Christina Riechers, General Manager of Square Banking on helping small businesses

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Peter Renton, Chairman & Co-Founder of Fintech Nexus and Christina Riechers, General Manager of Square
Peter Renton, Chairman & Co-Founder of Fintech Nexus and Christina Riechers, General Manager of Square Banking

I don’t think any fintech company has done more for small business than Square. They started with payment acceptance and have since expanded into many different areas of fintech. In fact, their lending business is now the largest in all of fintech. But it was the addition of Square Banking that has allowed this fintech pioneer to bring it all together.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Christina Riechers, the General Manager of Square Banking. She has been at Square nine years and was one of the architects of Square’s push into banking. This is the second podcast in the series that I recorded live at Fintech Meetup in early March.

In this podcast you will learn:

  • What first attracted Christina to Square.
  • Block’s mission and how that resonated with her.
  • The origins of Square Banking and Christina’s role in it.
  • How they built out their banking capabilities.
  • The different starting points for small businesses in joining their ecosystem.
  • Why established small business switch to Square Banking.
  • The scale they are at today for Square Lending.
  • How they are underwriting these loans.
  • How they are able to see a holistic view of the small business’s finances.
  • How their customers are using the proceeds from their Square loans.
  • The astounding percentage of women-owned business they are serving.
  • What is top of mind for Square sellers today.
  • How their payroll service works.
  • What integration opportunities there are between Cash App, Afterpay and Square Banking.
  • What they doing around Generative AI.
  • The fintech trends that Christina is paying closest attention to right now.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

Peter Renton  00:01

Welcome to the Fintech One-on-One podcast. This is Peter Renton, Chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus. I’ve been doing this show since 2013, which makes this the longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey.

Peter Renton  00:27

Before we get started, I want to highlight another podcast that I always listened to, Fintech Takes by Alex Johnson should definitely be on your fintech playlist. Alex is personable, a great interviewer, and one of the smartest people in all of fintech. I love his regular features like the Not Investment Advice shows he does with Simon Taylor, his monthly recaps with Jason Mikula. His deep dive shows with Kiah Haslett, and the top notch guests he has on the show from time to time. Check out Fintech Takes on your favorite podcast platform.

Peter Renton  01:04

This is the second in a series of live interviews that we conducted at fintech meetup in early March. I am delighted to welcome Christina Riechers. She is the general manager of Square Banking. Now, Christina has been at Square for quite some time. In fact, she was an integral part of this movement into Square banking, which we talk about. We also discuss the different components of the Square banking ecosystem today, we go in depth into the lending product, and talking about how that works, how their underwriting works, and how they are able to do things in an automated fashion there. We talk about the typical sellers on the platform and what is top of mind for them today. We talk about how they’re integrating the different products together. We talked about generative AI, we discussed the how Square banking intersects with with Cash App and Afterpay, and much more. It was a fascinating discussion. Hope you enjoy the show.

Peter Renton  02:13

Welcome to the podcast, Christina.

Christina Riechers  02:15

Thank you for having me.

Peter Renton  02:16

Okay, great to have you here at at Fintech Meetup Live. So let’s kick it off by just giving all the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. I know you’ve been at Square a long time, but why don’t you hit on some of the highlights of your career to date?

Christina Riechers  02:31

Wonderful. I have been at Square for nine years. Before that, and really throughout my career, including at Square, my focus has always been on how do I tackle problems that have an impact that matters, and just interesting solutions that you can build and figure out along the way. And so before Square, that had me in India working for a startup that made solar powered lamps for households without electricity, and figuring out how do you finance them because even a $20 light is too expensive for households who are living in rural northern India. And then later on started a nonprofit that was scaling public health initiatives to hundreds of millions of people. And so again, always sort of what’s a hard problem that, if you get it right, can have a really big impact. And you get to be really creative in how you build it along the way.

Peter Renton  03:18

Right, right. Well, another hard problem, obviously, is small business and small business financing. And we’re going to talk a lot about that. But maybe go back to your early days at Square or even before then. Nine years ago, Square was a very well established company, even back then. But what was it, do you remember that attracted you to Square in the first place?

Christina Riechers  03:39

So I had been living abroad, and was looking to be back in the US. And one thing I’ve always loved is serving the communities where I live, and feeling really connected to understanding their problems and what matters. So as I was back in the US for the first time in a while, I looked around, I said what matters here? And I saw that in the communities that were thriving, they tended to have a really strong small business community, those small businesses, yeah, they support the local sports teams, and they reinvest, and you just had a lot more vibrancy of the Main Street. And I thought that was just a really interesting problem of how you might be able to help small business owners. And so I kind of dug in and I met this woman who ran a bakery down the street, and I came to appreciate just how complex her business was. And all the different jobs that she ended up playing, right. She didn’t just start a bakery, she also had to hire 10 employees, she had to expect that 50 percent of them would probably attrit within the first year, and she’d have to hire more. And that at 3am somebody would text her and say, my kids sick, I can’t come in, and take that shift. And as I started appreciating all of the jobs and weight that small business owners carried, I thought if there’s some way that we can tackle that and take the load off a little bit and make it easier for them to focus on what they love and thrive, I want to do that. And that’s where I saw Square playing a really big role, and having the potential to do even more.

Peter Renton  05:03

Right, right. So then how would would you describe Square’s mission today? And I want to, maybe before I even ask, that I noticed, I haven’t been to your office since before the pandemic, but I was, when I was last there I was always struck by the, you have photographs of the I presume they’re Square customers and a little kind of vignette about their story. And it was really powerful, just being in your offices and seeing how Square’s impacted these people. So maybe talk about Square’s mission, and talk about how that’s kind of reflected inside the Square offices in those photos.

Christina Riechers  05:39

Our customers are at the heart of what we do. And we make that very visceral as you experienced going through an office. But even now that many people are working remotely, we’re constantly encouraged to get out there into our communities, talking and engaging with our small business owners to see how they act, what their needs are, and really feeling that empathy for what they’re struggling with, and we think that helps us build the best products. Block’s mission is economic empowerment, and for Square that’s meant since the very beginning, how do you democratize the tools that larger businesses have access to, and make it easier for the smaller businesses to also have access to it, to give them a leg up and help them be more successful.

Peter Renton  06:18

Okay.

Peter Renton  06:18

Okay. Okay. So then, what I want to now talk about Square Banking, and I listened to a podcast a while back with you talking about the origins of that, and you were talking to Jack Dorsey. And he said, just go off and do it. But what was the impetus there? And what did you see personally, to kind of kick this off?

Christina Riechers  06:39

Oh, sure. So Square was founded 14 years ago, I joined nine years ago. And when I had joined, we already had started the lending business, we saw that there were payment trends that were actually fairly predictable, and you could lend against them, and really open up access to financing to all these small business owners who didn’t traditionally have access to capital. When I came in, I started working on the payment side, helping sellers access their revenue from their sales for that day. And I launched a product called instant transfers. So that allowed a small business owner to press a button and for a small fee, get their funds instantly, rather than wait one business day for them to come into their linked bank account for free. And I was so surprised by how many sellers started using instant transfers, willing to pay a fee to get their funds just one day sooner. And so this really confounded me. And it led me to spending a lot more time with our customers just trying to understand how they thought about their business, how they thought about their business finances, and what drove all of that. And what I came to appreciate was that for a lot of small business owners, they didn’t start their business because they cared about finance and accounting, right? They started for another reason and that financial element of their businesses is what caused them the most stress, and maybe the week before they’d had a $35 insufficient funds from their bank when a supplier kind of check came in before they expected it, or they had some other way in which their inflows and outflows didn’t match, and they weren’t sure what was going to happen. And so they were using instant transfers to kind of paper over this uncertainty of what was happening with their cash flow. So once I appreciated that I thought, Okay, well, instant transfers is great as an emergency cash flow tool, if you need it. But we’re really not getting at the crux of what is behind these small business owners’ struggle, which is not really having a good handle or peace of mind over their finances. And so I thought, you know, Square made payments a whole lot easier a few years ago, why can’t we do the same with with banking, and really make it much more friendly? And so, long story short, I had just a, I was so passionate about some ideas of what this could look like. I was sketching out mocks, working with a design partner and others, and pitched to Jack and the Square leadership team at that time, how Square could do banking, and how we could start just by shifting that model of funds, of us being sort of a middleman of the funds, to having a stored balance with Square, offering a business debit card for free off of it, and giving sellers that instant access to their funds, but for free and we’d earn funds off the interchange. And so yeah, Jack and team said, go for it, grab two engineers and come back in three months. And that was the start of what is now the Square Business debit card today. And since then, we’ve parlayed that into a whole suite of banking tools, you’ve got Square checking, Square savings, Square loans, Square credit card, and are really thinking about that holistic, cash flow ecosystem that our sellers need.

Peter Renton  07:22

Right, right. So maybe we can just talk a little bit about getting that set up because that was not a trivial project that you took on there. And I know the Square went and, I think you know, you’ve applied for an ILC, and then you acquired a bank. What were some of the challenges that you encountered along the way there? And was it harder than you expected getting this all set up? I mean, right now it looks wonderful. You’ve got a nice suite you just talked about. But starting from scratch, it’s, you know, I imagine it was a challenging time.

Christina Riechers  10:14

It was. I think what makes it work is really starting with the customer, what do they need? How do we build it? And then what are the pieces we need along the way. So lending had been in place for a while, and the team decided to apply for that industrial charter application, and got it, and so today, the ILC powers our Square loans and Square savings products. But when it came to building the debit card, we had the benefit of looking to Cash App, which had already done a stored balance and a card issuance. And so to get that first piece off the ground, we were able to leverage a lot of what they’d built. And you know, even the first three Alpha sellers who used it, we actually had Cash cards hooked up to it. We kind of figured out how to push the Square payment proceeds into Cash App Services, issue them Cash cards, just to start testing. Did this have value to our sellers? What did this look like?

Peter Renton  11:08

Let’s talk about the types of companies that are using this because I imagine, you know, Square ,you were talking earlier on your session that, you know, you started off with solo entrepreneurs, and then you moved up market to like 10 person companies, which obviously most people think is downmarket but not for Square. So I mean, you were very well established at the point of sale people. I mean, people have been taking Square, you know, as a way to take credit cards, which was, you know, a brilliant innovation at the time. But a lot of companies have checking accounts, right. So are you finding the people using Square checking, are they new to business banking, or are they switching?

Christina Riechers  11:52

There’s a mix. So Square checking is an FDIC insured account that offers sellers instant access to their payment proceeds that they can then spend on this card. And what we found is that for 50% of the sellers who are using Square debit card and Square checking, for 50% of them, it’s their first time having a business bank account. So beforehand, a lot of them might have been using their personal checking account, and saw this as an opportunity to easily and in a fee free way, start separating their business and personal funds.

Peter Renton  12:23

Which everyone should do by the way.

Christina Riechers  12:24

Which everyone should do, by the way, but for a lot of them, for a variety of reasons, they haven’t done that. And so you have that segment of folks who are starting to become slightly more sophisticated in how they’re managing their business funds. When you look at Square Banking products overall, in addition to folks who are switching over or new businesses, we’re finding folks that are coming through just through checking. You’ve got folks who are using Square savings, because it’s a really differentiated feature from what they can get from their business checking account today, of allowing them to put percentages of funds aside into different folders and really kind of have more of a budgeting toolkit. Or for loans, they might not have access to loans elsewhere, or just find it much more simple and convenient to do it with Square. So the kind of starting point often comes from sellers who are using Square, come to Square because of our payments, because of our hardware, and see an opportunity to do something easier, more quickly with Square and that’s how they start joining the banking ecosystem.

Peter Renton  13:22

Right, right. So the interesting thing you said like the other 50% that already have a business checking account, obviously, see the benefit of Square. What are they? Why are they switching? What do you see in your research as to the differentiator?

Christina Riechers  13:37

So the starting point was instant access to your funds. So as soon as you take a sale, you have access to those funds to spend right away. That was a huge benefit to a lot of these really cashflow constrained businesses. The other thing that we see and that we’re increasingly leaning on is, small business owners feel like they have too many tools. And they often don’t work well together. And they want to simplify their life. And so we’re helping them do that by having your inflows, all your revenue, come into the same place that then you can spend it off of. And we’re starting to build more tools to kind of help you understand those inflows and outflows together. So it’s just a simplification element that attracts a lot of small business owners.

Peter Renton  14:18

Yeah, that makes sense. So I want to dig into Square Lending, if I can. As I said, it’s been around a while, and I was looking at some stats doing research for this interview and seeing that Square, it looks like, is the largest small business lender in the country right now. Maybe outside of some of the, one of the top 10 banks, but maybe you do have some numbers of the scale of you guys? It was in your earnings reports, I believe.

Christina Riechers  14:42

Yes, we’ve originated $1 billion per quarter of loans for Square sellers over the last seven consecutive quarters since we’ve reported out.

Peter Renton  14:51

Yeah, that’s 1 billion per quarter. That is quite something. And these are not $250,000 loans, right? What’s the average loan size?

Christina Riechers  14:59

It’s less than $10,000.

Peter Renton  15:01

Less than 10. Wow. Because that’s amazing. That’s even lower than some of the personal loan lenders that are out there, they’re often over 10. Okay, and then when someone is applying for a loan now, I imagine in most cases, is this a fully automated process? How are you doing your underwriting?

Christina Riechers  15:20

It is. So what is beautiful about Square loans is it’s fully automated, we are taking into account a lot of unique aspects of the business that Square sees, from your payments data, to your customer data to other things about your behavior and trends. And we’re using it to underwrite and then proactively make you an offer. So effectively prequalify you and say, Hey, you’re welcome to borrow $20,000 from Square, here’s the fee, and we would, you would repay it as a percentage of your sales going forward. And so it ends up being, this is a pretty exciting moment for a lot of small business owners who say, Oh, wow, Square is willing to lend me $20,000. And all I have to do is go through a very short flow for a few minutes, and I can get those funds next business day, or even immediately if I have Square checking. We can immediately deposit those proceeds in your Square checking account for you to spend, and you don’t have to think about it afterwards. Because what we can do is we just withhold a percentage of your sales going forward. And sellers love to not have one more thing to think about. And it works very well for Square because we’re in the flow of funds. And so it helps the economics of the program for us not to have to rely on whether a bank account has sufficient funds in it or not. Since we’re first in line for repayment.

Peter Renton  16:44

Right, right. So and then the customers that you’re dealing with there, I imagine, Square sometimes doesn’t have 100% of their revenue, right? They might have an Amazon account, or an eBay account, or something. I mean, obviously, you’re underwriting, I imagine, purely based on the Square revenue, right? I mean, how are you thinking about other other sources of revenue for these companies?

Christina Riechers  17:06

This is perfect. You’re leading me into where we’re at today. So historically, yes, we’ve just underwritten based on Square sales, but you captured it beautifully, which is we don’t see 100% of your revenue, in a lot of cases. And so we’re increasingly getting sellers to share access with external data sources for us, so that we can see a more holistic picture of their finances. And we’re building additional lending products that take that into account, that allow us more flexibility and what that looks like. We’re also encouraging more folks to use Square checking, because when they’re using Square checking, then if they are getting some revenue through still paper checks, or an online website that’s not Square, they’re then transferring those funds into the Square checking account. So we kind of see it through two ways. Either you’re using Square checking, and we actually are in the flow of funds, again, of all your revenue, or you’re not, but we have insight into what that looks like and can continue to advance our own underwriting based on a more holistic look at the business.

Peter Renton  18:07

That’s not live yet. Connecting those other sources of income?

Christina Riechers  18:10

We’re right in the thick of it right now.

Peter Renton  18:12

Right in the thick of it. Okay, okay. What do sellers tell you, or even what do you see? Because you’ve got the checking account, you can see, you’ve got great insights. So what are they telling you they’re using this money for?

Christina Riechers  18:24

We hear a lot of different needs. And sometimes it’s a kind of an emergency equipment breakdown comes up or, like I actually have one quote from one of our favorite sellers, La Pupusa Eatery, Urban Eatery, in LA and they said, we’ve taken out Square loans to help with certain expenses, like when we bought equipment to start doing our catering. Because we’re doing our expansion, we took another loan out, and we paid some of the city fees to try to get more of our expansion going. So sometimes you have just something breaks, but sometimes you have like with La Pupusa, they’re trying to expand, and they’re using these funds to invest in expanding their business lines, expanding their locations, and grow their business.

Peter Renton  19:05

Right, right. And then yeah, that sounds great. You really mean it, and it makes sense, particularly if they, you know, you’re gonna have really good insight into their business when they’re connecting other data sources, and seeing the scale you guys are at right now, it’s really quite amazing to see where you’ve come from.

Christina Riechers  19:21

So really allowing us to do some amazing things for traditionally underserved businesses, as well. Based on an analysis we did in 2022, 56% of the sellers who took a Square loan were women owned businesses.

Peter Renton  19:36

Wow.

Christina Riechers  19:36

And that compares to the SBA industry standard of less than 20%. And so we’re really proud of our ability to serve traditionally underserved segments, be it women or people of color or Hispanic business owners.

Peter Renton  19:49

And I imagine because yours is just a data driven, it’s a data driven analysis. And I mentioned that really helps with minority owned businesses that have not been able to get access to funding through traditional services.

Christina Riechers  20:00

Correct.

Peter Renton  20:00

Yeah, interesting. So then when you’re looking at the Square sellers as a whole, moving beyond the lending product now. When you’re looking at the Square, the broad ecosystem, what are the things that are top of mind for your sellers today? Like, what are the problems that you’re seeing again and again?

Christina Riechers  20:20

For Square overall, it’s one thing that came out via COVID for some of these businesses, since we’re serving the main street businesses is, how do we keep up with the ways that customers want to do business? So during COVID that meant, okay, people aren’t just coming into my store, or my restaurant or my quick service, in order to do it, I need to have a website that that people can order from, and do pickup. And so we were able to spin those up really quickly for sellers so that you know, few clicks and turn on your website, because you’ve already established in the Square point of sale system, these are my items, this is the inventory associated with it. And we can make it really easy to turn on an online ordering page, for example. Or if you’re a retail store, to turn that on the same way for you to attract a larger base of customers than you might today. And so getting more customers and increasing sales is always top of mind for customers. So we hear that. We also hear increasingly, attracting and retaining employees, especially a lot of our businesses operate with a good number of hourly employees. And so we’ve built Square payroll to try to help retain the employees really, and make it easier, not just to run payroll, but for it to be a wonderful employee experience as well, given that there’s quite a lot of competition for hourly employees for a lot of our small business owners. And then of course, for banking and cash flow services. What we hear a lot is that small business owners are looking to take the mental models they have in their heads for how they want to spend their money or what their funds are supposed to be going for. And so one example of how we’ve done that is by building Square savings, we allow sellers to say, Okay, I want, ideally wouldn’t it be nice if 3% of my revenue went just to a rainy day fund, so that if something happens, I have the funds there, or, gosh, I tend to spend around 15% on taxes. Gosh, remember last time the tax bill came, I kind of forgot about it. And I had no funds available for it. With Square savings we’re letting sellers take those mental models they have in their heads, and actually set those up as automated savings to certain folders. So some of the most popular ones are just that. A rainy day folder, a tax folder, a payroll folder, and it’s not savings in the traditional sense, right? Businesses don’t save, but it’s really about them preparing for those short and medium term business expenses that are going to come up in a way that’s automated and takes the guesswork out of it.

Peter Renton  22:46

I want to actually go back to Square payroll because did you develop that yourself? Or are you partnered with somebody else?

Christina Riechers  22:52

Square built Square payroll itself, yes.

Peter Renton  22:55

Okay. Interesting, interesting. And is that is that under your umbrella or not?

Christina Riechers  22:59

It’s not but uh, you know, always what we try to do with Square is find the ways in which are for a seller, they get benefits by using multiple of our products, and that the ecosystem really comes together. And so, you know, one example of how we’ve done that with payroll is if you use Square payroll and use Square checking, you can automatically run payroll for your employees, rather than have to wait for funds to get pulled from your bank account to run payroll, we know how much you have in your checking account, we can run payroll, and if you’re paying your employees into Cash App, that can also happen instantly. So the idea of instant payroll is pretty unique. So while we are separate teams who work on it, we’re constantly looking for opportunities to bridge the different products in a way that make life easier for our sellers.

Peter Renton  23:42

Yeah, so I want to talk about that actually, because, you know, Cash App, obviously monstrously successful. I think it was 50 million plus, I think I read in your earnings earnings report of Cash App users. And a lot of them have the debit card. And, you know, you’ve also got Afterpay. But I’m interested in like, these are really separate products in a way, like you’ve got Cash App, it a consumer product, obviously, Square is all small business, you’ve got Afterpay, which really is sort of a bridge between consumer and small business. How are you going to bring these three Afterpay, Cash App, and Square banking. How are you planning on bringing them together, integrating them in or what is sort of the movement there?

Christina Riechers  24:31

So as you touched on, Square and Cash App’s customer bases are different, right. Square serving small business owners and Cash App is serving individuals, really targeting households who make less than $150,000 a year. And so in that vein, when we build products between Square and Cash App, we’re building pretty bespoke customer experiences. And it’s not a primary goal to see how they interact with the other ecosystem. Where I think you’ll find, and we’re finding more opportunities to bridge the ecosystems, is in some of the platform elements, right? For Square business debit card, we’re using a lot of the infrastructure that Cash App built to do their own issuing program initially. So that’s like a great example of how we’re using the platform to help us build faster and scale more efficiently. There are some product overlaps, like I mentioned the Square payroll, and you can, if you’re using Square payroll for your employees, we suggest that you use Cash App’s tax filing service, to do taxes for free. So there’s some fun product synergy there, but I think the real potential is in the platform.

Peter Renton  25:43

Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. So I want to talk about generative AI for a minute. I’m curious about how you’re thinking about it, is it when you’re looking at Square banking, obviously, you’ve got huge numbers of customers that often have very unique needs. How are you actually, have you got anything in production yet when it comes to generative AI and Square banking? Or what are you thinking about?

Christina Riechers  26:11

One of my favorites, Square AI product launches has been with the Square marketing program. So this is a program that allows small business owners to send out emails to their customers. So you know, maybe you haven’t visited to the cafe or the quick service restaurant in three months. We automatically segment that customer base and suggest you send a $5 off coupon. Well, what we’re doing now is using generative AI to allow small business owners to write that email for you, right, you can choose what tone do you want? Is it friendly, is it professional, what length? And sort of have a few different buckets and then you know, you share the bullet points of what you’re actually trying to convey. And we’re using generative AI to draft those emails for our customers, which a lot of our sellers love, because that’s not something you know, there’s a really range of comfort that sellers have with writing and reaching their customer base, and to help them do so much more quickly. But the numbers of sellers who are using that feature is pretty staggering. When it comes to banking, some of the things we’re working on are really on the spending side. So as we’re working to have sellers think of us as the main home for their cash flow, we are building all sorts of ways for them to spend their money from Square, be it with their debit card, or otherwise with their checking account, be it with Square credit card, or with our bill pay product. And as we’re building out these different ways to spend with Square, AI offers a really great opportunity to be categorizing those spendings and help giving them insights into what they’re spending their funds on, so they can adjust that over time.

Peter Renton  27:43

Right, right. So I’m listening to you. And I’m struck by a couple of things. The small business owner, as you said, gets into small business not to manage a small business, they get in because they have a passion for cooking, or baking or for motor mechanics or any kind of whatever it is they’re in, they don’t want to manage finances, manage marketing, manage payroll, manage employees, and all that sort of thing. And I’m struck by the fact that it seems like we’re getting there when it comes to making life easier for small business owners. And I’d love to get your perspective on that, because you can look back nine years ago and think, What was Square doing for small businesses then? How far have we come in the last nine years?

Christina Riechers  28:27

We have come quite a ways, right? Like even with Square billpay, you get a paper invoice from a supplier, and you can take a photo and schedule when you want to have it set as paid via your debit card, or credit card or anything else. Like that’s lightways away from what was possible for your mom and pop shop 10 years ago, and just so easy and accessible. So while I think the tools are improving, I think the number of responsibilities and expectations that we’re placing on small business owners is also rising. So while you have an advancement of the tools, you also have an advancement of all the things that they need to do. And so I don’t know for a small business owner it feels like things are getting easier, because the complexity of what they need to do is also increasing.

Peter Renton  29:10

Yeah, interesting point. Interesting point. Okay, then last question, when you’re sort of looking at all of the trends in fintech and how they can possibly apply to small businesses in the future, what are the trends that you’re paying closest attention to right now?

Christina Riechers  29:30

So as you mentioned, the beginning, we’re at Fintech Meetup right now, and there is a lot of exciting things happening in this space. The two themes that I’m hearing the most and that we’re also thinking about, is back to this notion of small business owners have too many tools. How do we make them more connected and embedded to really give small business owners time back? That’s one. The second is around the partnership between fintechs and banks, and what that looks like as as regulation evolves, and so I think that will be also a conversation that continues as the sophistication of fintechs increases, as well as regulators kind of think about how do we keep our economy safe with people using all sorts of different companies and entities to store, move their money.

Peter Renton  30:18

Ok, well, Christina, we’ll have to leave it there. I really appreciate you coming by today. And great work you’re doing, important work, I think, to really help small businesses become more successful on the bottom line. So anyway, thanks again for coming on.

Christina Riechers  30:32

Thank you for having me.

Peter Renton  30:34 Well, I hope you enjoyed the show. Thank you so much for listening. Please go ahead and give the show a review on the podcast platform of your choice, and go tell your friends and colleagues about it. Anyway, on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate you listening, and I’ll catch you next time. Bye

  • Peter Renton

    Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus, the world’s largest digital media company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series.