Fintech Recap: Whop, Revolut, and Chime Buys Stride

Alex Johnson (0:02)

This episode is brought to you by Increase. Increase offers API-first banking for ambitious technology companies. Coast, Gusto and Ramp rely on Increase to process more than $500 billion annualized. If you're building the next great financial product and need a bank that gets it, visit increase.com. Hello, and welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. Today, in the beginning of the next month, we have another episode of Fintech Recap with our friend and the publisher of Fintech Business Weekly, Jason Mikula. Jason and I talk about Whop and the fever dream of creating a Neo bank using AI in 15 minutes. We talk about the Revolut hack in quotation marks and what it tells us about both the safety of crypto and the readiness of Revolut to be a bank. We talk about Chime also becoming a bank and what it means for the future of that business. And as always, we end with a few topics that we can't let go of, including one dating back to some long ago FOIA requests. All that and more on another great episode of Fintech Recap.

This is Fintech Takes, the podcast keeping you in the loop on all the latest Fintech trends, news and ideas. I'm Alex Johnson, creator of the Fintech Takes newsletter, your host and self-confessed Fintech nerd.

Okay, Jason Mikula is here and he is fired up and ready to go. Jason, how are you, sir?

Jason Mikula (1:43)

I am good. You know, we are going to see each other fairly soon.

Alex Johnson (1:47)

That's true.

Jason Mikula (1:48)

That's true.

Kia would make fun of me because I'm a procrastinator. I'm both bad at maximizing my points. Yes, me too. Very bad and also a very bad procrastinator when it comes to booking travel, which I always regret because I'm like, I'll do it later. And then the price goes up by like hundreds of dollars. And then I'm like, damn it, why didn't I book this?

Alex Johnson (2:10)

No, totally. Well, I mean, I'm assuming you haven't played around too much with any of the like Instinct, Muse, AI, Assistany, bots.

But apparently, Instinct, which just raised a billion dollars and has 14 people working at the company, led by a CEO who's 23 years old. They're already processing a huge number of not only requests for assistance, but a lot of those requests apparently relate to travel. So you're not alone in your lack of willingness to engage directly with the travel industry. And I don't know, maybe AI will solve this for you in the future.

Jason Mikula (2:53)

I hope so. I actually very timely started using Instinct. I think of myself as like a late, early adopter. Got it. Because I know that everyone was doing their open clause, like what, six months ago, nine months ago. And I'm like, okay, I'm seeing these horror stories about like, oops, it deleted everything.

And also...

Alex Johnson (3:16)

Yeah, that was two version one for me. I couldn't do it.

Jason Mikula (3:19)

I don't, like everyone is like buying a Mac mini to set this up. And like, I just, I don't have the time. But yes, I have actually started using Instinct and very cautiously allowing it to access certain things. And I will say, it is impressive. I mean, an example, you know, very much sort of in, in our industry wheelhouse, I got an email, an automated email from Ramp, from a client. And it was like, you need to submit an invoice with this purchase order. And I was like, okay, like normally I would, you know, manually go and edit the invoice, add the purchase order and resend it. Like, let's have, let's see if Instinct can do this for me, which requires going into my email, seeing what Ramp said. I use FreshBooks because that's what I signed up for a million years ago and I still use it because switching costs are really high for lazy people.

Logs into my FreshBooks, added to the invoice, sends it to the client payable address and did it all in two or three minutes and did it correctly.

Alex Johnson (4:36)

That's fantastic.

Jason Mikula (4:37)

To close this off and we can then start our real topics.

I was like, oh, filing freedom of information act request is a big pain because every single government agency tends to have a separate portal with separate logins.

The actual form, well, there's not a prescribed form, but the actual content is very simple, but the actual mechanical process to do it is a bit tedious. There were some foyers I wanted to file that are not with the usual banking agencies. I'll leave it at that for right now because it's a progress. I was like, all right, let's see if Instinct can do this. Can you file a foyer? It created, there were six different agencies, and it was actually able to create and file five of them for me. So it created accounts on those sites and filed five. The sixth one, I think I closed the tab, but the sixth one, it warned me that in order to do it, you had to tick a box certifying under penalty of perjury that the person filing it was in fact the person, and it was like, I can't do this for you, but it's already, just log in and submit it.