Hi, I'm Julie VerHage-Greenberg with This Week in Fintech, along with my co-host Lauren Crossett, Head of Go-to-Market at Spade, a data and AI platform that turns messy transaction strings into structured, verified records.
Welcome back to Season 4 of the Fintech OGs series! We're now on Episode 2, and we're keeping the energy going with two guests who've been in the trenches of fintech, not just as builders, but as founders who went out and created something new after seeing problems from the inside.
Today we're joined by Shanthi Shanmugam, CEO and Co-Founder of Casap (as in "get your case done, ASAP"). They’re an agentic platform for resolving disputes and first-party fraud, built by someone who scaled Robinhood's product for six years and lived through the GameStop moment firsthand. And by Natasha Vernier, CEO and Co-Founder of Cable, which automates compliance testing for banks and fintechs, and who helped build Monzo from a 10-person team in a London accelerator office all the way to 4.5 million customers before going out on her own.
In this conversation, we cover the wild hiring stories that got them into fintech, what career highs and lows actually feel like as a founder versus an employee, how to get a B2B team fired up about a product they don't use themselves, what AI means for the next wave of fintech, and the best advice they've ever received.
Let's dive in!
Episode Summary: Disputes, Compliance & the Founder's Emotional Range
[00:00 – 05:30] Introductions & Origin Stories After some fun banter about how to pronounce "Casap" (it's like "case" and "ASAP" combined — Julie vows she'll never forget it), both guests introduce themselves. Shanthi shares that she was the second product hire at Robinhood, where she spent six years scaling the company before co-founding Casap three years ago with a Chime alum. Natasha walks through her path from corporate finance and a law degree in London, to showing up at Tom Blomfield's tiny Monzo office in 2015 and essentially creating a job for herself — she organized an event with no clear objectives as part of her hiring process, then joined as business operations and quickly became Head of Financial Crime. She helped write the policies and procedures that got Monzo its UK banking license, grew with the company from zero to 4.5 million customers, and then left to start Cable.
[05:30 – 08:30] From Facebook to Robinhood — and Why Shanthi Chose Fintech Shanthi describes her path from electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley to a rotational PM program at Facebook — where one of her teams was tasked with getting women in emerging markets to use Facebook, a mission she quickly questioned. Nine months in, she wrote her own obituary as a way of figuring out what actually mattered. Her conclusion: only health and wealth truly do. That led her to deliberately seek out an early-stage fintech role — she wanted to be the first or second PM at a company that was messy but surrounded by people smarter than her. Robinhood fit. She joined in 2017, right into the crypto craze, and her first major project was launching crypto in about three months. The inspiration for Casap came later, from the GameStop moment — when she had to stand up 24/7 phone and chat support overnight and realized that disputes, fraud, and moments of friction were almost guaranteed to lose a primary banking customer if handled poorly.
[08:30 – 13:00] Career Highs and Lows Julie asks both guests for a career high and low — and how they got through the latter.
Natasha shares that the highs at Monzo felt enormous at the time — getting a UK banking license, reaching a million customers, then four million, growing almost entirely through word of mouth, and the hot coral cards that made people stop her on the street. Her wife was reportedly relieved when she left Monzo, only to discover that founding Cable brought an entirely new category of dinner conversation. But in hindsight, she says, those Monzo highs feel almost young compared to the pride of having kept Cable alive for six years — and the lows of Cable have been categorically lower: restructuring the entire company, transitioning people out, and feeling the weight of those decisions in a way no employee role ever demanded.
Shanthi's recent high: returning to a major industry conference where, just a year earlier, she was nursing a newborn and cold-approaching people in the lobby with one new sales hire. This time, she had a full team, a booth, hosted a Bollywood party where she taught banking executives to dance, and was stopped repeatedly by people who already knew Casap by word of mouth. Her low: early Casap, when three of her first five fintech design partners went out of business within six months. She'd been told by investors to start with fintechs and work up to banks — but she decided to go hear from the horse's mouth. Most of the banks said yes.
[13:00 – 22:00] How Founders Get Through the Lows Julie presses both guests on the mechanics of resilience — what actually gets you through?
Shanthi describes herself as "robustly optimistic" — not the glass-bubble kind that gets blindsided, but someone who imagines all the ways things can fail and still believes the narrow path through is the one she'll walk. Critically, she doesn't define her identity primarily through Casap. She's a wife, a mother to an almost-two-year-old, a dancer, and someone with deep relationships that anchor her when the business feels like it's on fire.
Natasha echoes the identity challenge — detaching from Cable has been genuinely difficult — and gives full credit to her wife, who has patiently served as her main sounding board through six years of founder questions. She also notes that getting outside with her kids — watching them notice a hummingbird or a butterfly, completely unburdened by any of the things adults have invented to stress about — is the fastest way she knows to break a funk.
Lauren notes that the presence of women founders with children, openly talking about this balance, would have been nearly impossible to imagine earlier in her fintech career — and that it matters.
[22:00 – 30:00] B2C vs. B2B: Loyalty, Scale & Getting Your Team Excited Lauren raises a question that gets both guests thinking: having worked at huge consumer brands, how do the highs feel different in B2B — and how do you get a team excited about a product they don't use themselves?
Natasha says she made a decision near the end of her Monzo tenure that she'd never work in consumer again. The customer support was endless, the scrutiny on leadership was relentless — Tom Blomfield was on the front page of UK newspapers constantly, and the BBC once parked a film crew outside their office with a giant ice sculpture of a Monzo card. That said, B2B brings its own version: chief compliance officers don't want ten tools for ten problems, they want one — so there's an aggregation dynamic that doesn't exist the same way on the consumer side. To keep her Cable team connected to the mission, she brings in customers to speak directly to the team and tries to tie everything back to the reason the work matters.
Shanthi knew early she'd go B2B — partly because consumer loyalty felt so fragile. She watched Snapchat's daily engagement drop in real time as Instagram Stories rolled out, and thought: I don't want to build something where customers are that fickle. Her goal in B2B is to build something more like Spotify — where the more you use it, the more it knows you, and the switching cost becomes meaningful. Her most powerful team-motivation story: a dispute specialist at one of their bank customers started crying happy tears during a video testimonial because Casap had given her weekends back. She'd been going to couples therapy with her husband because of the stress of her job. Casap brought that customer in to meet the whole team in person.
[30:00 – 36:00] AI, Niche Products & the Changing Economics of FinTech Natasha asks Shanthi whether AI might finally change the fickle consumer loyalty problem — if it's now cheap enough to build highly niche products for smaller but more devoted audiences. Shanthi thinks yes, in two ways. First: niche financial services that deeply serve a specific demographic — like a credit union built around teachers' actual financial lives — will win. Second: the real prize is network effects and accumulated context, like Spotify knowing your taste better than you do. Whoever builds that kind of relationship with a customer will keep them.
But both founders are clear that in B2B, the aggregation problem doesn't go away — compliance officers still want fewer tools, not more. Shanthi argues that AI enables a shift from selling tools to selling outcomes: think "AI-native services" rather than "AI-native platforms," where the value delivered is the thing, not the workflow it runs on.
[36:00 – 41:00] Advice for Recent Graduates Entering FinTech Julie brings up a news item about AI potentially eliminating a significant percentage of entry-level jobs, and asks: if you were graduating today, what would you do?
Natasha says the advice is mostly the same as it ever was: go join a startup. A venture-backed startup has built-in urgency and an expanding pile of problems to solve. The learning in two years at a small company dwarfs what you'd get at a large corporation — and even if the startup fails, you'll know more about what you want and don't want. She used herself as evidence: she's already had three distinct careers and expects several more. Her mother was a dentist in the same room for 30 years. The concept of career pivots was foreign to her parents' generation; it's now just the reality.
Shanthi adds the concept of a "skill stack" — intentionally building a portfolio of things you're good at, things you've learned you'll always delegate, and things you want to pick up next. Titles are a distraction; outcomes and skills are what matter. And she'd add one more thing: dedicate at least 20% of your time to reinventing your understanding of the world. What used to be an annual exercise is now something she feels she needs to do every weekend.
[41:00 – End] The Best Advice They've Ever Received Lauren closes with a classic question: what's the best piece of advice you've ever gotten?
Natasha's answer is really an answer about the structure of good advice: the best advice she's ever received has always come because she'd built a relationship with someone who could give her exactly what she needed at exactly the right moment. From Lauren herself early on in Cable, to a CRO-turned-mentor she shares with Stephanie Kirkpatrick, the pattern is consistent. Her advice: surround yourself with people you can call. Those relationships — advisors, angels, mentors, friends, industry contacts — are where the right advice will come from at the right time.
Shanthi circles back to the through-line of her whole career: always understand and focus on what drives your customer. In B2B it's still people, and she knows what gets each of her customers excited, scared, and looking good internally. As long as she keeps driving that value and maintaining open, honest relationships with customers, everything else — including funding — tends to follow. She's always focused on building a good business, and the money has been there when she needed it.
Lauren shares that the best advice she received was simply to get a coach — a mandate from a co-founder at Spade that led her to Janice, an executive coach she's now been working with for five years. The work has touched everything: how she leads teams, how she shows up at home, how she maintains composure in high-stakes moments, how she tends to her network. She's a self-described reactive Scorpio, and working with Janice has been about learning to notice the reaction, understand it, and decide if it's right — rather than just acting on it. The prompt generates an immediate group request for Janice's contact information, a waitlist joke, and the unofficial conclusion of the episode.
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