Podcast profile
By Tearsheet Studios
Tearsheet is news, opinion, and analysis on the business of finance.
Latest episode
16 min
Topics
Payment rails, cards, wallets, transfers, merchant systems, and payment infrastructure.
Digital banking products, bank technology, financial services transformation, and banking platforms.
Technology-company strategy, business models, operations, competition, and market structure.
Formats
Host-led conversation where a guest supplies most of the subject matter.
Interpretation, opinion, debate, review, and analytical discussion.
Audience level
Assumes basic technology literacy and familiarity with common products, roles, and terminology.
Stay connected
From the feed
Episodes shown — 10 of 25
For the second episode of The Editors’ Room, we flipped the format around. One trend we think the industry is overhyping, and one that isn’t getting nearly enough attention. Managing Editor Sara took the overhyped side: the race to become a customer’s primary financial relationship.
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023, it took with it a bank that had quietly become infrastructure for the startup ecosystem, holding the majority of the venture debt market and serving as the one relationship founders and fund managers trusted for everything from a wire transfer to an introduction.
Most banks seem to chase small business customers as one segment among many. Live Oak Bank was built around a bet that specializing beats generalizing — and it started about as narrow as a bank can start, lending only to veterinarians.
Amy Avery, Managing Director, Analytics, Modeling and Insights, took her job at Bank of America because of a number. When she interviewed at Bank of America, she was told that the bank interfaced with, at the time, 67 million clients. "Gosh, that's so much information," she remembers thinking.
Welcome to The Editors’ Room, a new Tearsheet Podcast series where Editor-in-Chief Zack Miller and Managing Editor Sara Khairi take the conversations that usually happen behind the scenes about our biggest stories and put them on the record. There isn’t a rehearsed interview or carefully choreographed panel answers.
Every account payable and account receivable department runs on the same friction: invoices chased four or five times, payments late more than 30% of the time, and credit control teams that can run 20, 30, even 50 people deep at a mid-sized corporate.
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.
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.
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.
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.