Stripe's First Employee on Building Modern Banking Infrastructure

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, Jackson Ellis sits down with Mike Milotich, CEO of Marqeta, to explore the evolving landscape of modern payments and embedded finance. Mike shares insights from his leadership experience at a pioneering card issuing platform, discussing how fintech companies are reshaping the way businesses and consumers interact with money. The conversation covers Marqeta’s role in enabling innovative payment solutions, the growing importance of real-time financial infrastructure, and how companies can scale responsibly in a rapidly changing regulatory and economic environment. Mike also reflects on the strategic priorities of a CEO in a high-growth fintech company, including capital allocation, risk management, and navigating public markets. This episode offers a thoughtful look at the intersection of finance, technology, and strategy, highlighting key trends shaping the future of payments and the broader fintech ecosystem.

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, host Vaibhav sits down with Christian Widhalm, CEO of Bloom Credit, to unpack how credit data actually moves through the financial system and why the infrastructure behind it has not meaningfully changed in decades. Christian shares his journey from Major League Baseball to fintech leadership, including his years at LendKey, and explains how Bloom is modernising credit reporting through a B2B, API-first platform built for accuracy, flexibility, and faster reporting cycles. We also dive into Bloom+, which enables consumers to build creditworthiness using consumer permissioned checking account and bill payment history, helping many establish credit profiles without taking on new debt. We cover: - Why legacy credit reporting standards were built for a different era - How real-time, higher-quality data can reduce errors and improve decisioning - What alternative data means for thin-file consumers and financial inclusion - Why policy and regulator engagement matters in credit innovation - A pragmatic view on AI in credit operations and reporting - Leadership lessons on trust, transparency, and operating without ego If you want a behind-the-scenes look at credit, alternative data, and the next evolution of creditworthiness, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, Cleo Fan sits down with Sandeep Patil, a Partner at QED Investors, about building and investing in fintech companies across global markets. They discuss Sandeep’s journey from operating roles at Capital One, Flipkart, and Truecaller to venture investing, how QED approaches fintech investing across Asia-Pacific, and his perspective on where the fintech ecosystem is headed, covering themes like stablecoins and AI at the application layer.

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, Bobby Ma sits down with Kyle Mack, CEO & Co-Founder of Middesk, a Series B company. Kyle shares his experience building Middesk, the leading business identify platform modernizing business verification, risk evaluation, and compliance. Its fast, frictionless APIs support KYB, credit assessment, and tax registration use cases, with data updated in days, not months. More than 500 customers trust Middesk to verify, underwrite, and grow with confidence. The company has raised over $70 million in funding and is backed by top-tier investors including Accel, Sequoia, and Insight Partners. We discuss: - Kyle’s journey building Middesk starting from developing proprietary data pipelines to creating a leading business identity platform - The value proposition of KYB and how it is fundamentally more complex than KYC - How Middesk serves and plugs into its customers’ decisioning workflows -The future of business identity as it evolves with AI and other technology trends

In this episode, Jackson Ellis sits down with Ben Borodach, co-founder and CEO of april, the AI-powered tax platform that is fundamentally changing how Americans interact with the tax code. Taxes have long been a "once-a-year headache," isolated from the rest of our financial lives. Ben explains how april is shattering this status quo by embedding tax intelligence directly into the apps and platforms where consumers already manage their money, from banking and payroll to wealth management.

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, Bobby Ma sits down with Dean Brauer, President & COO of Cybrid. Dean shares his experience building Cybrid, who combines stablecoin, fiat, and compliance into a single API-first platform helping financial institutions, FinTechs, and enterprises integrate stablecoin infrastructure and launch end-to-end cross-border payment solutions to more than 150+ countries, at up to 90% lower cost, and with full transparency. The Company raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by BDC Capital and has grown 5x in the last 12 months. We discuss: - Dean’s journey building Cybrid and his deep entrepreneurship experience - The solutions Cybrid offers in orchestrating stablecoin payments - The Company’s bespoke thought partnership with customers in creating and executing their stablecoin strategy - Recent regulatory & industry trends driving forward this rapidly growing space

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, Bobby Ma sits down with Sam Lewis, CEO of Fruitful. Sam shares his experience building Fruitful and how the company is reimagining personal finance through a membership model that combines CFP® guidance with AI automation to transform every paycheck into progress. Fruitful has raised $37 million to date and serves thousands of members across all 50 states. We discuss: - Building Fruitful and scaling its membership model for personal finance - Why income allocation matters more than asset allocation for most Americans - Closing the execution gap between financial advice and real-world action - The role of AI in scaling CFP® workflows

In this episode, Jackson Ellis speaks with Stripe’s first employee and the founder of Increase, Darragh Buckley, about building reliable, scalable banking infrastructure. We discuss lessons from Stripe’s earliest days, how Increase is modernizing access to payment rails, and why trust, uptime, and simplicity matter more than ever in today’s financial system.

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, Jackson Ellis sits down with Cindy Turner, Chief Product Officer at Worldpay, to explore what it takes to build and prioritize products at one of the world’s largest payment processors. Cindy shares her unconventional path into payments, lessons from leading product at companies like Visa, JP Morgan, PayPal, and Braintree, and how Worldpay operates across 185+ countries and trillions of dollars in annual volume. The conversation dives into AI’s growing role in payments, the rise of agentic commerce, shifting liability models, and how global processors compete and evolve in an increasingly complex fintech landscape.

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, host Vaibhav speaks with Riya Grover, co-founder and CEO of Sequence, an AI native revenue platform that unifies quoting, billing automation, and receivables so finance can finally run at the speed of sales. Riya shares her journey from investment banking and Harvard Business School to exiting her first startup and then launching Sequence to fix one of the most neglected parts of the CFO stack, quote to cash and accounts receivable. She goes deep on what it really takes to find product market fit in a saturated software world, why AI native entrants can out execute incumbents, and how Sequence is using agents to automate complex finance workflows. They also unpack Riya’s recent Series A fundraise, the story that resonated with investors, and her candid advice for founders building in a noisy, AI heavy, but more competitive than ever venture environment. In this episode, we learn about: - Why quote to cash and revenue operations have lagged behind AP and spend in automation - How Sequence uses AI agents to read contracts, generate invoices, and support finance teams - What investors really cared about in Sequence’s Series A, from logo quality to 190 % NRR - How Riya stays close to customers while scaling a fast growing infra company - Her advice for aspiring founders on standing out in today’s crowded AI landscape