I sat down with Myles Stephenson, CEO of Modulr, to talk through how the company evolved from powering early Revolut t to building a full-stack payments automation platform serving lenders, payroll providers, and travel companies.

Modulr made a deliberate call two years ago to stop being a horizontal BaaS provider and go deep on specific verticals. They hold an EMI licence, settle at the Bank of England, and have direct scheme access and Myles argues that gives them everything they need without the overhead of a banking licence. The business model is flow, not storage, which means transaction revenue drives profitability, not interest margin.

We get into:

• Why Modulr walked away from the embedded finance land grab to double down on payments automation
• How their EMI licence gives them everything they need (and why they don’t want a banking licence)
• The US expansion with FIS and what real-time payment adoption actually looks like across markets
• Why the US is behind on real-time payments and what it will actually take to change behaviour
• Commercial VRP and whether open banking can ever dent direct debit
• Stablecoins vs. tokenized deposits — and how a non-bank positions for both
• How Modulr built a compliance hub with Sardine and where AI fits into fraud and operations
• How Modulr reached profitability, and why the answer is flow, not interest margin
• What’s on the roadmap: ACH in the US, foreign currency, and commercial VRP as a collections layer

Modulr’s bet is simple: own the infrastructure, stay focused on payments, and let the applications follow. Whether that thesis holds in the US is the real test.

This is my first-ever in-person episode, recorded live at Stripe Tour London. I sat down with Neetika Bansal, Business Lead for Connect, Money Management, and Crypto at Stripe.

We covered a lot of ground: why Stripe doesn’t have its own stablecoin, what Stripe Treasury actually means for global startups, how AI agents are starting to transact at scale, and where the real stablecoin volume is coming from.

Here’s what we got into:

Why Stripe built an open stablecoin issuance platform instead of launching its own coin

Stripe Treasury: multi-currency accounts, stablecoin balances, and paying contractors worldwide

The machine payments protocol and Link AI wallet

x402 protocol hitting 100M cumulative transactions and what that signals

How companies like Meta, Felix, and Deel are using stablecoins for real economic activity

Fraud, disputes, and trust in a world where AI agents transact faster than humans

How Stripe is managing 300+ product launches across Bridge, Privy, and its core platform

Advice for founders building global-from-day-one companies on how to think about money movement

Neetika’s take on where agentic commerce goes in five years is worth listening to closely.

_____

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirojboboev/

Newsletter: https://www.fintechwrapup.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wrapuppodcast/

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wrapuppodcast

X: https://x.com/samboboev

Banks are not being replaced by AI. They are being rebuilt around it. Tim Rutten, Chief Marketing Officer at Backbase, joins me to break down what that actually means for your career and for the industry.

Jamie Dimon wants fewer bankers and more AI builders. But what does that really mean for the thousands of finance professionals already in the workforce? Tim gives a more nuanced read, and it is not the doomsday story the headlines are selling.

We also get into the difference between machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI in a banking context, how Backbase’s AI-native banking OS handles governance and auditability in a regulated environment, who is liable when an AI agent makes a mistake, and why token cost management is one of the most underrated problems in agentic banking.

If you work in banking or are thinking about entering the industry, this one is worth your time.

_____

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirojboboev/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wrapuppodcast/

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wrapuppodcast

X: https://x.com/samboboev