Curiosity Code Podcast
Discover the fintech podcast "Curiosity Code", featuring exclusive interviews on fintech innovation and financial technology. Hosted by Alex, founder of the digital agency Productera, with a background in B2B and SaaS companies, the podcast brings together founders, CEOs, visionaries, and fintech leaders driving financial innovation, AI, open banking, and digital transformation.Each episode offers success stories, challenges, and groundbreaking ideas about the future of blockchain, AI agents, digital payments, wealth management, and other related financial technologies.
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AI Coding Agents in Finance: What to Hand Over, What to Keep
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>9 out of 10 professional developers now use AI coding agents every week. This year, the best agent in a benchmark built to look like real work passed fewer than 15% of its checks. Both are true at once.</p><p>A solo episode of Curiosity Code on which engineering work a financial firm should hand to an AI-driven team and which it should keep with conventional developers. My company, Productera, sells both, so I make money whichever way you decide. My answer: writing the code got cheap, being accountable for it did...
Who's Liable When AI Agents Make Payments? | Abril Benhumea
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>An AI agent books your flight, stays inside the budget you gave it, and pays for the wrong date. Who is responsible? Abril Benhumea, fintech and payments executive and co-founder of Passport, walks through what has to happen between an agent deciding to buy and the money actually moving.</p><p>In this episode, Abril explains how Passport worked as an interoperability and orchestration layer on top of a bank's own infrastructure, and how real-time payment systems settle and reconcile differently from batch systems like ACH. She splits an agent...
Your Team Doesn't Need to Understand RAG. It Needs These 3 Things
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>Prudential in Singapore built an AI assistant for its insurance representatives. Six of its own experts graded the answers, and 59% failed. Four months later 99% passed. Nobody on that team had to learn how the model works.</p><p>A solo episode of Curiosity Code on what people in a financial firm actually need to know about RAG and AI agents. Most need to know how to use it and where it goes wrong. The firm needs three things: an owner who decides what a correct answer is, a set of...
Programmable Self-Custody for Crypto | Frank Hepworth
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>Frank Hepworth breaks down programmable self-custody, an onchain model where clients own their crypto accounts and a manager can trade in them but never withdraw from them.<br/>Self-custody crypto, onchain asset management, and why most crypto still sits with exchanges and custodians.</p><p>🔑 Key Topics & Timestamps:<br/>0:00 Introduction<br/>1:12 What holding crypto on an exchange really costs you<br/>4:49 Why banks entering crypto won't offer liquidity pools<br/>6:32 Programmable self-custody explained with one key vs two<br/>9:09 How the three-key system protects client withdrawals<br/>11:56 Who decides the whi...
Wise Owns Its Rails. Remitly Rents Them. Who's Winning?
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>One remittance company owns its payment rails and keeps 52 cents of every $100. Another rents them, keeps about $2, and grew faster last year. So does owning the pipes decide who wins?</p><p>A solo episode of Curiosity Code. I work through a question I've already answered twice on LinkedIn, in two different ways: crypto as the experiment where the rails couldn't be owned, what my guests Colin Butler and Elena Shiltseva said, Wise vs Remitly by the numbers, and what it means if you're building or backing a payments business...
AI Agents: Who's Accountable for Mistakes? | Erich Barlow
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>AI governance for AI agents in financial services: when an agent makes a mistake at computer speed, who is accountable? Erich Barlow says the organization that deployed it, not the system and not the vendor. "Regulators and customers will not accept that the AI did it." In this episode he walks through where agents are already acting on their own in financial services, how much harm a simple chatbot can really do, whether a permission written into a system prompt counts as an access control, what AI certifications like ISO 42001...
Crypto-Backed Lending Explained | Himanshu Sahay
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>Himanshu Sahay, Co-Founder of Arch Lending and a former engineering leader at Snapchat, Tinder, and Bird, breaks down how crypto-backed lending works, from bitcoin-collateralized loans to no-liquidation borrowing, currently available to institutional borrowers and rolling out soon for retail clients. This episode dives deep into the mechanics of institutional and retail crypto lending, cost of capital, and the future of bitcoin-backed finance.</p><p>📌 Key Topics & Timestamps:<br/>0:00 Introduction<br/>8:33 Why people still aren't educated on how to use bitcoin<br/>11:47 No-liquidation loans: available to institutions now, rolling out soon for...
AI Agents in Fintech: Are They Out of Control?
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>Are AI agents out of control, or are most companies just governing them with suggestions? A solo episode on agentic AI in banking and fintech: who is in control, and who is accountable when an agent gets it wrong.</p><p>In July, hundreds of AI agents inside an OpenAI test broke into Hugging Face. Meanwhile TD Bank cut a mortgage step from fifteen hours to under three minutes with an agent. Same technology, opposite outcomes. This episode looks at why, what my podcast guests disagree on, and why US...
Crypto Won. So Where Did the Money Go? | Colin Butler
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>Colin Butler spent 2022 to 2025 as Global Head of Institutional Capital at Polygon Labs, where his team ran every major institutional launch on the chain. In this episode he goes back through four years of his own calls and says where he was wrong: why stablecoins were crypto's first product-market fit but not its only one, why the value never accrued to the infrastructure layer he was building, and why it went to the firms that already had the customers.</p><p>📌 Key Topics & Timestamps:<br/>0:00 Introduction<br/>0:40 Where crypto actually fou...
Will Open Finance Democratize Banking? | Jose Luis Navarro
<p>Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts! </p><p>Open banking is evolving faster than most traditional banks can keep up with — so where should they even start? In this episode, Jose Luis Navarro Llorens, Strategy lead for Open Banking at BBVA, breaks down what open banking, open finance, and embedded finance really mean for the future of the financial industry.<br/><br/>⏱️ Chapters:<br/>0:00 Introduction<br/>9:13 Why open banking is more than just screen scraping<br/>14:35 Where traditional banks should begin amid rapid open banking evolution<br/>18:19 How embedded finance and open banking are redefining entire industries<br/>21:46 Will o...
