Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

The bank account is the product: Slash's bet on vertical SMB banking

Small business banking has always had a structural problem: the companies that hold your money and the companies that build your financial software have been two different things. One moves the money, the other tracks it, and small business owners are stuck in the gap between them. A new generation of fintechs has been trying to fix that, but most are still building horizontal tools for every business everywhere. The more interesting bet is vertical, going deep into the specific workflows of a particular industry and automating them completely. My guest today is Victor Cardenas, co-founder and CEO of Slash, a business banking platform that started with teenage sneaker resellers and has grown into a $1.4 billion company by doing exactly that — building industry-specific financial products that legacy banks will never prioritize. Slash processes nearly $3 billion in stablecoin payment volume annually, and the company has been doing serious work rethinking how AI fits into both how they operate internally and what their customers experience.

How Kudos built a consumer data moat on top of credit card rewards

Most people leave money on the table every time they swipe — not because they're careless, but because the credit card rewards ecosystem is genuinely complicated. Thousands of cards, millions of merchants, shifting bonus categories, buried benefits. The promise of AI is that it can do that optimization work invisibly, in the background. Today I'm joined by Tikue Anazodo, co-founder and CEO of Kudos — an AI-powered smart wallet that tells you which card to use at checkout, recommends cards based on your spending habits, and layers on additional rewards on top of what your cards already earn. Kudos has raised over $17 million, is backed by QED Investors, and was named to Forbes' Fintech 50. Tikue, welcome to Tearsheet.

Stablecoin infrastructure is rewiring cross-border payments

Unlock how stablecoin infrastructure is transforming cross-border payments, global treasury, and enterprise fintech strategy. In this episode, Avinash Chidambaram, Founder & CEO of Cybrid, breaks down how stablecoin rails are becoming production-ready payment infrastructure for fintechs, neobanks, and enterprises seeking faster settlement, lower fees, and programmable global money movement. Discover why regulatory clarity through frameworks like the GENIUS Act and MiCA is accelerating stablecoin adoption, how compliance APIs are simplifying implementation, and why CFOs, treasury leaders, and product teams are shifting from exploration to execution. Key topics include: Stablecoin-powered cross-border supplier payments Real-time global contractor payouts Treasury liquidity management Compliance, KYC, AML, and custody infrastructure Embedded finance and programmable ERP workflows The future of sovereign stablecoins and digital asset regulation How fintechs can operationalize stablecoin strategy today If you're a fintech operator, payments executive, CFO, or enterprise product leader, this conversation offers critical insights into the next generation of international payments infrastructure. Subscribe for more conversations on fintech innovation, digital assets, embedded finance, banking infrastructure, and the future of money. #Stablecoins #CrossBorderPayments #Fintech #DigitalAssets #PaymentsInfrastructure #BlockchainPayments #EmbeddedFinance #TreasuryManagement #Neobanks #CryptoRegulation #GENIUSAct #MiCA #EnterprisePayments #GlobalPayments #Cybrid

How Block built a $200 billion credit operation by seeing customers traditional lenders can't

The credit system in the US was built on a fundamental assumption: that past borrowing behavior predicts future risk. That assumption has left roughly 100 million Americans essentially invisible to lenders — no score, thin file, or a history that doesn't reflect who they actually are financially today. The result is a system that compounds exclusion, requiring debt to unlock debt, and pricing risk so conservatively for anyone outside the norm that the cost of capital itself becomes a barrier. Juan Hernandez has spent the last decade at Block building lending products for exactly those customers. As head of credit and underwriting, he leads the teams behind Cash App Borrow, Square Loans, and Afterpay — three distinct products serving consumers and small businesses that traditional underwriting models consistently misread or ignore. Block recently crossed $200 billion in credit extended to customers globally. The engine behind that number is a data advantage. By underwriting from first-party signals native to the Cash App and Square ecosystems rather than relying on sparse bureau data, Block has built models that are both more accurate and more inclusive. Hernandez sat down with Tearsheet to talk about how they built a credit operation at that scale, what it takes to serve the underserved responsibly, and where the product suite is heading next.

How Huntington modernized without touching the core ft. Qolo

The pressure building on commercial banks today comes from several directions at once. Corporate treasurers are younger, more digitally native, and less tolerant of manual reconciliation. Business structures are more complex: A franchisee group running fifty locations needs fifty entities managed cleanly, not fifty separate bank accounts generating a month's worth of reconciliation work. And the banking core, the ledger system that underpins it all, was never designed to flex at this pace. The standard prescription for this problem is core replacement. However, banks are increasingly moving toward augmentation. Rather than replacing the core, banks are building around it, layering modern infrastructure above it to deliver capabilities the core was never meant to provide. Huntington National Bank's connected deposits product, built in partnership with payments infrastructure provider Qolo, is one example of that approach in practice. For Deepak Kapoor, Huntington's H ead of Payment Products, the realization was straightforward: "We quickly realized we don't have all the Lego pieces in place to build the card that we want to build, and the ledger and the virtual account provide us with that missing Lego piece that we needed." The result is a virtual account structure that sits above the core and behaves, externally, like a real bank account, complete with routing numbers, inbound wires, and automated reconciliation, without requiring banks to touch the underlying system of record.