Utah’s Hidden Fintech Powerhouse: Ryan Christiansen on Building Bridges Between Academia and Industry

Ryan Christiansen has had one of the more unusual career trajectories in fintech—from managing credit portfolios during the 2008 financial crisis to leading bank integrations at Finicity during the early days of open banking, helping launch the Financial Data Exchange, and then making an unexpected leap into academia as Executive Director of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.

In this conversation, Ryan explains why the Center takes a unique multidisciplinary approach spanning business, engineering, and law schools, and shares details about their new master’s degree program launching this fall. We also dig into why Utah has quietly become one of the country’s most important fintech hubs—with over $1 billion in fintech wages and $7 billion in economic impact. We also discuss the upcoming Fintech Xchange conference on February 4-6 in Salt Lake City, which has become a must-attend gathering for fintech and banking executives looking for substantive content and genuine networking opportunities.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Ryan’s background building Finicity’s open banking platform.
• How and why he went from the corporate world to academia.
• The mission of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.
• The programs the university offers on fintech for their students.
• Details of their Masters in Financial Technology program launching in the fall.
• Why the fintech scene in Utah is so robust.
• Why they decided to create their own event called Fintech Xchange.
• What makes Fintech Xchange different.
• What attendees can expect at Fintech Xchange this year.
• What is most exciting about the work he is doing at the Fintech Center.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 568: Ryan Christiansen

Ryan Christiansen

How do we support and expand fintech? And we came up with a thesis on fintech, is that it’s a multidisciplinary field. You’ve got financial services, obviously, and then the technology. And when that technology or the technologists or innovators start touching the U.S. financial system or any jurisdiction for that matter, now you’ve got a whole host of regulations that a lot of technologists don’t have to deal with.

So that’s our thesis is this multidisciplinary approach. So we organized the center as a center sitting with the schools of business, engineering, and law, which is fairly unique. I have not, frankly, seen that at any other universities that have similar type of programs. But that was our approach, and we wanted to build something from the bottom up, and we thought that was the best way to put it together.

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. Today, I’m talking with Ryan Christiansen, the executive director of the Fintech Center at the University of Utah.

Ryan has had a fascinating career that spans traditional banking, wealth management and some big fintech names. He was at Finicity in the early days and steered their transformation from a financial management app to an open banking platform. He also helped launch the Financial Data Exchange and was part of the MasterCard acquisition before making an unexpected pivot to academia.

In this episode, we discuss how the Fintech Center is structured, working across business, engineering and law schools. And we talk about their upcoming master’s degree program launching this fall. We also delve into why Utah has quietly become one of the most important fintech hubs in the country. And we dive into the Fintech Xchange conference, the annual event of the fintech center happening February 4th to 6th, which has become a must attend event for fintech and banking executives.

And just a quick note before we start, you’ll notice my audio is a lower quality than usual. Silly me forgot to turn on my microphone for this recording, which was my first one after the break, so that’s my excuse. Sorry about that. Now let’s get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Ryan.

RC: It’s great to be here, Peter. I’ve been very excited. In fact, I’m so excited. I’m missing one of the few powder days that we’ve had this year. So that’s the level at which you’re at with me.

PR: And I do sincerely apologize. said you could have actually postponed it if you really wanted.

RC: I wouldn’t dare.

PR: I know what it’s like when there’s a power today. They don’t happen all that often, but hopefully it’ll still be good tomorrow. So let’s kick it off by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. Tell us some of the high points of your career to date.

RC: Yeah, for sure. I’ll, I’ve been at it for a long time, so I’ve definitely needed to hit the high points or otherwise it’ll take our entire time. But, yeah, I started out in, in finance and banking and, really pretty quickly migrated into the wealth management, private banking space. I, I’ve always been fascinated by finance and then the, the private banking and wealth management space gave me an opportunity to really kind of get close to how people create and manage wealth, which I just was fascinated by. I loved it. I liked working with the people, generally found that people that were creating a significant amount of wealth were some of the smartest and hardest working people I knew. And so there was a lot to learn from them.

So anyway, I did that for a number of years, eventually moved into management and then during the financial crisis, moved into managing a credit portfolio, which was honestly a lot of fun during the financial crisis. I’m not sure if I realized how much fun it was at the time, but the amount of learnings that you can get during a crisis is kind of unmatched. So, worked through the financial crisis, ended up managing the credit portfolio for Zions Bank on their private banking, wealth management, specialty lending, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Over that period of time, I had several clients I’d worked with.

One of them went on to found a company called Finicity. So as they were getting ready to really transform from a financial management application to an open banking platform, I was talking to my old client who was the founder and CEO about what he was up to and he asked me to come on board and help them stand up some regulatory needs that they had as well as lead the integrations to the banks. So that was a significant change, but I’d always had a little bit of an interest in tech. In fact, I’d always had been a bit of a geek around the tech side of banking.

Funny enough, I was early in my banking career, I was such a power user of Quicken that the customer service people would actually call me oftentimes when they had a hard to solve case because I could generally work my way through it. That’s dating myself a bit, you know, back in the Quicken days. But I just always had a proclivity to try to dig into the tech that was helping to run things. So anyway, I ended up going to work with Finicity and we were very early days in building out an open banking platform. Learned a lot about the screen scraping that was taking place at the time and managed that group. And then we were also thinking pretty heavily at the time about how to migrate from screen scraping to API. So I led the team that did all the contracting with the banks to do the data access agreements for open banking and also had a group of engineers that we did the integrations with. So did the contracting and the integrations.

And through that work, ended up doing a lot of work to help stand up and start the Financial Data Exchange, which was a lot of fun, a lot of work, but bringing together industry leaders that didn’t always see eye to eye in a way that we could find the commonality and figure out how to move the industry forward was quite a bit of fun. So we ended up selling to MasterCard in 2020 and I helped scale the bank connections piece of the MasterCard portfolio, which was a very interesting experience. were going global, so we were internationalizing that platform. So that’s a little bit about what I’ve been up to over the past 20 some odd years.

PR: So it’s interesting then, you’ve been in the for-profit world your entire career, and then obviously we know that MasterCard bought Finicity. So how did you go from Finicity slash MasterCard to the University of Utah as Executive Director of the Fintech Center there?

RC: Yeah, was not a journey that I was expecting. can tell you that. I mean, think pretty much most careers are like that.

PR: Mine is definitely like that too.

RC: While I was at Finicity, we had started doing some work with the University of Utah. One, we had a lot of hiring needs. grew from the time I started, we were 30 or so people, and we grew to about 800 or so people when we had the exit with MasterCard. So we had a pretty sizable need to recruit people. So we were working with the university on that and then some other initiatives as well. Got to know several people there and at the time that the dean of the business school was one of the people we were working with, Taylor Randall. And he was later promoted to be the president of the university.

After the MasterCard acquisition, we had been talking to President Randall about some FinTech initiatives that he had there. And he really wanted to get those focused and get a little bit more oomph behind some of the initiatives that were bit bespoke throughout the university. He and I started talking about the potential of standing up the Fintech Center, which sounded interesting to me. I was having a lot of fun at MasterCard, but also it was a different environment that I was used to. And this provided an opportunity to kind of go back into a startup type of mentality, as well as have a new challenge that I hadn’t done before. Academics is very different than the for-profit world. And it also gave me the chance to have a little bit of a give back component to my career as well, which I thought was an interesting angle to pursue.

PR: Right, right, interesting. So then maybe you can explain what the Fintech Center is exactly, what do you offer today?

RC: Yeah, you bet. Well, it might be easiest to start with how we see the world, which is our mission. And that is really to support and help expand FinTech, both within the borders of the state of Utah, but also within the United States and internationally. So that’s kind how we think about things when we wake up in the morning. When we thought about that vision, we then thought about, how do we support and expand fintech? And we came up with a thesis on fintech, which is, that it’s a multidisciplinary field. You’ve got financial services, obviously, and then the technology. And when that technology or the technologists or innovators start touching the U.S. financial system or any jurisdiction for that matter, now you’ve got a whole host of regulations that a lot of technologists don’t have to deal with. that’s our thesis is this multidisciplinary approach.

So we organize the Center as a as a center sitting with the schools of business, engineering, and law, which is fairly unique. I have not, frankly, seen that at any other universities that have similar type of programs. But that was our approach, and we wanted to build something from the bottom up, and we thought that was the best way to put it together. So that’s the framework of how we’ve thought about the Fintech Center. And with that, we’ve come up with some programming areas that we like to focus on.

One of them being academics, as you might expect, being at a university. So we have academic programs that consist of the fintech classes. We have a minor in fintech right now, and we’ll be launching a master’s degree in the fall of ‘26. We also support capstone projects where we work with corporate partners to get problem statements to bring into the classroom so that students can work on real world problems and that’s generally through our capstone program. So plenty of things in the academic space.

One of our other programming areas is our research and labs. So we really want to be a thought leader in fintech. So we conduct sponsored research for companies. just, for example, completed some research on industrial banks that looked at the strength of industrial banks in their unique structure, having a parent that is not a financial institution. So we just completed a study on that. And I suspect that that will probably be pretty heavily looked at during some of these questions that the FDIC has around industrial banks. So we do a lot of research like that, but we also support traditional academic research, which is highly theoretical. We like to write grants for faculty to do some of that work. And then we do labs as well. So that’s the chance for us to kind of again have that practical application and bring industry together with faculty and students to give opportunities for practical learnings. We have a fund as well where we help fund early stage fintech startups and then our annual conference which I know that we’ll talk about a little bit more.

PR: But just on the degree programs that you’ve got there, can someone do like a business degree with a minor in fintech? Can they do a law degree with a minor in FinTech and an engineering degree? I mean, how does it work?

RC: Yeah, that’s a great question. The way that we’ve designed the minor slash emphasis, and the reason I say that is we have either the minor or the emphasis, and it depends on which school you’re getting your degree through. So the practical piece of that is if you’re a business student, you can get your minor in fintech. If you’re an engineering student, you can get your emphasis in fintech so that you can pursue these studies without adding a whole bunch more to your class load.

So really it’s open to any student in the university that wants to add this component to their academic career, which has worked out really well because we’ve attracted students, know, a lot of students from the business school, a number of students from the engineering school, but we also attract students from gaming. We have students that have thought about how do I tokenize things in the gaming experience. We have humanities students. We had an art student that was thinking about how do I tokenize art? And they wanted to learn more about blockchain and tokenization. So we’re attracting students from across the campus, most of them are coming from the business and engineering.

PR: And you said the master’s program is starting this coming fall. Is that correct? What’s that going to look like?

RC: Fall of 26, yes. Yeah, so it’s 30 credit hours that will take you about two years to complete that. As we were talking to industry, we spent quite a bit of time talking to industry to find out, what are the needs of industry so we could help design the curriculum around that? Then we got some interesting feedback. A lot of the fintech companies hire a lot of technologists or engineers. And what they’re often missing is that understanding of the financial system.

So when you’re building products that are in FinTech or the financial system, it’s hard to build them well if you don’t understand that environment. And we also know that some of the tech in banking is different from other tech. As an example, core systems of banks. Unless you’re working at a bank, you probably don’t know a lot about that, really understanding what is the environment in which you’re building products. So that’s one of the emphasis in the FinTech program. And then we also spend some time talking about the regulations that you would most often see in the FinTech space.

One of the other things that we’re doing in the master’s program is really kind of taking a product management view and not necessarily so that someone would come through and say, I want to be a product manager, but that 360 view you need to have as a product manager we think is a very valuable way to learn about fintech and so whether you’re going to be an engineer or a product manager or whatever other career you’d be pursuing in fintech we think that that view is a valuable one.

PR: And so do people graduate with a master’s in financial technology and what what is the degree?

RC: Yes, it’s a Masters in Financial Technology.

PR: And then what about a bachelor’s like, is that a ways off before someone can come in and just say, right, I want to spend my entire degree focused on financial technology.

RC: So the undergrad is another thing that we’ll be working on in the future. That’s probably a couple of years out at this point, because it does take some time to build a program. So it is on the roadmap right now. One thing I did want to mention about the masters as well is as part of the masters program, we’ve developed certificates in FinTech. So if you’re a company that you have an employee that maybe you want to do some upskilling with, you can enroll them into this certificate program. They don’t have to be a student. They can just pursue the certificate. If the student and or the employer decides, let’s pursue some more education here, some more upskilling, you can get another certificate. And those certificates are stackable and apply towards the master’s degree credits.

PR: What sort of students are you seeing, like particularly, you probably haven’t started enrolling yet, I imagine, for the master’s program, but what are the types of people that are attracted to financial technology?

RC: I expect that we’re going to see some interest from a couple of different levels. First of all, I think that we’re going to see people that are fairly early in their career. They’ve been in the workforce for five or so years. They’ve decided that they’ve got a career track that they want to pursue and they want to start doing some upskilling or some additional degrees. The spaces where I think we’re going to draw from are probably both from banks. There’s a lot of banks that are thinking more about either fintech partnerships or how they’re developing fintech programs, partnering with fintechs. So I think we’re going to see a decent amount of interest from traditional financial services companies that want to get students enrolled, just students that are working, or I should say employees that are working at traditional financial services companies that want to pursue this.

And I also think we’re going to see quite a few people from the financial technology space that have been in their career for a little bit and have decided this is where I want to continue to work and want to pursue this degree.

PR: So I want to switch gears and talk about Utah, because you’ve mentioned industrial banks and that’s, you Utah is famous for its, you know, industrial bank license. Tell us a little bit about the fintech scene in Utah, because that’s something that I, before I really got involved in, you know, your event and others, I didn’t realize how robust the fintech scene is in Utah. So tell us a little bit about that.

RC: Yeah, it’s been a pretty well-kept secret. We had Simon Taylor out here a couple of years ago looking at what was going on in fintech. And I remember he did a scorecard with Utah against some other markets and Utah and his scorecard was scoring very high in several areas and then a goose egg in terms of people understanding what was going on in Utah. There’s just almost no visibility.

I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is I don’t know if Utahns have ever been the greatest cheerleaders for themselves, but probably more importantly, it’s been a lot of infrastructure that’s been occurring in Utah in terms of fintech. So it isn’t your brand names all the time, it’s the infrastructure companies that are helping to fuel what’s happening in fintech. But you’re right, it’s turned into quite a fintech hub. You’ve got companies like Divvy that was sold to Bill, that was a big purchase. You’ve got Progressive Leasing, Galileo that was bought by SoFi that still has their headquarters here, the Finicity MasterCard. You’ve got companies like Atomic and MX. So a lot of big players in the fintech space are headquartered here in Utah. And then you’ve also got a lot of fintech companies that aren’t headquartered here, but still have offices here with quite a few employees.

We actually did a report, it’s a couple of years old now, looking at the economic impacts of fintech in Utah and what we found was in Utah there’s about a billion dollars in wages being created by fintech companies and that’s resulted in about seven billion dollars in overall economic impact. So it’s pretty sizable.

A few of the other things that I think are important there are, as you mentioned, the industrial banks. They’ve been here for a long time and many of the industrial banks were some of the early entrants into the sponsor banking space. So you’ve got a pretty high concentration of that. And then you’ve also had a fairly, well, first of all, I should say we’ve had a long history of financial services in Utah, the very first security bank family, the Eccles, who was the first Fed chairman. Then beyond that, we’ve always had a fairly balanced regulatory regime for financial services in Utah that really helps protect consumers, but also helps businesses grow. So a lot of the credit card companies have major operations in Utah. So it’s just been a really good ecosystem.

That’s led to a lot of talent development. So you have a lot of talent in Utah and then a pretty progressive state in terms of supporting this. So if you look at the state of Utah, for instance, the legislature set aside $40 million for a Utah Innovation Fund to help fund deep tech companies. it’s just, I always had an ecosystem that supported things like FinTech.

PR: Right, right. And I do remember, I don’t think it was last year, it have been the year before when your governor, Spencer Cox, he did a keynote at Money2020. And I don’t know any other governor that’s actually given a keynote at Money2020. So, that, mean, the fact that he takes time out of his schedule to come to Vegas and do that means that he’s committed to FinTech, it sounds like.

RC: Yeah, he’s been very committed to fintech very early on. He stood up the governor’s fintech council where that I’m a co-chair of to help get feedback on how to support fintech and his office has been a really big supporter.

PR: Okay, so I want to switch gears again and talk about FinTech Xchange, which is your annual event and that’s, I’ve been working on it with you for the last year or so and it’s been a lot of fun to do that. But tell us a little bit about why you decided to create a FinTech event through the FinTech Center at the University of Utah.

RC: So the reason that we created the Fintech Exchange was in the first instance, we decided that that was a really great way to have our Hello World moment for the Fintech Center. So essentially that’s how we launched the center. We did some early work on what we wanted to do as a center and then we launched by announcing to the world that we exist and had our very first conference. We had always had the idea that we wanted to pull together a convening of leadership in the FinTech space.

And as we looked at the ecosystem in terms of conferences and other gatherings, we felt like there was a spot where you could have a small to medium-sized conference consisting primarily of leaders in the space that’s really geared towards thought leadership. And we felt like as a university-supported center, that we were uniquely suited to be able to do that. So that’s what we’ve really aimed to do. The FinTech Xchange, as it’s called, I think has done a very good job of pulling together some of the brightest folks in the industry to come and speak at the event, but also just participate in the event by attending the event.

And what we’ve seen is some wonderful networking opportunities and some wonderful sharing of ideas. And we’ve created it in a way that it’s not so big that it’s hard to navigate, but it is big enough that we can get all the right people there and provide the opportunities for people to have those face-to-face interactions.

PR: Yeah, that’s a good point because my first event was last year, which was your third event. And I was impressed that the caliber of people that you had in the room, I remember Nigel Morris, the co-founder of QED, was one of the keynote speakers. You had the, like Simon Taylor and Alex Johnson, Jason Mikula was there last year. I feel like these are bigger names and what I appreciated was as you said, when you go to some of the bigger events and you think, you you often will miss some of the like the people that you want to you want to connect with. If you don’t go out of your way to connect with them, you can sometimes miss them. That’s happened to me many times. And whereas this event like yours, I feel like you get to you get to see everybody.

RC: Peter, I just want to add a couple of things there as we’re thinking about it. It’s funny running an event because I haven’t been an event person in the past. so running an event is kind of a strange new startup type of opportunity for me. But I’ve been to a lot of events. And every time I think about what we do with FinTech Exchange, I think about what I’ve liked and not liked about events that I’ve been to, and you’ve experienced this with me as we’ve worked through this event.

I really try to lean into what are some of the most powerful experiences that I’ve had when I’ve gone to different events, and how can I recreate that and get rid of the stuff that is either noise or overhead. And it’s not easy, but that’s what we try to do, and I think we do a pretty darn good job of it.

PR: Yeah, I would I would agree. would agree. So let’s let’s turn to this year’s event, which is happening February 4-6. Tell us a little bit about how what people can expect from the 2026 version of FinTech Exchange.

RC: Well, let’s see, where should I start? Well, first of all, you’re coming to Utah in February, so you do have the greatest snow on Earth. That’s nice.

PR: As a Coloradan, and I can’t, I can’t let that go. Come on. We have pretty good snow in Colorado as well.

RC: Well, you weren’t early enough for the tagline, so we know that. We are one of the first fintech events, if not the first fintech event in the year. So as you’re thinking about your year, I think this is a great way to start it off. And what can you expect? We’re trying to innovate every year. So let’s start out with the core of the conference. We’ve got some really good content again this year in terms of speakers. We’ve got CEOs from Fundbox. You’ll have to remind me all the CEOs that we’ve got here.

PR: You got Renaud Leplanche from Upgrade kicking things off in the morning. Yeah, they’re not many bigger names than him in FinTech.

RC: I’m really excited. There’s been so much activity, as we mentioned a few minutes ago, around charters. And we’ve got Mercury coming to the event. They’ll be participating in the charter discussion, as well as Stripe, who has applied for a charter in Georgia. All the innovators in charters are going to be there. We’ll have them on a panel. Obviously, we’ll be talking about what’s going on in the AI space, specific to FinTech. There’s just some wonderful content. Definitely go to the website, check it out. You can see what we’ll be talking about. But as usual, really powerful content.

The other thing that you can expect is the executive roundtables. This is something we really started to do last year and we received some great feedback, which is the executive roundtables consist of putting around 20 or so people into a room to talk about a particular subject. And all the people in that room are deep subject matter experts on that subject. So it’s not speakers speaking to people, it’s everyone in the room having a conversation about best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and also creating those relationships that are so important in the industry. So we have the round table. So as I mentioned, those are 50 minute sessions, probably one of the most valuable parts of the conference in my opinion.

And then we’ll also have some academic papers being presented. As a university, we think that that forward theoretical view of what’s happening in the world is important. So we’ll have several papers being presented that are in the, in the fintech space and, and lots of chances for networking.

PR: Of course, yes, we should have mentioned too that the roundtables and the university part of the program is on February the 4th. And then what happens on February the 6th, Ryan?

RC: On February the 6th, we have our activity day. We’ll be going to Snow Basin, which is the home of the downhill for the 2002 Olympics as well as the 2034 Olympics. It’s a fabulous ski resort. So those that like to ski and snowboard will have a fantastic day there. And if we’d like to get together at the top of the hill and run the downhill and see who can get to the bottom first, that could be a lot of fun too.

PR: I’m there, let’s do it. I love that last year was my first time ever doing a FinTech ski event. And I love to ski, I live in Colorado and I had so much fun on that day. was just, was one of the great things about skiing is that you get the, you get a chairlift after every run and you get to chat. I had a great time just connecting with people like Jason Henrichs. So I’ve never really sat down for a long time. We skied all day, skied with you and It was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to it again this year.

RC: You’re so absolutely right too about the fact that the skiing is a lot of fun and then you get this little pause in between each run where you get to connect with people on the chairlift. And this year, even better, many of the runs are serviced by gondolas. So it takes that really cold part out of the day because you’re in the gondola ride. If you’re not a skier or a snowboarder,

We’re having lunch up at Snow Basin Resort. It’s a world-class resort, same owners as Sun Valley Resort. So world-class resort, and we’ll be offering gondola rides. So if you want to still get up to the top of the mountain and take in the view and see what’s going on there and not have to ski your way down, we’re doing gondola rides from the top to the bottom.

PR: Yep, yep, indeed. so let’s last question. Beyond the FinTech Exchange, which I is very exciting, what do you think is most exciting for you about the work you are doing at the FinTech Center?

RC: Honestly, I always come back to the students. It’s an experience that you don’t really get in any other workspace and the students are absolutely invigorating. Peter, you may have heard me tell this story, but I was walking through campus one day and I hear this roar coming up behind me on the big sidewalk and I look and I see a student on his longboard traveling about Mach 1 down the hill.

And I noticed he’s got a mountain bike tire in either hand. And I just looked at that and I was like, that’s an experience you don’t get to see everywhere. And I thought, you know, I don’t know where those mountain bike tires started and I don’t know where they’re going, but this kid clearly had a plan and that’s who’s going to be running the world in the not too distant future. that’s just incredibly exciting to me every day. I love it. And, and the caliber of students that I see on a daily basis and the way they think about problems, again, it’s just invigorating. So I think that’s probably the thing I think about the most.

The other things that are really exciting to me is we’re working on some labs. We’ve got a lab on blockchain right now that we’re standing up and one of our professors and some of the students are working on a quantum resilient blockchain solution because we know that quantum’s coming and more financial services are moving to the chain. So how do we secure that? So that’s something that’s very exciting. And then also just building the pathways for FinTech careers for both students and companies. Because as we know, FinTech is a growing industry. There’s a lot of employment needs. Having the pathways for companies to find good employees and providing those career opportunities is a lot of fun.

And I love being in a startup environment again as well. We’re relatively new and we wake up every day and figure out how we’re going to build something.

PR: Okay, we’ll have to leave it there, Ryan. Really, really great to chat with you as always. And sorry you had to give up a powder day today. I appreciate it. Anyway, best of luck with the FinTech Xchange and the growth of the FinTech Center. And thanks for coming on the show.

RC: Peter, thanks for having me and I’ll have you buy me a beer for making me miss the powder day.

PR: Indeed, okay.

I spent a lot of time in Utah over the past year or so helping with the fintech exchange as well as the AI native event which takes place at the University of Utah. I have come to know many of the people at the heart of fintech in Utah and have been so impressed by the ecosystem there. Utah has so many advantages as a fintech hub. Ryan talked about the talent and the many fintech companies and banks that are based there.

But the business environment in general is so supportive of FinTech startups. There may be no better place in the country to start a FinTech company today than Salt Lake City.

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.