Hey, fintech fam 💜

Writing to you from the West Coast, San Francisco to be exact. What are some of your favorite restaurants here that I have to try?🍴

I’ll be back in New York this weekend, but for now I’m having a blast recording podcasts, meeting with event partners, and visiting some iconic locations!

3 stories for you today: the first-ever fintech to go on Shark Tank (and closed 2 deals), what the recent bank charter news from this week means for fintech, and my recent conversation with a Chief Risk Officer.

Let’s get into it! ✨

#TRENDING

Every Thursday, I break down the fintech stories that matter most — grounded in my reporting, interviews with industry leaders, and what I’m seeing unfold across the industry.

Nikki Varanasi, founder and CEO of Parrot Finance, was packing up her booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2025.

Her flight was booked for a few hours later, when she walked past a casting room for the TV show, Shark Tank.

She had no deck, no prepared pitch, nothing but the Parrot app loaded on her phone. She went in anyway.

Six months of diligence later, Varanasi and her co-founders became the first fintech company ever to pitch on Shark Tank, walking away with a deal from two sharks and a season finale slot that aired in April.

👉🏽 Watch the Parrot Finance pitch on Shark Tank!

Varanasi's pitch centered on a gap she'd spotted in wealth management: retail investors have never had access to the strategies run by firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street.

Because that access has always run through financial advisors most people can't afford. 

At the time of filming, Parrot was building around 13F data and hedge fund partnerships rather than the influencer-driven copy trading her competitors leaned on.

Varanasi says this distinction mattered to the sharks watching for legitimacy in a category that has struggled with it. 

"It's about the trust piece," she told me, describing why fintech founders face a harder credibility bar than the consumer products Shark Tank usually features.

The sharks seemed to agree. So do I.

Varanasi and her team landed a deal with Lori Greiner and guest shark Rashawn Williams, an early investor in Robinhood and Coinbase, and fielded a separate offer from Kevin O'Leary they ultimately turned down. 

No shark said no. On a show built around rejection, that's rare.

The version of Parrot that pitched in June 2025 isn't the version that aired in April. 

In the months between, the company secured its RIA license, which let it move into automated trading and AI-driven recommendations, and gave it access to the same institutional strategies previously locked behind advisor relationships. 

Parrot now manages $200 million in assets.

Varanasi points to this as evidence the company has outgrown "boutique manager" territory. She's candid that the licensing shift, not the TV moment itself, is what actually changed the business.

Varanasi's pitch ran nearly an hour before producers cut it to the ten minutes that aired. 

She said the hardest part wasn't the pitch itself; it was the months of not knowing whether they'd made the cut at all, out of the tens of thousands of companies that apply each season. 

Would she do it again? Without hesitation. 

The value, she told me, was never really about the check. 

It was about bringing on a partner with a network she couldn't buy, and about the validation a founder gets from surviving a room full of people whose job is to say no.

Fintech runs the rails the entire economy moves on, but most people outside the industry couldn't tell you what it actually is. 

Shark Tank gave a fintech founder a rare shot at prime-time living rooms, the kind of mainstream visibility beverage and gadget founders get by default and fintech almost never does. 

And Varanasi didn't just get airtime; she and her all-women founding team walked out with two sharks fighting for a piece of the deal, proof of just how much work goes into building a fintech company worth betting on.

The OCC delivered two verdicts in the same week. 

On July 23rd, it gave Upstart conditional approval to establish a branchless, full-service national bank, just four months after the lending marketplace applied. 

The next day, it rejected Wise's application for a national trust bank charter outright.

Upstart's approval would let it originate loans in all 50 states, accept FDIC-insured deposits, and cut some of its reliance on third-party bank partners, while keeping the loan-purchaser network that funds most of what it originates today. 

CEO Paul Gu called it a step toward lowering the cost of credit, but the timing is also interesting. 

Charter activity is accelerating as the OCC has spent the past year expanding what counts as bank-permissible digital asset activity, and fintechs are recognizing that a charter is no longer just a regulatory badge, but infrastructure. 

That framing aligns with something one of our guest contributors, Fei Han, wrote in a recent piece on neobanking's next phase:

"A customer who direct-deposits their paycheck, spends regularly, saves, borrows, and invests all in one place is the real franchise." 

Owning a charter is one of the more direct ways to reduce dependence on the partner banks sitting between a fintech and that franchise. 

Fintechs are racing to own the primary financial relationship, and a bank charter is increasingly part of that strategy rather than a side project. 

But Wise's rejection, coming one day after Upstart's approval, is proof that supervisory scrutiny hasn't loosened just because the appetite for charters has grown.

I sat down with Green Dot's Chief Risk Officer, Kim Olson, at the SOLO Reliance Summit in New York.

She made a case for a version of risk management that barely resembles the department's old reputation. 

Now, she told me, it's about figuring out how to get to yes, fast, while volume and real-time decisioning keep climbing.

AI is a big reason why. 

Olson described it as an accelerant that can also make mistakes at scale if nobody's watching.

This is why she keeps a human in the loop on outcomes (like many operators are) rather than letting models run unsupervised. 

She was equally direct about the flip side:

Fraud has industrialized too.

Deepfakes and synthetic identities are giving bad actors their own accelerant, and banks have to move as fast on defense as fraudsters move on offense.

Her framing for founders choosing a banking partner stuck with me.

It's a marriage, not a vendor relationship, and you want someone invested in your long-term success with real compliance infrastructure behind them, not just a signature on a term sheet. 

Her advice to build safeguards into a product's foundation rather than patch them in later applies well beyond banking partnerships. 

It's the same logic behind her push for reusable KYC and KYB.

An industry-wide network could validate identity once and cut friction for everyone downstream instead of every institution rebuilding trust from scratch.

The founders who treat compliance as a growth strategy instead of a tax on speed are the ones who won't have to rebuild their infrastructure after a fraud event or regulatory gap forces the issue. 

Olson bets that the next generation of Chief Risk Officers will need to be technical enough to understand the data rails themselves, not just the policies governing them, because judgment and infrastructure are becoming the same job.

Leaders like Janelle Sallenave, COO of Stripe, will be speaking at The Leadership Summit on September 29th.

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That wraps up today’s edition—thanks for reading! Until next week, keep innovating and challenging the status quo.

See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜