Elliott Lorenz took an unusual path into consumer lending, moving from applied mathematics and high-frequency trading into the business of pricing credit risk. Today he is the CEO and co-founder of Edge Focus, a technology-enabled private credit firm that sits between consumer lending platforms and the institutional investors who want to deploy capital into the asset class. In this episode, Elliott explains how the firm's credit engine works, why speed is its biggest edge, and how he reads the recent wave of criticism aimed at private credit.

What We Covered

• From engineering and applied math to high-frequency trading
• What Michael Lewis's Flash Boys got right and wrong about HFT
• Spotting an edge in LendingClub's public loan data
• Turning a data-science hobby into Edge Focus
• The Origin credit engine and how it makes decisions
• Expanding a lender's credit box with an orthogonal view of credit
• Modeling with a single month of payment history
• Updating a credit model within a day
• The Lens portfolio analytics tool
• Where alpha comes from beyond the underwriting model
• Fraud and asset liability mismatch in private credit
• Building the EDGEX ABS shelf and partnering with Fortress
• Proving ML models are free from bias
• Where consumer lending goes over the next few years

Key Takeaways

• Edge Focus competes less on having a single better model and more on combining technology, capital, and platform relationships in one package, which Elliott calls the firm's "big unlock."
• The firm can incorporate even a single month of payment history into its models and push an update within a day, letting it react to macro shifts faster than firms that wait 12 to 24 months for data.
• Most of the recent private credit criticism falls into two buckets, fraud and asset liability mismatch, and Elliott sees the fraud cases as largely idiosyncratic and the redemption problems as a function of investors misjudging illiquid assets.
• Because Edge Focus invests its own capital alongside partners rather than acting as a pure technology vendor, its incentives are tied directly to loan performance.

About Elliott Lorenz

Elliott Lorenz is the CEO and co-founder of Edge Focus, a technology-enabled private credit firm focused on consumer lending. He trained as an engineer and applied mathematician, earned a master's in finance from Princeton, and spent several years in high-frequency trading before bringing those modeling techniques into consumer credit in 2013.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Andrew Davies has spent more than three decades fighting financial crime, starting with sanctions screening tools for central banks in the mid-1990s and arriving at ComplyAdvantage after nearly 16 years at Fiserv. He sits at the center of one of the most consequential questions in financial services: can we finally move the needle on financial crime detection after decades of catching less than 2% of what's laundered globally?

ComplyAdvantage serves more than 3,000 enterprises across 75 countries with its AI-native Mesh platform. If you want to learn more about the founding story and their early days, check out my podcast with founder Charlie Delingpole from 2019.

What We Covered

• Why the industry has historically caught less than 2% of money laundered globally
• How the money laundering economy ranks as the world's third largest at an estimated $5.6 trillion
• The evolution from sanctions screening to FRAML to multi-dimensional financial crime risk
• The Mesh platform and what a unified financial crime system means for compliance teams
• Cassie, the agentic AI analyst automating customer screening investigations
• How 90% of compliance work was historically spent chasing false positives
• Real-time payments compliance and the risk-based approach to payment screening
• The SEPA Instant Payments challenge and batch screening against the EU journal
• Stablecoins, unhosted wallets, and the compliance infrastructure gap
• FATF's finding that stablecoins represent 84% of illicit crypto transaction volume
• Data sharing consortiums as the next inflection point in fighting financial crime
• The network problem at the heart of money laundering and terrorist financing

Key Takeaways

The money laundering economy is estimated at $5.6 trillion, making it the third largest in the world, above Germany, yet we detect less than 2%. Agentic AI tools like Cassie are designed to eliminate false positives so human analysts only work cases that genuinely warrant their expertise. Data sharing consortiums, where organizations contribute to shared detection models, represent the most promising path to materially improving financial crime outcomes. Stablecoins create real compliance risk at the unhosted wallet layer, the Bank of England has floated a ban, while the US is unlikely to go that route, leaving a gap.

About Andrew Davies

Andrew Davies is the Global Head of Financial Crime Compliance Strategy at ComplyAdvantage. He began his career in the mid-1990s building sanctions screening tools for central banks and large financial institutions, and spent nearly 16 years at Fiserv in their financial crime division before joining ComplyAdvantage.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Joshua Silver has spent two decades in embedded payments. Before co-founding Rainforest, he built Patient Co, a healthcare payments business scaled to billions in processing volume and tens of millions of patients, then spent several years consulting with software founders on building their payments programs. Rainforest is payments as a service, purpose-built for vertical SaaS — and in this conversation Joshua makes a compelling case that embedded payments is not just a revenue opportunity but a competitive moat.

What We Covered

• Why vertical SaaS companies are still leaving money on the table with embedded payments
• The gap in the market Rainforest was built to fill
• How payfac as a service works and who it is designed for
• Why the number of registered payfacs is shrinking, not growing
• The $5 billion volume threshold for when becoming a full payfac makes economic sense
• How Rainforest differentiates from Stripe and Adyen for vertical SaaS platforms
• Vertical-specific risk models versus general-purpose tools
• Rainforest's real-time ledger and what it unlocks for complex payment structures
• Adding PayPal and Venmo for untapped vertical SaaS markets
• Expanding into Canada and building the playbook for international growth
• How AI is being used across the business and the rising threat of AI-driven fraud
• What success looks like for Rainforest in the next five years

Key Takeaways

Embedded payments builds a moat. Joshua's closing point is the sharpest: once merchants are running their money through your software platform, competitors face a much harder job dislodging you. Payments isn't just a revenue line — it's a retention strategy.

Vertical-specific risk models matter enormously. Stripe and Adyen have to serve everyone, so their risk tooling is built for the lowest common denominator. Rainforest has built models tuned to individual verticals — lawn care looks different from HVAC, which looks different from nonprofit donations — and it takes the fraud liability rather than passing it to the platform.

The $5 billion payfac threshold is the new reality. A decade ago the rule of thumb was around $1 billion in card volume. Regulatory and compliance burdens have risen so sharply that Joshua now puts the threshold at $5 billion with line of sight to $10 billion before it makes economic sense to go full payfac.

A real-time ledger is a competitive differentiator. Most legacy processors are batch-based, settled overnight on mainframes. Rainforest's ledger is real-time, enabling split payments, franchise fee hierarchies, and complex billing structures that batch systems simply cannot support.

About Joshua Silver

Joshua Silver is co-founder and CEO of Rainforest, a payments-as-a-service company purpose-built for vertical SaaS platforms. Before Rainforest, he co-founded Patient Co, scaling it to billions in healthcare payments volume before a sale, and subsequently consulted with software founders on building their payments businesses. He has been working in embedded payments for twenty years.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Michael Tannenbaum became CEO of Figure in early 2024, taking over from founder Mike Cagney and leading the company through its September 2025 IPO. In this conversation, we get into the mechanics of how Figure's blockchain-based platform competes with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, what it actually takes to cut mortgage origination costs from $12,000 to $1,000, and where the real opportunities in tokenization lie.

What We Covered

• Taking over as CEO from Mike Cagney and the Big Rocks framework
• How Figure describes itself: building the future of capital markets on blockchain
• The B2B partner network and how it compares to Fannie Mae's function
• Cutting mortgage origination costs from $12,000 to $1,000 and 45 days to five
• Why Figure competes directly with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
• How blockchain eliminates third-party diligence and prevents loan double-pledging
• The Figure Connect marketplace and its rapid growth since June 2024
• Where tokenization adds real value — and where it doesn't
• YLDS: Figure's SEC-registered yield-bearing stablecoin and its role in capital markets
• The timing and mechanics of Figure's September 2025 IPO
• Building a rate-agnostic business across different macro environments
• Three growth areas: consumer mortgages, Democratized Prime, and on-chain equities

Key Takeaways

Figure's origination platform and its capital market are the same system — you can't separate them, and that's the competitive moat. Tokenization only creates liquidity when the underlying assets are standardized and fungible; putting unique assets on a blockchain doesn't conjure buyers. The recent fraud cases involving double-pledged loans (Tricolor, First Brands, MFS) have turned blockchain's immutability from a skeptic's objection into a selling point. And Figure is running at what Michael calls the rule of 150 — 100% year-over-year growth at 50% margins — in one of the most rate-sensitive and entrenched markets on earth.

About Michael Tannenbaum

Michael Tannenbaum is the CEO of Figure, a blockchain-based capital markets company he took public on Nasdaq in September 2025. Before Figure, he was an early executive at both SoFi (Chief Revenue Officer) and Brex (COO), and sat on the Brex board when it was acquired by Capital One. He began his career in investment banking at J.P. Morgan.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr, an AI-driven valuation platform for asset-backed lending. He spent his early career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA, where he grew comfortable with the challenge of pricing hard-to-value assets. That thread ran through every role he held until it crystallized into a company built around a simple but structural problem: in asset-backed lending, appraisers give you a price and then spend the rest of their report telling you they're not responsible for it. Barkr is built to change that.

What We Covered

• Thomas's background in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA
• How a common thread across luxury assets led to founding Barkr
• Starting with fine art and private jets before expanding to other asset classes
• The two-part failure in traditional appraisals: accuracy and absence of liability
• How Barkr pairs an AI valuation with a contractual performance warranty
• The progression from Lloyd's of London to AXA to Munich Re
• $2 billion in covered valuations and what patience actually means in this business
• GPUs as a surprisingly durable and long-lived collateral asset class
• How Barkr finds clients, from pavement pounding to Nvidia referrals
• Monthly mark-to-market on hard assets throughout a loan's life
• Building a domain-specific LLM with human review in the loop
• Plans to build an in-house insurance vehicle to unlock capacity

Key Takeaways

Traditional appraisal firms hedge their liability by design. Page one is the price; the rest of the report is the disclaimer. Barkr's contractual warranty flips that model by standing behind the number.

Barkr's data on GPU durability challenges the conventional narrative. Chips five and seven years old are still generating revenue and still have meaningful resale value, which changes the risk calculus for lenders considering AI infrastructure as collateral.

Augmenting, not replacing, is the right positioning for valuation technology. Barkr actively encourages clients to keep using their existing appraisers and treats third-party appraisals as additional data inputs that improve their own accuracy.

Building a reinsurance relationship takes years. Barkr worked through Lloyd's, then AXA, before landing Munich Re, and each step required demonstrating proof of concept at the prior level first.

About Thomas Galbraith

Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr. He began his career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA before founding Barkr to bring accountability and AI-driven accuracy to asset valuation in the lending market. Barkr has covered approximately $2 billion in valuations across art, private jets, vehicles, and GPUs.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Patricia Montesi didn't start her career in payments, she started it in car rental. After nine years at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car, she was recruited into fintech with zero industry experience. That outsider perspective became her edge, and she never let go of it. Today, she's the CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure platform that combines card issuing, money movement, and a bank-grade ledger on a single API-first stack.

What We Covered

• How nine years in car rental shaped Patricia's outsider approach to payments
• Getting recruited into Wild Card Systems with no payments background, and why that fresh lens became an advantage
• The fragmentation problem at the heart of payments infrastructure and why point products create hidden complexity
• Qolo's three-product suite: Quantum Ledger, Qascade money movement, and Qinetic card issuing
• Why Qolo isn't quite a side core, it overlays and integrates with existing bank cores rather than running in parallel
• Rail agnosticism and why Qolo still supports checks in 2026
• The dual go-to-market: commercial banks and B2B fintechs, same platform, different vernacular
• How the Synapse collapse changed the ledger conversation for banks and fintechs alike
• Winning KeyBank in a competitive RFP against much larger players, and launching virtual account management in nine months
• How banks are using Qolo to protect commercial deposits from modern non-bank competitors
• AI inside Qolo: from Glean to Claude, and their internal "Turning Hours into Minutes" program
• 130% year-over-year growth and 142% net revenue retention

Key Takeaways

The moat problem: Patricia set out to build a company where customers stay because of the value delivered, not because switching is too painful. That philosophy shaped every product decision at Qolo.

Ledger first: Most point-product fintechs have basic ledgers that only support one rail. Qolo's bank-grade dual-entry forward-posting ledger underpins every rail, making reconciliation and real-time money visibility a solved problem rather than a vendor management challenge.

Synapse's legacy: The debacle forced banks and fintechs alike to ask harder questions about who actually owns the ledger and where money sits at any given moment. Qolo had been making that argument for years before the market was ready to hear it.

Bank as distribution: KeyBank and Huntington aren't just clients — they're strategic investors using Qolo to defend their commercial deposit base against modern non-bank alternatives.

About Patricia Montesi

Patricia Montesi is CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure company she built from the ground up after more than 20 years in the industry. She started her career at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car before being recruited into fintech with zero payments background — an outsider perspective she has held onto ever since. At Qolo, she and her team built the ledger, money movement, and card issuing stack as first-party infrastructure, without relying on third-party processors underneath.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, one of the largest financial software companies in the world, serving over 7,000 banks globally including 45 of the world's top 50. He joined the company a little over a year ago, bringing an unusually broad background spanning consulting, Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and several other technology businesses. This is a wide-ranging conversation about where Finastra is headed and why the conventional narrative around AI and software disruption misses something important.

What We Covered

• Chris's path from consulting to Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and beyond
• What attracted him to Finastra and the perception versus reality gap he set out to close
• How he spent his first 90 days listening to customers and internal teams before deciding direction
• The portfolio narrowing strategy, including divestitures of Treasury, Capital Markets, and student lending
• Finastra's core focus areas: lending, payments, and universal banking
• Growth vectors within an existing base of 7,000+ banks, including geography expansion, cross-sell, and data
• The AI center of excellence and why dedicated ownership changes the pace of deployment
• Internal AI use cases: an HR chatbot and automated sales approvals
• Operator Assist, a new product that uses AI to surface and resolve failed payments
• Agentic AI in mortgage origination, targeting documentation discrepancies
• Why Finastra views AI as a growth accelerant, not a cost-cutting tool, and why not all software faces the same disruption risk
• Community bank caution around modernization and why the economics will eventually force full core replacements

Key Takeaways

Companies that are systems of record with long-duration enterprise agreements are far less exposed to AI disruption than the public markets currently assume. The distinction matters, and Chris makes a clear case for why Finastra sits in the less-exposed category.

Dedicated AI ownership changes everything. Spreading AI enthusiasm across everyone's partial attention generates ideas but not scalable execution. The center of excellence model exists precisely to fix that.

Community bank core modernization is inevitable but slow. The banks most likely to win that market are those that can make transitions nearly frictionless, not those with the most advanced technology.

At $7 trillion in daily payments routed through Finastra's systems, the probabilistic nature of LLMs is not a minor technical detail. Chris's post-recording observation about where AI fits and where it doesn't is one of the more clear-eyed takes you'll hear from a CEO in this space.

About Chris Walters

Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, which he joined a little over a year ago. Before Finastra, he held CEO and COO roles at a range of public and private technology companies, including The Weather Company and a public wealth management and software business. He also spent seven years in consulting and held senior roles at Bloomberg.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Ali Niknam is one of fintech's most unconventional founders. He built multiple unicorns before turning his attention to banking, then self-funded Bunq with nearly €100 million of his own money before taking a single outside investor. That conviction paid off: Bunq posted €85 million in profit in 2024, putting it in rare company among European neobanks. Now, having applied for a US national bank charter, Ali is setting his sights on the most competitive banking market in the world.

What We Covered

• Ali's background as a three-time unicorn founder
• Self-funding Bunq with nearly €100M before taking outside investment
• Pursuing a greenfield banking license, the first granted in the Netherlands in 35 years
• Why Bunq launched with a paid subscription model when everyone else was going free
• Bunq's core user base: digital nomads and cross-border travelers
• International expansion across the European Union
• Applying for a US national bank charter and dealing with three regulators
• The philosophy behind building a bank people actually trust for day-to-day use
• How AI powers transaction monitoring, real-time translation, and marketing at Bunq
• Why Bunq describes itself as the first Gen AI-powered bank
• The personal CFO vision for the future of banking
• What an AI-native bank looks like five years from now

Key Takeaways

Starting with a paid subscription meant Bunq only attracted users who genuinely valued the product, building real engagement rather than vanity metrics — and better unit economics from the outset.

Pursuing a full greenfield banking license from the start, while far harder than working around incumbents, lets Bunq compete directly with the largest banks on equal regulatory footing.

AI at Bunq isn't a marketing term. It powers transaction monitoring, real-time multilingual customer support, and marketing automation in ways that materially reduce costs and improve security.

The vision for the AI-native bank is a personal CFO that makes abstract financial goals tangible — connecting daily spending habits to the things users actually want in their lives.

About Ali Niknam

Ali Niknam is the founder and CEO of Bunq, the Dutch neobank. A serial entrepreneur with three unicorns to his name, Ali was born in Canada to Iranian parents and has been based in the Netherlands for most of his life. Before Bunq, he founded TransIP, now rebranded as Team Blue, the world's third-largest domain name and web hosting provider. He is also the author of a book on entrepreneurship.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes