Why Banking Fundamentals, Not Technology, Decide Who Survives in Sponsor Banking With Amanda Swoverland of Hatch Bank

Very few people in this industry have sat in all three of the seats that matter in the bank-fintech story. Amanda Swoverland started as a compliance examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spent nine and a half years at Sunrise Banks rising to Chief Risk Officer, then joined Unit as its fourth employee and Chief Compliance Officer. Six months ago she became President of Hatch Bank, a California-chartered ILC that works exclusively with fintech lending partners. She still describes herself as a banker at heart, and this conversation is a good explanation of why that matters more now than it did five years ago.

What We Covered

• From Fed compliance examiner to bank president
• Why she was never the department of no
• Learning product and sales inside a fintech infrastructure company
• Hatch Bank’s credit-only model, with no deposits
• The five lending verticals Hatch focuses on
• Going deep with a few partners instead of diversifying across 30
• What a fintech gets from a small sponsor bank that scale cannot offer
• Lifting a BSA/AML consent order in under a year
• “Maturing for scale” as the theme of her first six months
• Using AI internally without sending agents out into the wild
• Why the quality of founders approaching sponsor banks has gone up
• The direct versus not direct debate after Synapse
• Why every fintech should have a second bank partner
• Where AI is genuinely working in compliance today
• DIDMCA, state charters and the usury patchwork
• What separates the sponsor banks that survive the next cycle

Key Takeaways

• The “direct versus not direct” framing that took hold after Synapse is, in Amanda’s view, a distraction. If a bank has a program, the bank is in charge of it, whatever technology sits in the middle and whoever is acting as program manager. Everything else is a question of how you oversee it, not who is accountable.
• The next failure will not look like Synapse, because that particular gap has been closed. What worries her is banks that never learned the fundamentals: liquidity, credit oversight, BSA/AML, and how a multi-party lending program behaves when the cycle turns and payments stop arriving on time.
• A second bank partner is good for the fintech and good for the bank. Concentration risk cuts both ways, and Amanda actively introduces her own clients to other banks she trusts, and is happy to be someone else’s second bank.
• Compliance is heading toward 100 percent sampling. Amanda thinks the days of testing a selected sample of transactions or complaints are ending, provided you test the system, watch the outputs, and keep a human in the loop.

About Amanda Swoverland

Amanda Swoverland is President of Hatch Bank, a San Marcos, California ILC that works exclusively with fintech lending partners across home improvement, small business, clean energy, student lending and healthcare financing. She began her career as a compliance examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spent nine and a half years at Sunrise Banks where she became Chief Risk Officer, and then five and a half years at Unit as Chief Compliance Officer, joining as the company’s fourth employee. She was named to Forbes’ 2026 list of the women shaping fintech infrastructure and banking strategy.

Cleaned Transcript

Amanda (00:10): I would hope everybody has learned after the Synapse debacle that you should be overseeing the third parties. This concept of direct, not direct, is still baffling to me. If I have a program, it doesn’t matter what technology I’m using, that’s direct because I’m in charge. We’re the bank, we’re in charge. I oversee every element of that product. There’s concepts of program management. I might have somebody else who’s the program manager. I might use some slightly different technology. But at the end of the day, these are all direct relationships. It’s just a matter of how you’re overseeing the technology and who’s the program manager in those types of relationships. And at the end of the day, the bank is in charge.

Peter (00:53): This episode is brought to you by the AI Native Banking and Fintech Conference, hosted by Spring Labs and the Utah Bankers Association. It’s on September 29th at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. AI Native is built for the people who run the bank, operations, compliance, and risk leaders, bringing them together with the fintech leaders and AI startups. No theory, just practical solutions to real problems. We’re capped at 450 people and expect a sellout. So register now at conference.springlabs.com.

This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton, and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives.

My guest on the show today is Amanda Swoverland, President of Hatch Bank, a California-chartered ILC focused exclusively on fintech lending partnerships. Amanda has one of the more complete backgrounds in this space. She started her career as an examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spent nine and a half years at Sunrise Banks, where she became Chief Risk Officer, and then five and a half years at Unit as Chief Compliance Officer, joining as the fourth employee.

In our conversation, we talk about what she took from each side of the industry: regulatory, banking, and fintech. And why she still describes herself as a banker at heart. We get into Hatch Bank’s credit focused model, her first six months as president, the quality of fintechs approaching sponsor banks today, what the industry should have learned from Synapse, where AI is actually moving the needle in compliance, and what it takes to be a long-term winner in sponsor banking. Now, let’s get on with the show.

Peter (02:54): Welcome to the podcast, Amanda.

Amanda (02:56): Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Peter (02:59): Great to have you. So let’s kick it off by giving our listeners a little bit of background about yourself. I know you’ve been in fintech for quite some time. Hit on some of the high points of your career to date.

Amanda (03:11): Yeah. I started my career as an examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, actually in the compliance area. Did that for a couple of years. It was probably one of the best possible ways to actually start my banking career to really truly understand kind of the fundamentals of banking. Spent a real short period of time in consulting and then went to a family-owned bank that was pretty traditional.

And really learned true banking fundamentals when I was there. It was a great experience, but then had the opportunity to go over to Sunrise Banks that was doing some more interesting fintech related things. I would say that they were probably one of the OGs in the space that really, you know, started along with some of the larger prepaid, you know, banks that were in the space and had an amazing team there, spent nine and a half years, started as the compliance officer, eventually became the chief risk officer.

And just an amazing place to be, really learned a lot. But I felt a pull to maybe want to go onto the tech side of things and learn a little bit more about what some of our partners were doing on the other side of the business. And so went to work for Unit, which is an infrastructure company within this space, essentially kind of like a side core, right? That would help fintechs and banks communicate with each other. And that was an amazing experience. Spent five and a half years after about nine and a half years at Sunrise.

Spent about five and a half years at Unit as their chief compliance officer. But really, you know, when you’re basically the fourth employee, you’re doing kind of everything at the beginning. So was one of the early employees, and it was an amazing experience. I learned so much about technology and how product works and really kind of how to build something from the ground up. But what I realized, and I also told the co-founders, they weren’t surprised by this, I am a banker at heart. That was really where my heart was at and my passion was at.

So I wanted to get back into the room and really I’m passionate about this business, but I just felt like there was something greater I could give. So getting back into the bank side of things after my learnings there. And I met the ownership of Hatch Bank and just immediately knew this was the place I had to be. They just understood the commitment. This is all we do. I don’t have to worry about what’s going on in a branch or, you know, other things. Like this is purely my focus and I have an amazing team. So the last six months have been an absolute blast kind of getting back into the banking side of things and maybe not a traditional path for a compliance officer or a risk manager to become a president. But at the end of the day, running a bank is about risk management, whether it’s financial, compliance, commercial credit.

So I feel like it gave me a good background to launch into this.

Peter (05:53): Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting your background because there’s not many people who have been on the regulatory side of things, the bank side and the fintech side. That sort of feels like all the components. When you look back then at everything you’ve done, like, what do you think some of the learnings are that you had from each side of the business?

Amanda (06:16): As a compliance professional, really starting my career, what quickly allowed my career to take off is that I wasn’t the department of no. I was the department of possibilities. I would always listen and sit with my business partners. I think one of the most fundamental moments I had in my career, and I will be forever grateful to an individual named Barry Super, I’m going to give him a shout out, at the first bank I worked at. I was the compliance officer. I’d come from consulting and regulatory and came in and I said, here’s a new reg.

And highlighted the things and handed it to him. Like he was going to go implement it. And he was like, no, that’s not how this is going to work. Like you got to figure out how to implement this with me. And so it was this really eye-opening experience where I had to figure out how everything worked from nuts to bolts. It wasn’t just the compliance rule, but I had to figure out how to integrate that. And I realized the magic came from when you can embed compliance into the day-to-day.

And make it not feel like it’s a checkbox thing, but it’s just something that’s embedded into the system. And when you realize that, when the business partners start to realize, wait, they’re actually an asset to this because they can think about things and make sure I stay out of trouble, but make it easy. That was a really eye-opening experience. So truly understanding how banks need to work and the fundamentals, I think, was really fundamental. And also just like, you know, the moments of understanding risk management. If anybody who’s worked with me has probably seen me draw a nine box on a whiteboard at some point kind of talking about the likelihood and impact of something and really trying to frame risk appropriately, right? Why are we spending time on things that really don’t matter when really we should be focusing resources on the big hairy things that could, you know, really impact. And so just building that risk management, those fundamentals of having to like manage and build an enterprise risk management function, it can really translate to any area of the bank.

And then kind of learning how to do sales, right? When you had to work at a technology company and you’re a new employee, you’re kind of having to sell your idea to everybody. You’re selling it to a bank, you’re selling it to a fintech, you were selling it, you know, with conviction, you know, that you believed in what you were building. And so when you kind of take that sales approach and you take that risk management approach and you kind of tie through as kind of the fundamentals of what banking is, I think that, you know, those were some of the experiences that really helped me get to where I’m at.

And quite frankly, when we see things fall apart in today’s environment, you know, sometimes those are the things that are missing. Maybe somebody’s really good at sales but doesn’t understand how the business actually works or the banking fundamentals that come along with it. So I feel pretty blessed to have arrived here kind of with the path that I followed.

Peter (08:53): So let’s dig into Hatch Bank for a little bit. Can you just sort of give us a brief history of the bank and what distinguishes you, differentiates you from other banks in the sponsor bank space?

Amanda (09:08): Yeah, there’s a growing number of us in this space, which I think is actually a really good thing. I think competition is always really good. And so we are a credit focused fintech. So today we are solely focused on offering credit products, consumers or small business. And I think that, you know, one of the differentiators for us is really staying close to our ideal customer profile of who we want to serve, right? So we’re in the home improvement space, we’re in the small business space, we’re in the

clean energy, in student lending and in healthcare financing spaces. So we know our niches and we’re open to new niches if we understand them and we feel like it’s something that we want to get into. But we really want to know who our partners are and dig into that. Some banks might, their model might be to bring on 20 to 30 different partners because they want to diversify. They want to have, you know, a wider array and number of different clients.

For us, we really want to stick in the industries that we know well and we want to go really deep with those clients and maybe have a more limited number of what those clients are going to be and dig in with them. For example, they might offer consumer lending, right, to somebody that’s going to go in and get braces at their dentist office, but we can also work with those dentist offices, right? Because they probably have to buy inventory and they probably have to buy equipment, right? And so it’s really finding ways that we can really deepen relationships and have those lending products across consumer and small business. And also stay within our risk profile, right? Some banks have a wide aperture of what they, you know, what they want to do. And they’ll look at a lot of different options because that’s what their clients need. And that makes sense for them to maybe do international remittance or work with digital assets. Today that’s not what we’re doing, right? We don’t have deposits and so we’re not having those types of things. So we just hope to serve, you know, the clients that we have really deeply. They can pick up the phone and call me.

They can call the, you know, the chief revenue officer and really have that direct access to us because we’re keeping things pretty curated here in terms of what we’re doing.

Peter (11:08): So you are exclusively a sponsor bank. Tell us a little bit about how that developed and how long you’ve been doing it and the scale of number of programs you have.

Amanda (11:17): Yeah. So I mean, probably five to six years ago is really when we got going and started with things. And it really came from the vision of our ownership. They had owned a thrift out in Rancho. It was Rancho Santa Fe Thrift in California. And they knew that they wanted to switch the model of that to a different type of organization because they weren’t doing the type of lending that they had been before.

And they really saw the vision of this space and got going with that and built it. We started to build it. You know, and as with any bank in this space, you have some starts and stops, right? Where you bring on some partners and you do things and then you maybe decide this isn’t maybe the right direction or the direction we want to go. And so it evolved over time and, you know, really moved into that credit focus side of things.

I would say within the last probably three to four years, the focus of things really started to come in. Within the last probably two years it’s really been refined really well. And I would say that that’s probably a similar story to what I’ve experienced in my career all along, is that when somebody gets into this space, it’s a little bit more of a wide aperture of what they’re willing to get into and take a look at. And then as you get in and become a practitioner and operationalize things, you start to maybe refine what that risk appetite and where the business model is going to be successful.

Peter (12:42): So just on competition, you really, there are others focused on the lending space that have a long track record and have significant scale. How does Hatch compete with some of those more established players, would you say?

Amanda (12:59): You know, we’re a great place for somebody who’s getting started, right? If you’re a second-time founder and you have experience, you know what to do in this space, but you have a new niche that you’re going after and you have that target market, it might be a little bit harder to get the attention of somebody who’s doing things at scale, right? If you go to one of the larger banks, they might be able to give you a little bit better pricing. They might be able to do things because they’re operating at scale.

And I don’t know, I don’t want to speak for them, but what I always tell our clients is you can get my chief compliance officer on the phone if you have a compliance question. She’s going to talk to you. She’s got a really great team. They’re going to walk you through this. One of the best compliments one of my clients gave me the other day is your team feels like an extension of our team.

It’s really truly a collaborative space where there’s not a we’re here to get you, we want to say no to things. It truly is collaboration. And so it’s a very high touch feel, right? So maybe when you go to a larger organization, there’s certain benefits that will come along with that. But with us, you’re going to get a more intimate, curated development with our team to be able to really build your product in a way that maybe you wouldn’t get someplace else.

Peter (14:14): Okay, so you’ve been in the role about six months. Tell us a little bit about how those six months have been. I know that you live in Minnesota and the bank is in California, so there’s obviously a lot of travel involved, but tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned and how you’ve sort of put your mark on the bank.

Amanda (14:33): Yeah, I think that, you know, the team here is amazing. That was the first thing I noticed when I got here. It took me about a week to be like, wow, did I hit the jackpot with a pretty amazing team of people? My executive team was great. But really, you know, they had a consent order for BSA AML in 2025. And they worked so hard that, you know, and this is all public information, by January, I think I’d been here for maybe a few weeks,

they had called, they had already come in and done a reassessment and had lifted the consent order. I think it, you know, wasn’t even a full year that it had been issued. So the determination and grit of this organization and the talent that they had hired was pretty remarkable. But going through one of those remediations and doing that is pretty exhausting, right? To go through that. And so, you know, one of the big things that I wanted to do was really take a step back and be able to give people a little bit of room to breathe.

And my leadership style is one that’s a little bit more curated to each of my employees, right? And kind of not a one size fits all approach. So really trying to understand where we could find some room to breathe. But really the theme of the year to kick it off was maturing for scale and just making sure that we were going in and looking at all of our different operations and all of the different areas and figuring out where we can do a little bit more to mature this, right?

If we were going to 10x our book of business, what would we need to have to do to be able to do that and grow with our partners and have the technology, the right people, the right processes to be able to do those things? And so that’s really been the focus of the first six months, is really maturing different processes that we have. And a big focus of ours is how can we use technology to do that? We talk about AI all the time in all of our team meetings. It’s a huge focus of ours. You have to do it responsibly.

We’re not creating agents and sending them out into the wild to do things, but we’re really challenging ourselves to think about how can we do this better? How can we reduce friction? Why am I doing the things that I’m doing? And I think a lot of those were tools that I learned from being at a tech company and really having, you know, those types of things in my toolbox. And the team has just absolutely embraced it, which has been really remarkable.

Peter (16:44): I’d love to kind of get your sense of the quality of the fintechs that are coming to you. Obviously, you were at Sunrise, they were doing fintech programs, you know, obviously all fintech programs. And so you’ve seen a lot of different programs over your time in this space. So I’m curious about, are people coming to you with a much better sense of what’s needed to be kind of a compliant fintech program?

And if not, what’s it like to say no? And do you get companies that are so far removed from what they should be that you just can’t work with them? I mean, how does that process look?

Amanda (17:25): I’d say that in general, there’s been a shift in the marketplace, right? So somebody who fits that latter part of what you just described, of maybe being pretty far off of what is necessary, doesn’t get too far into our trap, right? That they’re going to get filtered out pretty quickly. You know, we typically want clients that have been founders before, some experience or very deeply knowledgeable in whatever industry. Let’s say they’re in the healthcare space, they have a deep knowledge of that.

Our typical client base isn’t going to be somebody that’s just like, hey, I have a great idea and I’m going to go pitch it to a bunch of banks. Like that’s going to get filtered out pretty quickly for us. We definitely want somebody who’s a little bit more experienced in the space, but could be a brand new company, right? It’s not somebody who hadn’t been in the market already. We’re willing to work with those clients that we have a conviction that they’re going to be able to, just because of how we’re resourced and our specialty, right? That’s where we want to lean in and really help clients to do things.

But I would say in general, you don’t, the grandiose ideas that maybe don’t understand all of the nuts and bolts of like maybe what banking has done. There’s so much money in AI and some of the other industries that I think some of that has moved maybe to other pockets of where VC money is at. And the people who have remained in the banking and the fintech space to do the types of products we work with are typically a little bit more mature.

And you know, have a passion for that space and more deeply understand that than call it, you know, back in 2021, 2022, when money was really flowing into this particular space. Anybody with an idea, you know, is kind of coming up with this. I think that that’s maybe shifted to some of the other industries and we’re seeing more maturity. Not a lot of pushback. People are like, how do we do this right? They really want to lean into it and work with parties that can help them with compliance. So pretty good, I would say.

Peter (19:17): Okay, so I do want to bring up the Synapse debacle, shall we say, because it is still, we’re a few years removed from it. It hasn’t obviously, it hasn’t fully worked its way out yet, unfortunately. I can’t believe we’re two and a half years from when that all happened. But I want to know if you think that on the banking side, do you think the banking side has learned from what happened there and what do you think differentiates those that are really taking things seriously versus those that are still trying to fly by the seat of their pants?

Amanda (19:56): Yeah. It’s a great question and why I wanted to be back at a bank is for exactly that reason. I’ve seen a lot, right? I lived through the consent orders and the prepaid days back in what, 2011, 2014. And, you know, I was at a bank, went through those exams, lived through a lot of stuff, you know, in the early 2020s and saw a lot of things. A lot of that was, some of it, yes, improvements needed to be made. Some of it was just a, when things pop and get big, the regulators will come in and things need to get right sized and there’s consent orders that are issued. But generally most of those banks pretty quickly corrected those types of things and were running decent shops and worked through that, right? Not all, but I would say most.

The thing that keeps me up at night today is, and you’re going to hear me say that several times, is banking fundamentals matter. When disruption happens in any particular industry, the fundamentals that created that industry, parts of it can be disrupted, but the fundamentals cannot. Maybe how you do something, how you execute on something, how you get from point A to point B, we can always look at how those things happen. But liquidity matters. Good credit oversight matters. Good BSA AML matters.

We can debate all day long about how we do the things and, you know, how AI can help us to do those things. But, you know, working with partners that understand what happens when a banking crisis happens, when there’s a cycle shift, when all of a sudden liquidity starts to get tight or there’s a recession and payments aren’t being made on time. You know, you need to make sure that there’s a team of people at these banks that understand the cycles of how that’s going to work, especially when there’s multiple parties that are involved in that. So

I would hope everybody has learned after the Synapse debacle that you should be overseeing the third parties. This concept of direct, not direct, is still baffling to me. If I have a program, it doesn’t matter what technology I’m using. That’s direct because I’m in charge. We’re the bank, we’re in charge. I oversee every element of that product. There’s concepts of program management. I might have somebody else who’s the program manager. I might use some slightly different technology.

Amanda (22:15): But at the end of the day, these are all direct relationships. It’s just a matter of how you’re overseeing the technology and who’s the program manager in those types of relationships. And at the end of the day, the bank is in charge. I would say that the vast majority of banks understand that. And that’s been made very clear that that’s the expectation, you know, throughout the last couple of years. What worries me today is does everybody understand the banking fundamentals that need to go into running a bank and everything that comes along with it. If they do, that’s fantastic. And I think we’re set up for a really positive future. If not, you know, we could see another Synapse type thing happen. It’s probably going to happen in a slightly different way because I think the oversight of that particular situation has changed, but you know, things pop up in other areas. So I think that that’s where we just got to keep our eye on and have the prudential regulators really make sure that we’re paying attention to the fundamentals.

Peter (23:15): So then do you think it’s best practice today for a fintech to be using multiple bank partners so there’s no sort of single point of failure for the fintech?

Amanda (23:26): I do. I think it’s actually a good idea. I think it’s good for the banks and I think it’s good for the fintechs, right? For any bank, too much can be a concentration risk, right? Where people are going to start asking, you know, questions about what happens if this program leaves. So I actually, you know, talk to all of my clients about the second bank concept. They might not be ready for it right away, right? They need to get started and need to build the program, but I’m happy to introduce any of my clients to banks that I think have a good foundation in this system. And I’m also happy to be somebody’s second bank if they’re looking to have that other source of contingency or, you know, just opportunities to run on.

Peter (24:08): Okay, so I mean you touched on AI, but I do want to just dig a little bit deeper into that. I was reading that I think you have deployed AI for complaint management and, you know, that you still also say that you know you need good data and a human in the loop. What, as someone who’s got a background in compliance and risk, you know, how is AI really helping? And are you feeling like you’re getting good outcomes from current technology or where do you think the AI is making the biggest impact?

Amanda (24:45): Yeah, I mean, I still think we’re in the very early innings of where we’re going to go, but I’m so excited about it. I mean, big impact is just using whatever AI tool your organization puts in front of you that’s like safe and secure today, right? So I was using it 10 minutes before we got on here to help me put some ideas into a picture, right? So that I go to a meeting and have something to articulate it, right? Something that would have taken me an hour to probably build was 30 seconds of me prompting it, maybe another 30 seconds of like revisiting the prompt, and then maybe 10 minutes of reviewing it to make sure that like the final output was what I wanted. And so, you know, there’s efficiencies just throughout the organization with, you know, those types of wins. Compliance, I think, is going to be game changing. You know, we’re not there yet with things like complaints. We’ve definitely seen an uptick in what we’re getting from clients, how we can go through and look for keywords and look for things, but Peter, we’re going to enter a world at some point where you can do 100 percent sampling on things. The days of doing a selected sample of something will be done.

Peter (25:52): Right. I think we’re very close to that, I believe, right now. Yeah.

Amanda (25:55): Yeah, you know, you just need to make sure that you’re testing the system, you’re getting good outputs and that you have a human there that can look at those types of things. But the ability to go wide and deep and to find things that the human eye maybe wasn’t able to find before in compliance, I think is going to be a game changer in terms of risk management.

Peter (26:16): So Hatch is an ILC state chartered bank in California. I’m sure we’ve been following debates on DIDMCA, where there are some state chartered banks that are now seeking national charters. What are your thoughts on this DIDMCA debate?

Amanda (26:33): Well, I mean, you always got to pay attention, right? I mean, we have to, you know, in our situation, we have to be very careful about the states and, you know, we spend a lot of time and resources monitoring for all of those things. It’s part of doing business, right? And it’s just part of the regulatory regime that you have to work within the confines of. I don’t get myself too twisted up around what is or what is not going to end up happening. We just have to comply with what’s there and have a strategy for how we’re going to comply with each of those states and work with our partners within those states. And at the end of the day, it’s about the consumer getting the end product, right?

So as long as we can get products out to consumers that are helpful to them, that are within the usury rates, that are not predatory, and we’re helping them to do the things they want to accomplish, like get braces or buy a new air conditioner when it’s ninety degrees out and you need one, like I had to do this summer. Those are the types of things we want to be doing and it makes it a little bit more complicated when every state has a slightly different set of rules to get those products to consumers. But that’s what we’ll, that’s what we’ll do.

Peter (27:39): So no plans for Hatch to move to a national charter anytime soon?

Amanda (27:47): We’re heads down just helping our partners doing the things we do.

Peter (27:51): What I want to end with is a, you know, a forward looking kind of a view where I’m curious about your view on the whole kind of sponsor bank space. Do you feel like we have too many sponsor banks now? Do you think there’s going to be consolidation? So what do you think the future of the sponsor bank space is going to look like and what’s it going to take for Hatch to be one of the long-term winners?

Amanda (28:15): I think that we just, like in any industry, we’re going to see spikes and valleys in terms of people coming into this space. I do truly believe that sponsor banking is a large part of the future of banking. I think more and more of us want things here. We want it at the point of sale. Walking into a bank branch isn’t what it used to be, right? There’s still an important element of that that will continue and remain and there will be banks that will serve that very, very well. But there will be more banks that will come in. We will see in the course of the next four to five years, some of them will bump their heads and will decide this isn’t the business for them or something will happen and they will leave the space. I think the banks that you’re going to see survive this are going to be the ones that aren’t going to go with the pendulum swing, right? The ones that are going to just stay right down the middle. We’re not changing our risk appetite right now because we feel like there’s a narrative of, you know, a regulatory pendulum swing one way or the other.

We’re not going to follow that. We’re going to stay right down the middle and we’re just going to do what we know is right. We’re going to follow the rules. We’re not going to try to get cute about things. We’re going to stick to our risk appetite and our banking fundamentals that we know. Because that’s what’s going to keep us sticking around. That’s what has kept the banks that have stuck around for a long time, when you don’t try to do something that’s cute that you know is trying to sneak around corners to do things. And I hope nobody does that, but when you get an explosion of different things happening and people are trying to disrupt and do different things, it could happen, right? And so I hope it doesn’t, but I think, you know, over the next couple of years we’re going to see how that shakes out.

Peter (29:50): Okay, well we’ll have to leave it there, Amanda. It’s always great to chat with you and great to finally get you on the show and best of luck to you and Hatch Bank.

Amanda (30:00): Thank you, I appreciate it.

Peter (30:07): Here is an unexpected side effect of the AI boom. Amanda said the quality of founders coming to Hatch Bank has gone up, and part of the reason is that the venture money chasing anyone with an idea has moved to AI. What is left in fintech are second-time founders with real domain expertise in healthcare financing, home improvement lending, and more. That is a very different pipeline from 2021 or the heady fintech lending days of 2015, when a pitch deck and the generic lending idea were enough to get funded. The tourists have left and the operators stayed. And sponsor banks are better off for it. Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.