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In this conversation, we chat with Shamir Karkal, CEO and Co-Founder of Sila - a banking and payment platform for software teams building the next generation of financial products & services in regulated and unregulated industries.
A true FinTech pioneer, Shamir played a crucial part in building the infrastructure that would pave the way for online banking. In 2009, he co-founded Simple, the first bank of its kind in the United States, and later headed the Open Platform at BBVA. Shamir was drawn to serve smaller companies, co-founding Sila in 2018 with the goal of empowering financial innovations.
Shamir studied physics and computer science at Bangalore University and is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, and enjoys jiu-jitsu, long-range target shooting, and studying history whenever possible.
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Timestamp
1’33”: Shamir’s foundational career experiences
3’53”: Core developers of a blockchain protocol vs. the programmers in the IT department of a bank.
6’27”: McKinsey and its influence on Shamir’s thought process
12’11”: Auction rate securities and 2008 the financial crisis
15’08”: Founding Simple (an online replacement for traditional checking accounts) and its vision to transform banking services
19’21”: The influence of neobanking and fintech competitors on the strategic positioning of Simple
23’19”: The state of APIs and the strategy of a large traditional bank like BBVA to acquire Simple
29’42”: The acquisition of Simple by BBVA and its influence to shift Simple to an open banking infrastructure play
35’59”: The transition to co-founding Sila, its core mission and the evolution it has experienced to date
42’13”: The depth of Sila’s product and the scale of the business around ACH payments
45’44”: Channels to use to connect with Shamir and/or to learn more about Sila
Sneak Peek:
Shamir Karkal:
… I spent two years at BBVA building out their API platforms and eventually ended up launching two actually, one in Spain and one in the US. Built them, launched them, even got some early customers like Google to use the open platform in the US. But it was very frustrating for me because I felt like I was spending most of my time just trying to solve the internal political issues within BBVA and trying to manage the different teams and everything. I never could really grow and scale the business the way I wanted to. I left BBVA at the end of 2017, a little bit frustrated, thought about life for a while, and then decided that I still wanted to solve this problem. I just didn't want to solve it the way I was doing it at BBVA. I realized that what I really wanted to do was help people, whether the early-stage entrepreneurs or large late-stage companies, help them innovate and program with money. And I was like, "That's always been the core mission of Sila."
And by helping folks do that, I felt like we could unleash a whole wave of financial innovation. We could help build so many new financial products and services. And I'm a firm believer that when it comes to innovation, more is better. And if you have more FinTech products and services being built and delivered to customers, obviously not all of it will work. Some of it won't find their product market fit but I feel like there is huge, huge opportunity in this space. And we are still now barely at day one of this whole revolution. If you look at financial services globally, it's about a 20 trillion annual revenue industry, and that's out of a global GDP of around a hundred trillion. If you look at global advertising, and remember, advertising is where Facebook and Google and so many other companies make most of their revenue from, that's a 600 billion to 800 billion a year revenue industry. Financial services are 30 times larger than advertising, which makes sense when you think about it. Advertising is the thin fraud on top of the meat of the global business.
Lex Sokolin:
You're being mean to the internet.
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