In This Episode
Sarah Biller, Co-founder of FinTech Sandbox, joins host Rory Holland to explore the deep intersection of data, human values, and market stability. Drawing from her roots as an 11th-generation West Virginian, Sarah reflects on how early lessons in independence and community shaped her approach to modern finance. The conversation touches on her early work using machine learning to detect credit risk, drawing an analogy to oceanic buoy sensors that alert coastal communities before a crisis hits. Sarah breaks down why high-quality data remains the ultimate bottleneck for startup innovation and how FinTech Sandbox helps entrepreneurs bridge that gap. Together, they unpack the risks of relying on AI speed over deep understanding, the urgent need to treat financial literacy as a public health imperative, and the power of authentic storytelling to cut through digital noise.
Key Takeaways
- Roots Drive Purpose: Growing up in rural Appalachia instilled core values around financial independence, lifting others up, and expanding access to opportunity.
- Data as Financial Infrastructure: Clean, accessible data serves as the foundational fuel for financial innovation, yet high procurement costs remain a major barrier for early-stage founders.
- Early Warning Systems for Risk: Analyzing non-traditional credit risk factors through machine learning functions like ocean floor sensors, providing crucial lead time before market disruptions.
- Rigor Over Speed in AI: Deploying artificial intelligence faster without understanding the underlying math or data integrity threatens global financial sector resilience.
- Financial Literacy as Public Health: Household financial fragility directly impacts personal health, making basic financial education a systemic necessity rather than a personal luxury.
- The Non-Profit Catalyst: Eliminating data access costs for startups allows early-stage innovators to build, validate, and secure significant follow-on capital.
- Storytelling Beats Feature Lists: In a crowded, AI-saturated market, authentic founder origin stories and genuine problem-solving differentiate enduring brands from generic offerings.
Transcript
Hook – Give Us the Data for Free
Sarah Biller: Can you imagine going to Factset and Thompson Reuters at the time and saying, you know what, you get about six hundred thousand dollars a year for this data set. We think if you give it away for free, you’ll be better off. Can you imagine how insane they thought we were?
Rory’s Introduction
Rory Holland: Hi, I’m Rory Holland, CEO of CSTMR and the host of Mighty Finsights. My guest today is Sarah Biller, co-founder of FinTech Sandbox and a board director at Threadbank. There are some incredible moments in this conversation, such as how a seventh-grade math problem shaped her entire career, the real issue holding back FinTech innovation, and the story of how a crazy nonprofit idea turned into $3 billion of startup value.
Sarah is an 11th generation West Virginian, a heritage that bleeds into everything she does. This interview is a great example of why the heart behind the work often matters more than the technology. Sit back and enjoy my conversation with Sarah.
Well, Sarah Biller, I am so excited to finally have you on the show. Welcome.
Dignity, Roots, and the Power of Capital in Your Hometown
Sarah Biller: Rory, thank you. I feel the exact same way.
Rory Holland: Yeah, we were talking off camera. We could have been maybe separated at birth with all the connections we’ve got and the mutual values. So I’m grateful for getting a chance to meet you finally in person, at least video wise, and then to finally have you on the show. When I look at your background, I think about co-founder FinTech Sandbox, Vantage Ventures, CMX. Top twenty most influential women with American Bank are my goodness. There’s so much we can talk about around FinTech and financial services, but I wanted to take a step back and talk about something we both love—the state of West Virginia. There’s so much beauty in that state. You grew up there. I’d love to hear about what it was like growing up in West Virginia.
Sarah Biller: Yeah, Rory, that’s such an important question. For those of us who know the region or have roots or have just visited, the state of West Virginia is quite a riddle for many people. If you’re not from there, you look at it by the numbers. It’s an economically distressed area. Educational attainment is not the highest in the country. It’s known for coal and extraction as an extraction economy.
More interestingly, since we’re here today, it’s become somewhat of an anthem for the World Cup, for the US soccer team. The crowds sing “Country Roads, Take Me Home” after each win. And that is the place where I would take you to West Virginia. I would take you to a childhood where I knew exactly where I was from, where I belong to someplace deeper and richer in culture and legacy and history. It’s a place where neighbors help neighbors. You have as much dignity if you’re a farmer in the field as you are if you’re a senator with the last name Rockefeller. I think that’s an important distinction as I bring it forward to what I believe in financial services and fintech.
That is the power of capital to do a lot of good. We have a lot of responsibility—you, me, and everyone in the industry—to figure out how we apply those capabilities to the layers that most people don’t see, whether it’s building resilience in our infrastructure layers, our rails, our blockchain capabilities, as much as it is working in economic environments where people aren’t part of our modern day financial services system. But if they were, we’d all be a lot better off. West Virginia was a big gift for me, and I’d love a chance at some point for all of us to walk those hills because they’re really beautiful.
Rory Holland: I love it. You and I talked about the Cheat River, the New River, the New River Gorge Bridge. Those of you who don’t know, it’s beautiful country. Whitewater rafting is amazing. That’s kind of how we started—when I found out you were from West Virginia, we got going on that. And then our mutual spiritual values and your upbringing. You had a sister, right?
Grandmothers Taught Financial Independence & Generosity
Sarah Biller: One sister, a younger sister who has always been the adult in the family. I’ll point out that I am an 11th generation West Virginian on the same farm in the same region. When your great-grandfather and great-grandmother came over the Allegheny Mountains and the Appalachians and rooted in the same place, those roots are important to how you take shape and what family means. I actually own the farm that my great-great-great grandmother purchased with the pension of her deceased husband because he was a union soldier in the Civil War. That was her reward to herself—that she could be independent, that she could manage her own money. That came down through our family.
Small family, Rory, but a side note about the idea that we all have roots in this country and many of us get the benefit of telling these stories about why we’re so influenced to do good. Mine came honestly.
Rory Holland: What is it about your childhood and how you were raised in those eleven generations of farmers in West Virginia that makes you want to do good and shaped you?
Sarah Biller: You know, Rory, I think it’s a really important question. I think we’re all shaped by influences. For me, the shaping came from a family setting that was open to different experiences, valued education and critical thinking. I spent a lot of time directly with my grandmothers, who wanted to talk about the importance of independence. That independence came through not just being well read and well educated and a hard worker, but through the idea of financial independence. You don’t often hear that young women, particularly in Appalachia, get the conversation: let’s make sure you personally set yourself up for success, because then in any circumstance—good or bad—the decision is yours to stay or leave.
That formed a core value system that extended to the idea: if that’s the first principle we’re trying to solve for in our family, the second is now that you have security, how do you help others? How do you lift others up? How do you build a longer table? How do you bring in individuals who may not have the advantage?
Routinely in our home, the dinner table was full. I was just home in West Virginia and went to our hometown church, just a little country church along the road. One of those little white churches you see in pictures. A woman came up to me and said, “We’ve never met, but I’m here because your grandmother picked me up and brought me to church as a child.” There’s a lot of reasons to be charitable in this world and many value systems, but that hits home.
Sarah Biller: My ability to do something good for society isn’t because I pick up children and bring them to Sunday school. I’m a math girl, a total nerd. I learned spherical geometry on the side of the mountain, which I can tell you how that happened. That’s my gift—to translate technology and the movement of capital, whether it’s banking or capital markets where I’ve spent a lot of time, into places trying to solve what would have been intractable challenges for society.
FinTech as a category isn’t just a financial services feature anymore. We’re seeing these technologies embedded in non-traditional financial services firms reaching people where they are. I can talk about banking and little leagues on Main Street to make sure they have startup working capital to get these teams going every spring. So kids in small towns have a chance to gather together on the field. That’s a big deal when you grow up. But it doesn’t happen if we can’t figure out how to finance the future at that micro level.
It weaves together. I never really thought about it until you asked me why I have this itch—but it’s because I saw it every day in my everyday life.
Rory Holland: Your grandma understood that serving others is what we’re called to do. Whatever your spiritual perspective, serving others is core to what we are as humans. Creativity and serving others—that’s where fulfillment comes from. From you as a young child, making the table longer, bringing more people in, serving others—the heart for the work you do today started really young. And I want to ask about the spherical geometry, because you studied chemical engineering at West Virginia University. Financial services probably wasn’t on your mind back then. Spherical geometry was on the side of a mountain? I’d love to hear that story.
The Spherical Geometry Moment
Sarah Biller: Yeah, I started.
Sarah Biller: I also want you to share about your passion for doing good, because when we had our prep call, we agreed we were gonna make this two-way. As a storyteller and a leading light in how these messages get out, you have your own ability to make sure we’re all lifted up. So I know you’re gonna be in the hot seat, but since we’re here, let me share about spherical geometry.
You might imagine, in a small town, small school, being a math girl wasn’t cool. I was a nerd. The challenge didn’t just hit me in the classroom—it persisted at home. My father was and is still a really avid outdoorsman. Our fun was either tennis at the city park or walking in the woods. We spent more time walking in the woods.
One day I was in seventh grade trying to figure out how to mathematically compute an arc. That’s really what spherical geometry is. It’s not a straight line with a ninety-degree angle. It’s those points along a curve that had confounded me. I said to my father, who is an engineer, “Dad, I just can’t get it.” He said, “I don’t understand why you can’t get it. You’re standing in spherical geometry almost every day. Because look at the hillside we’re standing on—you don’t have any flat land in West Virginia, right? You’re always on a hill. See the tree and see the shadow coming off the sun? That is what we’re measuring. That is how we’re doing it. You’re using the plane of the ground as your third or Z factor.”
Sarah Biller: And it just clicked. It made perfect sense. I had to have someone take me out of the immersive world of the abstract—what we might call the digital world today if we were on computers—and go into the physical and figure it out.
There are little moments where you look back in time and think, I need to take myself out of where I might sit every day in front of a computer, especially because of AI, using new tools that don’t make me think critically, and get outside and get with people and understand it. That’s how I began to understand how mathematics applies to the physical world.
If you’re a chemical engineer beginning to think about the physical properties of the world, you begin to understand that’s what our markets look like too. A random walk down Wall Street is nothing more than the chaos that gets organized in nature. It’s the same thing.
Rory Holland: Your dad took the time. One, you were curious, and you seem to carry that curiosity today. Two, your dad took the time to explain it from his engineering perspective and his life experience. Was that how your conversations went when you’d walk with your dad or play tennis?
Sarah Biller: He simplified very complex things. He’d explain the structure of a bridge, how it works, and bring it down. I had the benefit—and many of us have this—of having to talk about it. My mom was a fourth-grade teacher, so everything was simple, the most profound moments when you’re starting to learn. My dad was an engineer and understood complexity at the molecular level in some ways. Our dinner table really did center on that table analogy—it’s really an actual thing. The conversation was always around the table with different people.
One misconception about West Virginia and Appalachia today is that you have an insular society, that the mountains are a barrier. But for me, it was a wonderful container for culture. Because you didn’t have a lot of outside influences, you retained the culture where you came from. I’m of German and Dutch and English descent. A lot of the ways words were spoken and the food that was cooked came through two hundred, three hundred years in that environment.
Outside guests were always treated excitedly. My grandmothers alternated—they were best friends, both chairwomen of the Mission Society. So we always had someone from China or Africa or South America visiting and telling us what was happening in those regions. When you learn that and think, where do I fit in this world? It made perfect sense. I’m not a good bench scientist. I wasn’t going to engineer better concrete. But I was going to be good at getting out and figuring out how the dynamics of the markets worked.
Chemical Engineering to Finance: First Union Bank
Rory Holland: I love that. Did that carry through to First Union Bank? I think that was your first job. How did you transition from chemical engineering to finance?
Sarah Biller: Yes, that’s right.
Sarah Biller: So I started studying chemical engineering and plugged through. By junior year, Rory, I knew I did not want to be an engineer. But I don’t come from a family of quitters. I wasn’t going to be in a position to say I want to be a political scientist. I was going to have to have a legitimate reason to change my major. My parents were paying for my education. When I decided to do something different, I looked for the closest analogue I could explain—that I could get a job. So it wasn’t that I fell into finance, but it looked a lot like what I already understood or was trying to understand.
Rory’s Commentary
Rory Holland: I think you can imagine what a tough decision this must have been for Sarah, but it’s a choice many college students face. Our careers rarely travel in a straight line. The idea that a twenty-something should know what they want to do is crazy. The world actually needs more people like Sarah who are willing to take a risk and look for the intersection between their skills, their passion, and what the world needs. The Japanese call this idea ikigai—your reason for being. It’s clear that Sarah has found hers.
Chemical Engineering to Finance: First Union Bank, Continued
Sarah Biller: In small-town West Virginia, it’s easy to say everybody needs a finance person. I had never seen a Bloomberg terminal. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I made the leap into banking initially. But I could figure it out. So I made the transition academically before I entered into it professionally. I also thought I might want to be a lawyer for a second.
Rory Holland: I don’t think kids should have to know. That’s a big decision. Obviously it’s great if you know you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant. But if you want to be like entrepreneurs—and you and I seem to be that way—I think the school of hard knocks is probably the best way to learn. You had courage to step out. Leaving small-town West Virginia, eleven generations, choosing to study chemical engineering, going to university, and then this first job—was that in D.C.? Was it a culture shock?
Sarah Biller: I do like the West Virginia angle a lot. But my dad was in the Air National Guard. My grandfather was in World War Two. We had a perspective that the world was bigger than West Virginia. Even though a small-town upbringing matters critically, I knew there was something bigger to be had. D.C. wasn’t so much of a culture shift. I moved into a group house with girlfriends. I had a supporting structure.
What was probably most surprising was how much alike everyone was. When you meet people around the table in your first job, I’m still very good friends with the first girl I met on day one. She popped her head over the cubicle wall and said, “Hi, my name’s Heather. Can we be friends? I’m from Baton Rouge.” I said, “Hi, I’m Sarah. I’m from West Virginia. We don’t even have a town name you’d recognize, so I’ll just tell you the state. Let’s be friends.”
That was a surprise. I expected a rural-urban divide. I expected people to be categorically different, to have a different approach to life. But it turns out we’re a lot alike. We have a lot of the same questions and struggles. That was the biggest moment when I got to a big city.
CMX and Machine Learning for Credit Risk
Rory Holland: That’s huge. My story was similar. I was from a smaller town in the South—like you, multiple generations. I had family members who fought in the Civil War, but on the other side. I love the backdrop. You’ve arrived in D.C. You made some moves along the way, then co-founded CMX—Capital Market Exchange, predictive analytics for bond investors. You were using machine learning back then, which was kind of different, maybe new?
Sarah Biller: Completely new. Our thesis came out of the credit crisis. Having been an operator at a large institution during the crisis, we were convinced there were non-traditional risk factors influencing the credit markets. We’d just come through the greatest level of distress in our generation. Some of the older guys had seen the seventies when New York City went bankrupt. We’d never seen anything like that.
Our founding team was convinced that if you could identify and quantify non-financial factors embedded in research reports from institutional investors, you could address them systematically. We used a survey mechanism to identify future risks, not today’s risks, but future risks that might widen or contract credit risk.
Unlike the stock market, the bond market has many instruments. We were measuring risk on about 750,000 instruments—not the Russell 2000 where there’s one company, one stock. We were measuring credit risk across the entire tenor of the curve. The tools we needed included very rough natural language processing because we’re reading through a lot of unstructured data. We’re identifying where professional bond investors see confluence in thinking about emerging risks.
From Random Forest to Agentic AI
Sarah Biller: In the post-credit crisis world, we no longer just use a Fama-French approach. We better understand liquidity constraints and cash flow constraints. We were using natural language processing and then random forest came out as a technology. Everyone listening probably thinks we’re old and nerdy. But we applied random forest.
We used a Bayesian estimation technique—a quantitative technique you can use a lot in social services to apply certain weights to certain factors. We used random forest techniques or machine learning to extrapolate where we had residuals in our modeling results. That put me on a track of wanting to apply increasingly AI to solutions with nested factors that require understanding statistically what’s more weighty and what factors need attention in these time horizons.
If you take that to what we look at today, we’re in probably the most profound shift in the last hundred years in financial services with the application of first generative AI. Generative AI allowed all the content produced by analysts previously, all that critical thinking they were publishing—we used to read that. Now we use generative AI as at least a copilot, at least a partner in that production. Last year all bets went off, Rory, in the markets. Now we have agentic AI. Money is making decisions.
Sarah Biller: We have the capability to go from needing an analyst because I type in four or five prompts and I get that same report about what everybody is talking about with risk. I can match it to all the underlying data because you have to take a text-based factor and turn it into something you can model. Now that’s off the charts because anyone using agentic AI is allowing that factor to be traded on without them being in the center of the market. But yes, we started early applying machine learning to this aggregation of information.
The Tsunami Analogy for Detecting Credit Crises
Rory Holland: You mentioned something about your dad describing mathematics on the hillside with the tree and shadow, and something clicked. You said you got hooked with CMX. Was there a moment where you thought, this is the opportunity?
Sarah Biller: Rory, you’re so good. You remember that little detail. Yes, I became obsessed—and still am—with the explainability of how markets work. This particular challenge of looking for new emerging credit risk and quantifying them in a way that institutional investors can act ahead of that risk, I still hold as a very personal challenge. I tinker with it still, today, in applications.
Just think about stablecoins. We’re getting ready to use programmable money as a store of value. But embedded in that stablecoin, if it’s not one-to-one, there’s a whole basket of securities underneath. When I tell you, as a modern example of what we were trying to solve for with CMX: you have a dollar’s worth of value, but as an institution, I’m trying to make twenty-five basis points using a different basket of securities than holding one US dollar to one stablecoin. You have a lot of complexity on how you do that without breaking the buck. Same issue we confronted then in fixed income as we do now.
I became totally obsessed. I used an analogy until my husband told me I was crazy. We set up a system of sensors across the ocean that measure imperceptible shifts in wave movements. Buoys understand weather patterns. They put all these factors together that have historically alerted individuals living on coastlines to coming tsunamis—giving them time to get out of the way. If we’re good at gathering all that difficult data to manage and model and use in weather systems as an alert, we give them time to pick up their belongings. It’s not just their life, but their family pictures or whatever.
Sarah Biller: We should be able to do the same thing in our credit markets. We have the ability, in theory, to gather all that information, put it together in a model, and say today, whatever credit market you work in—investment grade, high yield, CDS market—that same thesis applies to emerging market debt. We have those abilities. But that requires access to data. The ability to structure it, normalize it, quantify it, model it, and push it out in a way that somebody can make a decision.
Rory’s Commentary
Rory Holland: There’s a lot of discussion about the importance of data in financial services, and that conversation has reached a fever pitch with AI. Sadly, I’m not hearing many practical ideas about using that data to help people on Main Street rather than just profits on Wall Street. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with using data and AI to grow your business or improve shareholder returns. I’m saying we have a moral imperative to find ways that all of humanity can benefit from it. Sarah is definitely barking up the right tree.
The Tsunami Analogy for Detecting Credit Crises, Continued
Rory Holland: We love it. You know, so many things come to mind with how you describe that. We had some really terrible floods here. Some young people were killed. We talked about sensors not at the bottom of the ocean but in the rivers that overflowed here. I have friends involved with newer technology pulling that forward—what you talked about with the weather service and things like that—into our local rivers that tend to breach their banks during hundred-year floods so we can predict it way downstream, long enough to get people out of the way. I love that.
I wanted to talk about what led you to start FinTech Sandbox, but I want to preface it with something. You said, “AI is eating the innovation landscape, but without the right data it stalls. Where is FinTech most underestimating the data problem?”
AI is eating innovation. I think we’re in an interesting spot. On one side, I have to confess I resisted AI. I just didn’t think it was good for humanity when it first happened. The lack of—I guess it’s my desire for control, to be honest—to protect my family, our businesses, people’s jobs, our society. Just nobody knew. It was coming so fast.
I was thinking about what you said about machine-based learning because we started doing that in an automotive finance business I started in the early 2000s. We were using it back in 2003, 2004. We grew fifteen times because we could acquire leads for automotive financial dealers and franchise deals across the country at a higher rate because of the technology we built. That was such a magnitude of growth—it allowed us to generate capital to grow our business and do better things in the world.
The Origin of Fintech Sandbox and Speed at the Expense of Understanding
Rory Holland: But now I’m embracing the opportunity to create. I see tremendous opportunity for people who’ve had ideas to make them real because AI allows them to actually execute. I’m going to bring it back to finance and what you’re talking about with predictions and credit markets. I have a nineteen-year-old son who was a professional athlete at sixteen. We pursued that for a decade, arrived at the mountaintop, realized this wasn’t where we wanted to be, came back down, and wanted to climb another one. He’s been using AI for investing and trading, starting with zero. Over the last year and a half, he’s been able to develop predictive strategies and models for day trading. I’ve seen the power of AI and innovation, but I also know the downside because sometimes we don’t think. It’s too easy to let AI do our thinking.
Before we jump into the AI discussion, I want to put a pin in what I just said. I’d like to come back to it. But tell me the origin story of FinTech Sandbox. What led you from CMX to FinTech Sandbox? Was there a transition?
Sarah Biller: CMX was the reason for FinTech Sandbox. Before we go off your point, can I say something? I don’t want to forget it. AI is rapidly changing how we innovate. The speed in which we can innovate and access new forms of capabilities, like being an active trader, is overshadowing our continued understanding of how AI works. I don’t want us to forget that speed to market at the expense of understanding is building a less resilient global financial services sector. That’s really important for all of us because I use a lot of AI. My teams use a lot of AI. We need to understand how we’re reaching the conclusions we are.
Rory Holland: Okay, yeah. So can we dive into that?
Sarah Biller: Yeah.
Rory Holland: I definitely want to talk about FinTech Sandbox and other things you’re working on. But I really want to dive into that for a second. My son, when we had the tough conversation about not pursuing his pro career anymore—it was a very tough transition—chose to learn it from the ground up before using AI. It was about a year of training. He’s like, “I don’t want to learn from anybody—I want to learn it myself.” I couldn’t agree with you more.
We just talked about this in our company at CSTMR and with some clients—about younger people coming in without foundational experience of handwriting strategy or doing research. They’re not going to the library anymore. Everything is at your fingertips, prompt-based. But are you really learning anything or are you just getting the answers? You can fill in a Scantron. You remember Scantron? They still do that, I think. But Scantron multiple choice—you’re not really learning anything, you’re guessing versus handwritten. So what do you think about what AI is doing to us? How do we counter that?
Sarah Biller: I of course remember.
Sarah Biller: I have another observation. I don’t have children, but I’m surrounded by an enormous group of kids of all ages—nieces, nephews, friends, godchildren. This weekend over the Fourth, I sat on the beach blanket listening to them talk about their fears and thoughts on AI and where they’re using it. One of them said out loud, “Well, I don’t really memorize anything anymore because I can just get on my phone and get the answer.” I’m not passing judgment on that. It’s true—the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips. I could ask you anything right now and Google it and give you a really good answer. I could use AI to inform how I said it.
But I have to worry a little bit about adoption of technology today without the idea that we have to be discerning. We were raised to be discerning and critical thinkers—questioning a bit, being questioned. I do think about where we’re going with AI. It’s arguably the same as electricity. You put electricity in people’s hands and amazing things happened. Productivity increased almost overnight. The same will happen with AI. We just can’t stick our finger in the light socket. We can’t be dumb about it. That’s the balance in this moment of profound shift in our capabilities.
I’m reading the book Cointelligence. The author makes a point about AI in society. We’ve always seen technology tools that augment us as humans. The first oak tree fell because someone invented the axe. It was easier to fell a big oak tree if you had an axe. We always dreamed of flying, and technology put us in the air. What is AI doing to us? How is it augmenting us? That’s the question.
Rory Holland: What’s on my mind is the reliance on it. When your agent goes down, what do you do? That’s the kind of reliance I resist. I don’t want to be reliant on anything but my brain and my heart to make decisions. I think you’re spot on with discernment and wisdom. AI doesn’t have any of that. We have to bring that as humans. And I don’t think that’s going away, which gives me hope.
Maybe sixty seconds on FinTech Sandbox? Then I’d like to carry this arc into what you’re seeing with some of your younger founders—some successful, some struggling—and where data, technology, all these things that have crescendoed for you in your career. But first, tell us about FinTech Sandbox and your cohorts.
What Fintech Sandbox Is Seeing in the Startups of Today
Sarah Biller: Yeah, FinTech Sandbox—Boston-based nonprofit, eleven years old this year. The origin story is important. My co-founder David Jagan, if you haven’t met or spoken to him, you really need to, Rory. He’s an extraordinary thinker with a rarefied view of the landscape. He’s the managing partner at Fidelity’s Venture Capital Arm—F Prime—and has been a shoulder to cry on for me, a thought partner, an astute investor. When we started FinTech Sandbox, the thesis was very sound.
There were factors we weren’t quantifying that were influencing the credit markets. Someone needed a systematic, transparent solution. But that thesis required a lot of underlying data. For anyone in financial markets, it’s no surprise that data is the oil fueling the industry. Both neatly organized data like stock ticks and volume, as well as non-traditional data that doesn’t fit into rows and columns.
The procurement process for that data is very difficult. It’s an industry category unto itself. When we started FinTech Sandbox a decade ago, nobody had AI to build a synthetic model that tells you what happened to bond prices when Venezuela was under an embargo. You either created that yourself or bought it. The procurement process is extraordinarily hard and tedious. My sales guy at Bloomberg didn’t want to sell one terminal to a startup girl. He wanted to sell twenty-five terminals at a time. The time investment is about the same, right? And it’s quite expensive and remains quite expensive.
From Hail Mary to $3B Impact
Sarah Biller: I confronted that hurdle stepping out, trying to access data to build models that demonstrated the efficacy of the idea. Because we weren’t selling to jokers. We were selling to the chief investment officer of Oppenheimer and the head of the high-yield trading desk at Citi. That guy wasn’t going to see me if I pushed a napkin across the table and said, “I got this for you. Pay me.” He’s not doing that, and they still don’t today.
Data is the great hurdle to any innovation in financial services. Clean, accessible, comprehensive, timely data. A decade ago, FinTech entrepreneurs couldn’t get their hands on data. David became our central knot in the web when he said, “It sounds like this is killing what you all are building.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “What if we went to the data providers and asked them to provide data for free to entrepreneurs like you?” And what they’d get is seeing new applications for their data, new distribution pathways, because all of us were talking to big firms. They thought fintech was disruptive instead of partnering.
The origin story became: we have a problem and have to solve it somehow. Otherwise, this cycle of innovation—unlike what we saw in the seventies and eighties—is gonna die on the vine if we don’t have data. That’s how FinTech Sandbox started. It was literally a Hail Mary.
Rory Holland: I love it. Some Hail Marys you catch.
Sarah Biller: You do. I don’t know if anyone thought it would work. Can you imagine going to Factset or Thompson Reuters at the time and saying, “You get six hundred thousand dollars a year for this data set. We think if you give it away for free, you’ll be better off”? Can you imagine how insane they thought we were?
Rory Holland: They were probably like, “Okay, I’m listening.”
Sarah Biller: I don’t even know if they were listening, Rory. We are now partners—very good partners—at FinTech Sandbox. Our first relationship manager from Thompson Reuters started his own data company. The people who took chances with us early, it has grown. We have data sets available across five continents and twenty-two countries. We have entrepreneurs we’re serving with these data sets.
At the time, these people had to trust we were going to do something good with their data. They had to demonstrate that if their data wasn’t just going to large institutions—which is a big question today, by the way, with the CFPB decision two weeks ago allowing firms to charge exorbitant rates and creating obstacles to competition for fintechs to access their data—that’s back in play. But the reality is when you put data in the hands of experienced entrepreneurs who are asked “What are you gonna do with this?”, they build great companies.
Rory’s Commentary
Rory Holland: As you’ll hear in a moment, the FinTech Sandbox model has helped nearly 500 companies raise $3 billion, all while providing free access to data sets that are shaping real products, services, and business models. Listeners know that I’m a firm believer that a rising tide lifts all boats. Sarah Biller and her team are raising the tide in a big way. I’m excited to attend Boston FinTech Week and learn more about their work. This kind of change and transformation is why I’m in this business.
From Hail Mary to $3B Impact, Continued
Sarah Biller: We know it. They’ve raised almost three billion dollars from investors off our cohort. They’re in the market with incredible applications. We were first data in to help them prove their point.
Rory Holland: I think I read that maybe four hundred and fifty or so companies over the last decade, is that about right?
Sarah Biller: That’s right. We’re at that, and we’ll hit five hundred by the time you join us at Boston FinTech Week, which I hope you will. Yes.
Rory Holland: I’m excited for that. The notion of doing good and what you guys have carried forward into the great work you’ve done—three billion in funding for these fintech companies. As we know, thousands are spawned, created, founded every year. Too few make it. We’ve helped build some from a branding and marketing perspective, and it’s been a real joy. But I hate to see the ones with so much promise who either can’t afford the data or get the data but don’t have funding. There are all these pieces to getting a business past the first year or two, then five to ten years to success and growth.
Storytelling and Authenticity in Fintech
Sarah Biller: So, Rory, as you asked me about the innovation cycle in AI—I firmly believe if the data’s not available or correct, the system can’t be fair. The markets will not include everyone. But one of the more profound challenges in the fintech community is cutting through the noise of these capabilities and technologies. I’m at a loss for how we tell our story better. How do we use our tools and techniques? You’re a master at this. What do we do to make sure we’re cutting through the noise of AI?
Rory Holland: I think when you say that, I just think about the nature of our world today. We’re inundated with information. We don’t know what to believe because all kinds of people are saying all kinds of things. When prospective companies come in, they’re asking without asking: How do I know I can trust you? How do I know you’re competent? How do I know you care and can solve problems for me?
That exacerbates the challenge for fintechs coming out with new innovations because people don’t know who they are. Take the four hundred fifty or so you’ve worked with over the last decade, or maybe the dozen you’re working with now—they’re amongst thousands of fintechs and financial services brands, from big to small to medium. The story and narrative is a lot like what we did today with you and FinTech Sandbox.
Those listening will have a richer feeling for FinTech Sandbox because they know the origin story, got to know you and the heart of you and your partners starting it. That’s the weaving of narrative that I see missing with fintech and financial leaders. They think about features, function, services. Of course everybody can take deposits if they’re a bank. Everybody can make payments if they’re a bank. What distinguishes one bank from another? It’s the story. What’s the heart behind the work, what’s their culture, their story, how’s their brand perceived?
I think those fintechs that do well are ones that dig deep into what’s the heart behind the work we’re doing, knowing they’re solving specific problems for their audiences. Who is their audience in their market? How are they solving a legitimate problem for them? What’s the story of what led them to want to solve that problem? How do you solve it?
When we build brands—whether new brands or existing ones launching new products—that’s a lot of what we’re doing now because many fintech brands are coming out with new AI-driven technologies moving them into new categories or audiences, or adjacent to what they’re already doing.
Rory Holland: How do we tell this story without cannibalizing our core business? How does that weave into our history since this is new technology? Those are tough questions, but a good marketer, branding person, storyteller should help fintechs properly tell their story in a way that’s compelling, engaging, true, authentic, and genuine.
Those I see flourishing have a truth behind what they’re doing. They’re authentic, genuine, consistent. They stand on that truth—whatever foundation inspired them to start it. Hold on to that. It’s like your heart. Stand on what you know to be true. Don’t deviate from it. You can offer all kinds of new interesting products and services to your clients, but remember who you are, why you’re doing it, and serve customers really well. Those are the ones thriving compared to the ones that aren’t.
Sarah Biller: With my investor hat on, what you just said is the critical differentiator when you meet an entrepreneur. Have they felt the problem themselves and can they talk about it? I love that. So I have hope in this world of AI that the authentic original thinker is coming out. Very true.
Rory Holland: There’s so much good that can be done. I just call it technology now. I got tired of putting the letters A and I together because we grew up before cable, then three to five television channels, then cable TV, internet, social media, smartphones, now AI, machine learning. The speed of innovation has picked up a bit. But if you do it from a good place in your heart for what you’re trying to do in the world to make a difference, and you’ve experienced the challenges you’re having in your life—yeah, you can relate much differently because you can talk the same language. “I’ve been there. We’ve been there.” A lot of these founders are doing that, solving the data problem like you did. It’s brilliant.
Sarah Biller: Rory, thank you.
Financial Literacy as a Public Health Crisis
Rory Holland: This has been awesome. I want to talk about a couple more things and close on the West Virginia angle. I wanted to ask about financial literacy. You said publicly that it’s like a public health problem—the lack of financial literacy. I had no literacy growing up. I just got a job, bought a car, made a bad choice carrying debt, didn’t understand it. I feel like the system is rigged. You get college debt, then, unless your parents pay for it, you get a car and an auto loan, then you marry and buy a house with a mortgage, then credit cards. How do you think about that being a health problem? Are you seeing ways some of your cohorts or the Fed might be solving it?
Sarah Biller: I’ve said publicly—and it’s gotten me in hot water—but I think it’s true: a lack of financial literacy in the US today has created a very fragile household position and balance sheet. For all the reasons you said, Rory. There are so many more ways to get in debt than when we were coming up because you have access to microloans, non-traditional financial lending products. We’re not equipped in a broad strokes way to understand the cost of that easy money—push a button, get a couple thousand dollars in your bank account.
It goes back to: do you learn the importance of being financially secure as a child? Many households don’t emphasize that. Money isn’t talked about, just like your health, right? Those are the two challenges. We confront this cultural issue with a lack of emphasis on education that’s foundational for life.
We’re at a really large inflection point. The average American only has about four hundred dollars in their savings account. That means you’re one flat tire away from bankruptcy.
Sarah Biller: I think if we began to focus again—just like we think about AI the same way we did the Rural Electrification Act—you put electricity in people’s homes, internet in people’s homes, now AI. You have to teach them how to use it and what it means and how not to hurt themselves. Table stakes for this country is having a financially literate society who knows about the decisions they’re making.
I spent time in West Virginia with investment partners thinking about how to expand and diversify the economy. One of our investment rails was digital health because of rural healthcare delivery differences. Just sitting with people about delivering telehealth at home—a gentleman I’ve known for many years said to me, “Sarah, if you want to help my health, figure out how to help me pay my electric bill this month.”
They’re connected. If you’re worrying about finances and food on the table, it’s hard to be healthy. Conversely, if your financial situation is a mess, it’s hard to be physically healthy. We have lots of opportunities and shots on goal. We see extraordinary efforts in the entrepreneurial and nonprofit communities to reintroduce the basics of financial literacy at earlier times—before people have to make decisions about car loans, which today could be more than your rent or mortgage.
Connecting with Sarah and Fintech Sandbox
Sarah Biller: I do think pounding a bit more on the table—I love all the sexy, move faster, capital markets talk, figure out my agent talking to your agent, better trades, tokenize stuff—but I really think we’ll miss at this particular moment and make a big mistake if we don’t help people become financially literate in a world where their finances are really going to be managed by a machine. They’ve got to have some agency.
Rory Holland: I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. Financial and physical health are woven. I’ve made some not great choices financially over the years and know the stress of wondering how to make ends meet. I think I’ve lived a pretty blessed life, so I can imagine those folks. I have family members who went through bankruptcy, tough challenges, especially in 2008, 2009 when the markets crashed. It took them a decade to dig out, and they still haven’t made it back.
The stress of that on our society—the emotional and psychological stress is terrible. The physical stress, as you said, and health issues that come from that, then that impacts productivity. They can only think about the next paycheck, not innovating. There’s no freedom in that. I think we both share a desire to give people some financial freedom. And I think freedom comes with education, knowledge, and wisdom. There is a way out. I’m hoping we collectively agree as a society.
Sarah Biller: Yeah, yeah.
Rory Holland: Freedom comes with education and knowledge and wisdom. There is a way out. I’m hoping we collectively agree as a society. I’m gonna get off my soapbox in a second.
Sarah Biller: Stay on it.
Rory Holland: I think we talk about it a little bit, but we don’t talk about it enough. I believe you can make generational change. I’ve raised my kids completely different. My parents did a great job. I’m not judging them. But I taught my kids the value of money—not because we’re in pursuit of money, but because if you don’t have capital to make a difference in the world and serve others the way they want—locally in families, communities, throughout the country and world—you’re stuck. You can’t.
I framed it with my kids: every dollar you make, 50% goes into your investment account. Since they were about fifteen or sixteen, they’ve got investment accounts. I’m training them to do it better for their kids and so on. Don’t do it like mom and dad did, just being honest.
But yeah, I’d love to get behind you guys on that. Coming to Boston FinTech Week, of course, I appreciate the invitation. We’ll support you in any way we can. Sarah, this has been awesome. I feel like this is a good place to wrap up. There’s so much more. We gotta have you back on. I could go deep and wide with you some more. But to close this out, for fintech operators and leaders listening, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Outro
Sarah Biller: I’m definitely overwhelmed by emails at this point, so I love LinkedIn as a connection point. Can I say for those fintech operators or innovators listening, FinTech Sandbox provides access to data for free and without taking equity? I just want to make sure in that spirit you offered—of giving back, lifting up, doing what you can to make lives better—we firmly believe if we can help innovation happen in financial services, it will help our main streets, individuals in distress, and our markets work better, more efficiently and transparently.
Please come to fintechsandbox.org if you need data. We can’t think of any greater gift than the ability to continue that innovation because lighting one candle means maybe hundreds of thousands of people get served through a new application. Sorry for that little commercial, but how do we give? I’m not important, but the ability to give through FinTech Sandbox is.
Rory Holland: I’m grateful for you, Sarah. Your heart for doing good in the world, making a difference in people’s lives, the mission you’re pursuing at FinTech Sandbox. This has been awesome. Thanks so much for the time. Good to have you.
Sarah Biller: Rory, thank you for all you do. Appreciate you.
Rory Holland: While the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 was enacted to bring electricity to rural America at a time when 90% of farms didn’t have electric power, it was actually a financial move. The REA provided loans for companies to build out the electrical infrastructure we take for granted today. Historians and pundits may differ on the particulars of how effective the bill was. But there are people alive today who can tell stories about the night the lights came on.
Electricity as a public utility was about quality of life for all Americans, not just those in densely populated cities. We’ve seen similar progression with the expansion of high-speed internet service, and maybe the same with the adoption of AI. Only the future will tell. But what I can see is the impact Sarah and FinTech Sandbox are making.
She didn’t start this project to get rich and make news headlines. She started it because she lived the problem firsthand, growing up in rural Appalachia, seeing good people brought low by financial hardship and a lack of financial literacy.
Financial opportunity equality isn’t a pie in the sky ideal. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his famous speech, it’s one of the four essential freedoms—the freedom from want. In the ability to secure a healthy quality of life for everyone across the world. As Sarah said, when you light a candle, a lot of people get to see.
Thank you for listening to Mighty Finsights. You’ll find all our episodes on our website at cstmr.com, including more one-on-one interviews with fintech and financial leaders, as well as deep dive episodes on specific topics like branding and marketing. This show is produced and distributed by CSTMR, a financial marketing agency. All rights reserved. Our production team includes Zach Garver.
