Unlocking Embedded Finance with Green Dot’s Renata Caine

Episode Overview

​Renata Caine is a distinguished leader in the fintech industry, currently serving as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Banking as a Service (BaaS) at Green Dot Corporation. In this role, she spearheads the development and delivery of embedded finance solutions, collaborating with a diverse array of strategic partners, including some of the world’s most trusted brands. Her leadership is pivotal in advancing Green Dot’s mission to provide seamless banking and payment services, thereby enhancing customer engagement and fostering business growth.

With over 17 years of experience in the payments industry, Renata has built a remarkable career characterized by strategic vision and operational excellence. Prior to joining Green Dot in April 2024, she served as the Chief Commercial Officer at Justt, a Tel Aviv-based chargebacks startup, where she led global commercial operations. Her tenure at Marqeta, a leading card-issuing platform, was marked by significant achievements, including managing the company’s rapid expansion and playing a crucial role in its transformation into a global enterprise, culminating in a successful initial public offering in 2021. Additionally, Renata held leadership positions at WEX, focusing on corporate payments and go-to-market strategies, and provided advisory services to portfolio companies of Point72 Ventures, where she supported investment activities through diligence and strategic planning.

Renata’s academic background includes a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Minnesota, reflecting her enduring interest in understanding human behavior—a perspective that has undoubtedly informed her approach to developing user-centric financial solutions. Beyond her professional endeavors, she is an avid supporter of Wisconsin’s professional sports teams and enjoys traveling with her husband and two children, exploring new cultures and destinations. Residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Renata’s personal passions complement her professional life, embodying a balance of leadership, family, and community engagement.

Episode Transcript

  Renata Cain: Some really cool data that came from there over the next three years. 82% of business leaders plan to increase investments in embedded finance, and 24% said they significantly plan to increase. Now, the question is why 98% of them said that embedded finance and bass. Those are key drivers for growth for their companies.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Hey there and welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is. Thanks for listening. Today I’m chatting with, general Manager of banking as a service or bass at Greendot Corporation, a company at the forefront of embedded finance solutions. Renata and her team are helping businesses integrate seamless financial services directly into their platforms, reshaping how consumers and companies interact with money in the digital age. Renata and I dive deep into the world of embedded finance, exploring how green Dot is driving innovation in banking as a service, and we discuss the trends shaping the future of financial technology. So please welcome. So you got your degree from University of Minnesota in psychology. First of all, I was actually just talking to someone else about winters back in the Midwest. I’m from the Midwest. I bet you don’t miss Minnesota, winters.

Renata Cain: I don’t, I don’t miss Minnesota winters. I’ve been in California since 2001, so my blood has thinned for sure. But the Midwest is a great place to grow up. Where in the Midwest did you grow up around Chicago? Okay, I was Milwaukee, so.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Oh, you’re Milwaukee okay. Yeah. So we had very similar, uh, similar weather patterns, I guess you would say. Yeah, I don’t I’m in Colorado now, and I don’t. I don’t miss those long, gray winters that we used to get in the Midwest.

Renata Cain: Agreed. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Beautiful in the summer, but not the best when you’re in the middle of February. Or in this case, I agree.

Renata Cain: But, yes, I’m a proud golden gopher.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Nice, nice, nice. Um, do you feel like your understanding and background in psychology helps you in the business world?

Renata Cain: I think it helps. Like every day you kind of learn how to speak to people and, you know, match their enthusiasm. Or if they’re, you know, a little bit shut down, you kind of can do the same thing and you learn about that. So yeah, I think it helps me every day helps with my kids like that.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Although I don’t know if I want to I don’t want the psychological approach to my son. It would just terrify me.

 Kevin Rosenquist: So let’s talk about embedded finance for a bit here. So embedded finance is a very popular term in fintech circles. For anyone listening who may be unfamiliar with what exactly it means, can you kind of explain what it entails and why you believe it’s become so significant in the industry?

Renata Cain: So, you know, people ask me all the time what I do, and it’s hard to explain typically. But like if we were to define it, to me it’s really the the integration or seamless integration of digital banking, along with other financial products and services, into what typically are non-financial company platforms. So you’re embedding finance into another platform that normally maybe you wouldn’t use for financial services. The second part of your question is really ultimately, banking is slowly becoming the norm amongst brands that you and I trust and use every day. So whether it’s your phone or your favorite retailer or even your favorite financial app, bringing even more financial solutions into one place and bundling them together, that’s really embedded finance at work.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And why do you feel like the consumers demand it now? Is that why we’re seeing so much more of it?

Renata Cain: I think it’s less about consumer demand and more about brands realizing they have real opportunity to bring solutions to their customer base, to make to make it stickier, right? So if you’re going to use your phone as also your banking platform and also and also and also now like you’re going back to the same phone all the time. So you’re going to have a harder time switching whether it’s carriers or, you know, physical devices, than if it was just a phone. And so I think that brands are getting really smart and bundling all sorts of solutions into one place. And the consumer side, yes, we’re getting used to it. And there’s an ease of use and everything else. It’s nice to go to one place for one thing. So I think both are happening. I think it’s driven by the brands.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, you’re right about that. Yeah. It’s just we’re all about ease and we’re all about, you know, we don’t like to go to too many places. I mean, heck, if I, if I’m on a website and I feel like I’ve been taken to a different place to pay, I get uncomfortable.

Renata Cain: Yeah, yeah. How do you how can you trust it?

 Kevin Rosenquist: I mean, even if it feels even if it’s totally fine, I still get a little uncomfortable with it. And I think that’s the norm. Right?

Renata Cain: I agree, definitely.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And do you find that businesses are going in more that direction to, to keep from losing people in the, in the funnel?

Renata Cain: Some of that. You know, all these years we’ve been watching click rates and abandonment rates. And so yeah, I think the more you can keep someone in your app or on your web page, the more success you’ll likely have in the end. I think that’s right.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Let’s talk a little bit about banking as a service base, not SaaS. Um, and how it sort of facilitates the integration of, of financial services into non-financial platforms. Can you kind of talk about that and how you guys integrate that to me?

Renata Cain: Base and banking as a service and embedded finance, it’s really all one and the same. You know, the banking is a service traditionally has been defined as things like accounts, whether it’s checking or savings accounts like the core banking products. And I always thought of embedded finance as more like holistic. And it encompasses other products, including those core banking products, but it includes money movement. Whether you know money in or money out on traditional network rails or account to account all of it together, in my mind is embedded finance. Banking is a service traditionally has been like the very specific core banking, but right now it’s pretty much used the same.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And can you kind of talk about how Greendot uses your, you know, how your base platform supports businesses in embedding financial services?

Renata Cain: So I was really lucky. I joined Greendot about nine months ago, really at an exciting time because we were launching Arc, which is Green Dots embedded finance brand and platform of services. So it’s bringing together our secure banking and money movement processing capabilities. And it’s really just like one source configurable, scalable. It’s something that we have been investing in for the past several years. And now we have a nice brand, a brand name, something that we can look to and talk about. But yes, when we talk about Arc, we’re talking about our technology. We’re talking about our bank, and we’re talking about the program management services. So everything that you need to to bring a program to life.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. That’s pretty cool. That’s really cool. You know, as far as the best platform that you guys have as their specific industries, it’s more designed for or is it kind of a pretty broad product?

 Renata Cain: So you know, Greendot in our like our history, we started with low to medium income. And that was our focus. I think now with what we’re finding is there really isn’t a a vertical that stands out. We’re finding that any, any brand that has loyalty and has a customer base that will go to it and use them and, and actually make sense to use financial products in what they’re doing. It makes sense now. We’ve had success with digital companies, with gig workers, with payroll and earned wage access. So it’s a pretty wide range of companies. And I think that that’s what you’re going to find with embedded finance is um, it’s pretty much everywhere. And um, we’re going to see it more and more.

 Kevin Rosenquist: How did you find yourself in this trajectory in your career? You know, we talked a little bit about psychology being your major. Did you always see yourself in the business world or did it just sort of happen? How did you get in there?

 Renata Cain: It kind of just happened. Um, I joined an organization that was in payments in fleet. Now, you know, people are calling it mobility, but,that’s where I learned the payments world. And then I guess my trajectory, I just stayed with payments, and I really liked what I was doing, both from a product perspective and the companies. But really it was about building a team, um, learning all different sides of, I would say, the sales process, both like the outbound sales and then the management of customers. So in the beginning it was less about what it was I was selling and supporting, and then it became something that I just really enjoyed money and payments. So it just stuck with it stuck.

 Kevin Rosenquist: It’s funny how, how, how often I interview people who just really kind of dig payments. It seems like such a thing that if you tell it like you said, you try to explain to people what you do. And yeah, some people it’s like, well, that sounds boring, but people who are in the space really enjoy it.

Renata Cain: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been in it since 2006, so it’s I’m aging myself, but it’s been a long time and you’ve seen a lot of things change, but you’ve seen a lot of it is still the same. So it’s been it’s been a pretty cool ride.

 Kevin Rosenquist: A lot of things have changed. That’s a good segue into my next question. I mean, you know, we talked a little bit about consumer demands and stuff and is, is the consumer the one driving companies to innovate these new fintech products? Do you think it’s more just the options, the AI options, the technology advancing combination of both?

Renata Cain: You may have heard that we did a study. We did it a couple of months ago, and the reason for it was we wanted to confirm our own investments and where we were headed with our embedded finance brand, and we surveyed 250 industry leaders and decision makers. And we just again, we wanted a pulse check, like, are we headed in the right direction? Some really cool data that came from there. Over the next three years, 82% of business leaders plan to increase investments in embedded finance, and 24% said they significantly plan to increase. Now, the question is why 98% of them said that embedded finance and bass, those are key drivers for growth for their companies. So I think to answer your question, I think companies are driving it because they’re seeing the financial benefit to them. I think consumers are adopting it because they also see the financial benefit and the ease of use. So I think it’s a really interesting time for, you know, fintech and embedded finance because I believe it’s here to stay and we have the audience that wants to ingest it.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That consumer expectations are shifting because they’re seeing this more and more?

Renata Cain: I think you don’t have to be a sophisticated consumer to hear about and know about some of the turbulence in the industry recently. So you want to make sure your money is going to be protected. Typically that was in a traditional bank, but there’s a lot that comes along with fintechs and the benefits there. So people are taking some of those risks now. They want to make sure that they’re really calculated risks. And again, that’s where I go back to you’re going to work with a trusted brand. Now that brand may not be holding your money, but if you trust them, you also trust that they’ve made the right decisions as to who will be holding your money. So I do think a lot of this is consumer driven. I think a lot of it is also brands being opportunistic as to what they can bring to market.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, and trust is a big deal, right? I mean, that’s something that we know, like you said, there’s stuff in the news these days of anything that breaches or anything that goes wrong with finance and all that stuff. And is it difficult to innovate and continue to maintain trust?

 Renata Cain: You’d think that I told you to ask that question. And I know this one.

 Renata Cain: I didn’t tell you. Um, but one of the interesting survey results were that 50% of the respondents believed that regulatory risk and failure to meet compliance was one of the top concerns. But then security and data breaches and service interruptions for their end users, those were the other two top concerns. So and I think also importantly, is 58% believe that increasing regulation is going to benefit the industry. So remember, the people that we were speaking to that we have all this data from, those are folks that really understand fintech that are a part of fintech. They could be decision makers that are bringing in embedded finance programs to market. So they’ve got some knowledge here. However, again, back to my point about even a non-sophisticated consumer understands all this. I think that consumers are first and foremost worried about, you know, the safety of their own money. They are interested in their personal wealth and the growth that they can get in these different accounts. And then there’s technology. And in theory, technology should help the industry do both of this, both bring secure and compliant programs to market, but also do it with a pleasing and very simple to use UI for the consumer to interact with.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Just talked to somebody in the cybersecurity space. And yeah, friction is a big problem or is a big concern of companies because you don’t want people to be fickle and yeah. And if you want them to be safe, but also you understand that if they have to jump through too many hoops, they might bail on you. Yeah. And how is that? It’s difficult to balance that.

Renata Cain: It goes back to one of the first things that we talked about, like, don’t send someone to a different website to put their payment information in, you have a really good chance of losing them. It’s the same thing here, like keeping all of these, um, experiences and customer journeys in one place, and something that looks familiar and is easy to navigate is going to be key.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Crypto. Bitcoin. As far as embedded finance goes, do you see that pushing further into like more people asking for it, more people interested in it?

 Renata Caine: Think the interest continues from our perspective. It’s another modality. It’s another payment in. Payment out. Yeah. I think bringing all sources into one place again and making it user friendly is a good thing. It’s positive. It’s a positive user experience.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And I mean, a lot of people in this country don’t realize how how many different payment platforms other countries use and how many digital platforms other countries use. You know, when you’re implementing stuff, when you’re trying to help companies come up with embedded finance products, do you have to, like, really get a feel for what they want to offer and what they have to offer?

Renata Cain: Yeah. You know, right now we’re focused on the US.

Renata Cain: Fairly it’s fairly simple. I’ve had experience in you know outside of the US. And yes it gets very complex and there’s multiple networks and all sorts of different government payment rails as well. So I would say, you know in the US we’re lucky to it’s fairly simple, but there’s lots of different components for sure.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Some seem to think that we’re a little behind when it comes to some of that stuff. Do you see that changing? Well, you.

 Renata Cain: Know, I mean, real time payments has been a thing in other countries for a long time. And, you know, we’re you know, here we are. I don’t think we’re behind. I think that we’re slow and steady and measured and we’re making the most of it.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Of the challenges you’ve seen businesses face when they attempt to integrate embedded finance solutions? And how do you address those?

Renata Cain: Our buyers are looking for compatibility. So you have to be able to bring a program to life without it being a huge enterprise wide project. So ensuring that our platform is compatible with what they’re trying to achieve is important. I also think that business leaders, um, you know, when they evaluate different providers, they’re also making sure that the programs have the ability to scale and grow. If I’m a buyer today, there’s several ways in which, you know, I can piece together an embedded finance solution and introduce it to my customer base. But there’s definitely a growing trend of consolidation amongst providers that offer all the different components of embedded finance. And I think we’re seeing that because buyers want simplicity. They don’t want to have to have ten different contracts with ten companies to be able to still just deliver this one thing. And so it’s easier to to manage. But also there’s a compliance component. And I think that with the regulatory environment that we’re in, it’s just less cumbersome to bring something to market when there’s fewer players involved in bringing it to life?

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you actually just reminded me of something I wanted to follow up on that. You said earlier about that survey you did that this is top fintech people. And they were they they seemed pro-regulation. And I find that interesting because so much of what you read about the tech founders and all that stuff is they’re all anti-regulation. Why do you think that is so different from what we hear?

 Renata Cain: So again, I think increased regulation for those who can handle it and can stomach it, we’re going to be better at this because of it. There’s some that are just are not going to be able to do it. So that’s number one. I think the folks that we spoke to these are embedded. These are like potential partners of ours. Right. And they want to make sure that the compliance is at a place where they can feel that if they’re a trusted brand to a consumer or a small business, like they don’t want to lose that consumer because of something that happened with embedded finance, which is not even part of their core business offering. So increased regulation really kind of just secures it for them. Now it’s difficult. You know fintechs have had a tough time with it in the last year to make sure that they’re doing everything that they can to bring these really secure programs to life. But my opinion is the entire ecosystem benefits from it in the end. It’s painful as you, you know, go through it. But there’s a benefit at the end. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good way to look at it. You just got it’s like the forest for the trees. Right. You got to see. You just got to see the bigger picture. And I think then you can kind of get behind it a little more. But we’re just so inundated with news stories of big time tech moguls getting all ticked off about regulation. I think it’s easy to put that, to keep that in our heads. You said you’ve been in this space for almost two decades now, huh? In the payments space. So you’ve seen a lot of shifts, a lot of changes, a lot of different things. Do you get any sort of inkling as to what that next shift is going to be?

Renata Cain: I think I may have said it earlier. I think it’s less of a shift and more of a coming to terms with embedded finances here. It’s not going anywhere. If anything, we may not even refer to it as embedded finance. It’s just going to be part of our day to day norm. We’re going to use, you know, the things that we’re holding in our hands and, you know, the websites and platforms we go to every single day to access our financial tools to support our financial well-being. And so I just think that it’ll become quieter in the sense that you’re not talking about it as much, and it is just part of your day to day life.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That’s probably pretty accurate, I like that. All right. Well with green Dot Corporation, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate your time.
Renata Cain: Thank you for having me. This was great.