Fixing SMB Cash Flow with Ariel Blum, Founder of Receive

In this episode of FinTech Layer Cake, Reggie Young sits down with Ariel Blum, Founder of Receive, to unpack the challenges of small business cash flow and why “earned revenue access” could transform how SMBs operate. 

Ariel shares his journey from watching his parents struggle with delayed payments, to working at Amex, Green Dot, and Melio, to ultimately founding Receive. They explore the future of embedded finance, fintech’s shift from “hot or not” to “essential,” and how solving cash flow timing mismatches could unlock massive opportunities for the 33 million small businesses in the U.S. and beyond.

Transcript

Fixing SMB Cash Flow with Ariel Blum, Founder of Receive

Reggie Young:
Ariel, welcome to Fintech Layer Cake. Excited to have you on. You and I have known each other for years. I know you're super sharp in the fintech space and a lot of expertise to share, so excited for our conversation. Maybe the best place to start is what are you building today? What is Receive? What is the company you're creating, and why are you doing it?

Ariel Blum:
First of all, thanks for having me. We go way back, and it's just a pleasure working with you and getting a chance to just chat and the entire team. Thrilled and privileged to be here and especially on Fintech Layer Cake. This is cool.

In terms of, first of all, what we're building, we're building the first ever earned revenue access. That may sound familiar to the earned wage access and products of that nature. We're touching upon a key pain point that literally lives within the four walls of any small business. And that could be metaphorical four walls or actual brick-and-mortar four walls, and that's cashflow.

We are tapping into the ability for businesses to access their receivables or their earned cash in real time. And we do it with zero tech debt, zero APR, zero cost. So we're reinventing the idea of access, adding it that it's accessible anytime, and then the best part is by our partnership with Lithic and Mastercard, making it accessible anywhere. That's really the vision behind Receive.

We're just excited about the way folks are gravitating towards this, the earned revenue access space, which we're helping pioneer. We see a lot of interest. Folks get it. Small businesses are excited about it. Our platform partners are elated when they find out what we can do for them, the value that we can bring to their end customers, and also the value that we deliver to them. So it's been a very, very fun couple of years, definitely difficult, but I'm blessed to have a wonderful team, wonderful set of investors, an incredible set of, first of all, family members and support system, but also customers, which are amazing.

Reggie Young:
I love it. I've chatted with friends in fintech that kind of know the e-commerce space, and they're all like, oh yeah, that's a moneymaker of a business right there. Why this idea? What led you to want to start the earned revenue access model specifically?

Ariel Blum:
For that, we got to take a trip down nostalgia lane.

Reggie Young:
I was going to say, I know it's a big question with a big answer. I thought it'd be a good one to cover.

Ariel Blum:
Yeah. We'll take a couple of steps back to maybe where I had the long flowing blonde hair. My parents, they're small business owners. They're incredible. They've really done a lot to establish themselves. But I saw the trouble with cash flow. And I'm not saying that I understood the terminology, AP, AR, or things of that nature, at the time, but I could feel those problems of cash coming in generally slower than it went out.

And then I had the opportunity after college really, or even paying for college, helping sell paint door to door, or run my own DJ business, obviously not very well, but still trying, and just seeing how certain things were delayed. And when I came asking why, I couldn't get a straight answer. For example, if somebody paid me by PayPal, it was being held for five to seven days, or even on Stripe. And I was going, why is this happening? I don't know. That's just the way the system is. And I kept saying that that's just not a sufficient answer for me. And I always wondered, is it just a me thing, or other small businesses suffering from this?

And then I had the wonderful opportunity to join the team at Amex, really some of the best men and women I've ever worked with, an incredible marketing company. To think about the way they started as a courier service, and then morphing into financial services, it's just an amazing background. And honestly, it's a pool of talent that just explodes. Everywhere you go, there's these incredible Amexers. They call themselves blue boxers that have gone to different places.

Being there, I kept the same thread of, why are we doing this? Why is this working like this? And I got to start on the digital partnerships team, worked on the Plenty product for a little bit. But really, the why came to life when I was working on the co-brand side of things. So what is FICO? Why do we use FICO? Why do we offer 20%, 30% utilization rate, and then you shut off somebody's credit line, or you ding their personal credit score? Ostensibly, what it boiled down to was a problem with data. So I kept saying, okay, that's really interesting. We don't have real-time access into data, so we can't assess the liability. I was like, okay, cool. 

And then got a wonderful opportunity to join the team at Green Dot, really a pioneer in the Banking-as-a-Service space, publicly traded bank holding companies. The ability to see how banks work, processors work, all these things at a publicly traded scale was crazy and just an incredible experience. But there, seeing that all of a sudden, brands were thinking outside the box. They were saying, how do we tap into our customers' daily activity? If we're providing an iPhone, if we're providing transportation services, I know Uber calls themselves a logistic company, what else can we do for them? What's tied to that?

Originally, we did the deal where the Uber drivers could access their funds instead of waiting two weeks. And what those folks were saying was, we're being treated like W-2s, but technically, we're 1099s. We need the money faster. And you'd roll around, and I remember being in Uber’s and saying, hey, y'all, what do you need the money for? And they would say, my son has football practice. My daughter is playing hockey. I need to buy a new stick. So I'm driving a couple of rides, and then I need the money. So it was just cool to see that this problem that I touched upon a couple of years before of cash flow was prevalent for everybody.

And then, obviously, I had the incredible experience to join the Melio team, which was amazing. It was awesome being at other companies that were established. But this was ground floor, we're coming up with a new idea, and we're running with it. That was pretty eye-opening and an incredible experience, probably what caused me to do what I'm doing now, which is building Receive.

And what was exciting was to see the way they thought about these problems. Being exclusively focused on SMBs, it just helped me understand even better, whoa, these folks have a massive problem. Then I started learning the lexicon and terminology, accounts payable, accounts receivable. And just by launching products and talking to them, they said, can you make this work? Why do I have to wait? Turn my receivables into spendables. And that was literally, the light bulb went off. That's where the idea of access anytime, anywhere- actually, Matan Bar, the CEO of Melio, gave me that idea. He called it access anytime, anywhere. It's on the back of our t-shirts. It was really the catalyst to go do this.

So why this, why now? I would say about 10 years in fintech that seeing these problems and arming myself with the different parts of the ecosystem to understand, understanding the economics behind it, the problems, the risks, the this, all that, bringing that together, and then saying, hey, with the evolution of APIs and the desire for, like you said, the explosion of e-commerce folks that see this.

By the way, we always talk about e-commerce. Anybody with a smart terminal, it could be a Stripe terminal, it could be a Shopify terminal powered by Stripe, or it could be Toast, it could be Clover, whatever it is, as long as we're getting the batch data, we can work with them. I started saying the traditional wall between brick-and-mortar and online, that's disappearing. We can reach the broader segment of SMBs, touch into the 33.7 million small businesses. So why here, why now? Technology evolution, a wonderful set of mentors, an incredible run in fintech, and excited to see where it goes next.

Reggie Young:
I love it. Yeah. A lot of deep personal history and reason to build Receive. I remember looking at some of your original onboarding flows and all your implementation material when you were working with Lithic initially. It took me a few times before the Receive name clicks. And then it's, oh, obviously, yeah, you can get your receivables. There's a lot of fun puns and relevance in the name. I love it.

Ariel Blum:
I'm a big pun guy. I love those things. I always tell folks, if you have a good pun, you win my heart. We have one team member. Every week, we do our weekly recap, and we have one team member who always sends out the puns, and it just brings such a smile to my face.

Reggie Young:
I love it. This is now I'm going to start slipping puns into my own weekly updates. So this is a good challenge.

Ariel Blum:
That's it. I can't wait for the team to thank me. They're going to be like, this is genius.

The early sketches- it was funny. The other day, I was looking back at them, and I was like, oh, I understand why it took so long. I was like, doing them my own, the different sketches and the arrows and everything, I was like, oh, my God, I probably tortured Reggie by just sending this stuff. I was like, oh, I feel terrible. So I wanted to take the opportunity to apologize. They get all the chicken scratch and crazy ideas that I originally charted up.

Reggie Young:
Nothing to apologize for. Those are usually how the best ideas take shape. Don't mind at all.

I love hearing about your background, too. I think one of the interesting things you hinted at is that each place that you've been had a slightly different culture with a different kind of lens of viewing things, like we have a four- or is it blue box? That's the Amex- we have some former blue boxers at Lithic.  Amex clearly had a big culture impact on them. It sounds like both or all of Amex, Melio, Green Dot, similar kind of impact for you.

I'd be curious what your top lesson from each of Melio, Green Dot, and Amex was. If there's one big insight or piece of wisdom that you learned from your time at those companies, what would they be?

Ariel Blum:
Oh, it's a great question. I think at Amex, what was interesting was customer care, loving your customers. I have to tell you, I've just never seen an organization that loved its customers more. When Ken and, at the time, Leslie and Doug Buckminster, when these leaders, Glenda Mcneal, when they used to get up on stage and talk, it was always about it started with the customer. They'd always talk about the J.D. Power. And I remember thinking like, they're obsessed with their customers, and that's awesome. So that was really an interesting takeaway that I was very enamored with and something, by the way, that stayed true to this day.

By the way, whenever they spoke, every leadership spoke, they always had an anecdote. I remember this one time I was traveling here and somebody took out their Amex card and said they loved this or complained about that. It's not like it fell on deaf ears. They were listening. They passed it along to the appropriate teams. It's pretty amazing. That was definitely one of the things that was very ingrained in me after leaving there.

Getting the opportunity to go to Green Dot, it was a whole new world. The idea of embedding financial products and really moving fast and breaking things was something that I think we definitely did at Amex, but to a whole new degree at Green Dot, really focused on a new category with a bank in hand and the ability to work with some of the best and brightest and see how we could close big deals that were really big and had really big impacts, not just on a one-to-one ratio, but the one-to-one to many. Where I started to really change my thinking was I didn't have to go touch every single customer. I could work with a platform that had tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of customers, maybe even millions, and get to them that way. So that was a big paradigm shift that I never thought about.

And then at Melio, I learned so many different things. First of all, it was the first time seeing something really from the ground up. Now I was at an earlier point, but not on the earliest side by any stretch, but I had the opportunity to work with folks that literally had built something from scratch. I remember meeting Ilan for the first time, and it was amazing. I remember meeting Ziv. And then I remember meeting Matan and hearing how Matan talked about the business and his passion for small businesses. He's just an entrepreneur. And I kept being like, these three are just going to be successful. And the way they think about problems, the work attitude, it was unbelievable.

And also remember bridging the gap between, hey, we're based in Israel, but we're working in America, that's not an easy gap to cross, and they did it masterfully. It was very cool to see also the passion that they had for their employees. Just to laugh, we talked about the blue box, they called their team the Famelio. And I remember being like, that's so clever. I was like, that's so clever.

I'll tell you a funny story. I went to breakfast with Matan. I must've been at Melio for two weeks. So I just landed in Israel. I'm sitting, having breakfast with him. His phone is ringing, but he's talking to me about how they can change small businesses. By the way, their motto was keeping small business in business, which is an incredible tagline. He's talking about some of the problems he saw and how they started and all these things. We're talking, and all of a sudden it's like, it's an hour and a half, an hour and 45 minutes, we're approaching two hours. And I'm thinking like, if I'm here with you, that's okay, but you're the CEO. I remember he looked at his phone and he had a bunch of missed calls. He was late to something, but he was so passionate about it that time just dissipated. That's really amazing to see firsthand. I had incredible bosses. I worked with one of what I call a fintech star, Aharon Levine, a bunch of folks, just amazing opportunities.

And I think there was also this attitude, which was new to me, which is very prevalent here, which is why not? Very much I always grew up with, okay, do this, play by the rules, keep going. And when I had the idea for Receive, what they said to me was, why not do it? And that was crazy. That was something where I was like, I'm not you. I'm not entrepreneurial. They’re like, you don't know that. You haven't tried. All of a sudden you're confronted with that's true, but that's also scary. So what do I do?

Again, I don't think of myself that way. I look around and I'm trying to learn from some of the best and brightest in the business. I always call Beau just to ask questions or just hear how he thinks about things, folks that throughout the industry just have so much experience and are entrepreneurs at their heart. How do they handle problems? How do they think about these things? I'm very grateful, and that's probably one of the things that I learned most at Melio.

Reggie Young:
I love it. All great lessons. Green Dot's one that I love to dig in a little more, because if I remember correctly, you were the first hire on their, what was at the time called BaaS team or fintech team, whatever the current regulatory terminology for that, that a sector preferred regulatory terminology is. But you were the first one to lead their strategic development of the platform and their pipeline and all that. What were some of the big things that the bank had to get right?

Green Dot's obviously built a good name for itself. It is an established fintech partner bank at this point, but you saw it- to your point, I got to kick out of your combo, move fast and break things, but also a bank, which is very inconsistent in modern fintech speak. What were some of the things that when you were there at the ground floor, building that fintech practice at Green Dot, building that out, what were some of the things that the bank needed to get right to make that such a success?

Ariel Blum:
First of all, I think it's always people. That's the most important thing, people that know how to balance those risks with reward, but also think about the future. I was really lucky. I actually worked for somebody who was at American Express and had gone over to Green Dot, named Seth Ross. He's great. He was like, hey, we're starting this team, why don't you come on over? And I was elated to work with him. His boss was- I believe he was the CRO at the time, Brett Narlinger, who was a payments legend. To think about it, Green Dot ended up bringing amazing people, like Daniel Eckert and Steve Streit, the founder. These folks knew how to balance all those aspects and be forward-thinking and also know how to bring the regulatory landscape along with it, which was very unique.

I'd say, from the beginning, what was interesting is, like I said, move fast and break things, but also stay compliant. I think what was interesting was, and what they did wonderfully, was really staying collaboratively in sync with the risk team and the PMO team. Everybody really knew their verticals, their swim lanes, if you want to call it, whatever it might be, but they also stayed very collaborative. I learned that lesson, watching Brett, watching Seth, watching these folks communicate, talk, coordinate. The people that were running the technology team were deeply intertwined. We had a lovely, incredible product leader, Shaheen. I knew him. I got to go to coffee with him. These were incredible opportunities to see folks at the top who wanted to hear what we were thinking, who wanted to work cross-collaboratively, and it was a wonderful collaboration environment.

I think the thing that I realized was when you run really fast and you leave folks behind you, it's like in warfare, the tanks go and then they're like, oh no, we need our supply chain. There's not one particular special part. It's all of us together as a team. I think they did an incredible job hammering that home and bringing the bank along. The bank at the time, it was Mary Dent, Frank Mastrangelo. These are titans of fintech. They know their stuff. So to work with us and be close and collaborative, it was just incredible. Even like you mentioned, the Amex folks, the Green Dot folks, all these incredible companies just skyrocketing, and even Chime, Chris Britt, these folks that have taken these models and turned them into incredible businesses.

I think the key learning was collaboration, information, and staying in sync throughout the entire process. I think, generally, regulators, when they find out about something afterwards, the immediate reaction is to have an allergic reaction. But when you're brought along and you get to understand the thinking, you see what's going on under the hood, you understand, okay, it's in cold storage, it's transferred to hot storage. We are PCI compliant. Here's everything that's going on. We never expose any pan data, all these little bits. If we're able to keep the regulators, the bank, the compliance team, the tech team, and everybody on the same page, which is a very, very hard thing to do, I think that was the key to success, and it still is. And I think that they're an incredible team hoist for greatness.

Reggie Young:
I love it. Yeah. I love how you started with people, too. One of the things I always like to say is that every company is just a group of people. You can think about it as this disembodied legal entity, but at the end of the day, it's the people you hire.

The collaboration point is really interesting, too. You’re right, it's both internal and external collaboration. I think the deeper I get in fintech continually, the more I'm convinced that one of the key things you have to figure out how to navigate and is a big factor in success or not is this space is so complicated that if you make a product decision, that product decision can implicate your bank. It can implicate the risk team. It can implicate legal. It can implicate your support function. It can implicate your vendor. Everything is such a spider web. It's really hard to move fast, move quickly, without running rush hour, without irking a bank partner or whatever. I think this fundamental, the art and science of how do you navigate moving fast to this incredibly complicated intertwined hard industry, I think everything you described is great learnings from Green Dot.

Looking more to today, you've been growing Receive now for a few years, just successfully raised a Series A. So congrats. What are some of your biggest lessons from the Receive journey to date? What have you learned big insights on that changed or flipped what you thought you knew about at the SMB market or just starting a start-up? You already hinted at the journey of I'm not an entrepreneur, but I'm curious and figuring this stuff out,  but I'm curious if there's any other learnings you've had.

Ariel Blum:
First off, we're super thrilled to have the investors that we do, and we're thrilled to close our seed round. We're really excited. I think what I would say is the collaboration and the people are the most important thing, investing in people, letting them know that they have the ability to go out there and do what they need to do and to execute the way that they see fit, knowing that I believe in them.

I think our team is just a team of rock stars. They have my belief. They have my trust. But also establishing a cadence of collaboration. We touch base every day for 15 minutes. We have our Monday prep session where we all talk about what we're going to work on that week. We have our Thursday recap. What I think is wonderful is we think people that maybe necessarily may have not been the perfect hire for said role, they weren't exactly in fintech maybe, or maybe they did something fintech adjacent or something like that, and maybe now they're in a different role than they would have imagined, but I think when you find talented folks that are hungry, excited, able to communicate, it's awesome.

I think I started off by saying this, but I feel really grateful. It's fun for me having done a number of odd jobs in my life, all of which I enjoyed the ability to work with folks that are motivated, smart, and then see how it impacts small businesses. I think one of the things that you alluded to, like, what was your learning, I think the learning was something very simple. Every business, doesn't matter if they're a car wash, doesn't matter if they're e-commerce, doesn't matter if they're a repair shop, auto body repair shop, and it doesn't matter if they're a vitamin shop, they all have two truisms, things that they have to pay for and things to get paid for. That generally buckets into AR and AP.

When I started seeing that, I was saying, okay, so there's clearly a deficiency here where folks get paid by X, and thinking about that as I'm getting paid by your Stripe terminal, your processor, whatever that might be. Then I have spend where I have my card products. And then in the middle, I have my storage device, which would be your bank account or a ledger or something that you would keep your money at. I keep saying, how do we turn that time-to-cash or time-to-money cap into a benefit for small businesses? And that was the thesis behind Receive.

So I'd say what I've learned recently is that everybody has this problem. I think you can always read the stats. It was like 82% say cash flow is their biggest problem, and 87%, if they don't have the right cash flow products, they can go out of business. And you go, okay, these are stats, and I read them on paper and that's great. When you hear small businesses telling you this, that's a whole different- not problem, but exciting feeling that, hey, this is something we're tackling. That's a huge issue.

And going back to what I mentioned thatAmerican Express, understanding the customer, hearing their problem, saying, wait, if this is a big problem, we can help you solve this, I think that's been probably the biggest insight. This is a global problem. Right now, we're US only. I keep an eye to the global market. There's definitely some that have piqued my interest. I think with technological evolutions over the last six to eight months. Even though everyone's hearing about- you'll hear some exciting stuff coming out of the Receive side, but yeah, I think that it's a global problem. When you start to hear it, the idea of tackling it just makes it that much more exciting.

Reggie Young:
I love it. It's funny. As you've been talking to this podcast, you've been talking about this kind of timing mismatch problem for small businesses, right? This isn't a perfect analogy, but I've been thinking about banks have that problem, right? It's like they lend out for a certain timeframe, but then they also have to make deposits of it. They have this timing liquidity mismatch, and they have entire teams that run that treasury operations. A small business that might just be one person ordering their supplies and trying to collect after hours when they've been running their business during the full day, they don't have that treasury team to help them manage all of that. It's a hard problem that you have businesses all over the world to deal with.

Ariel Blum:
It's a huge problem. Even the way we built our UX was listening to customers. We're able to show you what you've earned, what you've spent, and what you have in your bank side. There's no longer, okay, let me go check in, for example, my Chase account. Wait a second, my Amex got pulled $4,000, but what did I spend on that? Now I can go to Amex. Oh wait, but how much money did I make? That concept is broken. That is variable pieces of information that are not congealed or consolidated into one place where somebody can log on, understand what's going on, assess the health of their business, and grow the way they need to.

Again, another thing that just jumped out at me, it was 91% of Americans work for a small business. And there's 33.7 million small businesses. Even if we assume, okay, 10% of this problem and 10% of that are actually interested and 10% would use it, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of customers. It's huge.

Reggie Young:
Yep. Huge space. I know this from my time at Bluevine, working at Bluevine on SMB problems almost felt like being a pro bono lawyer some days because you're like, wow, this is the lifeblood of the US economy, and I feel good doing this work. They exhaust my heart for that space.

Ariel Blum:
Of course. And a shout out to Yao. When I went to New York to start my fundraising journey, I got to meet up with him, and he was like, do it. He was another person that pushed me along this journey. Shout out to Yao, awesome entrepreneur and leader and good friend of the pod.

Reggie Young:
Yeah. No, he's fantastic. The entire team there is a special group of people.

One of the things you and I were chatting about before recording is the phrase, is fintech hot or not, which I'd love for you to break down for listeners, because I think it's a really interesting reframe of a consistent topic of conversation over the past five years in fintech. So what is the phrase, is fintech hot or not? What is that getting at?

Ariel Blum:
I think what it was alluding to is there's points where people start to look at things as hot or not. It's in or it's not. And we use this kind of paradigm or mental framework where we say, okay, if it's in, I need in. Oh, it's not cool anymore, I'm out. And I think what's interesting about fintech is I think it really had a very hot moment. We saw it with valuations. We saw it as money pouring in. And then shortly after, we saw it dip a little bit. We saw people step back a little bit, is this really where we need to be, what's going to happen to these business models, et cetera.

I think what's interesting is it's no longer, is fintech hot or is fintech not. It's now that fintech is essential. I think as we look at these small businesses, we understand that, yes, they might be selling something, but there's a financial component. When we look at enterprise partners or technology partners, they'd almost be remiss to look at their product in a singular view without a financial product lens or something on the road map. I think you'd be hard pressed to find any company, Fortune 100, 500 start-up, anything, that may be in a specific sector but doesn't have a financial component or financial technology component on the road map, or at least being talked about and thought about. And it could take various different forms, card products, stablecoin, et cetera. I think what we've moved past is the idea, is it in or is it out, to now that it's essential. It's essential to my business, it's essential to my customers, and it's essential to my future growth as an enterprise.

Reggie Young:
I love it. I think that's right. Yeah, fintech had this bubble in 2022. It's had a few bubbles over the years, but it feels like non-financial companies are coming around to the value of embedded financial products. Yeah, no longer hot or not, it's now, do you see the writing on the wall or not?

Ariel Blum:
And by the way, I think a lot of that happens in personal life. I have my mom who was like, can you Zelle me? And I was like, can you Zelle or send me money, or I Venmoed you. These switch from nouns to- I'm not an English major, but it's gerunds. I'm going to be Venmoing you money. It's like these things where you're like, oh, that's interesting. It's cool. I think that now it moved from this big, scary technology.

And by the way, I think a lot of that is also keeping regulators kind of very close to these products and protecting consumers. We probably should see more of that in the SMB side as well, which we can talk about at a later point. But I think that folks are starting to see this in a day-to-day existence, and that permeates then into the enterprise life. I think that's really cool. I've heard folks getting from grandma a Zelle for a birthday present. It's just interesting to see how this is really permeating. I don't think it's the future. I think it's now.

Reggie Young:
Yep. I love that. I'm pretty sure you win the award for first podcast guest to use the word gerund on the podcast over 50+ episodes. Props for that. But no, it's true.

I have two wrap-up questions. First one, what have you been thinking about a lot lately that you think folks in fintech aren't talking about enough?

Ariel Blum:
Oh, it's a great question. I think a lot of it was my take on the hot or not. But I think as we think about fintech, I think we often keep thinking about it exclusively as American based. I think what fintech can do is revolutionize the world. I think about fintech very much like I think about the internet. Originally, things were considered far away or difficult to access, with stablecoins, with card products, with things that can be ubiquitously spun up in a matter of weeks when traditionally would have taken years.

I think we can start to access parts of the globe that never existed. We can start to solve problems of inequality or problems of access or problems of qualification. We can start to think about the paradigms differently. I think finance in general is considered out of the box. I think it was, okay, do you meet this criteria? Do you meet this criteria? Then you get that. Do you miss this criteria? Okay, you're not on this criteria. So you get that, right? You can get X, you can get Y, you can get Z, and we'll determine where that goes. And often that was a black box.

So that was something that really drove me crazy. And by the way, one of the catalysts for Receive, it's the ability to see receivables, to see the bank account, use our product features, our job that we built in-house and coupled that with AI, to then produce spending power accordingly. So we're challenging the very notion of what does spending power mean? And we even coined that term. Now I'm starting to see a I got a Chase note about spending power. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool.

So I think that we have to think about this as a global revolution and opportunity to not just reach far away, but reinvent the way we interact with other parts of the globe and bring new products and new accessibility and new features to folks that previously couldn't.

Reggie Young:
I love it. Yeah. It's funny. This exact topic of the flow of financial products has come up in multiple conversations. It's one of those ideas that suddenly is just popping up in my life, all of our conversations with folks in fintech. I think everything you just said has been a big theme in that fintech can expand far beyond the US.

But also one of the things I've noticed recently in conversations is that fintech flows both ways. It's no longer the US is the only exporter of financial product ideas. It's now flowing in all directions. There's no clear, this is the main source of financial products anymore. So it's an exciting time.

Ariel Blum:
Totally. And I would even say, when we look back, some of the neobanks, like N26, when they entered the US market, maybe it didn't always pan out. And I think that what's really interesting is part of that is helping shape- as I kind of alluded to before at Melio, maybe something doesn't pan out. Maybe it's the entrepreneur spirit here in Tel Aviv. I don't know. Just because something didn't pan out doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea. It could have been bad timing, could have been all these different facets.

Like you said, it's not just going out. It's not just exporting. We're also importing. So you look at N26, you look at the way those things are going. I'll tell you a really interesting one. Here in Israel, if you don't have your card, you can basically type in a code pushed to you by your app within the particular bank and withdraw money from an ATM. That doesn't exist, really, when I was in the States. I had a lot of trouble with that.

So I think that, like you said, there's stuff that's moving in, stuff that's moving out, and that's just better for everybody. I try to tell folks, it's not competitive. It's rising tide floats all boats. And that's genuinely how I feel.

Reggie Young:
I love it. Last wrap-up question for me. How has your experience being a DJ informed your approach to fintech? Open-ended question, answer it any way you want.

Ariel Blum:
Wow.
Reggie Young:
This was not on the script of loose questions I sent Ariel ahead of time. This is an off-the-cuff answer.

Ariel Blum:
Off-the-cuff answer is I think if I was a better DJ, I wouldn't have gotten into fintech. But it was a wonderful experience. It really is the kind of touch point that changed my life, when I started getting paid by customers, where I had to then go pay folks. For example, we had a couple of DJs working for us, and I was like, what is payroll? How do I do that? What does this look like? And then I remember business accounting and you had to report this or do that. And I was like, what are all these things? It opened up my eyes to the entrepreneur lifestyle, which, again, I had no experience, no knowledge of, but I look at my parents. As much as, yes, they are small businesses, they're entrepreneurs. They're running their own enterprise. And I started to see all these things, like QuickBooks, balancing checkbooks, stuff like that.

It was funny. I talked to my dad about this. Early on, I must've been 14, he was teaching me how to balance a checkbook. And I was like, that's stupid. He actually brought me these early pretty bad sketches. I was like, if you have a phone, there's gotta be a way to tap and pay, because sometimes we would travel Europe, and I saw people tapping their card. I kept being like, that's interesting.

Remember, that was cool in Europe before it was happening in the States. And remember, it did come to the States and it failed. And now 20 years later, tap and pay is- what was it? It was like last year, Apple tap and pay did more volume than traditional Mastercard. We're in a revolution state that is using something that has been around for quite some time, but it's just become safer or more adopted or more prevalent because everyone's carrying their phone.

I don't know. It's funny. But the long and short answer is DJing showed me what cashflow looks like. DJing showed me how hard running a small business is. If I was a better DJ, I probably wouldn't have been in fintech. But it was the catalyst for me to start asking, wait, why does it work this way? Why does it work like that? And it really opened my eyes to this world and led me down this path.

Reggie Young:
I love it. Great answer. Awesome, Ariel. Thanks for coming on the podcast. This has been great. And I look forward to getting you on for future episodes.

Ariel Blum:
Yeah. Reggie, thanks for having me. Thank you to the entire Lithic team. Us here at Receive, we're big fans of y'all. We appreciate your support. We appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast. Yeah, let's chat again soon. I'll see you soon.