A2Z Fintech
Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala have spent over 25 years in fintech across Banks, BigTech, and Startups. This is a podcast of them riffing on payments, fintech and everything in between.
Episodes
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UPI cleared 373 transactions in its first month in 2016. In July 2026 it cleared 23.66 billion in a single month, worth close to 30 lakh crore rupees. Ten years on, the most consequential payments network of the decade turns out not to be a company at all.
On 25 August 2016 the Unified Payments Interface went live in Indian app stores, four months after a Mumbai pilot with 21 banks. T...
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Alphabet lost roughly $200 billion of market value in the eleven days after 5 August, close to a full year of its own AI infrastructure budget. On 14 August, a filing showed Berkshire Hathaway holding $37.8 billion of the same stock.
On 5 August, Google DeepMind announced that Demis Hassabis would step back from day to day management to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scient...
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Stripe has agreed to pay more than $7 billion for OpenRouter, a company valued at $1.3 billion in May. In the same season it has bid $60.50 a share, roughly $53 billion, for PayPal. The Collison brothers own a publishing house, and they have stopped collecting books.
Over the weekend Bloomberg reported that Stripe had finalised an agreement to acquire OpenRouter, an AI routing layer f...
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What if a new banking product offered you a staggering 6% interest on cash deposits and 3% cash back on spending? Sounds too good to be true, right? In this episode of A2Z Fintech, join hosts Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala as they dive deep into the launch of X Money, the latest banking venture from Elon Musk's company, X. This fintech podcast unpacks the implications of such an at...
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Trump Accounts give every American child born between 2025 and 2028 a $1,000 investment account, seeded by the US Treasury. Left alone it grows to about $250,000; filled to the $5,000 annual limit every year it reaches $13 million, and the distance between those two children is the thing nobody is explaining.
Trump Accounts were signed into law on 4 July 2025 and opened for deposits e...
What happens when a $53 billion PayPal acquisition offer shakes the foundations of the payments industry? Join hosts Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala in this gripping episode of A2Z Fintech as they dissect the recent bid for PayPal acquisition, a move that could redefine the landscape of financial technology. This acquisition offer, made by heavyweights Stripe, Block, and Advent, has sent ripples through the market, prompting a cri...
Have you ever wondered how technology is reshaping the landscape of wealth management? Join hosts Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala in this enlightening episode of A2Z Fintech, where they explore the evolution of investment strategies and the transformative impact of financial technology on the industry. As they share personal anecdotes from their extensive experience in finance, listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the shi...
What if the future of stablecoins is here, and it's backed by the giants of finance? Join hosts Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala as they dive deep into the groundbreaking launch of OpenUSD, a revolutionary dollar stablecoin that boasts backing from over 140 powerful institutions, including Visa, Mastercard, and BlackRock. This episode of A2Z Fintech uncovers the seismic shifts occurring in the stablecoin market, where traditional p...
What FIFA World Cup and SpaceX IPO have in common? In this riveting episode of A2Z Fintech, hosts Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala take you on a journey through the fascinating intersection of global events that are shaping our financial landscape. As the world tunes into the excitement of the World Cup, we also witness the largest stock market SpaceX IPO in history, including the much-anticipated debut of SpaceX. But how do these ...
A US Army sergeant bet roughly $33,000 on Polymarket on an arrest he had just been briefed on, and turned it into the price of a house. A Google engineer read his own company's unpublished data and moved about $1.2 million into a private wallet.
On a public blockchain, both men left a trail the FBI could follow to the cent. That is the paradox at the centre of prediction markets: the transparency that makes them exploitable is the s...
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Twelve hours after Sundar Pichai walked off the Shoreline stage, the recap industry was already ranking his Google I/O 2026 announcements top ten this, best five of that. Two former Googlers with 50 years between them think that misses the story.
On Wednesday 20 May, Sundar Pichai closed Google I/O 2026 with a 150-minute keynote that pulled together a 25-year arc. Google built the tra...
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Patrick Collison says agents will soon account for
most online transactions. The Machine Payments Protocol that
replaces the buy button is now live, and Stripe, OpenAI,
Google, Meta and Microsoft have all signed on.
This week at Stripe Sessions 2026, the architecture of agentic
commerce stopped being a thesis and started being plumbing.
The Machine Payments Protocol, co...
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Stripe shipped 288 features in a single morning at Sessions 2026 in San Francisco. The right pattern match for what the company is becoming is not Visa, Mastercard, or PayPal — it is Google in 2006.
On the final Wednesday of April, almost ten thousand founders, engineers, and CFOs queued around Yerba Buena Gardens, the same plaza where Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone nineteen yea...
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Two best friends from an accounting class in Ohio, both turning fifty this year. One spent the next thirty years inside the world's largest banks. The other made fun of them. Both just watched their first careers become obsolete in twelve minutes.
This is a different kind of A2Z Fintech episode. Recorded in Mumbai during a long working swing across India, Aman Narain sits down with hi...
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Ninety days ago we made ten fintech predictions on this podcast for 2026. Today we graded them in public. Four have already played out fully. Three are directionally correct. One is spectacularly wrong. One is still waiting on a phone call from Ben and David at Acquired.
This is the Q1 2026 fintech scorecard, recorded at the quarter-pole of the season. Mastercard's $1.8 billion acquis...
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Mastercard paid $1.8 billion for BVNK, the largest stablecoin acquisition in history. Four months earlier, Coinbase walked away from a $2 billion deal for the same company. What changed, and what it means for Visa, Amex, Capital One, JPMorgan, and Circle.
On Tuesday 17 March, Mastercard announced a definitive agreement to acquire BVNK, the UK-based stablecoin infrastructure compan...
India has 100 million diabetics. 47% of the population is overweight. And we are the most wellness-educated generation in history. That's the paradox.
Sumaya Dalmia has been transforming bodies and building businesses since 1997 — before fitness was even an industry in India. She's Vogue's Celebrity Trainer of the Year, WEF's Entrepreneur of the Decade in Health & Wellness, and the architect of a 7-pillar framework that ch...
In the age of AI, stock trading is still writing cheques.
That changed this week.
On March 9, 2026, Nasdaq partnered with crypto exchange Kraken
to build the Equities Transformation Gateway — tokenized
equities trading 24/7, settling in seconds, instant, fractional,
and always on. Four days earlier, NYSE's parent Intercontinental
Exchange invested in OKX at a $25 billion valuation w...
In September 2000, Elon Musk boarded a plane for his honeymoon. By the time he landed in Sydney, he was no longer CEO. His co-founders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, had staged a midnight coup, scrapped his everything-app vision, killed the X.com brand, and reborn the company as PayPal.
Twenty-five years later, that company has gone from a $360 billion peak to a $65 billion acquisition target. And Elon still owns X.com.
In this episod...
The Schroder family survived Napoleon, two World Wars, the fall of merchant banking, and the rise of passive investing. On February 12, 2026, they said "cash me out" — agreeing to sell their 222-year-old firm to Nuveen (TIAA) for £9.9 billion.
The Financial Times called it "the defining deal of a glass half-empty UK." Philip Augar, who worked at Schroders in the 1990s and wrote The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism, says histor...
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