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
Webinar: How Fundbox Launched a Loan-to-Card Program in 7 Weeks
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For most of the history of lending, approval and access were two separate events. A borrower gets approved, then waits days or weeks for an ACH to clear before the money is usable. For small businesses managing tight cash flow, that gap can be the difference between catching an opportunity and missing it.
Cards are changing that. When a lender issues a virtual card at the moment of approval, credit becomes spendable right away, with no ACH delay and no separate account.
In this webinar, Lithic product marketer Claire Jacobs sits down with Sarvesh Baveja, Chief Risk Officer at Fundbox, and Declan Callisto, Product Manager at Lithic, to break down how Fundbox built a loan-to-card program on Lithic and took it live in seven weeks. They cover the borrower experience from application to spend, the spend controls that let a lender manage risk at both the business and card level, the four partners required to stand up a program like this, and where SMB underwriting goes as static credit limits give way to dynamic ones.
Fintech Layer Cake and Lithic webinars are powered by Lithic, financial infrastructure that helps teams build better card and payments products for consumers and businesses.
Chapters
- 00:00 Why approval and access became two separate events
- 01:32 Sarvesh and Declan introduce themselves
- 02:00 Why loan-to-card is a new innovation
- 02:19 The SMB cash flow timing problem
- 03:21 Why the choice of issuer processor matters
- 04:13 The Fundbox borrower experience, from application to spend
- 06:00 What Lithic built behind the scenes: the credit ledger
- 06:56 Why spend controls work at both the business and card level
- 08:30 Where else card rails apply beyond SMB lending
- 09:36 The rent payment use case
- 10:29 The four partners required to launch a program like this
- 12:42 Why embedded payments matter for reaching borrowers
- 14:08 What Lithic offers that legacy processors don't
- 16:05 The biggest misconception about program timelines
- 18:15 Where SMB underwriting is headed: from static limits to dynamic ones
- 20:03 Closing thoughts
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