LoanPro’s Scott Johnson on launching credit cards, lessons from Galileo, and more

In this episode of Fintech Layer Cake, host Reggie Young sits down with Scott Johnson, President of the Card Division at LoanPro. Scott shares his deep expertise from over two decades in fintech, including his time at Galileo and his current work at LoanPro, where they are pioneering transactional-level credit. Together, they discuss the core pillars of launching a credit card, common mistakes fintech founders make, and how the lending landscape is evolving. Whether you’re a fintech builder or just curious about how credit cards really work, this conversation is packed with insights on the future of card issuing and credit products.

Transcript

LoanPro’s Scott Johnson on launching credit cards, lessons from Galileo, and more

Reggie Young:
Welcome back to Fintech Layer Cake, where we uncover secret recipes and practical insights from fintech leaders and experts. I'm your host, Reggie Young, Chief of Staff at Lithic. On today's episode, I chat with Scott Johnson, the President of the Card Division at LoanPro. We get into it more in the episode, but LoanPro is a loan management system that's been launching cutting-edge products. Prior to LoanPro, Scott spent over 20 years at Galileo working on prepaid and debit card issuing and brings experience from both GE Capital and Amex. We cover a 101 crash course on credit cards, Scott's top lessons from his decades at Galileo, the new products LoanPro offers have never been done before in the market, and much more.

Fintech Layer Cake is powered by the card issuing platform, Lithic. We provide payments infrastructure that enables teams to build better payment products that improve lives. Nothing in this podcast should be construed as legal or financial advice.

Scott, thanks for coming up on the podcast. Super excited for our conversation today. I know you have a bunch of fascinating experience and a lot of great practical insights that I'm excited to get into today.

The place maybe I'd like to start is just a 101 on credit cards. We'll dive into LoanPro a little bit later in the episode, but I know you're focused more in the credit lending space now. Maybe a good place to start is if you're talking to, let's say, an ambitious fintech builder or founder who wants to build a credit card, what are some of the core pieces that they should think about? This is something that we get frequently at Lithic where people are just like, what do we need to know? What are the core pillars to navigate?

Scott Johnson:
Like what should I be doing? Yeah, no. Well, first off, Reggie, thanks for having me on and really appreciate it.

Well, let me talk to you a little bit about the way that we think about it. Is your thing about building a credit card program? I always like to think about, who are the ecosystem partners? Who are the real players that you're going to bring to the table? And at the center of that is always going to be the issuing bank.

My joke with everything going on, I was going to wear a red hat that said, make BIN sponsorship great again for our podcast. There are so many things going on, but I always like to think about how do you start with a bank? In credit, it's so important. And one of the things that I talk to people about is, you think about, what's going to happen in the future? What do I want to do?

With some banks, or with some program managers when they're talking to banks, they've come to me and said, well, what do you think about this bank or that bank? We recommend sometimes saying, if you're very concerned, have an FDIC-chartered bank and maybe an OCC-chartered bank or banks that roll up, again, to different regulatory entities because that's some way that you can hedge a little bit on what risk you might have. So I always like starting with the bank because so many things happen at the bank.

And then very quickly, you look at like, well, who's plugging into this? You’ve got to think about on the issuing processing side. Obviously, Lithic is a great processor, but there's great players in the marketplace, Galileo, where I used to work, DPS. There's other players out there, but who are they connected into?

Sometimes someone will start talking to someone, they're like, I want to use this bank over here. And you're like, that's great. We can partner there, but it might take some extra time for you to get through that process. So I always like to say, hey, really make sure you look at the bank. Make sure you've got a good view of the process or where they're plugged in and what their capabilities are.

But then people will say, well, I'm talking to Visa or I'm talking to Mastercard. We've got great relationships with, obviously, both Visa and Mastercard. But Discover Card, even Amex, is getting into this more and more. So I say, make sure you're spending the time at the network level. Make sure you're looking at what they're bringing to the table, not just on the network incentive side, but how do you really partner with them? Too often people just are like, well, what's my incentive going to be? That's a piece of the puzzle, but they're missing a ton on the network side if you don't really look at that. And so I really focus on that.

And then the last couple areas that I always recommend people look at, your credit card ledger. If you're trying to get into the credit card space, credit card ledgering is hard. We're going to talk a lot about that. That is not something that's easy to do. So I always recommend people look at that and just making sure they've got a really, really good handle on how this is really going to work, in addition, like the other players, like chargeback disputes, the stuff you're like, oh, I've got to think about that. We've got great relationships with Alorica and Ubiquity and players that really specialize on that. So I tell people, don't try and take that in-house, certainly not to start. Work from the best players on the marketplace.

Reggie Young:
Yeah. I definitely echo that sentiment. I've had a lot of conversations with founders and builders who decided to try and build their own ledger in-house. To a T, everyone of them says, I wish I had outsourced that, because you want to spend the time running your program. You want to spend  folks on the bread and butter of getting this card to SMBs or whoever your target market is, and not worrying about all the quirks of running and operating a ledger and all for that. There's always a build versus buy or rent with a vendor discussion. Based on what I've seen, you probably don't want to build a ledger entirely yourself, unless you're an incredibly large,  public company,  have the resources, have the bandwidth to be able to do that. And even then, there's quirks. You want the experts like LoanPro to be focused on that.

Scott Johnson:
No question about it. And it's the thing, Reggie, to your point, is you start double clicking on it and you really start getting into the details. It's the edge cases that can just drive you nuts. So yes, I couldn't agree more. Focus on what you do best, being a lender, selling and marketing cards, those types of things. And we can really talk about the areas that we specialize in.

Reggie Young:
Yeah. One of the conversations I've been having a lot with folks, and I'm curious to get your take recently, is that credit cards are a pretty competitive space. It's a pretty hard nut to crack. I think people look at trying secured cards, and it's like, oh, look, there's this opportunity for those sorts of things. It's a lot more nuanced. So I'd love to get your take on what are some of the top factors for whether a credit card program will be a hit, whether it has a potential to find a good market out there.

Scott Johnson:
Yeah, you're right. Credit cards are a highly, highly competitive space. I start thinking about, Reggie, some of the gimmicks. There's people that are like, hey, I'll have a card that'll have  a little edge cut out so it's easier to get out of my wallet or my purse. It's like, hey, we've done a lot of research. A blue card is more likely to be used than a red card versus a black card. You've got some of those types of things.

And there might be a little bit of what moves the needle there. But you really think about- if you take a step back and you say, what really moves the needle on credit cards? Over the last 25, 30 years, there's really only a couple of ways that most people can differentiate their credit cards. One is, what is the interest rate? That's one lever. Is it 12.9? Do we have an introductory rate? Is it 18.9 for purchases versus cash advances? So you've got that lever that people can pull, and you've got rewards that people can pull. Those have been for, traditionally, these areas that people pull, and that's why it gets so stinking competitive because that's where they're focused.

Well, we think about it a little bit differently and try and think of ways to drive behavior and drive using our ledger. One of the things that if you look at some of the studies Visa and Mastercard have put out is what actually drives the top of wallet? Well, you think about doing the spend that we all do. What's one thing we all have to do all the time? Every person has to go to the grocery store. We all have to eat. So you think of like, what's the card that I'm pulling out of my wallet or out of my purse at the grocery store?

Well, if I can get the consumer to start saying, oh, I'm using the ABC card, I'm doing this or those types of purchases, it really, really drives more and more of the behavior that you want and how you enable that. Not to mention that you also want to be able to say, hey, here's the card I'm pulling out of my wallet to impress someone on my date night. So you want to have a way to think about this.

That's also got to be built, Reggie, within this context of what is the right revenue model and P&L model with this? Because what can get a little scary is you can't just rely on interchange. You've got a really good mix of the interchange, the interest rate, and making sure that you're looking at that to be able to fully be able to target the right audience.

The other thing, Reggie, I always joke about, people will come to me over the years, they're like, I'm going to do this card. And I look at some of their models and I'm like, not every man, woman, and child in the United States is going to have one of your cards. You got to back this out. You got to be a lot more targeted, a lot more segmented in the types of customers that you're really going to try and get. So I think if you look at all of those things, those are things that can drive the right type of behavior.

Reggie Young:
Yeah, I love it. You're starting with the kind of gimmick approach. I think Matthew Goldman, Cards for the Win, great newsletter, folks that aren't subscribed, fantastic, very concise, insightful newsletters. He does a good job, I think, of pulling out  the graveyard of gimmicks that cards have all tried where it's like, oh, this color, that weight, yeah, that little edge, that shit, whatever, you see enough of those and you realize that that's not the sustainable approach.

I also like that grocery comment, too, because I feel like top of wallet is such an abstract concept that to put it in- when I think about what's the card that I pull out when I go buy groceries, how would a card replace that? That's a lot more tangible. You recognize how hard it is to become that top of wallet in that context.

Scott Johnson:
Become that top of wallet that's actually going to be, I'm going to live my life on that card. That's what you're aspiring to be.

Reggie Young:
I love it. It's a great primer for folks who want to build credit cards. I would be remiss if we didn't spend some time talking about your background at Galileo. You spent over two decades there. I'm sure you picked up a host of practical lessons. This is one of my favorite things to dig into, is just  the practical stuff that you can't find Googling. I'm curious, a little over two decades at Galileo, what were some of your top two or three lessons from working with primarily debit, prepaid, payment cards at the time? What were some of your big aha moments or tips or tricks from that time period?

Scott Johnson:
Yeah, it's crazy, Reggie. I was there for two full decades, for 20 years, had a great experience. I was an early-stage employee. And what's amazing is we probably worked over the years, I think, with between 250 to 300 different program managers. So you're in all shapes and sizes.

But the couple of things I really learned that I share with people is, number one, how fast things change. And here's what I mean by that. I love telling some of the stories and my experiences. I remember it was 2006 or 2007 when I was at Galileo, and we were talking about a customer wanted to get our full API documentation. Now, granted, we had just started this concept of APIs. Now it's like, you hear that, you're like, what?

Reggie Young:
Table stakes now.

Scott Johnson:
You're kidding me. But we had to get together as an executive team to say, are we willing to document this, send it out in an encrypted email and send it to a customer? So we had them sign a double secret NDA, like, oh, my gosh, we're going to do this. And we were like, okay, whoa, we got over that hurdle, so we started to do that.

Well, then what was interesting about how fast things change, three or four or five years later, it's  2012, 2013, all of a sudden, we had this idea of like, what if we published them? What if we actually published our APIs out on our website? And I remember at the time, it was like, Scott, I was almost  slapped across the face, like, are you crazy? People can reverse engineer our system. We're going to get all these bad guys coming in. And we had to have this big, big, big, like, oh, my gosh, are we going to do this? And we made the decision to do it.

And what was so fascinating is how many different constructs started coming our way that we hadn't even dreamed of. Well, how fast things have changed. Now you look at it, and you're like, well, everybody does that now. Published APIs, that's not a big deal if you're on a modern API platform.

And so that was the big first one, Reggie, that I learned. I'll tell you one other quick one, and it's, I say, be willing to innovate. And here's what I mean by that. You see, at Galileo, it was like, well, first we'll send them out. Now we had to actually publish them. You always have to be willing to innovate.

You talked earlier, mentioned there's amazing fintechs that you can learn from. One of Galileo's biggest customers is Chime. And what was so interesting is to see how that company just continued to innovate. When they first came to Galileo, this is maybe a topic for another podcast, Reggie, true story, it was initially set up as the Dr. Phil card in the Galileo system. That is a story for another time. Chris Britt came in and started this amazing company called Chime.

Well, they started, and they were doing okay. And then they came up with this highly innovative idea to give people two days’ early access to direct deposit. And it was the same thing. It was like, this is nuts. This is crazy. But so many of these ideas had been grown up in the early fintech years. So Chime did that. Then they iterated and they started to do the SpotMe product. And then they got into a secured credit card, and they just continue to add and add and add.

I think that kind of the things that I have learned over the last 20 years is just how fast things change, how much you have to be willing to iterate. And if you don't, and if you're just focused on one thing, the market can just very quickly leave you behind.

Reggie Young:
Yeah, I love it. You never stop innovating. The joys and the pressure of working in fast-growing start-up companies.

Scott Johnson:
Right. You just always have to be thinking like, oh, I made it. And I think if you ever feel like you've made it, you're going to have a problem, because you'll be up there for a little while, but then it's like, oh, something else is going to happen. So you constantly have to be, how do I get better, how do I innovate, and what's going on in the market?

Reggie Young:
Yep, definitely. I love to click into card issuing specifically. Were there specific changes you saw in your time at Galileo? Obviously, we talked about some of the API stuff, which, to me, is very funny because I have definitely tried to reverse engineer some stuff from certain other card issuers’ APIs. It's like, you can only do so much. It's funny to me now to hear that as a risk, but if you're doing it for the first time, of course, it's like a legitimate thing to consider. But are there other technical components or just general changes in card issuing that you've seen over the past 20 years?

Scott Johnson:
Yeah. I'll tell a quick story. These stories are things that happened in the last 20 years in fintech. It's amazing again to see how the early years of fintech started and how issuing has changed. I went to the first Mastercard- they called it stored value before they called it prepaid, which a lot of that was the genesis of what grew into fintech.

So I went to the first Mastercard stored value conference. Clay Wilkes and I, the founder of Galileo, went in 2004 back at the Mastercard headquarters and purchased. I remember thinking like, I can't believe they're actually going to let us in the building, because it was, Reggie, 100 or 150 people that were the vagabonds of like, okay, you're doing- what? You're doing this crazy- if you want to do something crazy, it was going to be with one of the 150 vagabonds in that group, which would be really fascinating to go back and look at all the people that were in that room where you're like, wow, those were the early pioneers of fintech. A lot of people in that room have made a lot of money.

And so it was so interesting to look and see, because at the time, there were just a couple of banks that would do BIN sponsorship. So much of this was dominated, again, by big banks that were running, again, these monolithic core platforms. And what's been so interesting now is to see how the changes in these modern technologies. We were talking like, now you go back and you look at and think of what Lithic has done as a modern API-first payments platform. That was just unheard of to think of doing something like that.

And now to see how many banks- where the pendulum was over here and now it's swung on the other side where they're like, oh, my gosh, these fintechs not only are taking a lot of my market share, but how do I partner with them, or how do I acquire them because I need to modernize? I just can't think of running the same tech stack over and over.

The joke I always use now is I think of my 12-year-old daughter. I don't think she's going to want to walk into a stodgy branch to open up an account. I think if I can ever get her off her phone, it's going to be like, hey, honey, you can go to this app and download it and get an account right away. And so I think that those are some of the things that I saw that have moved so much in the last 20 years.

Reggie Young:
Yeah. It's funny to think about- I spent a lot of time thinking about how can we speed up the account onboarding. Obviously checking all the important boxes, you need to do KYC, KYB, all that stuff. But we're really just optimizing the last inch of the last mile. To think about the changes over the past 20 years in terms of how quickly can you provide cards to people, do they need a waiting period between when they apply and get it, versus you'll be able to do it ASAP. You’ll be able to get the immediate feedback on identity verification, thanks to all the API. This is zooming out for me to realize that like, I really just focused on that last inch often.

Scott Johnson:
Right. And so you focus on that last inch. It's like, oh my gosh, how do I get real-time account opening, push provision a card to a wallet to start doing spend? It really is unbelievable to see how far things have come. But also, there's still a lot of players in the ecosystem that still need to catch up to that. So that's where I think it's just a great opportunity for the right fintechs to just play in a space and really keep moving the ball forward.

Reggie Young:
Yeah. Speaking of the folks in fintech, what do you think that most people misunderstand or get wrong about just card issuing or cards in general? I think we talked about the interchange point of like, don't entirely rely on interchange for your business model, but I'm curious if there's any others.

Scott Johnson:
Yeah, there's a few things, I think, to think about. Again, Reggie, I’ll tell you these stories. I'll tell you a quick one. This was probably four or five years ago. Money was flowing into the space, and it was just going crazy. I get a call from this guy. It's like, I've raised $7 million or $8 million. And I'm like, okay. And I want to do a challenger bank targeted towards travelers to the Oregon coast. And I remember getting off that call thinking, okay, I should sell every fintech stock I have. This is too crazy.

And I think it comes back to like, what do people get wrong? It's going to sound silly, but I'm going to say it. These programs actually have to make money. At some point, it can't just be about the fintech for fintech say, or there's programs out there or ecosystem players that's like, I'm solving a problem, which is awesome, but I got to be able to solve a problem, and I've got to be able to solve that problem with the right economics in mind. So I think that that's really important. So you've got to look at, can I make money?

I also think where some people can get some things wrong is also like, what is their background?  Where are they coming into the credit card space? Here's an example. At LoanPro, we work with lots of different lenders in consumer and commercial use cases and lots of different things that go on there. And so they've got great experience, et cetera, in these different use cases. Well, they might not be ready to do a card program. They might know everything about lending, but they don't know how to do a card program. And so sometimes they jump in without really thinking about it the right way.

And similarly, there's a lot of card program managers that maybe grew up in the debit or prepaid space where I grew up, and they're lending. How do I do that? I've never even considered that. How do I start? So I think people make the mistake that way, because at the end of the day, the card and credit card, it's a lending product. People think about it like, oh, I have to pay for things with my credit card. Well, yeah, it's a payment instrument, but it's really a lending product. And so I think that too many people lose sight of that.

And I think the other thing, just a couple others, Reggie, that I think people sometimes do that's wrong, is I think some people think some part of new technology is just going to drastically change the way everybody behaves in the world. And I kind of joke, I think it was Mark Twain that said, the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. I've heard some people say for years, the card is going away. Now at some point, do I believe that a physical piece of plastic will go away? I do. I think at some point, they will. But I don't know that that's going to happen tomorrow.

I also don't think that buy now, pay later is going to change the way that everybody interacts. We love buy now, pay later. We've gotten a great buy now, pay later installment solution on the platform, but I've heard some people say that that's going to totally go away and credit cards themselves are going to be replaced by buy now, pay later.

I think it was Alex Johnson, not my nephew, Alex Johnson, a great guy, but Alex Johnson in the fintech space wrote some great articles about the year of the credit card in 2025, that buy now, pay later is going through the roof, no question about it. But so are credit cards, especially with Gen Z, and it still isn't that people are abandoning that. That's not right. So I think that there's a lot of different things that are going to continue to happen there, and so you can't just think about one thing.

One other one, Reggie, I'll just touch on briefly. I've heard people talk about real-time payments and FedNow. I think there's great use cases for that. But I've had people say, well, the credit card is just going to totally go away. I couldn't disagree more. I don't ever envision myself paying by bank when I go to Jimmy John's and order a number 15, the ultimate pork or whatever the name of that sandwich is, where you're like, no, I'm going to pay with my card, and whether I tap and pay or I'm just using it on my phone. I think, again, there's use cases, but I don't think it's going to drastically make that just one of these is going to win.

Reggie Young:
Right. Yeah. I don't expect we're going to start seeing 5% back for airline purchases using RTP, which matters to a lot of folks. There's a lot of these subsets. Maybe the takeaway there is credit cards often get lumped together as this singular thing, but they actually serve many, many purposes., RTP and buy now, pay later can chip out a little bit at some of those segments, but credit cards are still going to be there. I have a hard time imagining cards or the plastic cards are going to go away in my lifetime.

Scott Johnson:
Wow. Great.

Reggie Young:
Let's jump into LoanPro for a bit. How did LoanPro get to where it is today? Maybe in case any listeners aren't familiar, you could start with a brief spiel about what LoanPro is and what you all offer.

Scott Johnson:
Yeah, no, happy to do that. For those of you who are not familiar with it, LoanPro is a modern loan management system and credit card ledger. That's really at the heart of what we do, an API-first platform to support those different constructs.

I always chuckle, Reggie, because you think of like, well, how does the company start? Did the founders just wake up one day and be like, oh, you know what I'm going to build today? I'm going to build  a loan management system and the leading credit card ledger.

Reggie Young:
When everyone was choosing their career in elementary school, airline pilots, loan management system.

Scott Johnson:
That type of stuff, right? Like, what am I going to do? I love the story. LoanPro has been in business for about 15 years. It was started here in Utah, three brothers, the Roberts brothers that started this, come from a great family, had been in a couple of different businesses. And so one of the things they thought after they'd sold a couple of businesses, they thought opening up a car lot would be interesting and start selling cars. And so they started doing that.

It's one of the things I learned early in my career when I was at GE. It's like, GE sells a lot of appliances, but they have a tiny bit of margin on the appliance. It's all in the financing of that. I remember the first time I heard that, it was this like, oh, my gosh, you got to be kidding me. And they kind of had this aha moment as they were getting into this. They're like, well, the money isn't made in the margin on the cars. That's small. It's in the financing. And then they started to get into it and they're like, oh, my gosh, the platforms that we're using are just horrible.

What I love about LoanPro is, it's really the old cliche, they've walked a mile in a lender's shoes because they were lenders. All of a sudden, they started to deal with not just the easy fastball down the middle, straightforward lending use cases. It's the guy that came in and said, hey, I've lost my job. I can maybe pay it for a month or two, but then I know I'm going to be delinquent. What can you do to adjust this? Or it's like, complying with military SCRA use cases and building those types of things because they were like, I had to deal with that.

That's where the DNA of the company grew from that. And then all of a sudden, it was like, forget the car dealership. We're going to build the platform to really build on this. And that's really where the company has grown into loan management and being the preeminent loan management platform in the country, and then also building out onto this and being able to be the leader in credit card lecturing.

Reggie Young:
I love it. I did not know that car loan box. It makes a ton of sense. When you had to eat the dog food yourself- we think about this with a bunch at Lithic because it came from Privacy.com. It's like, oh, if you had that experience of building a card program yourself and knowing the pain points from some of the legacy card issuing providers out there, you're going to care a lot more about your customers. You're going to care a lot more about the infrastructure working super well. I'm sure that car lending platforms 15 years ago were probably not in the best shape.

Scott Johnson:
And that's why Lithic has got such a great platform today, because they went through that with Privacy and went through all the challenges like, oh, wow, I get it. Now I know how to build this, because you have to stub your toe a few times. It doesn't just magically work the first time. You got to be like, oh, that didn't work. We're going to build it this way, this way, and this way. That's why these platforms are so good. Now they're so scalable and so robust and typically have these great features that you can use or not use if you need to, because they've walked a mile on those shoes.

Reggie Young:
Yeah. I love it. Okay. So your time at Galileo, primarily debit, prepaid, processing side, and now you're focused more on lending. I'd love to almost return back to that question of like, what'd you learn from your time at Galileo? I'm curious what you learned now that your perspective is more on the loan management side.

Scott Johnson:
This one's been so fun for me over the last six, seven months. I love debit cards and ledgering and all the stuff that you learn when you're at a processor that primarily focuses on that. Debit ledgering itself is not overly complex. There's a lot of very hard things, as you know. I always say, hey, you know what's really hard in debit card ledgering and processing, is when you get a massive IRS ACH file that comes in and you have to have an ACH process that's going to come in and post a billion or billions of dollars within a certain time period. That gets hard, and keeping connectivity into the networks and everything associated with that.

But what's been so interesting for me, Reggie, is to come and look at LoanPro and what they do in credit card ledgering. One, the complexities of credit card ledgering in comparison to debit card, it's just a different animal. It's not that it's right or wrong. Debit card ledgers were not built to be credit card ledgers. Conversely, credit card ledgers are not built to be debit card ledgers. And so they're just two very incredibly different things. And you start learning about the complexity that it takes for credit card ledgering, and then also thinking through the eyes of a lender.

It's very different when all of a sudden you're looking at the eyes of a lender saying, well, it's either their money and their balance sheet, or they're working with the third party and it's their money. It's a very different way of thinking. Oftentimes, I thought for so many years just the number of card transactions on the payment side, which is a great business in itself, but it's very much a different way of thinking when you start looking at lending and ledgering, all the complexity that has to go into that, but also how you can build some incredibly profitable programs that way.

Reggie Young:
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Some people, I think, have a misconception on that. Credit is just doing debit but with an extended repayment. No, that extended repayment, all the interest stuff, incredibly complex as a lot of nuance.

One of the funny things that I see is there's not a lot of folks in the middle of the spectrum. They either think, oh, how hard could it be, or they think, oh, my gosh, this is going to be one of the most complicated things. And the truth is it's hard. You can navigate with the right partners with the right resources, but you can't show up and be like, oh, credit, how hard is that? Because I think that the joke is often, well, it's easy to get money away, but the hard part of credit is accurately managing it and then getting the money back. I think folks come in with two strong views on that spectrum. The truth is usually in the middle.

Scott Johnson:
Usually in the middle, and you're spot on with that. And it does seem like there's not a lot of middle-ground folks where it's either like, oh, it's just bits and bytes and it's just ledgering, or it's like, this is the most complex, difficult. The truth is it is in the middle. It comes back to what we were talking about earlier. If you have the right partners and understand it, are willing to lean in on this, you can build some really amazing stuff.

Reggie Young:
Speaking of building amazing stuff, what's on the docket for LoanPro in 2025?

Scott Johnson:
Yeah, so a couple of things that are on the docket for LoanPro. One in particular that I want to make sure I talk about is one of the main reasons why I'm here. I have fallen in love with what we call transactional-level credit. That is on the docket for us. And here's what I mean by transactional-level credit. People say, well, what is it? We've got patents on transactional-level credit. Transactional-level credit for us is being able to- if you can believe this, LoanPro has patents on being able to have custom interest rates, credit limits, interest abatement periods at the per-transaction level.

What you can do with that, it gets back to like, how do you build highly differentiated credit card programs? Well, one of the things we can do is you can run transactional-level credit on our platform. And that's what's new for us. Over the last couple of years, we've been working on this and getting these patents that we were awarded about the middle of last year.

And so I want to talk about, Reggie, some cool use cases you can do with that. People are like, okay, wait a minute, let me make sure I've got this right. Interest rates down to per-transaction level, here's a great example. LoanPro's offices are in Farmington. It's about 15, 20 minutes away from Hill Air Force Base. Let's say you wanted to do a military credit card. Well, if someone's a military deployed personnel, you have to comply with SCRA and very specific interest rates that can and can't be charged. But now you want to say, I want to do something more than that.

Because of transactional-level credit, you could build a very specific type of program where you said, hey, while your family member is deployed, this credit card that you're using that's running LoanPro's transactional-level credit capability, you can have now the ability to say any grocery store, I'm going to do it 2% or 3% interest. Or you could even get so specific that we can geofence things as well where you're like, any transaction within 3 miles of Hill Air Force Base at Harman's grocery store, which is a great local grocery store here in Utah, we're going to do a very specific, maybe do a promotion with Harman's like, there's no interest on that, on those transactions. You can build amazing programs.

Another one is a game day card. You could go to a Utah Jazz game. Any transaction done on game day within a mile of the Delta Center is at a different interest rate. It really becomes  a card marketer's dream come true. You want to dream it, we can probably do it on the platform using that transactional-level credit capability.

That's what's new for us in 2025, is just getting the word out that we have this capability on our platform to work with issuers, program managers, et cetera, in their partnership with their issuing processor, to be able to bring these type of highly differentiated credit card programs to the marketplace.

Reggie Young:
I love that. I think you just did a great job, too, of navigating something that I think is hard in the fintech infrastructure space, which is oftentimes you're doing novel things that the market has maybe never seen before. And so you immediately jumped into concrete examples, like  transaction-level credit. This is going to be a new thing that LoanPro is pioneering, that you're going to have to do a lot of that example of military base spending within geofence limits. Big light bulb for me, I think that's fascinating.

To me, it's exciting, too, because you probably don't know all of the examples that you're going to see walk through the door. And that's the fun part of being at the cutting edge of infrastructure.

Scott Johnson:
Right. That's the fun part. And you're exactly right, Reggie. We're looking for an issuing processor. You're the back end. You're the plumbing. It's hard to be like, hey, here's what's really cool in the plumbing, you typically get a phone call when the plumbing doesn't work, right? What's so fun is to be able to say, now you take this cool feature that has to be enabled at the plumbing, the back-office level at the lecturing level. And now you're like, whoa, now I can take that all the way up to the top of the stack to my touch point with my customer, and I can do something that's highly differentiated. That's where this gets fun. And so we are so bullish and excited about transactional-level credit and credit card lecturing in 2025.

Reggie Young:
I love it. It's going to be an exciting year. Scott, I think for a wrap-up, one of my favorite questions that I'll throw at you now is, is there anything you've been thinking about a lot lately that you think people in fintech aren't talking about enough?

Scott Johnson:
Yeah. A couple of things I think about, Reggie. I think people are talking a lot about this one, but they don't quite know what to do with it. If we went back a year ago and imagined there'd be a time where the CFPB website went down,  it was literally, I went out and got [inaudible] where I was like, is water still wet, and is the sky still blue? What world am I living in? It's hard to imagine how much I think that things could potentially change.

What I really think that people probably are not talking enough about, who knows where this is going to shake out. I do think this is a great time to say, if you've been on the sidelines a little bit about saying, I want to maybe try something new that, again, let's be very clear, is a very highly compliant product or program, this is a great time for people to start getting into the marketplace. I'm very excited, very bullish on that one, because I think that that's going to be key.

There's one other one, Reggie, that I think could be interesting. I think that crypto might make a little bit more of a comeback. Now, I'm not suggesting it's going to be like four or five years ago when I was at Money 20/20, you're walking around, everyone's like, king of crypto, sure on flashing lights. I was walking down the side of the hall. I'm like, well, I just own a little bit of crypto. I hope I'm not a horrible person. I don't think it's going to cut back to the crazy time of crypto.

But there's certainly some use cases here that I think are going to start continuing to come back a little bit more. I think there'll be some very interesting use cases. That's one I think that people are not talking about enough that I wouldn't be surprised if we see come back a little bit more, but not to the great level that it was.

Reggie Young:
Yeah, definitely. The first shadow, too, is a really important one that fintechs can- there's going to be a lot of opportunity with all the kind of change that's happening in DC right now, a lot of good opportunity for innovation, and also opportunity for fintechs to help shape that innovation. I think two recent podcasts we've had on the one immediately prior to this with Penny Lee, CEO of Financial Technology Association, where I'm like, what's happening in DC? A lot of opportunities to get involved with fintech trade groups.

Folks in fintech, it's tough. The policy arm is always one of those important but never urgent, I think, for a lot of growing fintech start-ups. You can actually have a big impact and influence by just talking about the practical boots on the ground. Here's what could be possible and innovating that ultimately helps consumers, small businesses, all that fun stuff.

Scott Johnson:
Yeah, absolutely. And at the end of the day, that's the key. This has got to be innovation for the consumer, for the small business. That makes sense. And that's what I really think as you look at these. There's just some incredible companies out there that are focusing on that. So I'm super excited about it.

Reggie Young:
Yeah, it's going to be a fun time. Scott, well, awesome. If folks want to find out more about LoanPro or get in touch with you, where should they go?

Scott Johnson:
Well, certainly come to our website if you want to learn more about us. Always reach out to us on LinkedIn as well. You can hit us up. We're pretty much at every payment credit event out there in the marketplace as well. So by all means. We'll be at a fintech meetup next month in Vegas. That's an easy way to get a hold of us. We always like to think of ourselves first in sharing what we can about our platform, the industry, and really being taking that consultative approach and trying to help companies achieve their vision of what they want to do.So by all means, don't hesitate to reach out.

Reggie Young:
I love it. Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Scott.

Scott Johnson:
Well, Reggie, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. And again, I really appreciate it.