Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

How Paze is betting bank trust can crack the digital wallet market

Early Warning built Zelle into the dominant peer-to-peer payments network in the U.S. — processing over a trillion dollars in yearly transactions. Paze is their next bet: a bank-backed digital wallet for e-commerce checkout, backed by the same seven major banks, designed to bring that same institutional trust to online shopping. Serge Elkiner came on as GM in late 2024, brought over from Visa where he ran product for money movement globally. His mandate is to unlock what that network can do at checkout — with 165 million eligible cards now in place and distribution deals closing with Fiserv, Worldpay, and ACI. Today we talk about what it takes to convert infrastructure into consumer behavior, and whether the banks can do for e-commerce what they did for P2P.

How KeyBank and Qolo are modernizing corporate treasury without ripping out the core

A mid-market company with dozens of bank accounts shouldn't have to deploy a small army to figure out where its money is. But for most commercial banking clients, that's still the reality because the systems tracking it haven't kept up. Banks know this. Most of their commercial clients know this. The gap between what legacy infrastructure can deliver and what today's treasury teams actually need has been widening for years, and the banks that aren't solving it are starting to lose ground to those that are. KeyBank and Qolo are building a way out of that problem. Bennie Pennington, Head of Embedded Banking at KeyBank, and Patricia Montesi, CEO of Qolo, joined Tearsheet to talk about how they designed and launched a real-time virtual account management platform together — and what it's already proving in the market.

How Modern Treasury is building a payments platform for a hybrid money world

For years, companies that needed to move money at scale faced the same frustrating tradeoff: build their own bank integrations and compliance infrastructure — a process that could take months — or stitch together a patchwork of specialized vendors, each covering a different rail. Modern Treasury has spent years sitting inside that problem, providing software infrastructure to help companies integrate with their banks, track funds, and manage ledgering at scale. Now, the founders have taken the company a significant step further, launching Payments, an integrated PSP that handles onboarding, KYB, and banking infrastructure on a client's behalf, compressing what used to be a six-month setup into days. Stablecoins are built in natively from day one, powered by Modern Treasury's acquisition of Beam, a stablecoin infrastructure company founded by Dan Mottice, who previously led crypto products at Visa and now heads stablecoin strategy at Modern Treasury. The result is what the company calls a "forever payments platform," designed to let companies start with fiat or stablecoin payments quickly with a single integration and expand over time, without the painful migrations that have historically defined scaling a payments stack. Listen to the podcast to learn about how Modern Treasury is thinking about fiat rails and stablecoins as complementary infrastructure, how the Beam acquisition shaped the new product, and why President Dimitri Dadiomov and Mottice believe the most significant near-term stablecoin opportunity lies in how companies manage working capital.

Truist's Dontá Wilson: 'Innovation without empathy is empty’

There's a tension at the heart of modern banking that technology doesn't seem to totally resolve: how do you be both, digitally excellent and deeply human at the same time? Most banks have picked a lane: either betting on digital efficiency or doubling down on relationship banking. But consumers aren't asking for one or the other. They want both. They want their banking app to work flawlessly when they need it, and they want someone who actually knows them when it matters. My guest today is Dontá Wilson, Truist's Chief Consumer and Small Business Banking Officer. He leads 20,000 teammates serving clients through both digital channels and more than 1,900 community banking branches. His portfolio spans core deposits and loans to mortgage, auto, credit cards, and the full stack of consumer products. He also oversees Truist's multi-year growth plan that's reimagining both their digital experience and their physical branches using insights and AI. We talked about how AI is redefining consumer expectations and trust, what it takes to innovate inside a highly regulated industry while keeping client purpose at the center, and why Dontá believes innovation without empathy is empty.

Pathward's Anthony Sharett on why sponsor banking's future is about evolution, not revolution

Sponsor banking has become one of the most scrutinized business models in financial services. The headlines focus on enforcement actions and regulatory pressure, but behind that noise is a more interesting question: when done right, how do bank-fintech partnerships actually expand financial access to people the traditional system has left behind? My guest today is Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward. Before joining Pathward he led Nationwide Pet Insurance and served as Interim President of Nationwide Bank. At Pathward, his mission is powering financial inclusion through partnerships with fintechs and platform companies. We're going to talk about how the sponsor banking model actually works, what makes these partnerships succeed or fail, and why Anthony believes these relationships are essential to expanding financial access beyond what traditional banks can reach on their own.