FINTECH TAKES

Welcome to Fintech Takes—the place where fintech’s biggest nerds come to sit back, relax, and completely geek out.

Fintech Recap: Risk, Standards, and Double Standards

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September 1, 2026

Fintech Takes x Nova Credit Presents Cash Flow Conversations Ep 7: A Traveling Credit Score

Hello, and welcome back to Cash Flow Conversations, a podcast series sponsored by Nova Credit. If you’ve followed my work, you’ll know that I’m obsessed with cash flow data because it has enormous potential to positively reshape consumer lending in the U.S. Cash Flow Conversations tracks that shift, from theory to practical use across the […]

August 26, 2026

Premium Cards Get Weird

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined again by fellow fintech creator Matthew Goldman, founder and managing member of Totavi, and author of one of my favorite newsletters on cards and payments, Cards for the Win. We cover a lot of ground, like whether fintech’s premium-card obsession is distracting from what […]

August 19, 2026

The SMB Context Margin Paradox

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by David Snitkof (GM of SMB at Ocrolus) to explore one of my all-time favorite topics in financial services: small business lending. Consumer lending is basically homogeneous. People move through predictable life stages, and underwriting comes down to assessing reliability and capacity. Small business lending is […]

August 12, 2026

Not Fintech Investment Advice: Natural, Sky Fusion, Quarters, El Dorado

Welcome back to Not Fintech Investment Advice, where Simon Taylor and I do what we do best: talk about companies we’re absolutely not giving investment advice on! First up is Natural, an AI agent orchestration layer for payments that just raised a $30M Series A. We explore its wallet architecture (which uses account structure itself […]

August 5, 2026

Fintech Recap: No-KYC Cards and Political Bank Charters Aplenty

Welcome back to Fintech Recap. I’m Alex Johnson, joined as always by my partner in recapping, Jason Mikula. We open with a tangled story that you should absolutely read Jason’s reporting* on. Trump-linked World Liberty Financial poured $1.5B into a crypto treasury company called Alt5 Sigma, whose token plummeted from ~20¢ to ~5¢. Buried inside […]

July 29, 2026

Inside Stripe’s Open Standard

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I’m Alex Johnson, joined again by James Wester (co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research), who I’ve come to think of as our resident stablecoin correspondent to make sense of the biggest stablecoin news of the summer. In July, Stripe organized a consortium called Open Standard, backed by […]

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