Today’s conversation is with Peter Hazlehurst, the CEO and co founder of Synctera, the company that just acquired my company, Cable.

Peter has a fascinating story, having grown up in Australia and teaching himself to code as part of his “gap year” job working for the government, before traveling to Silicon Valley and landing a job building a core banking system. Many tech jobs later, including stints at Google and Uber, he is now building Synctera, which could in many ways could also be described as a core banking system.

One of the themes of our conversation were the lessons that we can teach our children, and we covered:

• How an interaction with the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra when he was 14 years old gave Peter a life philosophy that has stuck with him since
• How being lazy can unlock near-endless opportunities
• Peter’s core belief that if you build something, you have a responsibility to make sure that, as far as possible, people can’t do bad stuff with it
• How the secret to making B2B businesses successful is the relationships built over many years
• Lessons on managing teams learnt from Google
• The similarities of the dot come bubble and today’s AI hype cycle
• How startup life influences parenting styles

Listen along to hear more from Peter, and for a chance to reflect on your own early life lessons. I hope you enjoy the conversation!

00:00 Introduction and Acquisition Announcement

00:31 Peter's Childhood and the Influence of Music on his Life

11:30 First Job and Teaching Himself to Code

18:06 Moving to the US and Jumping on the Startup Train

21:29 How Startup Life Influences Parenting

24:43 Leadership Lessons from Google

26:33 The Through-line of Payments, the Origins of Synctera and the Importance of Building Relationships

38:10 Acquiring Cable

In this episode I sat down with Renata Caine, who leads Embedded Finance for Green Dot.

How does Starbucks offer it's reward card? How does Amazon provide a credit card? All these "embedded finance" programs have banks behind them who help the brands onboard customers, provide oversight, and act as the buffer between the brands and the regulators.

I went into this conversation thinking that standing up an embedded finance program was mostly about choosing 1 great partner and making sensible decisions around compliance. Now I know how wrong I was!

• A bank getting into BaaS is a bit like a contractor building a house. They may do everything - the plumbing, the electrics, the painting - or they may outsource all those things to others. Deciding what skills you have as a bank, and therefore what you can offer, what you can build internally, and what you need to contract, is step 1.
• We got into detail about the pros and cons of For the Benefit Of (FBO) v Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) account types. An FBO account is a single pooled account at the bank on behalf of a brand or a fintech, whilst a UBO structure means every end consumer (or business) is an actual customer of the bank. There are distinct pros and cons to both set ups, and again, the bank should work out where its skills lie to decide which route to take.
• Making money is harder than it seems! You might make revenue from interchange, interest and/or program management fees, but the size of those buckets varies hugely depending on the type of brand or fintech you work with. Diversification is the key, and scale is needed to make any meaningful revenue. This isn’t an area you can “try out”. You either go hard, or go home.

For so many more great insights, listen in here.

Sanctions started in ancient Greece and now touch every bank and fintech on the planet, but most people in finance have never really examined how they work.

In this episode, I talked to Peter Piatetsky, former US Army intelligence analyst, former Treasury Department official, and now CEO of Castellum AI, about the history of sanctions, how they've evolved from a careful diplomatic tool into something governments reach for freely, and what that means for banks.

We covered the Turkish pastor case that changed how policymakers think about sanctions, how Peter personally figured out how to sanction aircraft at the Treasury, the existence of the UN Credit Union (one of the highest-risk financial institutions in the world), how people actually evade sanctions, and why the explosion of fintechs may be creating more sanctions risk than the sanctions themselves.

If you work in finance, you can't afford to miss this one.