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

How BILL is rebuilding for the Fortune 5 million and gearing up to take big swings on AI

For most small and midsize businesses, financial operations still look a lot like they did a decade ago. Bills get keyed in manually. Receipts pile up. W-9s get chased down at tax time. While the tools have multiplied, the work hasn't gone away. “Most finance teams work in an incredibly manual way,” says Michael Cieri, Chief Product Officer at BILL. “There's a ton of work done by finance professionals that could be automated, and could actually be done better through the use of technology.” The gap between the promise of modern financial software and the day-to-day reality of running the books at a small business is something BILL has spent nearly two decades trying to close. The company processes over 1% of US GDP in payments and has moved more than a trillion dollars across its platform – a scale that gives it both a data advantage and a particular sense of accountability. When you're handling that volume of transactions for the long tail of American businesses, the stakes of getting automation wrong are very high. Cieri joins us on the show to talk through where BILL's product thinking stands today: how Cieri's team decides when to take big swings versus make incremental improvements, how it builds and validates AI features for a high-trust domain.

Trust, stablecoins, and the AI margin squeeze:What McKinsey and QED's fintech report means for banks

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast, where we explore financial services together with an eye on technology, innovation, emerging models, and changing expectations. I'm Tearsheet's editor in chief, Zack Miller. Fintech just lived through four distinct ages — pioneers, growth-at-all-costs, the 2021-22 hype cycle, and the brutal reset that followed. Now we're in a fifth: bigger, more profitable, and more disciplined than any version that came before it. Stripe's reportedly eyeing a six-figure-billion IPO. Fintech listings tripled investor appetite this year. And yet talk to anyone who lived through 2021 and they'll tell you this doesn't feel anything like that boom. To make sense of that contradiction, I sat down with the authors of a new joint report from McKinsey and QED Investors — two firms that sit on opposite sides of the table from the fintechs they study. Max Flötotto is a senior partner at McKinsey, where he leads the firm's global retail banking practice and coordinates its fintech work across Europe. Mike Packer is a partner at QED, leading growth-stage investing globally for a firm that's been backing fintech since its earliest days, nearly two decades now. We dig into the report's biggest findings: why the simplest version of banking — collecting deposits, making loans — is structurally at risk if customers start letting their own AI agents shop for the best rate; why fintechs have, for the first time, actually overtaken incumbents on trust in Europe, even as banks have closed much of the product gap; and the massive spread in how seriously banks are actually taking AI, from "talking about thinking about it" to rebuilding their entire operating model around it. We close with each of them picking the one trend, out of six in the report, they think matters most for the next decade. Max, Mike, welcome to the show.

How Figure and Method closed the loop on debt consolidation and cut delinquency in half

Debt consolidation has always rested on a promise lenders couldn't verify. A borrower takes out a HELOC, says they'll pay off their credit cards, and the lender hands over the cash and hopes for the best. Credit bureau data lags by 30 days. There's no mechanism to confirm the debt actually got retired. And a significant share of consolidation borrowers end up re-accumulating balances — leaving lenders with paper that performed worse than expected and borrowers worse off than before. Figure and Method set out to close that loop. Figure is the largest non-bank HELOC originator in America, a public company on the Nasdaq running a two-sided capital marketplace on blockchain rails. Method is a financial connectivity API that gives lenders real-time access to a borrower's full liability picture — and the ability to pay those liabilities off directly at the moment of funding. Together, they've built what they're calling verified debt consolidation: a closed-loop system where the lender doesn't hope the debt will be paid — they know it will be. Today I'm joined by Mit Shah, co-founder and COO of Method, and Rod Albuyeh, who leads AI at Figure and is something of a boomerang — he was at Figure from 2020 to 2022, left, and returned in January to a company that had transformed around him. We talk about what the data actually shows, what happens when this capability travels across Figure's 380 white-label partners, and whether verified debt consolidation is a premium feature or the future of the category.

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.