Three conversations show how the industry is starting to think differently about where value comes from

Tearsheet Editor-in-Chief Zack Miller had three recent conversations on the Tearsheet Podcast.

Almost none of the guests spent much time talking about the financial product itself. The discussions kept circling back to the work surrounding those products. How decisions get made, how information gets verified, and increasingly, how AI can take work off a customer’s plate instead of simply answering questions.

Whether it was Slash rethinking business banking, Figure redesigning debt consolidation, or leaders from McKinsey and QED Investors discussing AI’s impact on financial services, they were all pointing toward the same conclusion: value isn’t coming from product alone but from everything wrapped around it.

The financial product is no longer enough

Miller’s guests kept returning to the idea that real value comes from helping customers move closer to their goals.

The financial product is simply one piece of solving those problems. That’s the idea that Slash, a business banking platform, has built its business around.

Victor Cardenas, the company’s co-founder and CEO, argued the biggest flaw in business banking is the divide between the companies that hold a business’s money and the companies that build the software used to manage it.

“For the longest time, there were two categories of companies operating in the SMB finance space,” Cardenas told Miller. “There were companies that actually bank and move money… and then there were companies that build financial software. Our view is these should not be two kinds of companies.”

That belief shapes Slash’s strategy. Instead of treating banking and financial software as separate businesses, it combines them into a single operating layer. “Your product is much more powerful if you’re not only ingesting data… but actually acting on the data,” Cardenas said.

Traditional financial software can surface insights. Slash, on the other hand, can move money, issue cards, approve payments, and automate workflows because it controls the bank account itself.

For performance marketing agencies, that means replacing manual reconciliation with dedicated client accounts, automated advertising-spend tracking, and real-time fee collection. The bank account then becomes the infrastructure that powers the business.

[Watch or listen to the full conversation with Slash here.]

Execution replaces trust

Figure, which uses blockchain and AI to modernize lending, and Method, which builds lending infrastructure for financial institutions, are approaching lending with a similar mindset that Slash is bringing to business banking.

Traditional debt consolidation has always relied on trust. A lender disburses funds, and the borrower is expected to pay off existing credit card balances. Whether that actually happens often isn’t clear until weeks later, when credit bureau data catches up.

Figure and Method looked at that process and asked a simple question: Why leave that step to chance?

Instead of relying on borrowers to pay off their debts, the companies built a system that verifies liabilities in real time and pays creditors directly when the loan is originated. That gives lenders a current view of a borrower’s obligations rather than relying on weeks-old credit bureau data, while ensuring the loan proceeds are used exactly as intended.

“It’s a closed-loop system,” Method co-founder and COO Mit Shah explained to Miller. “The money goes directly to the creditor. It never touches the consumer’s bank account.”

That seemingly tweaked small operational change has meaningful implications.

With verified liability data, Figure can underwrite against a borrower’s current debt obligations rather than a weeks-old credit report. It also removes uncertainty around how loan proceeds are used, giving lenders greater confidence while improving outcomes for borrowers.

According to the companies, borrowers using the platform were 50% less likely to become seriously delinquent, improved their FICO scores by an average of 21 points within 30 days, and saved roughly $500 a month in interest payments.

[Watch or listen to the full conversation with Figure and Method here.]

The next moat isn’t the product

McKinsey and QED suggest AI is compressing the lifecycle of financial products. When software can be built faster and at lower cost, products become easier to replicate and harder to defend.

“We’ve been trying to figure out what a moat even means in the age of generative AI,” Mike Packer, partner at QED Investors, told Miller. “Trust and distribution become much more valuable.”

Max Flötotto, senior partner at McKinsey, sees the same dynamic playing out in banking. “The simplest form of banking is collecting deposits and making loans,” Flötotto said. “If customers let their own agents optimize deposit pricing and move money to whichever bank offers the best rate, banks risk becoming dumb product providers in the background.”

The same thinking extends to another area generating great interest: stablecoins.

Despite processing trillions of dollars annually, only a small share of today’s stablecoin volume reflects everyday commercial payments. Much of it still comes from trading and crypto markets. But both Flötotto and Packer argued that stablecoins are already changing expectations around how money should move: instantly, globally, and as programmable infrastructure.

Whether powered by AI, stablecoins, or embedded finance, the broader shift is toward financial workflows that require less manual effort and more intelligent automation.

[Watch or listen to the full conversation with McKinsey and QED here.]

Where value moves next

Listening to these conversations, it’s hard not to notice where everyone’s attention is shifting. Nobody is obsessing over the bank account, the loan, or even the payment itself anymore.

The conversation has moved to everything adjacent to those products: gathering better context, verifying information in real time, removing manual work, and ensuring the intended financial outcome actually happens.