Commerce Conversations

About Commerce Conversations

What powers the brands and financial services we love to use? Commerce infrastructure, of course. The more consumers adopt digital products and demand fast, delightful experiences from their brands, the more this space grows. Commerce Conversations is a podcast from Commerce Ventures, where we dive into the most interesting emerging themes across retail tech and FinTech. Tune in for research deep dives, industry conversations, and intimate CEO interviews from our team.

Publisher

Commerce Ventures

Category

business · business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

23 Jun 2022

Latest episode

16 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

49 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   16 Jul 2026

   What Agentic Banking Actually Looks Like, with Drew Sievers

   The conversation covers three main areas: Drew's path from advertising to mFoundry to a stint in investing and back to operating. Drew traces his route from Ogilvy and Saatchi & Saatchi through five years in Japan to founding mFoundry in 2003, before the iPhone existed, to solve mobile banking's two big problems: handset fragmentation and carrier control. The turning point was landing Citi as a client, which pushed him to drop every other vertical (astrology apps, wine guides, Yellow Pages) and bet the company entirely on banking. Within a few years mFoundry had a third of the top 20 US banks as clients before selling to FIS. He's candid that the investing chapter he tried next was his biggest career regret; he now wishes he'd taken months off before jumping back in, which eventually led him back to operating, most recently at Drift. Where agentic AI is actually landing in banking: Drew splits this into near-term and long-term. Near-term, the real activity is in unglamorous, controlled environments: fraud, AML, compliance, reconciliation, onboarding, and customer support, where ROI is provable and regulators are comfortable with augmentation. He cites research showing 88% of finance leaders would allow some form of agentic AI in banking workflows and 71% say AI-initiated connectivity now factors into their choice of bank. Longer-term, he argues the real battleground is orchestration. Whoever controls permissions, identity, and auditability wins. And that banks will eventually serve autonomous software agents, not just people in apps. He also reframes the "AI has to be perfect" objection: human-run banking workflows already run 10-15% error rates, so an AI system that halves costs while improving to 8% error is an easy call for any bank. Could a bank run with a fraction of the headcount, and is AI overhyped: Dan and Drew debate whether a $10B depository institution could be built and run with roughly 50 employees. Drew's answer is yes: building a modern core is no longer the hard part (he points to a Drift team rebuilding a full agentic product in four months versus an 18-month traditional SaaS timeline); the bottleneck is chartering and regulatory approval. On funding, Drew argues that AI remains under-hyped even as capital pours in, and that collapsing barriers to entry mean M&A outcomes increasingly hinge on go-to-market speed rather than product.

2. 

   11 Feb 2026

   Why Banks Can't Afford to Wait on Tokenized Deposits, with Jon Briggs

   The conversation covers three main areas: Jon's career transition from KeyBank to FIS -- Jon reflects on moving from the bank side to a large fintech infrastructure provider. The biggest eye-opener was the sheer complexity and diversity of clients that companies like FIS manage daily. He and Ys discuss what made KeyBank's payments strategy punch above its weight: direct CEO-level reporting for payments leadership, a willingness to learn from the fintech ecosystem, and the realization that innovation happens around the payment, not in the commodity payment itself. Their best example: launching a virtual account management product in just nine months from handshake to market. Stablecoins vs. tokenized deposits -- Jon draws a clear distinction: stablecoins are synthetic units of value pegged to fiat currency, while tokenized deposits are a "digital twin" of an actual bank deposit. He argues that banks haven't missed the boat yet, but urgency is real. The technology offers meaningful improvements in programmability, fraud/AML transparency, and cross-border efficiency. FIS has partnered with Circle to integrate stablecoin rails into its money movement infrastructure. Jon emphasizes that trust remains the bedrock -- 75% of consumers surveyed would try stablecoins if offered by a bank, but fewer than 4% are comfortable with unregulated providers. Capital One/Brex and the battle for business banking -- Ys and Jon discuss whether the acquisition is a wake-up call similar to Square's disruption of acquiring, or something more zero-sum. Jon leans toward zero-sum: spend management platforms like Ramp and Brex are blurring the line between software and digital banking, and banks risk losing share if they don't respond. On build vs. buy, Jon believes very few banks can successfully acquire and scale a large technology company the way Capital One can -- most should focus on targeted capability acquisitions and strong fintech partnerships.

3. 

   28 Jan 2026

   Building Bank-Grade Infrastructure for the Next Generation of FinTechs, with Tom Bianco

   Commerce Ventures Partner Ysbrant Marcellus sits down with Tom Bianco, who leads Newline at Fifth Third Bank, to explore how a top-10 U.S. bank is building embedded payments infrastructure purpose-built for modern fintechs. They dive into what makes Newline different: a standalone brand backed by $300 billion in assets, a team that "looks like a fintech to serve fintechs," and modern APIs that let companies like Stripe, Brex, and Ramp move money at scale without navigating traditional bank bureaucracy. Tom shares how Fifth Third's proprietary core—owned since the 1950s—and the strategic acquisition of Rise Money in 2023 created a platform that now processes massive commercial payment volumes with minimal manual intervention. They discuss the three pillars of embedded services (payments, banking, and finance), why conviction from the CEO down was essential to building a 95% ring-fenced team, and how Newline is positioning for a future that's "more agentic, more real-time, and more global." Tom also unpacks why he's bullish on stablecoins as the "leapfrog technology" that could disrupt the correspondent banking oligopoly, where AI-driven B2B payments will create the shortest path to revenue, and why his north star metric is hitting trillions in monthly processing volume by 2031.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 37 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

50

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

60

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.