My guest today is Denada Ramnishta, the Chief Revenue Officer at Efficient Capital Labs. I've known Denada for over a decade, having first met her during her time at American Express where she was part of the early team building out merchant financing. She's been a consistent champion for democratizing capital access for small and medium-sized businesses, and now she's doing that at ECL, which provides non-dilutive funding and cross-border payment infrastructure for AI and SaaS companies.

In this episode, we dig into how ECL approaches revenue-based financing differently from others in the space, their AI-driven underwriting system called Aura, the fascinating origin story behind their cross-border payments product ECL Flow, why VCs are actually their top referral source, and how they're adapting their underwriting as SaaS pricing models shift from recurring revenue to usage-based models. We also discuss the so-called SaaS apocalypse and what Denada is actually seeing on the ground from the founders she works with every day.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Her journey from American Express to Efficient Capital Labs.
• What her time at Amex taught her about building responsible lending products.
• What ECL does exactly.
• What has been learned from the high profile stumbles in revenue based financing.
• How debt funding has been misunderstood by founders.
• Why VCs are the number one deal source for ECL.
• Their underwriting system called Aura and why it is unique.
• How Aura has allowed them to evolve their underwriting process.
• Why they decided to expand to underwriting companies that operate cross border.
• Why they created ECL Flow and expand into cross border money movement.
• Where they will be expanding this new infrastructure.
• Denada’s thoughts on the SaaS apocalypse.
• As pricing models change for SaaS, how they are adapting their underwriting models.
• How they are able to grow fast with very low charge off rates.
• What is next for ECL.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

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

Payment declines happen millions of times a day, but how a financial institution handles that moment of failure can define the entire customer relationship. My guest on this episode is Amir Wain, the Founder and CEO of i2c, a global payments and banking infrastructure company he has been building for more than 25 years. Amir is a serial entrepreneur who made a foundational architectural bet early on: that a single, customer-centric, composable platform built for all products and all geographies would ultimately win over the industry's prevailing approach of stitching acquisitions together.

That bet has paid off. Today, i2c powers card and banking programs across 200-plus countries for financial institutions, fintechs, and governments alike. In our conversation, we dig into how modern unified payments infrastructure enables real-time contextual decisioning, why the moment of a payment decline is actually an opportunity to build customer trust, how i2c thinks about balancing fraud prevention with false positives, and what the rise of agentic AI means for the authorization process, and for keeping the human customer at the center of it all.

In this podcast, you will learn:

• The evolution in Amir’s thinking that led to the founding of i2c.
• When he realized that architecture will determine the destiny of the business.
• How i2c has evolved over the last 25 years.
• How contextual decisioning in the authorization process has become a differentiator for i2c.
• Where traditional infrastructure falls short in authorization decisions today.
• What fraud signals are the most important when balancing friction and user experience?
• How the industry can balance personalization and data privacy.
• The three segments of the market that i2c is focused on.
• How they are thinking about moving beyond payments.
• How they are planning for the world of autonomous AI agents making transactions.
• How far away we are from agentic commerce having significant scale.
• What keeps Amir excited today about the future.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

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

In banking, we often talk about the "front end" customer experience or the "back end" systems of record. But according to S.P. “Wije” Wijegoonaratna, the founder of Aliya, the real revolution is happening right in the middle. From his early days in the UK to his time in the high-stakes world of New York hedge funds and his role as an early investor at SoFi, Wije has consistently found himself at the intersection of financial data and decision-making.

At its core, Aliya is an operational intelligence layer that sits between a bank's customer-facing front end and its core system of record, what Wije calls "the middle." It combines transaction categorization trained on 1.5 trillion transactions from nearly 1,500 banks, dynamic risk segmentation, and real-time post-origination monitoring into a single microservices platform.

In our conversation, we discuss why Aliya went after the largest banks first, how their approach to post-origination risk management drives charge-off rates as low as 2.5%, why Wije believes Nubank poses an existential threat to regional and community banks, and why he thinks the biggest opportunity in banking today lies in transforming that middle layer.

In this podcast, you will learn:

• How meeting Mike Cagney and the founders of Palantir was the catalyst for the birth of Aliya.
• Why they decided to start with helping banks with lending.
• The two core offerings Aliya has today.
• Why the cumulative losses on their portfolio is far better than most lenders.
• How they decide when to take action on a consumer that may be having problems.
• Why they chose to focus on selling to the large banks first.
• What they are providing to the large banks exactly.
• Why Aliya doesn’t fit into any fintech category.
• Where the biggest opportunity for Aliya is today.
• Why Wije believes Nubank is going to be successful in the US.
• What is next for Aliya.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

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