Thejo Kote, Founder & CEO of Airbase

The expense management space is heating up. While it has not garnered the same headlines as other fintech categories, there has been a lot more attention focused on it in the last couple of years. Earlier this year we saw Bill.com acquire Divvy for several billion dollars and companies like Brex are unicorns many times over. But hardly anyone is focused on the middle market companies, those with 50 to 1,000 employees.

Assaf Wand, Co-Founder & CEO of Hippo

The home insurance industry has been dominated by legacy insurance carriers for decades. These companies are still doing business the same way as last century with primarily a transactional relationship with their customers. But there is a new breed of insurtech companies that are challenging the status quo and doing so in remarkable new ways.

B.C. Silver, President of The Change Company

In many ways the racial wealth gap has it roots in the financial system. It was one the driving forces behind the Community Reinvestment Act of the 1970s but clearly that did not solve the problem. We need new solutions that get to the heart of the problem and one of those solutions is more home ownership for minorities.

Aaron Klein, Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution

While America remains the richest economy in the world it is also the one where it is the most expensive to be poor. I have written about overdraft fees before (here and here) and that is one of the real problems with the banking system that is holding people back that live paycheck to paycheck. But it is about more than overdrafts, it is about expensive bank accounts and payments that take too long to clear.

Lilac Bar David, Co-Founder & CEO of Lili

The freelance market in the U.S. is huge and it continues to grow. During the pandemic as millions of people were displaced from their regular job, many decided to supplement or replace their income with freelance work. These people have unique needs when it comes to banking, they are not quite a consumer and not really a small business. They are a bit of both.

Brendan Coughlin, Head of Consumer Banking at Citizens Bank

I have been following Citizens Bank for many years as they built this robust online lending operation across multiple verticals. They have also launched an in-house digital bank called Citizens Access and they have a groundbreaking partnership with Apple which has, in many ways, changed the iPhone buying experience. They are a top 25 bank that has the mindset of a fintech.

Kirill Bensonoff, Co-Founder & Head of Product at New Silver

One of the main use cases for decentralized finance (DeFi) has been lending. This typically involves crypto investors using their holdings as collateral to take out a loan to (often) invest in more crypto. This is all done programmatically via smart contracts but it has all seemed far removed from traditional finance. But in April, we had the world’s first real estate transaction conducted via DeFi.

Steve Muszynski, Founder & CEO of Splash Financial

Marketplaces are dominating so many areas of business these days. There are Airbnb, Uber, eBay, Etsy and of course the biggest marketplace of them all: Amazon. There are also lending marketplaces, some of which have existed for a long time, and are doing large loan volumes. But there is a new type of marketplace coming on the scene, what I call an “intelligent marketplace” that is more sophisticated on the back end and provides a far better user experience.