Explore every episode of the podcast In Control with Natasha Vernier

In this episode I sat down with Renata Caine, who leads Embedded Finance for Green Dot. 

How does Starbucks offer it's reward card? How does Amazon provide a credit card? All these "embedded finance" programs have banks behind them who help the brands onboard customers, provide oversight, and act as the buffer between the brands and the regulators. 

I went into this conversation thinking that standing up an embedded finance program was mostly about choosing 1 great partner and making sensible decisions around compliance. Now I know how wrong I was! 

• A bank getting into BaaS is a bit like a contractor building a house. They may do everything - the plumbing, the electrics, the painting - or they may outsource all those things to others. Deciding what skills you have as a bank, and therefore what you can offer, what you can build internally, and what you need to contract, is step 1. 
• We got into detail about the pros and cons of For the Benefit Of (FBO) v Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) account types. An FBO account is a single pooled account at the bank on behalf of a brand or a fintech, whilst a UBO structure means every end consumer (or business) is an actual customer of the bank. There are distinct pros and cons to both set ups, and again, the bank should work out where its skills lie to decide which route to take. 
• Making money is harder than it seems! You might make revenue from interchange, interest and/or program management fees, but the size of those buckets varies hugely depending on the type of brand or fintech you work with. Diversification is the key, and scale is needed to make any meaningful revenue. This isn’t an area you can “try out”. You either go hard, or go home. 

For so many more great insights, listen in here. 

Sanctions started in ancient Greece and now touch every bank and fintech on the planet, but most people in finance have never really examined how they work. 

In this episode, I talked to Peter Piatetsky, former US Army intelligence analyst, former Treasury Department official, and now CEO of Castellum AI, about the history of sanctions, how they've evolved from a careful diplomatic tool into something governments reach for freely, and what that means for banks. 

We covered the Turkish pastor case that changed how policymakers think about sanctions, how Peter personally figured out how to sanction aircraft at the Treasury, the existence of the UN Credit Union (one of the highest-risk financial institutions in the world), how people actually evade sanctions, and why the explosion of fintechs may be creating more sanctions risk than the sanctions themselves.

If you work in finance, you can't afford to miss this one. 

Spade has raised a $40m Series B, and I was lucky enough to sit down with Oban MacTavish, CEO and co-founder, to learn about how Spade makes merchant data usable, and to hear all about their fundraise. 

The data your bank gets when you swipe your card is shockingly bad - a jumbled descriptor of ~50 characters, a merchant category code that might be wrong, and a "city" field that's sometimes just a phone number. 

In this episode I learn about why payments data hasn't meaningfully changed in 30 years, how Spade built a body of merchant data covering 99.9% of payment-accepting businesses in the US and Canada, and what banks can actually do once their merchant data is good. 

We also discuss Spade's freshly announced $40M Series B led by Oak HC/FT with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, what nearly 500% YoY growth breaks inside a company, and why Oban is saying no to obvious opportunities to stay focused.

I am obsessed with prediction markets! 

But maybe not for the same reasons as you. 

I am obsessed with how quickly they have grown, how they seem to be on track to disrupt the gambling industry entirely in no short order, and how they seem to have evaded appropriate regulatory oversight.

An alarming stat: we know that when a state legalizes online sports betting, bankruptcy rates increase by 25-30% over the next 3 to 4 years, and so to me, the fact we’ve found a way to avoid state gambling regulation is… worrying to say the least.

Are we creating a whole generation of gamblers? Have we found a way to avoid gambling regulation? Is it simply another tool through which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?

To understand more about prediction markets I begged Alex Johnson, founder of Fintech Takes, to chat to me. He’s the fountain of much knowledge, and like me, is pretty obsessed with what’s happening here. This episode is a cracker, and we covered so much, including:

→ What prediction markets are and how they work

→ The regulatory landscape they exist within, and that which they’ve managed to avoid

→ Where their volumes come from - what kind of predictions are being made?

→ Some pretty suspect behaviours linked to politics and predictions on these markets

→ How Robinhood and others are starting to present prediction markets as an investment opportunity

Do you know who Frank McNamara is?

Well done if you knew that he invented the credit card!

On this week’s episode of In Control, I was lucky enough to speak to Susan Ehrlich, and to learn all about credit cards. 

Susan ran the credit card divisions at Citibank, Washington Mutual, Sears, and Amazon, including building the Amazon Prime 5% cashback card. Now she's a partner at Core Innovation Capital. In other words: she knows how this industry actually works! 

I absolutely LOVED this conversation because Susan was able to go so deep. She taught me about the history of the industry, how banks and merchants make money from credit cards, and completely demystified the proposed 10% cap on interest rates. 

You do not want to miss this episode! 

We covered:

→ The three revenue streams: interchange fees, interest income, and late fees

→ Why credit cards are the most profitable product banks have

→ How Delta makes $7 billion/year from their loyalty program

→ The origins of the first credit card - The Diners Club - in 1950, started by someone who forgot his wallet at lunch

→ What happens to access and rewards if the rate cap goes through

Name. Image. Likeness. How student-athletes are able to receive compensation for endorsements, social media, and appearances. 

Or, how student-athletes are paid to play?

On the latest episode of In Control, Richard Scioli of Analog taught me how NIL works, including how creative the compensation can become. 

Unlimited BBQ for offensive linesmen? Done. 

Decoldest Crawford as the face of… you got it… an air conditioning company? Done. 

Richard got into it all to break down the business of college sports. We covered:

→ The three buckets of NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) and how they work

→ Why college athletes setting up LLCs is now standard practice

→ How 10 people regulate 363 Division 1 schools and 175,000 athletes

→ The private equity deals reshaping athletic departments

Whenever my mum comes to the US and we go to a restaurant, she never lets her credit card out of her sight - insisting on following the waiter all the way to the register.

They always look baffled, but she might actually be onto something! In-person fraud rates in the US are much higher than in Europe.

Why is card fraud so prevalent?
We share our 16-digit card numbers everywhere - is that safe?
How do merchants actually protect this data?

To dig into all of this, I spoke to Colin Luce, CEO at Basis Theory, and it turns out there's a quiet power struggle happening.

Visa and MasterCard want merchants to rely on their tokens and delete the original card data.

Merchants don't trust what comes next.

Once you give up that data, you can't switch processors, you can't negotiate, you take whatever pricing the networks decide.

We also discussed in the podcast:

- Why agentic commerce isn't really a payments revolution
- Why MasterCard are getting rid of the PAN
- Whether consumers care about card fraud
- How your Stripe token is useless with Adyen

What do you think Delaware's third largest source of revenue is?

Props to you if you knew it was escheatment. 

This is the craziest area of financial compliance I’ve learnt about in a long time, and my head is still reeling from my chat with Allen Osgood, CEO of Eisen.

What started out as me wondering what would happen to the Bitcoin that I can’t access (moved country, changed phone number…) turned into a mind bending story of a man who lost all of his Amazon stock (bye bye nice retirement), how claiming your own money back from states has become rife with fraud, and how there are $70bn of funds being held by US states that they just make money off and use to fill budget. 

Madness!

Consumer losses from fraud jumped from $3.4B to $12.5B between 2020-2024. That's a 270% increase! Should we be worried about what lies ahead?

Back when I was Head of Financial Crime at Monzo, I watched fraudsters pump tens of thousands of pounds of petrol using cards with just £100 on them. We had their names, addresses, photos - everything! But the police didn't know what to do with it.

And that was before AI changed everything.

Now Yuliya Kazakevich, who's led fraud teams at Charles Schwab, Apple, Adyen, Cash App, and Lithic, is watching fraud evolve in ways that genuinely concern her.

And if someone with her experience is worried, we should all be paying attention!

It was great to welcome Yuliya on the pod to discuss all of this. Here’s what we covered:

• Whether AI companies should be liable for enabling fraudsters
• Why JP Morgan is opening more branches
• How AI is scaling fraud to terrifying new levels
• The shift from unauthorised to authorised fraud
• How law enforcement is overwhelmed and under-resourced to tackle fraud

Fraud is evolving faster than we can keep up - and we need to start paying attention.

Half of all US banks could be gone in the next decade. That's Joe Mancini's prediction - and he would know. He's been through three bank M&A deals, most recently as COO at BankProv when it was acquired by Needham Bank.

I've been talking about bank M&A a lot lately because it affects everyone, not just bankers. We all need a bank to function in the world - to get paid, rent an apartment, receive welfare etc. So what happens when banks start disappearing?

Joe and I got into ALL of it on this episode:

- Why $10.1 billion is the worst size for a bank to be
- How Needham Bank integrated BankProv over a single weekend
- The embedded finance future and who's going to win
- Whether branches will exist in 15 years
- How banks might use your data to offer you loans before you ask
- Why the talent crisis is accelerating everything

If you want to learn more about the future of banking, check out this episode.

I hadn't written a check (or cheque if you’re British/ Canadian) since I was 12… and then I moved to America.

Two years in, I use a modern fintech bank but I still can't send money to anyone without using a third-party app. Why do I need Venmo to split a dinner bill?

The payments system here in the US is NUTS! So I asked Will Messina, CEO of GrailPay, to help me understand it better.

We cover: 

- Why businesses still mail checks like it's 1987
- How Venmo actually makes money (it's not from moving money)
- Why banks charge $20 for a wire transfer
- What stablecoins will actually be used for.

One thing that blew my mind: Delta makes $2 billion a quarter from payments alone - they're basically a payments company that happens to fly planes.

So if you’re as baffled as I was by how banking works in the US, this one’s for you.

When I was at Monzo, we didn’t buy an external core banking system - we just built our own and it ended up supporting 12 million customers.

So when I started working with US banks, I was baffled. Why is there a never ending list of systems like Silver Lake, DNA, and Signature?

As it turns out, they almost all belong to the big three providers: FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry.

To shed light on this, I spoke to Stacy Bishop, former sales lead at Jack Henry, to find out why banks don't just build their own.

We covered:

- Why choosing a big three provider is the safe career move for bank executives, even if they hate the service.
- The reality of deconversion fees - where banks have to pay to get their own data.
- How legacy cores stay dominant by handling the double letter US regulations so banks don’t have to.
- How banks are finally innovating by building alongside their legacy systems.
- The inside scoop of how core providers secure long term contracts with banks.
- Why the next 5–10 years will look nothing like the last 20.

If you’ve ever wondered why US banking tech feels stuck in 2005, this is the episode for you. 

Starting a bank seems like one of the hardest things you could possibly do. David Jarvis, CEO of Griffin, did exactly that and walks me through the WHY and HOW of building a bank from scratch.

Getting a banking license is no joke! I thought I understood this from my Monzo days, but turns out I'd only scratched the surface.

In this episode, we get into:

- How the licensing process actually works - from the first phone call to the Bank of England through 4.5 years of iterative feedback
- Why every bank has a £1M monthly burn rate 
- The reality of raising £50M before you have a single customer or £ of revenue
- What actually happens when you send a payment (there's probably another bank involved)
- Why Revolut, with 70M customers, is still fighting for a banking license

David also shared about the less glamorous bits of startup founder life, but you’ll have to listen to find out!

The In Control podcast explores the finance of everything, through conversations with people who’ve done it, built it, or experienced it firsthand. Join host Natasha Vernier, Founder of Cable, as she sits down with leaders, innovators, and experts across the financial industry to explore how it all really works. The focus is on learning aloud and making complex topics accessible.