Omer Menashe

Clyr - Smart Expense Management & Spend Automation

The leading expense management platform for project-based companies with employees on-the-go.

Founder

LinkedOtter

Need more CISO demos for your cybersecurity startup? Struggling to generate leads can stall your growth. LinkedOtter is designed specifically for cybersecurity startups to effortlessly generate leads.

Strategic Advisor

eMojo Digital Marketing

We specialize in everything digital. Our forté is catapulting brands skyward.

We’re fundamentally different from other digital marketing firms. Larger agencies are often slow-moving and lack the ability to quickly shift gears. Small agencies may have trouble properly servicing large accounts or maintaining consistency and reliability. We are uniquely suited to handle any and all types of clients, thanks to a combination of proprietary technology we've developed and our deep knowledge in performance marketing.

Inspire Mobile

Founded, managed and sold the company. 

Inspire Mobile is a leading mobile development company and a provider of mobile development training. Inspire Mobile gained fast access to the local market through partnering with leading players and the delivery of high-quality products and services.

Founder & CEO (Exit)

A serial entrepreneur and digital marketing expert with 20+ years of experience. 

Established a top digital marketing agency that influenced $20MM+ in ad spend.

Crafted digital growth and acquisition strategies for startups to Fortune 500 giants such as Hilton and Disney. Contributed to the marketing success of two clients that have been acquired by Google (Siemplify) and Oracle (Ravello) for $500M each.

As a way of giving back, I'm fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to mentor early-stage startups via leading accelerators such as TechStars, WEVE, ScaleUp, 8200 Impact, and more.

Founder & CEO

Alex Johnson

Director of Fintech Research

Writer. Podcaster. Researcher. Consultant. 

Aspiring to be the most curious person in fintech.

Writing about the most interesting questions and trends in fintech, with plenty of analogies and pop culture references.

This is a very good summary of a complex and fascinating trend!

ceo @ cove | If you have 50K+ customers, you’re leaving $1M+ on the table | I’ll show you where

FICO's monopoly is dead.

Cash App just announced something that changes consumer credit forever.

They're showing customers their "Cash App Score" - the actual score Block uses to make lending decisions.

Not FICO. Not VantageScore. Their own score.

Why this matters:

70% of Cash App Borrow customers have a FICO score below 580.

But Block approved 88% of them using their own model vs 64% with traditional bureau data.

Same loss rates.

This is the first large-scale closed-loop credit score.

Instead of "how much credit am I qualified for?" - it's now "how much credit from you am I qualified for?"

Here's what Block is signaling:

→ They don't furnish data to credit bureaus → They don't use bureau data to underwrite → They're exploring selling this score to other lenders

They're building an alternative credit infrastructure.

For fintech founders, this is the playbook:

If you have customer transaction data + lending products + distribution - you don't need FICO.

You can build your own scoring system tuned to your customers.

The credit bureau oligopoly survived because data was fragmented.

Now fintechs with 58M users can just... opt out.

Closed-loop credit is coming. Cash App just made the first move.
/
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Shout out Shane for the share and Alex for the killer article,
You can learn more here: https://lnkd.in/e-jHGFyU

Dave Wasik and I revisit a Great Recession line about auto loans and consumers' repayment hierarchies: “you can sleep in your car, but you can’t drive your house to work.”

Then we ask the 2026 question: with work-from-home and Uber/Lyft now as substitutes, does auto keep the same spot in the repayment hierarchy in the next downturn?

If fewer borrowers “need” the car to earn income, does willingness to pay change? Does that change apply evenly across all income and credit score brackets?

What’s the early signal that the hierarchy is shifting?

No tidy answers here, but there's a real change in the lived economics that credit models still have to underwrite.

Tune into Facing Credit, “Pressure Points”, for our full rundown of today’s credit conditions: cards vs. BNPL, auto, student loans, and the growing question mark that's private credit: 

https://lnkd.in/gtt4uScj

Google didn't just add AI to search; it changed how borrowers find lenders in the first place.

But if no one is clicking on search results anymore, what happens to the ad model that funded your funnel?

On a new episode of Facing Credit episode, Carlos Caro joins to explore what Google's updates and zero-click behavior are doing to publishers, affiliates, and the cost of a loan before it is even originated.

In this clip, we talk about the fate of click-driven ad models in a world where no one clicks.

And if you're wondering why a trillion-dollar company would damage its own ad engine out of fear of what comes next (and what that means for lenders, publishers, and affiliates)...?

Watch the clip, then listen to the full Fintech Takes episode here: https://lnkd.in/gZy46CRu

Interesting!

Dave Wasik and I talked about this on the Fintech Takes podcast a while back.

Federal student loans aren’t really loans. They’re public policy projects masquerading as loans, which, in our very polarized political environment, makes them difficult for borrowers and lenders to plan around.

Open article: Trump administration won’t seize wages and tax refunds for defaulted student loans by washingtonpost.com

Trump administration won’t seize wages and tax refunds for defaulted student loans

A 10% cap on credit card interest rates is an unambiguously bad idea.

Even consumer advocates agree that the outcomes from a 10% cap would be bad in the aggregate.

General Partner at Ensemblex; ex-Capital One; co-founder of Zest.ai and Gestalt

You may have seen the tweet. President Trump “will no longer let the American Public be ‘ripped off’ by Credit Card Companies."

It may sound great for consumers, but it isn’t.

TL;DR: The best case scenario is that lenders would find work arounds that would only be a bit more expensive than current interest rates.

Let’s start with a metaphor. Instead of capping interest rates, let’s imagine instead that he declared a cap on the price of new cars at $25,000. 

Customers would rejoice. That $70,000 car they’ve been dreaming of would now be affordable! Alas, it should be obvious that is not how it would work out. There are several possible outcomes:

     1.  Stop selling cars in the US because they can’t make a profit at that sales       
          price.
     2.  Make lower quality cars and, perhaps, accept a lower profit margin.
     3.  Find a work around. For example, stop “selling cars” and instead “rent” 
           them.

The third option is the most likely outcome. What would not happen is that BMW would start selling their $100,000 X7 for $25,000.

The same thing will – and won’t – happen with a cap on credit card interest rates. The two most likely outcomes are that only the lowest risk customers will have access to credit cards or the industry will find work arounds. Both are bad for consumers. If access is limited, moderate and higher risk customers will be pushed into other higher rate products like payday loans. If the companies create work arounds, these will be much less transparent.

We already have an example of this. Texas has a cap of 10% on many types of loans. Customers pay a 10% interest rate (yay!) to the “lender” and a service fee of, say, 20% (oops!) to a Credit Access Business (CAB). The CAB then shares that fee with the lender. Since that brings in another “mouth to feed”, the effective rate of 30% is more than the customer would pay without the cap.

If this conversation moves beyond tweets and into real policy proposals, lenders are going to need to think carefully about second-order effects—on access, pricing transparency, and product design. At Ensemblex, we work with fintechs, banks, and investors to stress-test exactly these kinds of policy and market shifts—before they show up in portfolio performance. If this is a topic you’re actively modeling or debating internally, we're happy to compare notes.

The conversation around agentic AI is usually from the merchant POV. Usually, but not always!

At Money20/20, I had the chance to sit down with Marqeta CEO Mike Milotich to dig into the questions that show up when you view agentic AI from the issuing POV.

Because if an agent is going to shop on my behalf, the most interesting questions sit with the side that already knows my intent, sets my controls, and carries my risk.

Start there, and the entire picture shifts.

Watch the clip for Mike's unlock and catch the full Fintech Takes episode here: https://lnkd.in/gjH7-vwz

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The Battle

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