Fintech Layer Cake
Welcome to Fintech Layer Cake. A podcast where we slice big Financial Technology topics into bite-sized pieces for everybody to easily digest. Our goal is to make fintech a piece of cake for everyone. Fintech Layer Cake is powered by Lithic — the fastest and most flexible way to launch a card program.
Fintech Layer Cake
Nobody Loves SWIFT: Payments Inertia and Invisible Crypto Rails with Davi Strazza from Lightspark
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Davi Strazza spent a decade at Adyen as the company scaled from around $30 billion to over $1.3 trillion in annual payment volume, running Latin America and then North America as president. Today he is Chief Business Officer at Lightspark, the company powering over 15% of Coinbase's Bitcoin transfers.
In this episode, Reggie Young talks with Davi about what actually moves enterprise payments decisions. They cover why inertia keeps trillions on legacy rails, how challengers find their wedge against incumbents, what Pix's adoption in Brazil reveals about changing payment behavior, and how Lightspark uses Bitcoin and stablecoins as invisible infrastructure for global money movement. Davi closes with the risk he thinks fintech still underweights: the compliance work underneath every product that scales.
Fintech Layer Cake is powered by Lithic, financial infrastructure that helps teams build better card and payments products for consumers and businesses.
Chapters:
00:00 – Cold open: most money still moves in fiat
00:21 – Meet Davi Strazza: Adyen, Lightspark, and $1.3T in volume
01:56 – Latam vs. North America: relationships vs. pragmatism
04:33 – Why enterprises don't rip out legacy processors
06:19 – Redundancy, and finding your wedge as a challenger
07:56 – Changing the org before the org wants to change
11:31 – What Pix taught him about shifting payment behavior
13:12 – Why it takes an Uber to teach consumers new payment habits
15:43 – What Lightspark powers, from Coinbase to cross-border payouts
18:42 – Global Accounts: offering the endpoint, not just the transfer
20:18 – Making Bitcoin invisible: the rail-agnostic thesis
24:10 – Selling infrastructure while the rules are still being written
27:53 – Why you no longer need to be Stripe to build in fintech
30:02 – The next decade: fiat and crypto converging
33:09 – Stablecoins are earlier than the headlines suggest
34:34 – The underrated work: compliance that scales
37:23 – Where to find Lightspark
Nothing in this podcast should be construed as legal or financial advice.
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