Fintech Layer Cake

What if millions of Americans had already proven they could handle a mortgage payment — and the system simply refused to count it?
Reggie sits down with Suhas Reddy, Head of Product at Pathward Bank, to unpack what it really means to build product inside the most regulated corners of financial services. Suhas was among the early product leaders at Fannie Mae, driving the Lighthouse Project that later transformed one of the world's largest secondary mortgage institutions into a customer-centric, digital-first product organisation. He now leads product at Pathward as SVP of Product Management across the Nasdaq-listed sponsor bank's B2B products — payments, issuing, lending, acquiring, and commercial finance — developing the products that enable fintechs and brands to reach customers at scale.
The conversation covers the 10-year product build that became an overnight pandemic success story, why Suhas treats risk and compliance as design constraints rather than roadblocks, and the title insurance battle he fought — and lost — years before it became national policy. They get into the philosophy of “Legos, not unicorns” as a framework for building scalable fintech infrastructure, and the human-centric conviction that turned rental payment history into a mortgage underwriting signal — unlocking homeownership for borrowers the system had previously ignored. 
Suhas continues to build infrastructure that expands financial access for underserved communities through Pathward's product platform.

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.

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.

The payments industry spent years turning tokenization into a business tool for lock-in. So what does it mean that the same technology might now hold the key to making agentic payments actually work?
Reggie Young sits down with Basis Theory’s Co-founder and CEO, Colin Luce, and CTO, James Armstead — the team behind the programmable token vault platform that has quietly become central to the agentic payments conversation. Colin and James break down what tokenization really is, how it was co-opted as a competitive moat, and why they believe it's the foundational layer that agentic commerce needs to get right.
They get into the reality of agentic payments today — what's hype, what's actually transacting, and why human-in-the-loop is a feature, not a bug. The conversation covers the technical choke points legacy infrastructure wasn't designed to handle, the intent and fraud problem nobody has solved yet, why the industry is over-complicating protocol selection, and what a smarter approach to tokenization could unlock. 
Plus: Colin's bold prediction on the fate of PANs, James on why the early winners will just accept the volume, and the pair on why a misspelled email might be the highest compliment you can give someone in 2026.

If AI is about to transform tax filing, why do 55% of Americans still trust a human to do it for them?
In this episode, host Reggie Young sits down with Gavin Nachbar, founder of Column Tax and Chief Product Officer at Aiwyn, to unpack what it really takes to build in one of fintech’s most complex and overlooked spaces: tax filing.
Gavin shares how Column Tax built the first modern embedded tax engine in the US, what AI is about to change for the 55% who still rely on a human preparer, and why he’s genuinely bullish — not worried — about the road ahead. They also dig into his lessons on entering a regulated space as an outsider, the unique challenges of a seasonal product, and the hard-won takeaways from going through an acquisition.