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Fintech Takes

Fintech Takes

Written by: Alex Johnson
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 Fintech moves fast. But here at Fintech Takes, Alex Johnson and his rotating panel of guests move faster so that you can stay on top of the latest and greatest news in the industry without breaking a sweat. Welcome to Fintech Takes—the place where fintech’s biggest nerds come to sit back, relax, and completely geek out. Join Alex and a lineup of fintech’s brightest minds as they dissect what’s happening in fintech and banking. Each week, Alex and his guests recap the most interesting developments in fintech and explore the industry’s most pressing questions, diving headfirst into the intricate workings of some of the industry’s most ground-breaking business models and unpacking the emerging players that promise to shape fintech’s future. From riveting conversations with fintech’s most relevant operators to comprehensive recaps of the month's most compelling news stories and in-depth analyses of the latest regulatory developments, Fintech Takes is your one-stop-shop for navigating the fintech universe. Subscribe now to join fintech’s nerdiest podcast around!Copyright 2026 Alex Johnson Economics Personal Finance Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 7: Collections Without Borders

    Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 7: Collections Without Borders
    Apr 23 2026
    Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections: what it enables, what it complicates, and why it may force the industry to retire the word "collections" altogether. In this episode, I sit down with Chris Smith, VP of Product at C&R Software to discuss what goes on in collections around the rest of the world. I spend almost all my time looking at the U.S. market, and Chris is exactly the right person to tell me what I'm missing. We start with why innovation in collections tends to be powered by friction. Markets without reliable infrastructure had no choice but to go digital fast (the U.S. had no particular urgency). From there, we get into regulation. The U.K.'s Consumer Duty asks banks to prove that every customer interaction produces the right outcome (with data). That mindset goes further than most U.S. lenders would expect. One U.K. bank ran NPS scores across every customer touchpoint, and the highest score came from collections. On AI, Chris compares a U.S. and South African bank he spoke with in the same week, finding radically different appetites for autonomous AI in collections. We close on Chris's slightly controversial prediction: in the most progressive global markets, collections as a category may not exist in five years. This episode is brought to you by C&R Software. More than just debt collection, C&R sets the global standard for AI-native, humanized credit management. They simplify the complex with end-to-end credit-risk lifecycle support, powered by automated workflows, AI-native intelligence, and real-time, data-driven decisioning. Learn more at https://hubs.ly/Q03Wl1DY0. Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. Follow Alex: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson Follow Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisismith/ Learn more about C&R Software here: https://hubs.ly/Q03Wl1DY0
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    46 mins
  • Facing Credit: The Credit Score After FICO

    Facing Credit: The Credit Score After FICO
    Apr 22 2026
    Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined by Rich Franks (a fintech advisor and consultant with 20+ years in credit risk across both the bank and fintech sides), for a new episode of Facing Credit. This one's about credit scoring. And it’s about why the market has changed more in the last year than in the prior 30. The FICO monopoly has cracked. Federal regulators opened the mortgage market to competing scores. Cashflow underwriting arrived with roughly 30% predictive lift over traditional bureau data. Block built a proprietary score from Cash App transaction data, and plans to sell it to third-party lenders. Plus, a new generation of cashflow scoring companies (including Prism, Plaid's LendScore, Nova Credit, Pave, and CloutScore) are all competing in the market for a top spot. Rich and I dig into: Why even 80% conversion on the bank account linking step still kills a lending funnel, and what it takes to solve friction Why FICO's cashflow answer had an architectural problem, and why lenders started looking elsewhere The fair lending risks hidden inside merchant-level transaction data What makes Block's Cash App Score innovative, and the game theory question it raises if large depositories start thinking the same way Tune in for Rich's take on where the cashflow scoring market consolidates, what the end of FICO's de facto monopoly means for lenders and consumers, and whether AI resolves or accelerates the fragmentation. This episode is brought to you by Persona. Persona is the identity verification platform trusted by fintech's fastest-growing teams, from YC-backed startups to publicly traded companies. Build your identity program with enterprise-grade tools, starting at $0 with Persona's Startup Program. Fintech Takes listeners can get a full free year through Persona’s Startup Program at withpersona.com/ftt Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. Follow Rich: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richfranks/ Follow Alex Johnson: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnsonX: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson
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    56 mins
  • Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 6: Humans in the Fintech Loop

    Fintech Takes x C&R presents Collections Conversations Episode 6: Humans in the Fintech Loop
    Apr 16 2026
    Welcome back to Collections Conversations, a new miniseries from Fintech Takes, sponsored by our friends at C&R Software. The series digs into how generative AI is reshaping debt collections; what it enables, what it complicates, and why it might finally force the industry to retire the word “collections” altogether. In Episode 6, I sit down with Pedro Maya, Head of Collections and Credit Risk Execution at Tangerine, to talk about the biggest misconception he encounters inside banks: that AI will automate and fix everything. It won't. AI amplifies whatever you already have. Good design gets better. Bad design gets worse faster, and at scale. Training teams to work alongside AI across the credit lifecycle turns out to be less a technology question than an accountability one. The human guardrail AI can't offer is a question teams need to keep asking: is this the right outcome for the customer? We get into two concrete use cases where that plays out. Quality assurance (QA), where analyzing every agent call (rather than a monthly sample) turns a compliance exercise into coaching; and agentic AI, and agentic AI, where offloading basic customer interactions frees agents for the ones that require them. The KPI landscape is shifting, too. The new metrics are effectiveness-based: cure rates, NPS, and dollars collected as a function of the quality of the interaction (rather than its volume). And because this is Collections Conversations, we close on the longer view: what does the ideal human-AI collaboration look like across the credit lifecycle two or three years from now, and what, then, has to go right between here and there. This episode is brought to you by C&R Software. More than just debt collection, C&R sets the global standard for AI-native, humanized credit management. They simplify the complex with end-to-end credit-risk lifecycle support, powered by automated workflows, AI-native intelligence, and real-time, data-driven decisioning. Learn more at https://hubs.ly/Q03Wl1DY0. Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. Follow Alex: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson Follow Pedro: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedro-maya-7280b919/ Learn more about C&R Software here: https://hubs.ly/Q03Wl1DY0
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    51 mins
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