JD Durkin: Say hello to our next guest, Deepa Subramanian, chief financial officer at DailyPay, here to talk to the evolution of fintech and much more. Really good to see you here today.
Deepa Subramanian: Thank you for having me.
JD Durkin: So talk to me first and foremost about the ways that, from your experience and where you’re positioned, fintech has continued to evolve really the last few years. What do you think the next phases of innovation in the space will look like?
Deepa Subramanian: Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, right, fintech started with slick consumer apps, getting access to people. Then it evolved to ensuring the underlying infrastructure was built, the rails were functioning. I think what’s really next is bringing it all together and bringing real-time experiences for the consumers and meeting them where they are, and being able to deliver that at scale.
JD Durkin: How have you seen the regulatory rules of the road continue to shift for the broader fintech ecosystem, and what still needs to happen in order for improvements to continue to occur?
Deepa Subramanian: Yeah, I think a lot of it is, as new products and new solutions come to market, a lot of it is just education, right? Like if you think about DailyPay and the role we play, we spend a lot of time educating investors, educating regulators on what does earned wage access mean. What is this product? How are we helping solve real needs for day-to-day working Americans? And I think that’s the journey.
JD Durkin: Fintech companies are now, there’s no doubt, the industry itself has undergone incredible maturation in just the last few years. I wonder what that means from where you’re positioned for the capital needs of the fintech giants. How has that conversation continued to evolve?
Deepa Subramanian: Yeah, so I think, you know, fintech companies start with venture capital as their first sort of funding source. But as companies start to mature and there’s good data, good history, good functioning receivables, so to speak, you start to see that maturity in the capital structure going from, you know, venture to traditional banks to accessing public markets. And that’s the same journey DailyPay has been on. We’ve been, you know, around for about ten years, and we started off with, like, venture money funding on-demand pay or earned wage access receivables. We then moved on to having institutional banks support us, and now we’re, you know, we’ve done two asset-backed securitizations. We’ve gone to public markets to be able to garner their support on funding the product and the ecosystem.
JD Durkin: Amazing. Deepa, I’m almost out of time, but I want to get this in. DailyPay recently completed its second $200 million securitization. What should people know about that development?
Deepa Subramanian: So we’re, you know, our second transaction was executed really well. If you think about it, we’re the pioneers of bringing on-demand pay receivables to the securitization market. We’re the only provider in the earned wage access space that is in the ABS market. And having done two of them with our senior tranche being rated AA is just phenomenal. To see the markets kind of acknowledging the scale and the performance of the company, and that we’re proud of bringing the products to our users.
JD Durkin: Deepa Subramanian, chief financial officer at DailyPay. Really grateful for your time and perspective today. Please come back and see us anytime.
Deepa Subramanian: Thank you for having me.
