Building a Community Bank for the Embedded Banking Era with Chris Black, CEO of Thread Bank

My latest guest is Chris Black, CEO of Thread Bank, a Nashville-based community bank that has been purpose-built around embedded banking. Chris came to banking by way of a career as an Air Force pilot, followed by time on Wall Street analyzing banks during the financial crisis, before eventually making his way into community banking in Nashville. He partnered with fintech investor Joe Maxwell of Fintop Capital to recapitalize a small Tennessee bank and transform it into an embedded banking platform focused on vertical software companies serving small businesses.

In our conversation, Chris talks about how Thread navigated the BaaS regulatory storm of 2023 and 2024, what they look for in fintech partners, and how their fiduciary-first philosophy was already in place long before regulators came calling. We also discuss the wave of fintechs now seeking bank charters, the future of community banking in America, and what Thread has on the horizon with the launch of embedded lending and merchant acquiring.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Lessons Chris learned during his time in the Air Force.
• How the idea for Thread Bank came together.
• How they took the acquired bank and made it ready for embedded banking.
• When they took on their first fintech partner.
• What they are looking for in a fintech partner.
• Where Chris sees the biggest opportunity for Thread.
• How Thread navigated the BaaS regulatory hurricane of 2023 and 2024.
• Why the shift in regulatory focus with the Trump Administration has not changed their thinking.
• What Chris thinks about all the fintechs that are now acquiring bank charters.
• What it takes for a new fintech to be onboarded with Thread.
• The process when a fintech wants to do something that Thread does not think is reasonable.
• The key to a thriving community bank sector over the next decade.
• What exciting developments are coming down the pipe.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 573: Chris Black

Chris Black

We are a community bank at heart. We are just changing the paradigm of how the delivery of the products and services occurs. Instead of the traditional brick and mortar branch, which is a conglomeration of that geographic community, typically, just generally speaking, we’re saying that that model is obviously very difficult to scale. It’s under tremendous amounts of pressure and it’s this paradigm around geography and physicality is what needs to be challenged. All the other rules, the safe sound principles, many of them have, by definition, have to stay in place.

Peter Renton

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 today is Chris Black, CEO of Thread Bank, a Nashville-based community bank built around embedded banking. Chris came to banking by way of the Air Force and Wall Street before serving as CFO at two community banks. He then partnered with FinTech investor, Joe Maxwell from Fintop to recapitalize a small bank in Tennessee and build it into an embedded banking platform from the ground up. Threads approach has been deliberate. They partner with vertical software companies serving small businesses, embedding deposits and soon lending and payments into their platforms. A strategy that was stress tested during the BaaS regulatory storm of 2023 and 2024.

In our conversation, we discuss how Thread navigated that turbulence, how they select and manage fintech partners, and Chris gives his perspective on the rush of fintechs getting bank charters. We also talk about the future of community banks in this country, and Chris previews what’s coming next at Thread. Now let’s get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Chris.

CB: Thank you, Peter. Good to be here. Appreciate it.

PR: Great to have you. So I like to these things started by giving the listeners a little bit of background. You do have an interesting background. I know when we chatted over dinner a bit over a year ago, you talked about some of your military background. So tell us little bit about what you’ve done in your career to date.

CB: Yeah, trying to keep it short before I go into that. Maybe I’d say there’s a book that says everything I needed to know in life, I learned in kindergarten. I add and the Air Force to the end of that because it really it just had such a profound impact on my life and how I think about the world, how I think about business, my family, you know, just how things work and how to do things. And I was I was a pilot in the Air Force. And so it’s all about, you know, prudent risk management, execution, performance. So it’s all the things that are really required of anyone who wants to be successful in business, particularly anyone who wants to be a leader in business.

And so that’s something I wanted to do since I was a little child growing up in Ohio, went to college in upstate New York, ROTC, was in the Air Force for almost 10 years. At some point in there, I realized that maybe I actually didn’t want to be a four star general, which is what most people might think going into it. And that’s what I believed when I was young. And so other interests kind of, you know, really came into my mind and had a great commander who allowed me to get my MBA while I was still in. So my last assignment, I had to balance that of three and a half years of business school at night, essentially a program Auburn had, and then while still full time in the Air Force and was fortunate to move to New York, my wife and I post Air Force post business school to Wall Street. I was at Merrill Lynch analyzing large cap banks during the crisis, pre-crisis.

PR: That would have been interesting.

CB:  I’ll tell you what, I learned more than I ever imagined. I went in barely knowing what a balance sheet was and came out knowing a whole lot of things. so what it kind of laid the groundwork for family reasons, we moved to Nashville about 17 years ago and that was an amazing move for us. My New York firm let me keep working here for a while and got into the…kind of meandered my way into the hedge fund world for about five years, learned an immense amount about risk management and entrepreneurship, know, much, much smaller firms and Air Force and Merrill and not exactly, you know, small entrepreneurial places. And then, you know, was very fortunate and found my way into community banking at what is a great now, I guess, turning into a regional bank here in Nashville, First Bank helped them go public. The bank was three billion back then, and I think they’re 18 or 19 today and so had just a fortunate opportunity of kind riding in the pocket of the CEO and helping him from strategy became CFO of banking there with him and then into got recruited to be CFO of another $5 billion bank in town.

And the opportunity presented itself from a technology perspective to really form along with Joe Maxwell, an investor group to go do embedded banking solely. And that’s what we sought to do back that started during COVID actually. And we’ve been just so many fortunate bounces of the ball. But what we’re doing today, embedded banking at Thread is what we sought to do. It’s been almost five years since we recapitalized the bank. So, long answer to a short question, but it’s all been a bit circuitous, but a lot of linearity in terms of the themes and the things that I’ve been fortunate to be exposed to and focus on. This has been the chance at Thread to bring all those things together.

PR: So let’s go back to that, the COVID times and you, I don’t know whether was you or Joe that had the idea, but what did you see back then that really piqued your interest having been, you you’ve been working at community banks for a while. What was it about embedded banking that really piqued your interest?

CB: It was, and I hadn’t known Joe until First Bank and he was just starting Fintop at that point. And actually the CEO, Chris Holmes, who’s still the CEO and is a great mentor of mine, he and Joe knew each other when Joe was starting Fintop and connected us together. And essentially said, need to, you guys need to get together and figure out if there’s a way to use Fintop to help the bank. And so I barely knew what technology was honestly at that point. I have these things where don’t know much about anything and then I get linked up with people who know a lot about them and then I guess I’m okay at learning. Timing seems to be pretty good.

So we went through, Joe and I kind of went through that journey together and great banks, great leadership, committed leadership, but very hard to innovate and transform inside traditional banking models. And particularly this was 10 years ago. So it’s a different environment obviously than today.

And so the second bank where I was, actually, the board decided to sell the bank and I helped lead that sale. And so Joe being Joe called me and said, what’s going on? I said, well, sorry, the dreams over, you know, the bank’s being sold. Sorry, we didn’t really get much. We didn’t have enough time to really get things done here. And he just said, I’ve been waiting for this day. I knew it would come at some point. We’re going to go do this on our own. And I said, do what? You know, and he said, we’ll buy a bank or we’ll start a bank. And, you know, I laughed at him for quite a period of time.

And then we figured out as we started talking to, you know, made calls to early investors and they said, it’s a great idea. And it was his idea that I didn’t really understand at that point exactly what embedded banking meant. I understood the pain points. I understood what was difficult inside of a community bank to scale and build technology and innovate. I knew nothing of the how, candidly.

And so that’s Joe’s superpower is he really understands the how and he knows how to put people, the right people together and to help create conditions and create teams. And then we were just extremely fortunate to have the investor base that we do who shared the vision and gave us the room to run and said, go do this. And that board, it’s a tremendous board, very talented. You know, some of the folks on the board and we’ve been together from day one.

And it’s just been, yeah, it’s been the great fortune of my career for sure to do this. we’re just really still early innings of executing on the strategy, but it hasn’t, it hasn’t really wavered since the very beginning.

PR: So you found a bank to, you recapitalized, I think it was 2021. When did you launch and how did you sort of take the existing bank and make it ready for embedded banking?

CB: I’m a very risk averse person actually, until I can understand. It kind of goes back to the pilot thing. You know, it doesn’t matter what airplane you’re flying, the ground has a probability kill of just about one in any of them. And so you really have to understand, you know, what the risks are. And so we’re, we’re incrementalists. We’ve got a big vision and very big goals and big views on where we want to go. And I think pretty clear views, but all these sayings I have, but you know, we’re evolutionary as we just kind of move along in our process. But when we look back, it should look like a revolution, but we’re never going to bet the bank, right? It’s a zero or one. Like this is either going to work or it’s not. That’s not how you run successful banks. And most companies can’t be successful like that. There are exceptions to that rule, obviously, but that’s our approach.

And we wanted a very small bank and that’s what we got. And being very small and very low on capital, there were a lot of constraints from regulators when we took over that charter. And it’s been great. And there are so many folks who were at the bank when we bought it, and now they’re integral members of our team. Many of them spend more than 50 % of their time on doing embedded banking. But we went in phases.

And we said, we’re going to stabilize the bank first, get everything safe and sound, policies, procedures, get everything really structurally secured and start to build the foundation upon which we could really execute the strategy. And then we knew there would be this, we call it the intermediate phase, which would last a period of years while we were really focused on building the embedded deployment phase. And that’s just where we are now. I’d say we’re only in the beginning of that embedded deployment phase, which was from day one, always contemplated. We didn’t know exactly the route that we would get here, but we knew we weren’t going to be builders per se of technology.

That’s a distinct advantage that we have with our network and experience and number of investors who many of them are public who they are. The insights we have into the emerging technologies and what works, what doesn’t and interoperability. It’s a pretty special attribute that Thread has. And so we knew we didn’t have to go build things. We knew we would have to connect. We would have to integrate and we’d have to be absolute data experts. And so that’s how we focused on it. Instead of building commoditized plumbing, right, we want to have a differentiated strategy that focuses on, I call it the homogeneity of the system, data management, risk management, technology stacks, so that we’ve got the flexibility to allow for the heterogeneity of the partner interactions, if you will. We think of our partners as branches of Thread.

And so that’s been a very iterative process with a lot of great partners along the way who’ve helped us grow and learn and build through that. And it does look like a revolution looking backwards, but it’s been just very step-by-step.

PR: Okay, so when did you actually take on your first FinTech partner?

CB: I would say the end of 2022. So we recapitalized the bank in May of 21 and the first onboarding was a year and a half later.

PR: Maybe it’s changed over the last three plus years, but what are you looking for in a FinTech partner?

CB: Yeah, I think our objectives, we want to do Main Street banking. We are a community bank at heart. We are just changing the paradigm of how the delivery of the products and services occurs instead of the traditional brick and mortar branch, right, which is a conglomeration of that geographic community. Typically, just generally speaking, we’re saying that that model is obviously very difficult to scale. It’s under tremendous amounts of pressure and it’s this paradigm around geography and physicality is what needs to be challenged. All the other rules, the safe sound principles, many of them have, by definition, have to stay in place.

Deposits, loans, capital, liquidity, payments, right? The risk management, the safety, the soundness, the regulatory interaction that is so important, the transparency, just how that structure works is critical. But it’s…we are looking for specific partners who deliver mostly to small businesses. We’ve got some niche consumer kind of tolerance in our model and appetite, if you will. But where we see the biggest opportunity are those verticalized, kind of specialized commercial small business focused partners who have a real edge in it all goes back, Peter, like I saying, this is banking 101, it’s business 101, it’s never going to change ever. It’s all relationship based, right?

It’s just the nature of the relationship and how you define that and how you think about the paradigm that changes for us. But we have strong through our partners, we have very, very strong relationships with our end users, with the end depositors or the borrowers of the bank or payment companies of the bank. And then therefore we have very strong relationships with our partners, but we want them to do something special, provide a differentiated service that has stickiness already to it. And then by us bringing the banking products and services and that homogeneity of the banking infrastructure, we help our partners really capitalize on the special sauce that they already have. And we enhance that. It’s a very symbiotic approach.

PR: So can you share some of the names of the fintech partners that you’re working with that you can share publicly?

CB: We try not to mean that you can web crawl them and find them. They’re all I try not to for you know, various reasons, but you can think thematically. What I would think about thematically is just this that community banks typical community bank, I’ve worked at two really good ones. They’re full of really smart bankers, right? Really dialed into the community and they care a lot and they offer differentiated relationship services to their to their customers.

Heretofore they’ve offered differentiated banking services to them as well. That’s what’s being commoditized. And traditionally, they don’t have the scale or the expertise to compete with the verticalized software offerings in terms of how do I select? Let’s take a restaurant vertical, for example. A well run restaurant vertical software platform has developed such deep relationships with the restaurant customers of theirs and expertise in how those restaurants operate their business, it would be challenging for any bank, even up to the biggest banks, to hire a team of bankers who could compete from a relationship management standpoint with the software company.

And so despite a community bank’s best efforts, they’re generalists naturally, or they have a small team maybe that can focus on a segment, or they’ve got some specialized knowledge, but they have a really hard time competing with that vertical software company. Then conversely on the upside, the big banks, some of these companies may just be too small for them to do, come after profitably and serve. And so there’s this big hole in the market. And this is what we knew from the beginning. We called them back then ISVs, industry specific verticals, from kind of the payments world. And that still exists today. And that’s where we’re making so much progress and really enhancing our partners’ business and their relationships with their customers by helping them to embed seamless banking products and services. It’s not rocket science. It’s hard to execute.

PR: Okay, so let’s go back to 2023 and 2024. You you’ve started adding fintechs onto your platform and then there’s this whole kind of craziness that happening in the BaaS space and there’s been there’s consent orders flying around and there’s end users that have done that have lost that don’t have access to their money and brought a lot of attention on the bass space, very little of it good.

What was it like from your perspective going through that and what do you think the lessons the industry needed to learn from that?

CB: It was challenging, no doubt, because like with anything, I called it a category five regulatory hurricane. I speak in these analogies because they work and you know, in a hurricane, there are a lot of things that happen that you have no control over and are not your fault. And you just have to focus on battening down your house, right? Hopefully ahead of time and making sure that you withstand it. You’re going to lose some shingles. You might lose your roof and hopefully you had good insurance and contingency plans.

And so when that was happening, that’s the way we looked at it. We said, this isn’t personal. It’s a storm. And again, going back to life lessons, banking is just a part of my life. So it’s all got to be congruent with what you do. Life lessons are be a part of the solution, not the problem. And so we intentionally entered an industry, one of the most highly regulated industries on the planet, because we thought that was the moat and it proved to be.

And so we said, you know what? We can’t control what we can’t control. What we can control is how we interact with our regulatory bodies. And we’re going to be transparent, honest, forthcoming. We’re going to take responsibility when we screw something up. We’re going to tell them a clear plan to fix it. But we’re also going to push back when we think it’s rightful to do so. And it’s actually a responsibility to do so. When things are misunderstood or mischaracterized or there’s just a fear factor going on.

And so it’s funny through that, Peter, I can’t speak for other banks, but what this did for us was created another pretty big asset for us because with all that scrutiny came elevated visibility. Traditionally in banking, people say you don’t want that. And we embraced it and said, no, we’re just going to tell our story very clearly. We’re going to, again, fess up when we screwed up, commit to fix it. And we’re going to do it with a smile. And we’ve built strong relationships, I would say, kind of across the agencies by doing that and hope to be able to use that as a vehicle to demonstrate smaller banks are equipped and with the right investment can do these things and can be leaders, you know, from a regulatory perspective.

And so, you know, it turned out to be lemonade out of lemons type of situation. But part of the reason that we were able to navigate that, fairly successfully given the given the conditions was that banking 101 approach. Before the phone ever called, before there was an event going on that you alluded to or events in 2023, 2024, our baseline principles we’re fiduciaries for our customers, for our depositors. It’s a non-negotiable. We have to know where every penny of their money is at all times. And so we had already architected that as a, that was a given. And so it wasn’t really stressful at all. It was a little stressful when questions come and is this in line and let’s hopefully it’s working right. And we knew it was working right. But, you know, that always causes stress. But we had already that was already planned because that’s just a non-negotiable when you’re a fiduciary. So I think that gave us a strong foundation to say we’ve already been thinking of these things. We’re prepared for these things just because they’re something in the market rhymes that that doesn’t translate necessarily to other similarly positioned companies.

PR: Of course, now in the last 13 months, the pendulum has swung the other way and there’s very much a friendlier environment in Washington. Has that changed your approach at all or are you just keeping things the way they’ve been?

CB: It goes back to everything is human nature. And I think it reminds one that things are never as bad as they seem at the bottom and they’re never going to be as good as they might seem at the top when you think you’re there. So stay humble, always be on guard and plan for the long term. And like I said, don’t take it personally. Don’t don’t get too tied up in these things that are outside of your control. Control what you can. There’s really good playbooks on that all through our economy and industry and just life experiences of how you manage risk and these things.

And we’ve been proactive to tell our partners on the regulatory front that even if the pendulum swings through, we’ve got our kind of fairway here. And we operated within that before and we’re going to operate in the same space. And we’re not going to chase the pendulum because it will come back. There will be things that happen. And that’s just not our style.

But I do think it’s, this has been a washing out and it’s been a kind of separation of the wheat from the chaff, if you will. So I do think there’s more confidence and I do think that companies like ours will more likely get the benefit of the doubt going forward because we’ve been able to demonstrate the resilience to kind of withstand that storm. So I think that that is a little bit of a change in mindset for us. It just, provides that additional optimism that anyone who’s innovating and doing entrepreneurial things really needs to have to keep pushing forward. But it’s core level, like we haven’t changed our principles.

PR: One of things that have changed with the new administration is obviously the ability for companies to obtain a bank charter that would have been next to impossible under the previous administration. And of course, many fintechs have taken advantage of that. There’s been a lot of preliminary approvals received. There’s more in process. How do you react to that? Because I mean, most of these charters are from companies, fintech companies that have multiple bank partners and have been sort of taking advantage of the embedded banking model. How do you feel about as someone who really specializes that is this sort of a validation of your model or is it a threat?

CB: I think it’s a validation of the substance and the value of the model. think depending upon where you sit in the market, it’s a threat. I think it’s individualized at this point. We’ll see how it shakes out over time. But our approach, not knowing exactly what was going to come, but our team, our board being very financial and risk management oriented people. I mean, even I have strong portfolio management background from securities, right, and from an asset standpoint. And so the portfolio approach of whether it’s your stocks or your customer base diversification, right, belt and suspenders. And I think that that’s exactly how we’ve built our strategy and built with our partners.

And so to try to really limit concentration risk, to try to avoid kind of that systematic risk that you might have if you had just a few large concentrated partners who would be eligible to graduate and move on and might have that desire to get their own bank charter. So I think it’s a nuanced answer. We feel really good about our strategy and our positioning and our partners, they want to just continue to build and they want to have us do the banking really well and they do the technology really well. And I think we’re in a spot where we can be very flexible and adaptable as it moves forward. But it’s a total validation of the approach that it…the scarcity in this whole ecosystem, Peter, I’ve said this a lot too, but the scarcity is the bank charter. It’s not the technology. The scarcity is the bank charter and the strong end user relationships. That’s what really makes this work well.

PR: Okay, so then what does it take for a new FinTech to be onboarded with Thread? Do you, like, is there a certain level of scale that a FinTech has to have before you will onboard them?

CB: Sure we don’t publicly disclose exactly what that is, but we’ve actually got a pretty well-defined board appetite at the board level of what we’re looking for, minimum requirements in dimensions of capital raised, what the business model is, what the industry they’re serving. We don’t do all industries. And importantly, as you know, most of these companies are in growth mode and hope to be in hyper growth mode. And so they’re capital burning entities.

And so this is common sense stuff. How many months of cash runway do these companies have? How does that fit with their business plan? What do we think when we discount that or we put adverse stress scenarios on their models, how do we think this will endure? Do we have relationships with the management team already? Maybe they are a second time or a third time founder and folks in our shareholder base or network know them or maybe have backed them.

Do we know if not, do we have relationships with the VCs or private equity if that’s who they have as backers? So it’s all those things mixed together into a stew to try to get to the right answer.

PR: So then today, imagine this sounds like this has always been a high priority for you, but when you’re looking into the, your FinTech partners are doing and you obviously, I presume you’re looking into a lot of this stuff is in real time. I mean, how do you approach when you see something that you don’t like and maybe it’s, maybe hopefully it’s happened before it’s actually been implemented, but what’s your approach when a FinTech company wants to do something that they think is reasonable and you don’t think is reasonable. What’s that process like?

CB: I think we’re getting better. think, you know, at the end of the day, we’re a bank. And that’s the non-negotiable. That’s the foundation. And, you know, there’s a certain level of kind of implied regulatory rigidity that come from the regulations, right? Not really from humans, but just from from the regulations. And I think there’s there’s kind of a long standing way of dealing with that. And that’s something that we’ve really worked on over the last period of years of…how do we find that blend right to these non-negotiables remain in place and we have a very partner driven attitude.

So therefore it all comes back kind of where I started to relationships. You know, so we spend time, our team, our senior team, our SMEs, you know, on, on our teams, try to spend intentional time with partners to know them, hopefully in good times. So then when the crisis comes or, you know, the issue comes, the, the one that I call it the too tough pile always ends up on my desk.

And so hopefully, you know, there’s a strong relationship in place where we can work through, but it’s just like any any business problem that there is. And, you know, I try to encourage our team that, hey, we’ve all signed up to operate in banking. And there the rules are all written, some of them very clearly, some less clear than than others. But we’ve all on principle agreed to abide by the rules. And so let’s not make this an argument between us and and a partner say.

This is what the tech says. We’ve all agreed to adhere to it. So we’ve got a problem here. It’s a gray area. How do we transparently lay the problem out and then go solve it together with an open mind, non-negotiables intact, but with an open mind of how we’ll solve it. I’d say that’s a work in progress. We’re not perfect and we’ve certainly made our stumbles, but it’s been a big focus for the team as we really get refined in our model. And because we want to be a strategic partnership driven company where we’re really here to serve the needs of our partners while adhering to the fact that at the end of the day, we’re all subject to the regulatory framework.

PR: Okay, so I want to ask you about community banking in general. You’ve been doing this for a little while now, involved in the community bank space and not every community bank is going to have the expertise or the desire to do what you’ve done. What do you think is the key to a thriving community bank industry over the next decade?

CB: Maybe it’s a placard response, but it’s got to be innovation and paradigm challenging. I think if that does not take place over generalizing, you’re unfortunately going to see many more media banks disappear. They’re either going to close up shop, they’re going to sell probably not for maybe a price that they were ever thinking they would sell for. So to me, it’s an imperative. And that’s where, you know, we’re, grateful to see the various agencies really lean in and they understand this and now they’re really trying to figure out how do we foster that? How do we promote that?

Yeah, everyone is not going to go and have a business model like Thread and they’re not required to, but what can they learn through, they’re obviously a whole group of banks that are peers and that are in the space. What can they learn about those cycles and the innovation process that banks like us are undertaking? And to try to create very actionable, logical and elegant frameworks for other banks to innovate in their area. Do they all have to be geographically focused? Maybe they’ve got, I’ve said this before too, but maybe they’ve got a specialty capability within the bank, agricultural lending or music industry or hotel, CRE, whatever it might be. Why couldn’t they partner, right?

Of course, with the right risk management and technology provisions, why couldn’t they partner with a technology company who would help them expand that footprint way outside of their physical footprint and to find new growth revenue opportunities where they would, that bank would be contributing real expertise into that relationship. So I think the banks who do that will see growth opportunities and revenue opportunities and survivability and the ones who don’t won’t.

PR: Okay, so last question then. What’s next for Thread Bank? Is there certain industry sort of niches you’re excited about or different initiatives you’re excited about? What’s coming down the pipe?

CB: Yeah, very thinking about it when I said early innings, you know, the growth to date and the business to date, we’ve only really scaled the embedded deposit part of the business. And we think of each of them as threads to embed, it’s to thread. So next, and it’s this year initiative, we’ve got all the folks in place, processes in place and technologies are being, you know, kind of finalized and are in different stages of launch mode on both embedded lending and embedded acquiring, which is merchant acquiring, because in each of these cases, we think about our partners as branches and to be a full bank branch, you might want or need all or some of those threads that deposits loans and acquiring. And so that’s our goal. That’s the mission this year is to have those products available to either existing partners or we’ll bring in new partners through deploying those products.

PR: Okay, well, I have to leave it there, Chris. It’s always great to chat with you. Thanks so much for coming on the show today.

CB: Yeah, thank you Peter, appreciate it very much.

PR: What struck me in this interview was Chris’s emphasis that being a fiduciary is non-negotiable and it was that principle that saw them navigate the BaaS crisis well. Before the regulatory storm hit, had already architected their systems so they knew where every penny of customer money was at all times. That wasn’t a reaction to the crisis, it was baked in from day one.

Thread’s underlying philosophy has been do the boring, hard, foundational banking work right, and then the innovation on top of it becomes sustainable. That philosophy will, I expect, stand the test of time in the years ahead.

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.