I have some exciting personal news to share.
After an exciting 16 months at Even Financial, I’ve decided to take my talents (figuratively) south to Arlington, Virginia and take on a new challenge of helping build out the sales organization alongside Dan Dall’Asta and the team at Rize.
During his time on the board as an investor at DriveWealth with Route 66 Ventures, Dan was a huge proponent for the advancement of B2B Fintech infrastructure. He was a steadfast supporter through some of the early highs and lows and if you ask anyone, was a reason for much of DriveWealth’s early and continued success. So when Ceilidh Cross reached out about the opportunity to join his team (with a quick introduction from Monica Murthy at Alloy), I didn’t hesitate at the opportunity to learn more.
The recent Tiger Woods Documentary explains how Earl Woods taught his son Tiger from a very young age to start playing golf. Contrary to how the game is conventionally played, Earl taught Tiger by starting him at the pin and working his way back. That helped Tiger to visualize and cement that goal in his mind and work backwards from there, tweaking his game to get him to the goal of landing the ball at the bottom of the cup.
The best Fintech CEOs I’ve ever worked alongside are the ones who started at the pin and visualized an unsolved customer need and how they could build technology to suffice it, and then worked backwards from there. Justin Howell and team started Rize under the premise that in order to deliver real customer-centric innovation, a new set of infrastructure was required to be able to match how customers think about and use money in the real-world and work backwards. Justin and the Rize team have created a set of architecture that makes it possible to pull from different custodial and regulatory silos (banking, brokerage, lending, etc.) to enable clients to deliver wholly new customer experiences. The end result is a technology solution that (1) makes it easier than ever before to add multiple products and services, (2) gets clients to market faster, and (3) allows fully purpose driven use cases to be created by and for consumers on top of Rize’s core banking-as-a-service platform.
Rize is catered specifically for the world of embedded finance — forward-looking entrepreneurs understand that the only way to win in a world where switching costs are low, complete attention has to be paid to the end-customer. Rize has built the easiest path to get to market and the most flexible architecture in the sector — enabling leaders to focus on customer experiences and success.
The Rize API will exponentially speed time to market for new and established brands both in and out of fintech who are looking to empower their customers. Whether in single or multiplayer finance, Rize’s banking technology can be implemented for any number of use cases where financial products can be delivered to end consumers or businesses. The Rize API will allow any company — financial or non-financial — to rapidly offer these latest and greatest in financial products to their customers via a single API integration, reducing the previous need of having to acquire a multitude of different vendors and write to different APIs along the way.
