The Fintech OG Series: Shanthi Shanmugam and Natasha Vernier

Powered by Spade.

Money moves faster than ever, but the hardest moments in fintech still happen when something goes wrong: a confusing transaction, a disputed charge, a fraud claim, or a control that fails when regulators come calling. We talk with Shanti Shanmugam, CEO and co-founder of Casap, and Natasha Vernier, CEO and co-founder of Cable, about what it takes to build trust in those high-stakes edge cases and how modern AI is changing the playbook for banks and fintechs.

We also get candid about founder life: the highs, the gut-punch lows, and the practical ways they stay resilient, from building a support network to separating identity from the company. Finally, we debate how agentic AI could drive more niche consumer finance products, what creates real loyalty, and what advice actually helps new grads entering fintech now.

Subscribe for more conversations with operators building the future of financial services.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Julie VerHage-Greenberg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-verhage-greenberg-1748801b

Lauren Crossett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-crossett-b3752126

Shanthi Shanmugam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanthi-shanmugam-4057284a

Natasha Vernier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashavernier

About The Fintech OGs

Former Bloomberg Fintech reporter Julie VerHage-Greenberg leads panels of the people who’ve taken Fintech from a hashtag to an industry through discussions on where we see the industry moving, what it takes to stay on top of the enormous changes that are still gripping the financial services industry,  and what they have learned as the best leaders in the field.  

Listen for the best up-to-date know-how from leaders in banking, payments, venture capital, fintech entrepreneurs, and all of those that have recreated financial services, and are still at it.

Transcript

Intro

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 1:26

Everyone, even in 2026, when fintechs can spin up cards and minutes and move money across borders in real time, it's still hard to decipher transactions. That's why financial institutions turn to spade. Spade is the data and AI platform that turns messy transaction strings into structured, verified records in real time. To learn more, head to spade.com. That's spa-de-e.com. Hello again. Welcome back to season two of episode two of season four now of the FinTech OGs. Um I'm back with my co-host Lauren of Spade, and we have two fabulous guests on today. We have Shanthi from is it Casap or Casap? How do you prefer? I've heard both. It's neither, actually. It's it's Casap, like a case done. K Study. Casap. Like a case study. No, I'm never gonna forget it. That's amazing. Okay, and then Natasha from Cable. Much I know how to pronounce cable, so we're good. But I'm gonna let each of you do a quick intro on your self. Shanthi, I'll let you go first since I mispronounced your company name.

Shanthi Shanmugam 2:31

No, it's all good. It's all good. I'm glad that it gets me such privileges, like getting to go first. Um yeah, Shanthi, CEO, co-founder of Casap, stands for get your case.asap. Um, we are an agentic platform for solving disputes and first-party fraud. Um, started the company three years ago, um, based out of New York and San Francisco. Before that, um, I was the second product hire at Robinhead, where I helped scale the company for six years, and my co-founder was at Chime. So just really built the company from a lot of the things we've seen in the guts. I think Natasha has a very similar story as well. Um, and have just been very fascinated by the problems that we solve.

Natasha Vernier 3:09

So, yeah, that's me. Awesome. Um, thanks for having me. I'm Tash. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Cable. Uh, we automate compliance testing. Uh, so where banks have to have a bunch of controls in place like identity verification or KYC, transaction monitoring. They also have to test whether any of that stuff works. And we're the first people, and so far, I think the only people to actually automate that. Um, I'm also newly the host of the In Control podcast, which I'm loving. Um, so I hope maybe I can have all of you on there one day.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 3:39

There we go. You're booked out through May, you said. So it might it might be a few months before we can get on. But you know, before the end of 2026, maybe we'll get a sliding.

Lauren Crossett 3:47

Yeah, that's the list I want to be on. Um Natasha, maybe you could start by telling us a little bit more about how you got into FinTech.

Natasha Vernier 3:56

Yeah, for sure. And I was thinking we should do some um where did our company names come from? And I am pleased that you explained that, Shanthi, because I was wondering about that. So I will now not forget it, Casap. Um yeah, so I was working in corporate finance back in London, and I was I was working at a I really liked the people I was working with, but I was really, really bored with the work itself. And I started going to a lot of fintech meetups in London. Uh, we have what we call the Silicon Roundabout, which is not as impressive as Silicon Valley. It is literally a roundabout. Well, what roughly like what year is this to?

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 4:32

Just so I get some like timing there.

Robinhood Lessons That Became Casap

Natasha Vernier 4:33

Yeah, this is 2015. So this is pretty early in like the London tech scene. Um, and I decided I wanted to get into tech, and I decided that FinTech, or as we called it back then, Challenger Banking, was the place that I could add some value. I'd been um in corporate finance for five years. I had a law degree and accountancy qualifications, so kind of like banking finance made sense. Um, and I decided that challenger banking was the place for me. And at the time in London, there was Revolute Mondo, now Monzo, um, tandem and starling. And I thought that Tom Blomfield and Monzo or Mondo were the ones that I wanted to do this with. And I emailed Tom. They didn't have any jobs um, you know, open at the time. There was like 10 people in uh in White Bear Yard, which was Passion Capital's like little accelerator office that they had. And I, you know, said, I wanted to start a bank and this is what I would do. And can I work with you? I had a pretty strange um hiring process because they didn't really have a hiring process set up at that time. I organized an event for them with no real clear objectives other than like have an event. Um, and then I joined in January 2016 as just business operations, pretty quickly became head of financial crime. It was my first experience of anything compliance related. Uh, but it was really cool because I got to come at it with a totally fresh set of eyes and partner with a very experienced uh financial crime subject matter expertise expert. And together we kind of wrote the policies and procedures to get us a UK banking license. I was there for four and a half years. We went from no customers to four and a half million customers, uh, and then I left to start cable. So that's kind of the whistle stop tour of my background into founding cable.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 6:17

I think my new question of like whether or not someone is a fintech OG or not is just gonna be what was Monzo's original name? And if they remember that right off the top of their head, then they're a fintech OG. You're good to go. Um, but Shanthi, I feel like you probably had a weird hiring process at Robinhood if you were their second product hire and stuff too. Was that your first job in fintech, or had you been in the space a little bit before that too?

Shanthi Shanmugam 6:38

Yeah, no, that was my first job at fintech. So for me, like my background was in electrical engineering computer science from Berkeley, but I was very much like I could code, but I was so much more interested in figuring out what problems I should solve than like how to do it. So I like kind of stumbled into product. Like the way I thought about product was like someone pays me to like do things a founder would do without the risk of a founder. So I was like, this sounds great.

Natasha Vernier 7:00

Um and my first job back why did why did you ever why did you ever stop that?

Founder Highs Lows And Resilience

Shanthi Shanmugam 7:06

That's a great question. It's one that I asked myself from time to time. Um, yeah, maybe I like pain. Um, but yes. Um, but yeah, no, like my my first gig out of college was actually, you know, this is kind of funny for for us to think about, but it was um I was on the there's this like rotational PM uh program at Facebook. That's actually where I met my co-founder like over a decade ago. But I was on these teams, and one team was literally called Women in Emerging Markets, which is like, Shanthi, go figure out how to get women in emerging markets, specifically India, to use Facebook. And I'm like, they have better things to do with their time. So I, you know, nine months in, I was just like, why does this need to exist? Why do I need to get more people to use Facebook? What truly matters to people? And I did something quite morbid, um, which is I wrote my own obituary. This sounds really wild, but I was like, what do I want to be able to say on my deathbed about my impact on this planet? It was like very like, whoo. Um, and then I just kind of realized that there's only two things that matter to people, and I think that's health and wealth. And then I was like, okay, because these domains matter so much, they're so regulated, and because they're so regulated, they feel very antiquated. And like, let me understand why. So I was very intentional when I chose Robin Hood. I was only looking at health techs and fintechs. I wanted to be the first or second PM super early, needs to be the messiest, but I have to be surrounded by people that I thought were smarter than me. Um and Robinhood kind of checked a lot of those boxes. So yeah, that was my first foray into fintech. And timing-wise, it was wild because I joined 2017 right into that crypto craze when Coinbase was number one in the app store. And my, I think my first claim to fame at Robinhood was launching crypto with an amazing team. Um, but I was definitely the crypto product lead and launched it in like three months, which is wild. So did that, and then the inspiration for a case app actually came from the whole GameStop fiasco where I had to launch 24-7 phone and chat support and figure out how to build trust. And lo and behold, you build trust in these moments of friction and and and fear, fraud, disputes. And I realized that those situations were almost guaranteed to, you know, lose someone as a primary customer's Robin Hood. Um, lots of compliant requirements that made our team very nervous about making, you know, consistent decisions, whether it's approving or denying, and then would always touch the bottom line when it came to fraud losses. So I was like, oh, that's a hairy problem that I just spent three years solving. And then when ChatGPT came out, I was like, huh. Like everything changes now. And then that's when I started Casap. So that's like that's the longer story, but yeah.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 9:33

I wish we could spend the entire podcast talking about like what it was like being at Robin Hood during the whole GameStop thing and stuff. But what not were you guys all remote? I forget exactly what months that happened, but you guys were remote still at that time, right? Or were you in person? Because I remember like COVID obviously was going on.

Shanthi Shanmugam 9:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is like kind of like COVID time. Actually, not kind of, it was like smack dab COVID time. Um, so we were in person, then COVID, and then we were in person again as we were like scaling up.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 10:02

Crazy. I mean, I guess that got you ready kind of for the pain of being a founder and like the adrenaline rush and like, you know, twists and turns and everything too. But that has to be again, I we need to do like a whole other episode on just that part of it. Because I feel like all of us, plus the listeners, would love learning more about that as well. Um, that brings me into another question, though, a little bit too is talk through a little bit about some career highs and lows. Um, not that that would, I don't think that would be a high, uh, maybe a different kind of high. But um even necessarily a low. I feel like being a founder, there's so many other lows that you go through on just like a daily basis, like, you know, VC shooting down your ideas, a like product not resonating with customers as much as you thought, um, something going wrong and like risk compliance, etc., given we're talking a lot about that too. But um, Tosh, maybe walk through um, you know, whichever one comes to mind first, like a career high or low that that you um that you think of right away. And if it if it's a low, like how you got through that.

Natasha Vernier 11:05

Yeah, I I think that both of those things have like changed in their in their kind of structure over the years. I certainly remember lots of career highs at Monzo getting our banking license was just like this massive moment for us because of what we were doing at the time. And we were the first new banking license in God knows how many years there. Um, and you know, reaching a million customers and then reaching four million customers and like spending no money on marketing, and then we launched a TV ad, and that was huge. Like all of those things felt like really big and important at the time, and I have such fond memories of them. It was like Monzo in London probably felt quite similar to Robin Hood in San Francisco at the time. Like we had these hot coral cards. Um, I probably have one in my desk somewhere. Uh, we had these like hot coral cards, and you would go to any shop, um, any cafe, any restaurant in London, and people would be like, Oh my god, have you got a Mondo card? And then I'd be like, Yeah, I work there. And they'd be like, Oh my god, tell me about your job. And my wife was so relieved when I quit Monzo because she was like, I do not have to talk about Monzo over dinner ever again. And then I started a company and she was like, hmm. Um, so those all like highs, but they now in hindsight, they were like, they feel like quite young or immature in sort of how I felt about them at the time. Because now, compared to cable and compared to like the pride of having founded a company and even just having run it for six years, having kept it alive for this long, like that's a different kind of high and pride that I'm able to feel. Um, but with that, the lows during cable have been so much lower than the lows that I had during Monzo. Um, the lows during Monzo were more me learning how to manage or learning how to upward manage and present effectively at a board level with this regulated bank that I now worked in. And like they were, they were like personal development lows that came with a lot of stress. But the lows of cable are like, I have to fire people and I am impacting someone's actual life. And we restructured our entire company. We were based in the UK and Europe, and we we moved here and we moved from remote to in-person, and and that was like basically an entire company restructure, which involved transitioning a lot of people out of the company. And, you know, I don't want to diminish how that felt for those people. It felt, I'm sure, truly awful for the people that were impacted, but the kind of low that it feels as the person like making that decision and going through that is a is a very different kind of low than I ever felt when it wasn't my company. Um, so I guess in summary, being a founder, the highs are higher and the lows are way lower. And both of those things feel much more frequent than when I was just an employee.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 14:02

Totally. I can't know myself really, but I see Shanthi shaking her head in agreement the entire time you were talking there.

Shanthi Shanmugam 14:09

Yeah, I mean, you said it so well towards the end. The highs are high and the lows are low, and they're a lot more often. Um, I feel like I'm so hyper-stimulated as a founder CEO. I feel like I've almost made myself unemployable ever again because I can't imagine doing anything that's not this. Um, but for me, yeah, like I there's so, so many highs in my in my career so far at Robinhood. Um, the IPO was insane. Um, and and at Casap so far too. Uh we've been seeing really cool product market fit. I used to wonder what does product market fit feel like at an enterprise company? You know, I've only had been to Facebook, Robinhood, all consumer, it's very different. There's metrics. And I was like, oh, and you know, you know. And like, you know, we're at this moment now where I was at like I'll tell you a big high recently, and then I'll also tell you a low from like earlier K SAP. A big high recently was that we were at a a pretty big um conference last week, uh two weeks ago. And this is a conference that this is the first conference I went to after I had my first child. You know, I still remember I was like pumping, nursing, feeling so awkward. I was the only person doing anything go to market a year ago. Like I just hired someone. My first time meeting him was at this conference, and we were like crashing this conference in the lobby, just trying to meet people. And I just felt, you know, it was I was doing my thing, but it just felt like I was just so um so invisible, right? And then this time I'm at this conference, you know, we have this big booth. I have 10 people on my sales team there. We host this dope Bollywood party where I'm teaching all of these banking executives how to do like a dance, and I'm walking through this like main lobby that everyone congregates at, and people are like stopping me. Like my team was joking. It's like, how long do you think it'll take to walk across this lobby with Shanthi? Because everyone seems to know her. And the coolest part was when I would tell someone, you know, oh yeah, I started this company Casap, like, Casap, I love you guys. And I was like, I know for a fact you're not a customer and we've never talked to you before. So the fact that there's this word of mouth, like I get goosebumps just thinking about it. So literally, like two weeks ago was like a very, very big moment for like, wow, so much can happen in a year. But I still remember one of the lows, early Casap, and trust me, but many, of course. Um, but I remember the first year, 2023, um, you know, I was very clear on the problem we wanted to solve, which was like, how do we leverage, you know, the latest in AI to help uh financial institutions, bank, fintech, whatnot, to instantly resolve a dispute for an honest person without losing money to less honest people. We started seeing this trend of first party fraud, where honestly the fraudster these days is the person that is exactly what they say they are buying a thing and also wanting the money, right? It's like it's a very interesting phenomenon right now. So I was very clear on the problem. And then I thought, you know, okay, well, I was at Robinhood, my co-founder was at Chime, that's where my network is. Let me go talk to FinTechs. And I, you know, through tooth and nail, before even having a full product, had signed like maybe five fintechs, you know, we call them design partners, where they would give us some sort of money and feedback, whatnot, but customers. And then six months later, three of those five went belly up. And I was like, huh, I have to be both a founder and an investor and really understand which one of my customers are actually going to exist six months from now. And there aren't that many fintechs. Like, is this even a sustainable business model, let alone a venture backable business? And I had this moment, six months into start. And again, like my risk profile was kind of high because, you know, I'm living in the middle of Manhattan. My husband had already quit his pretty lucrative job to take no money starting his own company a year earlier. And we knew that we wanted to start a family. So I'm like, did I just make one of the worst decisions of my life? And what I realized in that moment was like, okay, well, what are some assumptions I made? The assumption I made is what all these investors had told me that I could only sign fintech. And then once you sign fintechs, then you get the attention of larger fintechs, and then you get the attention of banks, and there's a sequence to it. Let me hear from the horse's mouth that they're gonna say no to me. Like, let me go talk to banks, let me go talk to credit unions, let me go talk to these traditional financial institutions that are historically risk averse. And then most of them said yes. And I was just like, huh. Okay, lessons here. Um well, maybe always hear it from the horse's mouth, quote unquote, and don't take other people's words for it and uh believe in yourself, I guess. Like it's so cheesy. But um, I think if you know, if if I'd sort of given up in that moment when, you know, 90 75% of my customers pretty much didn't exist later, I I we would not be here. So I think that was a low that have then converted to a high. But yeah, that's that's what comes to mind.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 18:46

How do one quick thing before we move on? How did you get through each of those lows? Well, like I'm talking like going out for a walk, talking with your spouse or friends, um, having a good like what got you through and convinced you to keep going in in any of those things? Okay, workout. I don't know. Lots of things.

Shanthi Shanmugam 19:07

I did work out quite a bit. Um uh keyword did like I've not gone to the gym in like two months. I should work on that.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 19:13

But um Well, you have a kid now too, so that's a workout.

Shanthi Shanmugam 19:17

I won't I won't blame her for anything that I don't do that I want to do. I was like, oh, I have a kid now. Um, but no, I honestly like I I would say I have, and I think this is like who I am as a person. Like I've been through, you know, other lows personally and professionally before, even I mean, six years at Robinhood, it was crazy. Like very similar high highs, low lows, all of that. I think I had like eight managers in my six years there, some great, some not so great. High managers if you're listening. Um, but my I think I'm I'm a robustly optimistic person. What I mean by that is there's dunk your head in the sand optimism, right? And that's a very naive, brittle, um, you know, glass bubble type optimism where you just like hope and by sheer will everything will work, but then you're blindsided when things don't work, and then you're in like down in the dumps. I've always been someone that exactly, exactly, right? And I've always been someone that um has been, I've always been very um, I guess, aware of I guess I have a wild imagination and I'm always on, right? Unless I'm watching a really good thriller on Apple TV, which has been crazy good so far. Um, but I'm always imagining all the different ways things can fail in every everything that I'm doing. But I have this like unexplainable kind of like optimism that, okay, in the face of all of this, that small 1% sliver where I like navigate through all of that, that's gonna be the world that I create. That's gonna be the life that I live in. And I think because I'm aware of everything that can go wrong, but I still believe that that's possible. Um, and I think the other thing too is I don't my identity, like, yes, I have to, you know, I talk a lot on LinkedIn, and a lot of people do know me as like CEO, co-founder of Kassap, or you know, like if they haven't heard the whole case ACP yet, I don't actually internally consider my identity as co-founder, CEO of Casap. Like my identity is much deeper than that. Like it's I have a very great relationship with my husband. I have a beautiful almost two-year-old daughter who is like the light of my life. I have great family and friends. I love to dance. Like, there's so much more to me than than just this. And I think that helps me, that helps me feel like even when things go wrong, the world is not ending around me, even though my body viscerally feels like there's a fight or flight response. So I I hope that answers your question. But like I think the combination of that is what makes me resilient enough to keep doing this thing and want to do this thing for the next like few decades, you know?

Parenting Identity And Founder Support

B2B Versus Consumer Fintech Reality

Natasha Vernier 21:50

Yeah, I uh I I definitely have struggled with what you're talking about there, Shanthi, of like detaching my identity from cable. Um, that has been like a really, really difficult thing I have found to do on a consistent, ongoing basis. Um I always say that I think that spouses or partners of founders should get equity in their businesses automatically because the amount of shit. Am I allowed to swear on this? The amount of stuff that my wife has like had to listen to over the years of like the stories, the endless like, should I do this? These are the options, what do I do now? Like the, I mean, just endless conversation about cable. Um, probably the main way that I get out of my lows is by talking it through with her. And uh, and yeah, she's uh she's a very patient woman. Um, but it it's funny, and I'm interested how you, Shanthi, kind of handled this in the early days of Casap. Um, we had our first daughter the week before I, the week after I signed my term sheet for our pre-seed round. And so we had like our daughter Delphine, like basically as I started the company. And then just under two years later, uh, we had my son, um, and I had an ectopic pregnancy in the middle of that. And so, like, a lot of the story of cable is like really tied up with my family. And so the best way is if I am stressed or if I'm feeling really low, if I could tear myself away from my desk right here and go and like take a walk or go on a bike ride or just get outside with the kids. And just to see them not caring about any of the stuff that, like frankly, we as adults have all made up for us to care about and do with our lives. Because like frankly, it's all just made up stuff. To see them just like looking at butterflies or like looking at the hummingbird on the hummingbird feeder. Like they just don't have this weight of the stuff that humans have managed to create for themselves to be stressed about. And I find that like the best way to get out of any funk I'm in. This is such a sweet like mom spectrum.

Lauren Crossett 23:57

Like we're turning it into a mom podcast. But I think that's so nice too, right? Like I I feel like you know so for so long at least in my fintech career it didn't feel like there was a lot of uh that family balance um and certainly not amazing women founders with children. And so I I think that's so great. And um yeah I definitely use my daughter for the same thing of like okay let's go do something else. You don't care. Although she's obsessed with this microphone.

Natasha Vernier 24:31

Me too. Oh my gosh. My kids are obsessed with my like little microphone and they try and press all the keyboard buttons and they're like turning on the lights and yeah.

Lauren Crossett 24:40

But I just wonder too um you know having you're both have experience at these massive um direct-to-consumer brands how do the highs feel different in B2B and and you know as founders too like how do you help your teams feel the highs when it's not the people at the coffee shop being like oh you have that card?

Natasha Vernier 25:01

Yeah. That's like a it's a very good question. At Monzo, I remember thinking by the end of my time there, I will never build or work for a consumer brand again. The customer support was endless just absolutely never ending. And the focus on a founder of a consumer brand is so much more intense than that of a B2B brand in my opinion. Our CEO at Monzo Tom was on the front page of the UK newspapers like every week we had a one of the BBC TV programs, they made an ICE Monzo card and put it outside of our office to talk about how we were freezing cards and then they brought a live film crew and were recording outside our office with an ICE Monzo card. Like it was insane. That said B2B has its like whole other variety of challenges and one is like the one that you you ask about specifically Lauren like how do so we're building automated control testing how can my team get excited about that when like they're not using it every day. And that's certainly a big challenge. And so we have found that trying to really connect with like the mission of what we're doing and trying to bring education and learning to our our meetups or our weekly lunches or whatever it might be to try to make sure that they hear the the reasons why we're doing what we're doing is is helpful. Bringing in people to chat as well some of our customers like having customers come and talk about how much excitement they're getting from the product is a really helpful way. But it's definitely more difficult than with a consumer product. Shanthi hat, what have you found?

Using Customer Stories To Motivate

Shanthi Shanmugam 26:45

Yeah um yeah I was like thinking about that that story yeah talk about founders like I think Vlad had to deal with so much through Robinhood and like the crazy ups and downs. I actually I made very similar to you Tosh like I made a very early decision in my career that if I were to start a company it would absolutely be B2B. I think for me that came from wanting to really understand at a deep level who every one of my customers are. And I also think the loyalty that you can build through a B2B relationship, it's very hard to replicate in a consumer relationship. Like I remember seeing that when I was at Facebook I was at Facebook the same time Instagram launched Instagram stories. And you could essentially see just like as Instagram stories that experiment was getting you know more and more available to the general public how Snapchat daily activity would drop. And you're like, okay Snapchat came up with this like way of communicating and you have these people that have been using Snapchat for you know a decade at that point where is the loyalty it just felt like your consumers are so fickle and I just did not want to bet my entire life and livelihood on fickle consumers such as us. Right. So I think from that perspective I decide really early on enterprise and to answer your question around like how I think about the the enterprise thing and getting the team excited you brought up the whole thing around okay how do they get excited and build a deep empathy for a product they don't use themselves. That's the same thing we're asking too like one of our values at Casap is be an expert, be an expert in this space. What are ways we can help them be experts like truly deeply like I've actually been thinking about signing folks up to certain like certification courses around disputes and chargebacks and fraud and and crimes and just like financial crime just to give people like whether it's an engineer or marketing or sales or or even my executive assistant right I think everyone needs to have full empathy for the problem. So like I'm totally there with you in terms of getting folks really excited like I I think with us like because we solve something that does have an end uh consumer impact with disputes like we've actually had a lot of examples and the teams the teams that we support like I literally um I was on site with one of our customers and we were recording they happen to have a TV studio which I thought was cool. So this um so this uh institution had a TV studio where we're recording a testimonial on their experience with Casap and this is literally someone that's been doing disputes for I think two decades now and she started tearing up and I was like huh? And she was like she was crying happy tears because she felt like she could actually not be a robot and so much more of a human after like leveraging Casap as her tool. And she was talking about how she was never able to leave work at work because of the deadlines because of how intense it is when someone's like I need my money back I can't pay rent. She was always working weekends, evenings, mornings to the point where they were actually going to couples therapy with her with her spouse, just talking through how she could handle it. And she literally was like in the case study for Casap I'm gonna put the couples therapy I no longer have to pay for and my husband would be here and wanting to talk to you about like the impact Casap made. And again I think this is like an edge case I'm not I'm not hearing this all the time like um but like like yeah I I can't say on my tagline on my website Casap saving marriages but it's just like that really struck me and I started crying. So there was just like this like little sob happy tear situation. But I think like I think and we actually flew her into our New York office had her meet with the whole team but like I think there's something about the teams that you support and helping them do their best work and this you know kind of end impact that has for their consumers who's able to make rent who's feeling like their back is covered by this institution you know all of that like it was it was super meaningful so yeah I don't know there there's certain moments like that it's not every day but when you have those moments you hold on to them for dear life I think can I can I ask a question that is amazing.

Natasha Vernier 30:31

That's such a cool story. Can I ask a question about something you said earlier you meant you said that um with consumer apps like the loyalty feels so fickle do you think that that is gonna change with AI because like before Robinhood was like the product to do any kind of it's like the new way to buy, keep, sell, trade um equities. But it's like a one product fits all. And now with AI it's so much cheaper to do niche products for a smaller group of people and to make that financially viable because of AI. And so do you think we're gonna start seeing a lot more products but with smaller user bases but that are very viable businesses with much higher brand loyalty.

AI Niche Brands And Loyalty Moats

Shanthi Shanmugam 31:14

Absolutely so there I there's actually two ways I think that's gonna manifest. So one is like here's my take you guys are going to get my hot take on fintech right that's what we're here for. So like I feel like every financial institution on this planet fintech bank credit union name it is trying to do the same thing. Everyone wants to have that primary financial relationship. Like I can ask you Lauren where do you keep all your money and I as your bank would want you to say my name but at the end of the day there's only like 15 different financial products an institution could provide to their customers. And at the end of the day it's a commoditized industry. Like you have to realize like you know within Robinhood we'd say oh credit card this is zero to one this is so exciting waitlist how many credit cards can the average American choose from a ton. So my point to to answer your question Tosh is like on one on one end I think people differentiate by real access to relevant value. Relevant is the whole like AI thing, right? Where it's like if you have a niche like you know a card for um you know certain immigrants from a certain country that need a certain thing. Or if you look at credit unions, they were actually segmentation based right so there's a credit union in Southern California that is literally focused on teachers and they have all these financial products that surround things that teachers need right they take summer vacations maybe there's certain ways that you can tailor to that their payroll is like through the school and there's certain things so I think it's really understanding the needs of a demographic and I totally believe in niche sort of financial services winning. The other way I also think about AI changing things is the same thing I focused on at Robinet for a few years, which is network effects. Like when I think about a consumer app that has my insane loyalty I think of Spotify. Even if there was a Spotify like copycat that showed up tomorrow cheaper you know $10 cheaper whatnot a month I don't remember what I pay for Spotify I wouldn't move. I wouldn't move because I have like sweat equity in Spotify it knows me. Like it knows me better than I know myself at least my music taste. So it's like to me it's like you pick an audience and you focus on their true jobs to be done their like internal needs and you make it so that the more they use it the more they need to stay here because no one else has the context that this relationship has. But I think the financial the financial industry I think they're quite far from like really achieving that.

Natasha Vernier 33:37

Does that resonate? Does that make sense? Yeah yeah yeah for sure I think that um I think that we're gonna see a lot more smaller brands and I it's gonna be interesting to see what it does to the VC industry as well because there's going to be less need for investment on the smaller end and then as we've already started to see like more investment needs at the bigger end or not we'll see how any of those investments play out. But like yeah.

Shanthi Shanmugam 34:00

That's an interesting call out that's actually an interesting call out because I feel like you know in the early days when you think about like the origin of venture when we had all these big consumer brands a lot of that money went to like marketing right like when I think about some of Robin's biggest fan or Monzo's biggest fan it's like that marketing budget the c competing on the Apple like the App Store the Google ads or you know whatever.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 34:23

I think there were stories about like how much SoFi spent on marketing each year and people were like this is absurd. And then of course they bought SoFi Stadium which has turned out to be brilliant with how many Super Bowls and everything have been there.

What AI Changes For Venture

Shanthi Shanmugam 34:34

But exactly exactly like we we even did a Super Bowl ad and a few different there's a whole story of marketing as I did and did not work at Robinhood. But like I think the the question that I was kind of asking with that is like okay well that was a that was a requirement of capital right that you needed to land grab you needed to get that awareness how does that work for B2B I'm not saying we don't need marketing. We absolutely need marketing but it's a very different economics I think being B2B enterprise focused on financial institutions where it's like how we think about venture dollars and how we think about deploying capital I think needs to be very different than what venture was originally sort of known for in tech like a decade ago. You know what I mean?

Natasha Vernier 35:11

Do you think I do think it's so different B2C and B2B with regards to the venture because yes on the B2C side marketing and then also customer support both of which have now fundamentally changed with AI. On the B2B side I don't know that niche products work the same right because whenever we talk to a chief compliance officer at a bank they don't want 10 different tools for the 10 different niche things they have to do. They want one tool and so there's still going to be this like aggregation problem on the B2B side that I don't think exists necessarily on the B2C side.

Advice For New Fintech Graduates

Shanthi Shanmugam 35:44

In fact I'll take it even a step further I I think what like AI enables us, agentic AI enables us to do is actually provide outcomes right like I I feel like so far we've been so focused on workflow integration tools but I actually feel like if we can think of it as like teams and outcomes but the teams and outcomes are AI enabled I it's a very interesting nuance but I think that also that also changes how the enterprise sale will be whereas like I think it's we're actually going to move more into like AI native services versus AI native platforms.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 36:17

I have a question for you guys. So we've we've brought up the topic of AI on CNBC I think earlier today it was there was an article probably some consulting firm did a project where it's like AI could eliminate 30% of like incoming college graduate jobs. And given that one of the questions I like to ask on here is if you were a recent college grad, you know what areas of fintech would you want to be getting into right now?

Natasha Vernier 36:41

So kind of take those two like combining those two things what advice would you have for someone that either undergrad or MBA is graduating is like, you know, I I want to make it big in fintech I want to climb my way up the corporate ladder maybe start my own company one day what advice would you have for them I saw something a headline yesterday that the CEO of Palantir basically said you either need to be in professional services or you need to be like neurodivergent to succeed in the future which I think is such a bullshit take. But that aside um have you seen the CEO of Palantir? I actually can't believe like that I would say that other than I'm like yeah yeah I think I think that it it actually like right now hasn't changed hugely the advice that I'd give to the advice that I was was giving when I joined Monzo. So when I graduated from university I had a law degree I knew I didn't want to become a lawyer. I went to Ernst Young and I spent three years doing the accountants for qualification, working in corporate finance, like a graduate scheme, pretty quickly realized I hated that spent another two years doing that and then moved into tech. The thing that I was just so amazed by was the opportunities and the speed of learning at a small startup versus a huge corporation like Ernst Young just hands down different worlds. And so my advice still would be just get any entry level job at any startup because if in a small startup that has got venture backing there is going to be an inbuilt urgency. There is going to be new and just an increasing amount of stuff to be done and the amount that you'll learn in two years, even if the startup dies, even if you don't find your area of passion that is where you end up for the next 10, 20 years, you will learn so much that you'll know a little bit about what you don't want to do and you'll be set up to go join the next startup. I think I certainly had this and I I imagine other people do. I was so concerned as a young graduate to find the path that I would be on forever. And already like I'm 37 already I have had a corporate finance career. I've had a head of financial crime at a fintech career I've had a founder career like I'll probably have two or three or four other careers. And that was a foreign concept to certainly my parents but probably like our parents generation my mum was a dentist and she worked in literally the same room for 30 years. And so her concept of me moving jobs was like ah panic. And so the advice I would give to young people is like just get a job in a startup because the amount that you'll learn and the things that you'll know that you do like and importantly don't like, those things will just happen quicker. And the experience that you'll gain will just be absolutely useful for whatever it is you want to do.

The Best Advice And Coaching

Shanthi Shanmugam 39:37

Yeah I'm I'm pretty much with you there. I think the thing I would also add to that is like um what I've realized that I got kind of lucky with is I ended up building a skill stack kind of like how like tech has their stacks. I have a skill stack of things that I've touched that I know I'm good at things that I've touched that I know I'm not good at things that are really important that I know I'll always delegate but like pretty much I have a very good understanding of how I want to spend my time and what my unique sort of skills are. And I think like I think it's I think it it benefits people because you know at a startup or even at a big company you kind of get pulled into where's the org where's the reorg where's my manager going what what where's the market going? What do the investors want us to do? So like being able to navigate some of that to be like okay cool like I I have enough in product like can I get some in design okay I have enough in design can I get some in like just technical speak or like engineering. So I I think I I think that's like the other piece of advice I'd give and then the the other thing too is like man I look at like what Claude can do these days and I'm just like I need to be constantly reinventing how I spend my time and the assumptions I make on like a clip I've never had to do before that for that used to be like a oh every New Year's resolution let me play around with things over the holidays to every weekend I feel like I need to try different things try new skills connectors stuff like that. So I just feel like if someone was graduating college now start up understand what skills you have and what skills you want for you know things you want to be able to do in the future don't think of it in terms of titles but like outcomes that you'd want to be able to drive and then dedicate 20% of your time to constantly understanding and reinventing your perception of the world in my opinion that's wild.

Natasha Vernier 41:19

Awesome maybe just to round it out um what's the best piece of advice you've ever received I don't know that there's like one I there have been so many bits of advice that have felt at that moment like the most important piece of advice and that what that actually tells me is that the advice that is the best is like surround yourself with people that you can call because the the advice that I have gotten that has always felt like the best advice has been because I've I've had the opportunity to call somebody who is an expert in that area. So Lauren we were introduced in like December 2020 when I was just starting cable and you gave me a ton of advice about how to sell to banks. Fast forward right three, four years later, I um I have the opportunity to have this advisor and a mentor and an investor who is the chief revenue officer and like founding team member at Marquetta. I can call him up and it's like the the ability to like have people that you can call that at the right moment can give you the piece of advice that you need right then that's how I have found those pieces of advice that at that moment I've been like, oh my God, of course that's the best piece of advice that I have ever had over the six years of cable there isn't one piece of advice that sticks out because there's just so much to do and there are so many different challenges and honestly like I have changed so much, right? That like the kind of advice that I need varies so much. And so to like totally not answer the question and to flip it back round, the advice that I would give is like surround yourself with people who can at the right time give you the advice that that will help. And those might be angel investors they might be advisors they might be friends they might be family members they might just be people in the industry that you're fortunate enough to be introduced to but those relationships and that advice that they can give over the years that I've been doing this that has always been the best advice I've gotten.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 43:27

It reminds me I think it was Stephanie Kirkpatrick that's um has told me before like one of the best pieces of advice she got was have a 911 list which is people that you can call whether it be work personal whatever like those are the ones you know are gonna they're gonna answer they're gonna talk you through it give you great advice and and you're set.

Natasha Vernier 43:46

And Stephanie is an ancient investor in cable and actually the advisor that I'm talking about from Marquetta we both share and she has talked about him a lot. So yeah I uh I think Stephanie's very wise your 911 list. He sure is yeah uh Shanthi, what about you?

Shanthi Shanmugam 44:00

Yeah it's really hard to think about a piece of advice I've received but uh I think um honestly yeah so I'll like flip it around just be like if there's like one thing I would advise people to think about on this journey um which I've learned from like just like firsthand experience is like um always I would say always understand and focus on what what drives your customer right your customer even even in enterprise it's people right I feel like for all of our prospects and all of our customers I know what gets them going I know what gets them scared I know what makes them look really good I I know what they're thinking about like next year and the year after that and I feel like as long as we're driving that value and there's a really great open line between me and them regardless of how great things are going or how better things could be going everything else we will build a good business. Venture funding will always be that I think that's the other thing too it's like there's a world where you can do things for great funding rounds that are it's mutually exclusive from building a good business believe it or not like I I I feel like that's just I I I think I've always focused on building a good business and the money has always been there when we needed it knock on wood that that continues to be the case. But I think Yeah, I think it's just like there's so much, there's so much distraction, right? So much stimuli that we could respond to. There's probably at least 50 emails I haven't responded to yet that I need to work on. But it's just like that there's like one thing that's super important is just making sure we're always continually driving customer value at that customer brand and relationship that we have, and like everything else will be good. So like that's that's kind of what I use when I'm like sitting looking at my inbox, but just wanting to like close it out on a Sunday, being like, I don't even know where to start. I'm like, all right, where are my customers at? Let me go figure that out first. Um so yeah, that's that's probably that's probably what I would say.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 45:55

Lauren, what's the best piece of advice you've ever gotten?

Lauren Crossett 45:58

Oh no.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 46:01

Again, I I can edit out the pauses too.

Lauren Crossett 46:03

So I spent a ton of time with my coach, and I think um someone along the way must have told me to get one of those. Um, and I think that that's actually been the best piece of advice. And and actually, maybe it was Tess or the co-founder at um State where I work now that that made that mandate. Um, but having Janice, amazing coach, and just that time to think about the job and about what I'm bringing to the job and what I need for my life, not just my professional life, but my whole life, um, has just been so transformational for me. Um in every way, like not just in how I lead teams and how I participate in teams and how I show up when it is family time and um in recognizing the value of the network and how to keep investing and growing that nine-on-one list and what have you. So yeah, I think that the advice to have a coach or to at least have time to really think about like how we're doing the work, not just doing the work, which is really, really, really hard for me for a long time, um, was definitely the best advice.

Shanthi Shanmugam 47:21

Wow, that sounds amazing. I I want your coach. I've I've looked at coaches, I haven't found anyone I really liked. I need I need an introduction. Tash, do you have a coach? I'm curious.

Lauren Crossett 47:30

She's I mean, talk to Janice.

Shanthi Shanmugam 47:32

Yeah, I think it's been five years.

Lauren Crossett 47:34

Like I am I'm all in on Janice.

Shanthi Shanmugam 47:36

All right, Janice.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 47:38

Just I I need I need her number. There you go. Here's the referral. If anyone else on here needs Janice's number, ping ping Lauren.

Natasha Vernier 47:48

Yeah. Lauren, I wonder, having spent some time with Janice, um, often I like reflect on the time I've spent with my coach or with different mentors and advisors and people over the years, like the thing that actually most decisions, most action like comes back to is just being able to follow my own gut. And I wonder if you have any like similar, similar thoughts that like actually like a lot of your conversations lead back to you already know what to do, take away everything else.

Closing Thoughts

Lauren Crossett 48:22

So a lot of it's following your gut, but I think like my gut, at least personally, I'm pretty reactive. Um I get over things really quickly, but in the moment I get to attend. And so a lot of it is kind of like the work you do and and try to work with your kids on their reactions, is probably a lot related to the work I've I do with Janice to like maintain my composure. Um, but I think probably like early in our time together, it was really focused on that. Like, how can other people bring such a different energy to a meeting? Like, don't they know how important it is? Um to then like, you know, now it's it's having that time to reflect and yeah, maybe um still be able to hear that crazy reaction, but think like, why am I having it? And and is it right or is it wrong? Um I'm an Aries, so I can so relate to that.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 49:18

I am just like a spicy, like I can't hide the reaction, it's just there.

Lauren Crossett 49:23

Yeah, the Scorpio. I'm gonna get mad.

Speaker 3 49:25

Scorpio.

Shanthi Shanmugam 49:27

I'm a Taurus, but I don't know what that means about me. So maybe you guys should tell me.

Natasha Vernier 49:31

But yes, I'm a I'm a well, I I don't know about you, but my son is a Taurus, and I understand that it is a uh particularly stubborn uh star sign.

Shanthi Shanmugam 49:42

Honestly, yeah. I think I you know, you know what's so funny. My my my my husband was literally talking to me about this last night where he was just like, yeah, see, you don't you think you're really easygoing, but you're actually very stubborn under underneath it all. How many people know that? And I was like, okay, cool. Good to know, good to know. So yeah, checks out, checks out.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 50:04

Oh man. Well, this episode has been so much fun to record. I literally was messaging back and forth with Kelsey as we were going. I was like, I love this episode so far. They're so good together. This is amazing. Um, but I'm excited for this one to come out. I think people are really gonna enjoy listening to it. Just like you guys had such good perspectives. We dove into so many different things. Um, I I truly enjoyed this conversation.

Natasha Vernier 50:27

Likewise. Thanks for having me.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 50:29

Yeah, love that. Thank you. Thank you all.