Wharton FinTech Podcast

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, Bobby Ma sits down with Kyle Mack, CEO & Co-Founder of Middesk, a Series B company.

Kyle shares his experience building Middesk, the leading business identify platform modernizing business verification, risk evaluation, and compliance. Its fast, frictionless APIs support KYB, credit assessment, and tax registration use cases, with data updated in days, not months. More than 500 customers trust Middesk to verify, underwrite, and grow with confidence. The company has raised over $70 million in funding and is backed by top-tier investors including Accel, Sequoia, and Insight Partners.

We discuss:
- Kyle’s journey building Middesk starting from developing proprietary data pipelines to creating a leading business identity platform
- The value proposition of KYB and how it is fundamentally more complex than KYC
- How Middesk serves and plugs into its customers’ decisioning workflows
-The future of business identity as it evolves with AI and other technology trends

In this episode, Jackson Ellis sits down with Ben Borodach, co-founder and CEO of april, the AI-powered tax platform that is fundamentally changing how Americans interact with the tax code. Taxes have long been a "once-a-year headache," isolated from the rest of our financial lives. Ben explains how april is shattering this status quo by embedding tax intelligence directly into the apps and platforms where consumers already manage their money, from banking and payroll to wealth management.

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, Bobby Ma sits down with Dean Brauer, President & COO of Cybrid.

Dean shares his experience building Cybrid, who combines stablecoin, fiat, and compliance into a single API-first platform helping financial institutions, FinTechs, and enterprises integrate stablecoin infrastructure and launch end-to-end cross-border payment solutions to more than 150+ countries, at up to 90% lower cost, and with full transparency. The Company raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by BDC Capital and has grown 5x in the last 12 months.

We discuss:
- Dean’s journey building Cybrid and his deep entrepreneurship experience
- The solutions Cybrid offers in orchestrating stablecoin payments
- The Company’s bespoke thought partnership with customers in creating and executing their stablecoin strategy
- Recent regulatory & industry trends driving forward this rapidly growing space

In this episode of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, Bobby Ma sits down with Sam Lewis, CEO of Fruitful.

Sam shares his experience building Fruitful and how the company is reimagining personal finance through a membership model that combines CFP® guidance with AI automation to transform every paycheck into progress. Fruitful has raised $37 million to date and serves thousands of members across all 50 states.
We discuss:

- Building Fruitful and scaling its membership model for personal finance

- Why income allocation matters more than asset allocation for most Americans

- Closing the execution gap between financial advice and real-world action

- The role of AI in scaling CFP® workflows

In this episode, Jackson Ellis speaks with Stripe’s first employee and the founder of Increase, Darragh Buckley, about building reliable, scalable banking infrastructure. We discuss lessons from Stripe’s earliest days, how Increase is modernizing access to payment rails, and why trust, uptime, and simplicity matter more than ever in today’s financial system.