The Fintech OG Series: Mike Taormina and Ian Lampl

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On this episode of The Fintech OGs, hosts Julie VerHage-Greenberg and Lauren Crossett sit down with Ian Lampl, co-founder and CEO of LoanStreet Inc., and Mike Taormina, co-founder and CEO of Vault, for a conversation about what it really looks like to build through multiple market cycles, from marketplace lending hype and COVID disruptions to crypto booms, AI momentum, and policy shifts no one can predict.

Ian shares how LoanStreet grew from a thesis around syndicated lending access for community banks and credit unions into a broader marketplace, analytics, and servicing platform. Mike reflects on the realities of scaling a fintech lender, from raising that first major pool of capital to realizing that once pricing unlocks demand, the next challenge is finding enough funding to keep up.

The conversation digs into the unknown unknowns founders face when external events suddenly reshape the business, including the overnight impact COVID had on student loan refinancing, and how resilient lending companies adapt when the model changes beneath them.

Julie and Lauren also unpack where financial infrastructure is heading, from cloud-native systems and stablecoins as a faster way to move dollar value to the practical role AI can play inside lending workflows, while Mike explains Vault’s bet on crypto-backed lending and why pledged digital assets could create a smarter way for borrowers to qualify, improve rates, and help lenders better account for collateral while staying compliant.

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

This episode is sponsored by Granola. Try it free for 3 months at granola.ai/thisweekinfintech using code THISWEEKINFINTECH.

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

Ian Lampl: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-lampl-b7a5b684/

Mike Taormina: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelataormina/

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 0:04

Everyone, even in 2026, when FinTech can spin up 14 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. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of season four of the fintech OGs. My co-hosts, Lauren Crossett, and I of Spade are so excited to join have two lending veterans join us today. Um, Mike and Ian, I will let you guys do a brief intros. And then I'd love to know how you guys first met and everything too. I imagine it was probably like mid-2010s or something. But Ian, since I I do not know you personally yet, um I would love to have you go first.

Ian Lampl 0:56

Sure. Thank you for having me today. Really appreciate it. And it's always great to see an old friend like Mike. Uh I'll be brief on my background. So we started the business, uh, Lone Street. I'm the co-founder and CEO in 2013. Before that, I was deputy chief counsel at TARP. And for some of your older listeners, they may recall that TARP was the government program to stem the financial crisis. You'd be surprised how many times people say they don't know what that was at this point, which is kind of scary. But so I worked at the U.S. Treasury Department for roughly four years, helped a roll out and manage those programs, and then ultimately left to start Lone Street. Um and the original thesis behind Lone Street was to help bring syndicated lending to community banks and credit unions. Uh, you fast forward to today. Um, for our original solution, we have about a thousand plus credit unions in the United States on it. Um, and we've expanded, obviously, over the last you know decade. So now we

Guest Backgrounds From TARP To Crypto

Ian Lampl 1:50

offer syndication, marketplace, analytics, servicing for commercial and corporate loans. And there uh we work with U.S. credit unions, Canadian credit unions, U.S. private credit, U.S. third-party agents, and European agents as well. So um, we've really expanded uh the scope and types of clients we serve, but it's always around lending and always around financial institutions.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 2:11

Very cool. Mike, what about you? Because you've also stayed in lending, but you've you've changed what kind of lending you do quite a bit from where you got your start to today.

Mike Taormina 2:20

Yeah, that's that's fair. And first, thanks for having me. Um Although we're we're we'll get into it a little bit more later, but we're actually solving a similar problem than that I did with um my first venture. So I've been in um startups for about 15 years at this point. And my first um company was called Common Bond. Common Bond was a fintech lending platform that focused on um student loans. And over you know, 10 plus years originated over five and a half uh billion. Many of uh many of those loans were securitized and rated deals. Um we sought to bring down the cost of um basically student loans that the government were providing. That's the main lender in the space, and uh, we saw an avenue to help folks refinance once they got out of school and get them a better deal. I've done a lot of other things in fintech. I I went into crypto as well. Um, so I co-founded a company called Alluvial, that was the software uh developer behind the liquid collective protocol. That's in Ethereum liquid staking. It's a very esoteric concept, but it's it's it's basically a way to um uh support a blockchain network. This is a proof of stake uh uh concept. And it just wasn't being done in a way where institutions could participate. It was an institutional grade. And so that's why we started the company to make that institutional grade uh solution. And so it's accessible today where institutions keep their um digital assets. So at uh companies like Anchorage, Kraken, BitGo, like that's that's where you can access uh the liquid collective protocol today. Um what I'm doing now is my fourth venture, and it's called Vault. And what we do is we're the orchestration layer that allows lenders to accept crypto as collateral for everyday consumer loans. So imagine today you're going for could be any kind, really personal loan, auto loan, student loan. And what we want is for the option for folks to be able to post some of the crypto they have, and increasingly so many Americans do, over 20% of adults in the US have some form of digital assets to actually post some of it to get themselves a better deal. This could be a lower rate, it could be a slightly larger or larger uh loan size, it could be the thing that gets them credit in the first place. Maybe they were initially declined and now they have another avenue to get that credit. We're the infrastructure that allows lenders to incorporate that into their process. And we'll talk a lot more about that, but that's the high level.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 4:58

Only on FinTech OGs can you go from TARP to Ethereum within about a minute of each other. So, how did you guys meet?

Mike Taormina 5:07

So what we would do, yeah, what we would do with Common Pond, we'd have we were just trying to keep up with so many people that we started to have these happy hours at our office, which was also where we lived. So the there's three of us, which includes my current co-founder Nate, and then my co-founder, who's a CEO of Common Pond, David Klein. Uh, we lived in the back of the office. We kind of kept that a secret for a while. But um, to folks who came by on hap for happy hour, they knew this. And so that's where we had the office. And we said, why don't everyone just come over on Friday? It was a way for us to meet with, you know, uh potential partners, NBA students would come by. And that's actually how I met Ian. One of our early employees um knows him from uh from Princeton and brought him by. And that's when we started talking. And what one of the things that um Ian impressed upon us was uh you know, ways that we could be more efficient with how we finance our loans. And that's how we learned a lot about you know whole loan sales, and and that that's very much what Ian was was doing and helping credit

How Two Lending Founders Met

Mike Taormina 6:15

unions uh to participate. Would you add anything to that, Ian?

Ian Lampl 6:19

No, I said I, you know, they were Common was definitely the cool startup back in the day. Um and so we were like the me and my co-founder, we were the the nerdy guys coming by the cool kit, happy hour, but nonetheless, uh you know, created a lifelong relationship.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 6:33

Ian, did you also live in the back of your office or no?

Ian Lampl 6:36

I did not. I did not. Um we didn't even have we were we were so scrappy, we didn't even have uh our own office at that time. I think we were sharing someone else's office. We were pretty pretty scrappy at the time.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 6:47

It was like the OG we work then, basically, you know?

Ian Lampl 6:51

Uh something like that. I think we were even, you know, people were we were like literally sharing someone's like we had a desk in someone's office was how we got started.

Lauren Crossett 6:58

I remember a lot of common bond happy hours, but maybe like a little bit later with like not that.

Mike Taormina 7:04

We we had a big theme of uh of community. So we did we did both the happy hours at the at the office, but uh but a whole a whole load of events over time. Yeah.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 7:13

All right, Lauren, I'll let you I I've hijacked the interview so far, so I'll let you take the first question.

Lauren Crossett 7:20

Um Are we just sticking with our normal Yeah?

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 7:23

I mean, you can ask whatever you'd like.

Lauren Crossett 7:27

What's a common thread that maybe keeps you two connected? What do you talk about these days?

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 7:34

Is it more TARP side or is it more Ethereum side?

Mike Taormina 7:37

Oh, well, that that's an interesting uh way of putting it because anytime something happens in the in crypto that uh let's just say Ian is um crypto skeptic. I would I would put him in that bucket. Um, but he's also open to learning, he's open to to seeing the innovation. So he gives me many opportunities to explain why there's any utility in crypto. And there's so much noise in the space. So anytime something happens, I'll get uh I'll get it, I'll get a ping from Ian, I'll get an email forwarding. What do you think about this? It's some some uh some blow up, some hack, something happens in the space. So we do we talk about that. Um, but then we also we've also talked about you know things that we're both going through. Uh, you know, if I'm fundraising or he's fundraising, or we're thinking about how, you know, what's next for our business, we've just had this ongoing dialogue of supporting each other.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 8:31

So you guys are uh the one thing I've talked about in other interviews, and I think it was even the last one that Lauren and I did as well, um, is like having your own 911 list. Like people, like a list of like five or six people that you're like, I know I can call them and they're gonna give me good advice, talk

Founder Resilience Through Market Cycles

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 8:45

me through this. So it sounds like you guys are on each other's 911 list.

Ian Lampl 8:48

Yeah, I always like to say, I mean, I know there's exceptions to this rule, but startups are not a straight line. Things go up and down. It's the real life, it's dirty, it's messy, and they're not overnight success. You know, and like yes, you you can watch the, you know, read an article about how this one startup went to zero to worth $100 billion overnight. And God bless those. That has not been my experience, nor is it uh I think I'm free to say for Mike either. And it's just helpful to sometimes have someone in your network where you can have an honest conversation about the fact that it's not always easy. There are good days, there are bad days. You win clients, you lose clients. And it's nice to have someone to talk to about the reality of running a startup as opposed to just the face that people put on that, like, oh, everything's perfect, and I'm amazing, and my team's amazing, and we never make any mistakes, and everything works perfectly. So I really value um there and there are a handful of people I think in the startup world that you can have those conversations with. I think it's pretty far and few between.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 9:44

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because like even though everyone goes through it, there's only certain ones that you, you know, have that sense of comfort with that you know that you're gonna be honest with each other, etc. And you know, it's almost like a you know, a fellow founder therapist or something like that. I always joke, like, I I don't want to be a founder, but if I did do a startup, I would almost just start like a therapy company for founders where like they have therapists that specialize in talking them through all the things you guys have to go through. Um so if anyone ever starts that, you heard it here first. Um lending in particular, I mean, every area of fintech has had its crazy ups and downs, but I feel like you know, lending's one of the like oldest areas of fintech that we think of with fintechs. People think of like lending club and that area is kind of like one of the it the first time we started calling fintech fintech, really, right? Like you still have PayPal and whatnot before then, but it wasn't fintech then. Um Bloomberg was before then and it wasn't fintech then and stuff. But you know, talk me through how you've survived some of those ups and downs because like, you know, Ian, you've had the same company the whole time. Mike, you've been in lending the whole time. Uh well, crypto, I guess, wasn't entirely into lending, but you stayed lending adjacent um at least the whole time. Talk me through like some of the ups and downs that you went through and like moments of just like surprise. Things were like, wow, that really caught me off guard. I was into like, what did you think the space was gonna look like when you first got into it? You know?

Ian Lampl 11:12

So if Mike, if you don't mind, I'll go first. So I will say what has like almost the comedy, and Mike knows this from talking with me, is that we've always sort of been running against the grain. So when we were launching, Lending Club was everything there was in the world. We work with tons of credit unions. I'd go to meet with investors, and they'd be like, What are you talking about? Credit unions are going to zero. Look at Lending Club, look at Prosper, look at whoever. And I'd be like, No, no, no, like credit unions are gonna do a lot of lending. They do trillions of dollars lending, and I was told that I was crazy and that I was working with dinosaurs, right? And then so I would have to spend like pages of my investment deck talking about lending clubs instead of myself, because all anyone wanted to understand was how could I possibly exist when there's lending clubs? And not that lending club's not a great company, but the idea that they were gonna be 100% of lending is like a comedy.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 11:57

Uh and then later on, it'd be like if Stripe was gonna be 100% of payments.

Ian Lampl 12:02

Right. Um, but when you talk to VCs, they just sometimes there is certain bandwagon, like it's hard to express to them that no, that like depository at the time people did not think depository institutions were gonna survive, which seems crazy now, but that was the milieu. And then, you know, when I was later, it was crypto, right? It's like we are not a crypto company. It's like obviously credit unions are going away, lending is going away, it's all gonna be on smart contracts. And so what has surprised me is actually how much we've always had to talk about things that we weren't versus what we were, because people can be very focused on the very hot thing, as opposed to, you know, we've seen a lot of companies come and go where they're chasing the hot idea, as opposed to doing the heavy lifting of working with enterprise companies that are slower moving, that take time to make decisions, that you know, you're not gonna scale from zero to a thousand credit units overnight. And so that has been the most surprising thing to me is one, how much you have to work sometimes to get your story through when you're not riding the hot wave of whatever is exciting. Like now it's AI, right? Like we're not an AI company, but you can see people pivot. You can look at the LinkedIn profile, they were crypto, then they were machine learning, now they're AI. And it's amazing how their LinkedIn profile magically changes to whatever's hot in the moment. Um, and we've really tried to stay the course of what is our thesis, why do we believe that in the long term? And it can be very difficult at times to kind of hold to your knitting when everyone is telling you, hey, you need to pivot, you need to go do something else, because that's what the fun and exciting thing is. And so we really try to stay true to the fact of like what we know we are adding value and who our clients are.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 13:32

Was it do you remember a moment where it was hardest to stick to what you were doing versus you know people telling you to do something else? Because I'm sure like, you know, each time you start to question yourself a little bit, etc. Um, like I remember it was Jack from Airwalks when I had him on last season, talked about their very early days, you know, they weren't having they didn't have any revenue or anything yet. And he had some people from City that were like, not on his board, but on the executive team, and they're like, this is never gonna work, this is stupid, you can't do that. And instead of believing them, he just fired all of them and was like, no, this idea is gonna work, I'm gonna stick with it and make it work. Um, do you remember any sort of moment where it was the hardest to believe in what you were doing?

Ian Lampl 14:11

We had, you know, this was like, I would say, a year or two into Lone Street, we were getting credit union clients, we were seeing some success, and we got contacted by one of the largest players in the credit union space, saying they wanted to partner with us, they wanted to invest in us, they wanted to give us access for their sales force, they gave us their pretty reasonable term sheet, and you know, obviously we were a small company, a couple of employees, and at the same time, one of the largest credit units of the country approached us saying, Hey, we see what you're doing, we would like to automate this problem. And so between talking with the largest credit union about doing implementation and converting their book, as well as talking with one of the largest players, basically ate up the entire quarter. Where like all we were doing, we could barely maintain it, we couldn't do any other business development. We spent the whole time working with these two shops. And on like the end of the quarter, on the same day, or like Friday, whatever, March 31st, whatever it was, we got uh an email from the large player in the space where they flipped the term sheet on us from being an investment to being an ownership, where we'd basically be giving them the company for a job, which is not what we thought we were signing up for. And when we told them no, they said, That's fine, we've seen your business model, we're just gonna copy it. And the very large credit union said, We've seen everything you've done, we think we can just build it internally, and they passed. And so we went from thinking we were like, oh my God, we're like finally launching this thing after a couple of years of having a large client and a large partner, both on the same day going to zero. And I remember sitting there, like, you know, talking with my wife at night, being like, I think this is it. Like, if like the whole thing is falling apart, like what are we doing here? And literally that night, it was like Friday night at 11 o'clock at night, we get an email from a different trade association within the credit union group that we had been selected for their like best ideas competition to present. And we're like, it was like it felt like a sign from God, right? Like, if on the worst day of the company's history, like who gets emails at 11 o'clock at night? Um, there was like, hey, someone else thinks this is a good idea. We're like, okay, like we should keep going. But I think we came like I think within inches of just quitting um when those two deals fell apart. So that was like the lowest.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 16:13

I wish you could name names. I want to know who this was. But NDs are a thing. So yeah.

Ian Lampl 16:20

They know who they are.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 16:22

There you go. I hope they listen to this. I hope they listen to this. Um Mike, what about you?

Mike Taormina 16:30

I have so many things in my head right now. Give me a good tee up for that.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 16:33

What we're talking about up I mean, so you've done a yeah, ups and downs. And you know, you've had a a few different ventures at Vault super early, so you don't necessarily have to do vault right now because you know, there's a long story ahead of that one. But you know, Common Bond had a very long life. Um, I don't know as much about the companies in between those two, but you know, when you think of ups and downs, moments where you're like, no, like we should just quit. This isn't gonna work. Um, maybe it was when you were still living in that apartment, or maybe it was past that date, maybe it was both, um, since there's lots of up and downs on a founder journey. But what comes to mind?

Mike Taormina 17:09

I mean, I think for for us, so the story of Kamban was initially we we did a pilot at Wharton. We raised two and a half million dollars of seed capital. And the idea at the time, at the very beginning of the company, was it was alumni-funded student loans. We thought, okay, if you went to Wharton, you were alum of Wharton, you'd be willing to give students or recent grads a better deal. And so we raised to two and a half million. What we found was it's really hard to get the uh to acquire both the borrowers and the investors. So our model shifted to institutional capital. But the other thing that we found out was that we had applications for the full amount within 24 hours, and that was at one school. And so my model at the time uh said that if we that said that we could place reasonably if we expanded to the next 20, 25 schools, $100 million in our in our first year. We just needed $100 million. And so when I think about the pilot happens, that was great. We got some great validation from it. The next uh nine months was you know, basically two guys going around midtown trying to find $100 million from nothing. And we did that. We were able to find um, you know, at the time the banks,

Capital Raising Pricing And COVID Shock

Mike Taormina 18:30

you know, to Ian's point, they just weren't there yet. The the larger institutions, the established players weren't there. So we were able to get a credit fund that really understood the credit story here. You know, we're we're lending to Harvard business school grads and and folks like that who are or employed. Okay. And they got the credit story, they gave us the $100 million, and that was hugely validated. Now, of course, with lending, you're always either I need more money or I have too much money because I have to have to get rid of this. I have to lend it out. So the next the next several months was how do we get true product market fit where we are signing up as many borrowers as we were able to so quickly with the pilot? SoFi was out at the time and they were sophisticating on their pricing. And uh, you know, our our financiers were uh not comfortable yet doing that. But then um fast forward probably 10 months into it, where we're we are trying everything we can to lend out this hundred million, and it was really tough. We made one tweak where we started doing risk-based pricing, and all of a sudden the floodgates opened. And I remember everyone in the office was very excited about this. I became terrified because I said, we're going to run out of money like immediately. So then it became a full court press to get even more money, and we ended up um getting another 200 million over the next next few months. And that the company kind of you know went from went from there. It's this uh seesaw of getting more capital, lending it out, doing it efficiently, and and building uh a business around it.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 20:08

As far as I actually with the low, I want to ask you about COVID. Because that's kind of like I mean, you had left Kottman Bond at that point and were doing other things, but you still you know own part of the company, etc. There were other founders that went through similar things that you did, and maybe it wasn't COVID for them, but something that like there's just no way you can predict something's gonna like that. That's there's no way that was on your bingo card or anything as like a risk for you, for your investors, anything. How did that feel as a founder? And how did you kind of like learn from it, make your way through it? Um, you know, piece of advice for someone that maybe has something like that come up going in the future.

Mike Taormina 20:51

Yeah, it's I'm hard pressed to know what I what I learned exactly from it, but it just solidified the the point that there are, you know, I think back to Donald Rumsfeld when he talked about the known knowns, the known unknowns, and then the unknown unknowns. And like this fell in that third bucket where you just couldn't predict a pandemic coming in and what that would mean from a policy response standpoint. So, for context for the listeners, right? Um, basically the company is doing well going into 2020. They're actually celebrating. At this point, I'm not at the company, right? So they're I'm getting this secondhand, but they're celebrating the fact that the main business line is profitable. And during that celebration, um the head of HR pulls my co founder Dave into a room and says, I think we have to close the office because the pandemic was just rearing up. And what then followed, besides remote work, um, which was arguably fine, was obviously a lot of volatility in the market. So I'm already a little nervous about what this means. And the response to it was zero interest rates, which at the outset made A lot of sense. But it became something that first the Trump administration and then the Biden administration both relied upon, because very um viewed very positively by uh young voters and young borrowers to keep interest rates on federal loans at zero. We're a refinancing company. So why would you ever refinance when rates are at zero? And so that hurt the company and it's just started to bleed cash. And there are other opportunities like focusing on other private student loans as a refinancing target, kind of trying to make it so that it it didn't matter that the government was doing this, but that was a large part of the market, and ultimately that's what befell the company.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 22:41

Right. Yeah, it reminds like on a smaller level, something that happens like there were a lot of restaurants in big cities that ended up having to close because there's just no way they, you know, if you can't serve people food, you can't refinance, like why would someone refinance a loan then? Like, what are you gonna do? So yeah. Okay.

Lauren Crossett 23:00

Maybe staying on that vein, like outside of a pandemic. What are some other big surprises that you've seen um in your your tenure in in fintech? Maybe Ian will hear from you for first.

Ian Lampl 23:14

Surprises besides COVID and fintech.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 23:17

Um you're like an like an upside surprise and a downside surprise, or something like that. Like something where you're like, wow, like that's so surprised. Like we've gotten that already. That's so cool that fintech was able to do that. And something like, really? Like we we still like can't easily move money instantly. Like, what is going on here? Those those kind of things.

Ian Lampl 23:36

So I I would say when is when can maybe under the water uh journey that sometimes people are completely unaware of. It's like when we originally started the company in 2013, we started on AWS, and may that may seem completely unsurprising at the time. The idea of a cloud-based solution going to community banks and credit unions, I mean, they assume genuinely they would say it was unlawful, and they would say, why would I use a book company to host my software? Like they had never heard of AWS before, they thought Amazon sold books. And so, and now, you know, if you were to go to a community bank and a credit union and say, hey, I want to install something on-prem, I think they look at you like you are crazy. And so that is a really behind-the-scenes thing because you know, to the consumer, everything's on their phone,

Fintech Shifts Cloud Stablecoins AI

Ian Lampl 24:20

and they haven't really thought about like every interaction they've ever had with a fintech was either online or on a phone. When you were selling to institutions, it's amazing now how much things have changed. Where originally people would literally call me up and say, I'd love the solution. Can you send me the C D? Like they didn't understand that you would actually access our platform online or that that was even lawful. And now the opposite occurred. So I think it's been really interesting watching how much more open today financial institutions are uh to fintechs and web-based solutions. And the C change, I would say, really happened actually ironically around COVID too, where there really wasn't a choice. There really was this idea that the like five years worth of you know forward thinking happened during COVID. And so I think it forced like that. If we're gonna close all our branches in our office, our operations staff can't use on-prem software. And so while at the time it was extremely painful and like Common Bond, we like all of our clients were shutting down and we're not using our service, and we had to do other things to you know stay alive. Once we got through that initial pain, the the switch to how people think about technology at the institutional level has been dramatic.

Lauren Crossett 25:41

Mike, any other surprises?

Mike Taormina 25:44

I'd say um I actually think about uh two things when when you give that prompt. Um first, you know, to Ian's point about how at the time it seemed nuts to be using AWS, and now it seems nuts that it was ever anything other than that. You know, online lending as a concept was strange at the time of getting, I'm gonna borrow money over the internet. Like that now seems nuts for me to say. That's just how it's done today. So like I'm very proud to have been part of an Ian as well. Like we're just part of this movement to make it easier for people to get access to credit. But there was a time when that wasn't as uh as readily accepted as it is today, as obvious as it is today. And and the other thing that I think um I'm pleasantly surprised with is um kind of leaning more on the on the crypto side, just the acceptance of stable coins and what that means. So crypto starts out and it initially Bitcoin's going to be this payment network, and that really never happened. Right? People now have moved to it's uh it's a store of value. And whether or not you buy into that, I think that has more resonance than its use as a payment network. But what stable coins represent is huge, right? I can take a dollar and truly not just digitize it, because dollars are really digitized at this point, but more use them, use a form of a digitized dollar over blockchain Rails, which means I can personally send money to Ian in a matter of a minute if I want to, and it's going to arrive in his self-custody wallet. Uh that's incredible. But that was mostly being done by um more crypto native people. You know, I'm doing it, but I'm a small subset of the population. The fact that so many large, very well-known institutional players are either in the space or trying to figure out how they can use stable coins, the fact that they're, you know, the Genius Act is is passed and that we now have some some more um clarity on how this is going to work, that's a huge breakthrough. And that's a pleasant surprise that we've gotten this this far.

Lauren Crossett 27:54

Yeah, certainly. Um Ian, don't don't hate me or hold this against me. I I do work at a data and AI company, uh, spade. So I'm I I I feel like I have I have to ask, right? Like what do you what is your answer to how are you moving into an AI-shaped future and and how does it impact your business? I totally respect that like you are not an AI company, but how is it changed maybe operationally or or how you do things in that same way that AWS changed uh everything?

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 28:30

If you want to have some buzzwords in a funding round, just add that you are an AI company though, just to be clear.

Ian Lampl 28:36

So I will admit, like I am a bit of an AI skeptic, but I am much less skeptical of AI than I was of say distributed lending, taking away depository lending.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 28:46

Or are you more skeptical of crypto or AI?

Ian Lampl 28:50

Crypto, for sure. I'm actually much less like I so I'll give you my like so one, we we use like our of like I'm sure every other startup AI is used by our engineers to move more, you know, generate and be more productive. I think there's a lot of learnings our company has to do to get better at it, but we think about it all the time. I talk with our engineering team, everyone. There is no doubt that it is a tool that every engineering team is going to use. And we have conversations internally about what our first client-facing AI features will be. We I don't think we will be an AI platform or even uh whatever, some type of layer on top of AI per se. But there is without a doubt use cases that our clients would benefit from where we could embed someone else's model, whether it's COD or whatever one works the best, or let them have their own options. I don't think we've fully thought it through, or even that there may there could be even more than one answer is where what a client-facing feature might look like. So we we use AI at the company. I suspect by the end of the year we will have some features that are supported by AI. Um, I guess where I'm a touch skeptical about AI, and and then I'll circle back, is the closest thing we've seen to the type of productivity gains in the world ever would be Moore's Law, right? Where computing power doubled like every 18 months for the like 40 years. And Moore's Law is basically over. And you know, if people want to quibble with me, fine, but it's basically over. Um, not that you don't see continued improvement, but not at the rate it was before. What people ignore about Moore's Law is that parabolic with the compute power was also spend, right? So if you look at the number of engineers and RD spend from the beginning of Moore's Law until today, it also was parabolic, right? They were doubling spend every two years in order to double compute power. We simply cannot keep doubling spend on AI. And so the idea would be that in the first time in the history of the world, right, where we could improve something's performance by doubling every teen, eight months without doubling spend. I don't, I just I don't believe that's plausible. That doesn't mean there won't be improvements, it doesn't mean that people won't find ways of adding it. But I'm very skeptical that where we are today, we're gonna continue to see doubling of improvement indefinitely without doubling spend. I mean, if you look at the amount of money that Microsoft, Google, Facebook are spending, you could probably double that once. There's just not enough money in the world to double it another two, three times. Like it just doesn't exist. So that's why I'm a bit skeptical that we're gonna continue to see the pace of change, right? But that does not mean that what we don't have today already isn't amazing and it can't be further refined and used as a tool. And I think I would be crazy if my company wasn't thinking really hard about how to incorporate it into our solution. All that being said, I think when it comes to enterprise software, clients are very uninterested in probabilistic outcomes. Right? If I am telling someone that the amount of interest due on March 31st is X dollars, that can't be 99% right. It can't be 99.9% right. It's just got to be right every time. And there can't be a different answer sometimes, right? Like there's just there's zero interest in certain parts of financial institutions, whether it's accounting, invoicing, events that have occurred, like there's just zero interest in probabilistic outcomes. Um, that being said, there are areas where probabilistic outcomes are totally fine. And I think the savvy companies are going to figure out where a probabilistic outcome that's 99% right is an amazing part of a workflow that's better than what the human can do. And there are parts of it that there's just zero interest in. And if you can combine those two parts, I think you have a winning combination. And that's what we spend a lot of time thinking about is like where can we add probable probabilistic outcomes that are very, very good next to things that have to be right every time?

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 32:37

We sell probabilistic outcomes, so good news for Spade. Uh Mike, I hope you don't have his uh Ian's number stored as Ian Lample. You need to have it stored as devil's advocate in your cell phone because he's literally just call him for devil's at any time. Anytime. But how do you see AI um transforming lending over the next you know six months to six years?

Mike Taormina 33:01

Sure. Um, well, first, I'm you know, whether the current players in the space have the right business model and will be able to grow at a certain clip is is less interesting to me than what we can do with it today. So kind of like like Ian and Lone Street, like we're very AI forward with how we're doing things. I find it in in just in completely invaluable. It's like um just the best chief of staff possible for an early stage founder. So we use it and are increasingly incorporating it into everything we do. We're building our product, of course, uh with it. And but I use it um just on a on a daily basis to do all sorts of things. I uh one of my you know more recent um examples is I was doing this analysis on Bitcoin volatility, and what I wanted to show, because this comes up with lenders, but what I wanted to show is what it would look like if lenders had actually made crypto-backed loans uh over the course of the last seven years and how protected they would be in in ups and downs. And I'm a Excel power user, and I needed to end point, I needed to get it right. So I did it on my own, and this this was millions of cells. It ballooned to 172 megabytes. It was one of the largest, if not the largest model I've ever made. And I was saying to uh to Claude Um, you know, this this is the state of things, and yeah, it's uh that's a really large file. Like maybe you can explain exactly what you're doing. We do a Python script, and I couldn't upload the model. I couldn't show it what I had done, which you would have thought would have been necessary. I just explained what I did. And the first go at a Python script, it nailed my ending balance at the end of seven years to the penny. And it was an 18-kilobyte script with more flexibility than the model that I had built. And that kind of analysis would normally take me, you know, probably weeks. I was able to do something, you know, I was able to do a lot of the the analysis work for that overall project in a couple days. So that it's just changing how startups can can move. And it's it's incredible. As far as lending goes, I think we're we're somewhat defensible from AI because there's a lot of regulatory uh moat there. Um and I'm I'm glad. So being a provider to folks who are you know have this have regulatory concerns and considerations gives us some stickiness that I think maybe some other industries will struggle with over the next few years. I do think and Ian it basically the growth will continue. I don't know exactly what it looks like uh if it's gonna double per se, but it if the improvement's gonna continue to be there. Are we going to get to a point where you know I hear a lot about um you know the agents are gonna be involved and we're gonna have AI-based lending. I think for the regulatory considerations, that's that's I'm somewhat skeptical that that's gonna happen anytime soon. Um but uh I so I mostly see it as the productivity gains as a startup that we're able to incorporate today. And it's wild.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 36:18

I think it also just depends on like which part of the lending stack you sit in too, right? Like the servicing side, I've seen a lot more AI stuff than you know, actually going through and making the loan makes sense. But on the servicing side, it also makes you know companies like Spade so important just because they clean up the data and make it digestible. If you have the wrong data, AI is not gonna do much for you. It's just gonna give you wrong answers, and it's pretty important to get the right answer too. Um I guess uh we only have a few minutes left, so I want to ask one more question, and that is what are you most excited about in fintech right now?

Ian Lampl 36:56

Mike, why don't you go first? I've been leading a lot of these. I mean, I'm gonna be I'm gonna be a little biased.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 37:01

He just he feels bad for saying so many bad things about crypto. So he's he's like, okay, you can go first.

Mike Taormina 37:07

He does not. He does not. We will we will continue to have those conversations. It's fine. You know, the what um I mentioned this at the outset, what we're coming back to with Vault is what I'm so excited about. That's why I'm pouring my life into this. Um when I started to come up on one of the re one of the tells that we were on the right path was when I applied for my second-year MBA loan, I was declined on the on the basis that I didn't make enough income. And I I was like, well, I'm a second-year MBA student. Of course, I didn't have a good year last year, like I was in school. And it just kind of showed how broken the system was. But the other thing that um that I learned from that was they did not care about the assets that I had. They didn't factor it in to the credit decisioning process at all. So lending today is basically um based on data, you know, credit score, what's your income, debt-to-income ratios, maybe cash flow underwriting. But they don't look, lenders largely don't look at the value that you have because you could uh go to Vegas tomorrow and basically spend any of the assets or savings that you have. It if in effect, it's not pledged.

Future Crypto Collateral And Lending Fragmentation

Mike Taormina 38:17

That's what would need to happen for a lender to incorporate it. But if you think about the pledging process for most assets, like moving your um brokerage account, I mean, that just doesn't move at the speed of a modern loan application. That's what we're hoping to change. And that's the reason why we're we're using digital assets as a proving ground because nothing can move at this at that speed. You know, you could participate in, you could go through an application, a loan application, and within a couple of minutes send the required um crypto to the qualified custodian account that we've we've partnered with, where that the assets remain during the life of the loan and now get a lower rate on your personal loan, on your student loan, et cetera. We just love the idea that we're actually going to bring in the value that that folks have into the credit decisioning process. And I just think this has huge ramifications for lending, and that's why we're working on this.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 39:16

Ian, you close this out.

Ian Lampl 39:18

Sure. I think, you know, well, I started off saying like I was a big fan of depositories and skeptical of lending club, even though I think it's a wonderful company. Actually, I'll take the other side of that for my closing remarks, which is well, I don't think depository institutions are going away. Um Is that allowed?

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 39:33

Is this allowed?

Ian Lampl 39:36

Yes, I can take my I'll take the He's devil's advocate. He's got to do it to himself. I think that what is similar to what Mike was just saying is that lending is actually becoming very democratized, right? And that there are lots of different institutions doing lots of different types of lendings where maybe historically all lending would happen at banks or at credit unions. And now there are different types of lenders, right? And some things we'll call them shadow banks or private credit, or in some ways, lending club was an early private credit, right? These were non-bank lenders lending to consumers and Apollo's lending to middle market companies. I think there's different types of capital sources for different types of loans for different types of borrowers. And I think we're going to continue to see fragmentation in lending and who does different types of lending. And I actually think that's incredibly healthy. Um I think it diversifies as different sources, makes our economy much stronger. Um, and it's a source of strength for the US, right? We have an incredible diverse capital market where there's lots of different types of credit products being provided by lots of different parties. Um, and at loan state, we'd like to provide infrastructure for lenders to diversify and manage capital. So for us, um, what we see is an incredible diversification of capital providers, and we think that's a great thing. We think it's great for fintechs, we think it's great for small businesses, medium, large businesses, it's great for US dynamism. So I'm a big fan, and I think even if I am a believer in traditional depository institutions, I'm also a believer that, and we're gonna continue to see a positive fragmentation of the lending ecosystem.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg 41:04

Amazing. I love that. I love ending on a positive note. So thank you, Ian. I appreciate that. Um, well, thank you both of you for joining us. Um, I'm really excited for this episode to air. People to learn more about you know, diving into the the lending industry. And you guys both have been in in fintech for for quite a while now. So you have really good insights on where we've been, where we're going, and and what's to come. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Ian Lampl 41:26

Thank you for having us.