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

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.

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.

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.

Digital banking has become the largest branch of modern banking, yet most banks and credit unions still aren't approaching these experiences with a product mindset. They're managing digital channels the way they've always managed technology: as IT projects, rather than products that need constant refinement based on user behavior. The result is an ecosystem where institutions miss opportunities to serve different customer segments effectively and struggle to demonstrate ROI on their digital investments. "Banks sell rails, and fintech sells outcomes," said Dados’ Christine Berry, a quote that Anthony Ianniciello, VP of Product Management at Q2, says encapsulates the fundamental shift that needs to happen. "That really gets to the heart of how you shift that mindset away from, I have this thing, and I have it for you, as opposed to, here's what I really want to drive for your success." Q2 has partnered with Pendo, a product experience platform, to help regional and community financial institutions make this transition. Trisha Price, Field Chief Product Officer at Pendo and host of the Hard Calls podcast, brings a cross-industry perspective on how companies leverage behavior data and analytics to build better products. Listen to this podcast to learn how banks and credit unions are using product management principles, user behavior data, and in-app guidance to transform their digital channels from cost centers into strategic growth drivers. And for a deeper dive into how Software Experience Management can boost banker productivity and drive measurable ROI.

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. For fintechs, cracking the credit union market is notoriously difficult. It's relationship-based, insular, and requires a fundamentally different approach than banking. Many try and fail. But when done right, it opens up distribution to institutions serving over 140 million Americans. Today I'm joined by Brian Kaas, president and managing director of TruStage Ventures, the corporate VC arm of TruStage—a $5.5 billion annual revenue insurer that works with 92% of credit unions nationwide. Since 2016, TruStage Ventures has deployed $400 million across 50 portfolio companies and facilitated over 3,000 partnerships between credit unions and fintechs. We first spoke with Brian in 2021 when the fund was just gaining traction. Four years later, the portfolio has matured with companies like Ethos, Current, and SmartAsset, and Brian's team has become essential connective tissue between innovative fintechs and credit union distribution. We'll dig into what makes credit union partnerships different, why so many fintechs struggle to break in, and why stablecoin solutions have become the number one request Brian's hearing from credit union CEOs.

Financial institutions are rethinking loyalty at a critical moment. Credit card spending sits at record highs, but economic uncertainty looms. For banks aiming to stay relevant, loyalty can no longer be an afterthought – it needs to be embedded into every customer experience from the start. At FIS's Emerald 2025 conference in Orlando, Mladen Vladic, general manager of loyalty services at FIS, sat down to discuss how the loyalty industry is evolving beyond traditional card-based rewards. His central argument: Financial institutions need to shift from chasing share of wallet to capturing share of mind first.

Commercial banks are confronting a rapidly shifting landscape as private credit markets grow toward $3.5 trillion and fintech competitors accelerate their offerings with AI-powered tools. Rather than retreating, traditional institutions are doubling down on technology investments and reimagining their commercial lending strategies to compete in this new environment. "Banks are not short-term thinkers," says Héctor Pagés, SVP and Head of Global Commercial Lending at FIS. "We're not seeing a slowdown in terms of interest or investment from our institutions, in terms of advancing and changing the ways that they're working." The response from banks has been multifaceted, according to Pagés. Some retail-focused institutions are shifting resources toward commercial lending, while smaller commercial banks are expanding into more complex lending products. Others are adopting an "originate to distribute" model, partnering with private credit firms to spread risk while generating fee income. This strategic evolution is happening against a backdrop of regulatory uncertainty, tariff fluctuations, and the continued expansion of non-bank lenders into territory traditionally dominated by banks. Listen to the podcast to learn about how banks are transforming their commercial lending operations through unified technology platforms, the role of AI in automating credit decisions and underwriting processes, and why cloud infrastructure is becoming essential for global scalability.

Community and regional banks operate in an environment of perpetual tension. They need to grow deposits and drive lending profitability while managing operating costs that threaten to overwhelm smaller institutions. They must also prevent increasingly sophisticated fraud while delivering customer experiences that match Amazon and Netflix. And they need to do all of this while building technology foundations that won't become obsolete before the implementation is complete. At FIS's Emerald 2025 conference in Orlando, Peter Boyer, head of banking at FIS, and Craig Focardi, principal analyst at Celent, discussed how financial institutions are navigating these competing demands. Focardi and Boyer discuss how modernization is now a continuous process of adaptation, and that the institutions most likely to succeed will focus on enabling agility rather than chasing specific technologies. "If you really take a step back and think about regional and community banking, there's a couple headwinds or tailwinds, that are driving how banks are thinking about the market," Boyer explained. "One is deposit growth and profitability growth through lending. Every bank right now is thinking, how do I grow? What is my sweet spot in my segment? Thing two is operating costs. How do they continue to drive a more efficient bank? AI is a big topic on that particular solution. And thing three is fraud. How do you protect the banking ecosystem? You put those three together and you've got a meaningful amount of where the energy is in the market today."

The GENIUS Act brings regulatory clarity to stablecoins, but Conduit CEO Kirill Gertman argues that clarity alone won't guarantee success. Banks face a choice between building their own infrastructure or becoming the pipes for others. Kirill Gertman has watched the stablecoin industry evolve from multiple angles. He spent nearly two decades in financial services before founding Conduit in 2021, including six years in crypto and a stint as VP of product at BRD, which became Coinbase Wallet. His company grew 16x in 2024 by solving a practical problem: businesses in emerging markets were accumulating stablecoins to hedge against local currency volatility but couldn't use those balances in their day-to-day operations. Conduit now works with tier-one banks and multinational corporations, processing billions in cross-border payments. And with the GENIUS Act bringing the first comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins in the United States, Gertman argues the legislation's passage raises as many strategic questions as it answers—particularly for banks that have been sitting on the sidelines. Today, we'll explore why the GENIUS Act matters, the critical difference between stablecoins and deposit tokens, what strategy banks should actually pursue, and where Gertman sees the industry heading as major players race to build vertically integrated stacks.

The venture capital world has a liquidity problem. With IPOs scarce and M&A exits few and far between, investors have been stuck in positions for years, unable to return capital to their LPs or move into new opportunities. But while traditional exit doors have stayed shut, technology has opened up new ones—specifically, platforms that make it possible to create and trade Special Purpose Vehicles at scale, something that used to require armies of lawyers and fund administrators. Today I’m joined by Nik Talreja, the CEO and co-founder of Sydecar, a platform that’s turned what used to be a manual, months-long process into something you can do in days. He started his career as a securities attorney at firms like Weil Gotshal and Cooley, where he spent his days drafting the same documents over and over for venture deals. That experience showed him that much of what venture capitalists were paying lawyers to do could be standardized and automated, which led him to found Sydecar in 2021. In our conversation, he explains how technology is reshaping private market infrastructure, what gets automated and what still needs human expertise, and how software is changing who can participate in venture investing.