basketball history; a great player with a sneakily influential style, an important coach who helped nudge the Warriors towards their […]| Fintech Takes
An hour before a scheduled procedural vote in the U.S. Senate on the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, the President and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), Rebeca Romero Rainey, issued a statement. The statement begins: On behalf of the nation’s community bankers, ICBA urges the […]| Fintech Takes
According to the New York Fed’s Liberty Street Economics blog, more than 9 million student loan borrowers will soon start to see substantial declines in their credit scores. Those declines will be larger for higher-score segments, with those in the 760 – 850 range seeing an average drop of 171 points: That’s a big deal. […]| Fintech Takes
Lawyers and accountants might disagree with this statement, but I’ve always thought that the process of becoming a public company is, primarily, a storytelling exercise. You are trying to engineer the best possible response from public market investors while complying with all the regulatory requirements for accurate business and financial reporting, which requires a very […]| Fintech Takes
3 Fintech News Stories #1: $KLAR What happened? Exciting times for Klarna! The company has filed the paperwork to go public: Klarna, a provider of buy now, pay later loans filed its IPO prospectus on Friday, and plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol KLAR. Klarna, headquartered in Sweden, […]| Fintech Takes
My first job in fintech, which I got 20 years ago this month, was with a company that provided credit decisioning software to banks. One of the features of that software product, which I didn’t give a whole lot of thought to at the time, was data aggregation. When a bank was making a credit […]| Fintech Takes
I have reached a stage in my life where I have very little need for my credit reports. I am paying a mortgage on what I hope is my forever home. I have a minivan that I am planning to drive into the ground (this is a flex … listen to this podcast for the […]| Fintech Takes
The fundamental problem with banking as a service (BaaS) is that in order for it to work, every participant in the value chain needs to do their job with more diligence than they are required to do. For the most part, this hasn’t been an issue. Fintech is filled with founders and operators who care […]| Fintech Takes
3 FINTECH NEWS STORIES #1: The Difference Between a Bank and a Network What happened? Capital One is teaming up with Stripe and Adyen: While Capital One has built models to protect its customers from fraud, it was getting stuck because it just “didn’t have enough data,” said head of fraud strategy Jon Borman. So […]| Fintech Takes
