Fintech Layer Cake

Welcome to Fintech Layer Cake. A podcast where we slice big Financial Technology topics into bite-sized pieces for everybody to easily digest. Our goal is to make fintech a piece of cake for everyone. Fintech Layer Cake is powered by Lithic — the fastest and most flexible way to launch a card program.

Fintech Layer Cake is a technology podcast hosted by Lithic, with 81 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Lithic hosts Fintech Layer Cake, a technology show with 81 episodes published.

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  Fintech Layer Cake

  Nobody Loves SWIFT: Payments Inertia and Invisible Crypto Rails with Davi Strazza from Lightspark

  Jul 28, 202638 min

  Davi Strazza spent a decade at Adyen as the company scaled from around $30 billion to over $1.3 trillion in annual payment volume, running Latin America and then North America as president. Today he is Chief Business Officer at Lightspark, the company powering over 15% of Coinbase's Bitcoin transfers. In this episode, Reggie Young talks with Davi about what actually moves enterprise payments decisions. They cover why inertia keeps trillions on legacy rails, how challengers find their wedge against incumbents, what Pix's adoption in Brazil reveals about changing payment behavior, and how Lightspark uses Bitcoin and stablecoins as invisible infrastructure for global money movement. Davi closes with the risk he thinks fintech still underweights: the compliance work underneath every product that scales. Fintech Layer Cake is powered by Lithic, financial infrastructure that helps teams build better card and payments products for consumers and businesses. Chapters: 00:00 – Cold open: most money still moves in fiat 00:21 – Meet Davi Strazza: Adyen, Lightspark, and $1.3T in volume 01:56 – Latam vs. North America: relationships vs. pragmatism 04:33 – Why enterprises don't rip out legacy processors 06:19 – Redundancy, and finding your wedge as a challenger 07:56 – Changing the org before the org wants to change 11:31 – What Pix taught him about shifting payment behavior 13:12 – Why it takes an Uber to teach consumers new payment habits 15:43 – What Lightspark powers, from Coinbase to cross-border payouts 18:42 – Global Accounts: offering the endpoint, not just the transfer 20:18 – Making Bitcoin invisible: the rail-agnostic thesis 24:10 – Selling infrastructure while the rules are still being written 27:53 – Why you no longer need to be Stripe to build in fintech 30:02 – The next decade: fiat and crypto converging 33:09 – Stablecoins are earlier than the headlines suggest 34:34 – The underrated work: compliance that scales 37:23 – Where to find Lightspark Nothing in this podcast should be construed as legal or financial advice. Subscribe for new episodes every other Wednesday. If you enjoy the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help more people in fintech find it.

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  Fintech Layer Cake

  A Former Prosecutor on How Fintechs Become Targets, with Laurel Loomis Rimon from Jenner & Block

  Jul 14, 202626 min

  Laurel Loomis Rimon has spent her career on the enforcement side of fintech. As a federal prosecutor she brought the first case against a digital currency company in the US, years before Bitcoin existed. She later served as an assistant deputy enforcement director at the CFPB, and today she co-chairs the fintech and crypto assets practice at Jenner & Block and founded the firm's payments practice. In this episode, Reggie Young talks with Laurel about how enforcement and prosecution of fintech actually work in practice. They cover what puts a company on an investigator's radar, what genuinely exposes fintechs and banks to enforcement, how regulators and prosecutors assess good faith, and how she is advising clients to navigate debanking, KYC, and a fast-moving regulatory environment. Fintech Layer Cake is powered by Lithic, financial infrastructure that helps teams build better card and payments products for consumers and businesses. Chapters: 00:00 – Cold open: the risk everyone underrates 00:22 – Meet Laurel Loomis Rimon: DOJ, CFPB, and Jenner & Block 02:15 – Prosecuting E-gold, the first digital currency case 04:24 – The legal hooks before crypto law existed 05:48 – Money transmitting becomes a baseline concern 06:10 – What actually makes a company a target 07:13 – Why the company is rarely the target at the start 08:02 – Don't become the platform of choice for illicit actors 08:25 – Regulators are consumers too 09:39 – When the complainant is the regulator's own family 09:57 – What fintechs worry about too much 10:16 – The most boring risk: documentation 12:06 – Product thinking as a compliance skill 12:26 – How regulators assess good faith 12:58 – Why staffing is always key, even in the age of AI 14:18 – When growth outpaces compliance investment 15:40 – Where debanking comes from: Operation Choke Point 17:45 – Reputation risk and the regulatory whiplash 21:02 – How KYC changes amid the debanking pushback 22:25 – The executive order tension banks are caught in 23:34 – Advising fintechs to build for the next administration 25:41 – Where to reach Laurel Nothing in this podcast should be construed as legal or financial advice. Subscribe for new episodes every other Wednesday. If you enjoy the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help more people in fintech find it.

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  Fintech Layer Cake

  Payments at Square, Etsy, and the Agentic Era, with Drew Edmond, Partner at Glenbrook Partners

  Jul 7, 202646 min

  Drew Edmond has spent 15 years inside payment operations, first at Square from its scrappy hardware days through IPO, then at Etsy running payments across a marketplace with sellers in 230+ countries. Today he advises merchants at Glenbrook Partners and hosts the Payments on Fire podcast. In this episode, Reggie Young sits down with Drew to trace how payments actually work from the operator's seat. They cover what changes when a payment goes card not present, the data and testing work most merchants skip, why global expansion demands a plan for every country rather than every region, and whether agentic commerce is real yet. Drew's answer on that last one is more measured than the hype, and more useful. Fintech Layer Cake is powered by Lithic, financial infrastructure that helps teams build better card and payments products for consumers and businesses. Chapters: 00:00 – Cold open: why card not present changes everything 00:35 – Meet Drew Edmond: Square, Etsy, and Glenbrook 02:53 – Inside early Square: free readers and a new class of merchant 04:40 – The chain of trust that holds payments together 07:13 – Living in constant negotiation with banks and networks 10:43 – Trusting "the Twitter guy" with your money 11:46 – Square vs. Etsy: the three jobs every platform shares 12:38 – What e-commerce and going global really change 14:51 – Why there's no such thing as a "Europe strategy" 18:53 – The optimization lever most merchants underinvest in 21:44 – How fraud quietly tanks your approval rates 25:32 – Why the optimal amount of fraud isn't zero 26:44 – The hidden complexity of subscription payments 33:13 – The "miasma of payments" and 900-page network rulebooks 35:38 – The CVV era of agentic payments 41:03 – Why discovery is harder than the payment itself 44:57 – Who controls the agent layer wins payment selection Nothing in this podcast should be construed as legal or financial advice. Subscribe for new episodes every other Wednesday. If you enjoy the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help more people in fintech find it.

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  Episode #8

  Escheatment Primer + Innovation with Aisen CEO Allen Osgood

  May 28, 202627 minS4

  What if every dormant account in your fintech is a ticking compliance clock — and you didn't know the timer started three years ago? Host Reggie Young sits down with Allen Osgood, CEO and co-founder of Eisen, the company modernising escheatment — the process by which dormant accounts and abandoned funds get transferred to state governments. It's an obscure corner of financial compliance that touches every bank, fintech, brokerage, and increasingly every crypto platform. More than one in seven Americans has money sitting in state hands because of it, with over $80 billion held by state governments at any given time. Allen and Reggie cover what escheatment actually is and why it matters, the wild story of a retiree who planned his retirement around an Amazon investment — only to find the state of Delaware had liquidated it. They dig into why crypto is about to smash headfirst into dormancy periods nobody planned for, why the 'deal with it later' mindset is a trap that hits three years faster than founders expect, and how proactive compliance can flip a cost centre into a retention engine.

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  Episode #7

  Why Credit Cards Are Hard with Scott Bass from Ensemblex

  May 14, 202619 minS4

  What if the decision that kills your lending business is one you made six months ago — and you just don’t know it yet? Host Reggie Young sits down with Scott Bass, Managing Director at Ensemblex, the fintech lending and credit consultancy. Scott brings a rare combination of perspectives: he helped build Capital One’s data-driven credit operation before it was a household name and was one of the first two Americans hired to launch Monzo’s US business. Scott and Reggie cover what Capital One actually got right that most people miss, the lessons Monzo taught about building products that feel nothing like a bank, and the most predictable mistakes fintech founders make when building credit products. They dig into the six-month lag problem in lending, why being “light on the fin in fintech” is a slow-burning liability, and why Scott believes credit cards remain the most complex — and therefore most defensible — financial product a fintech can build.

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