Leo Fintech Advisors
Leo Fintech
Advisors
Insights

Notes from inside the work.

Short, practical pieces written by the same advisors you'd hire. No clickbait, no listicles, no sponsored posts.

Payments

What an interchange optimization study actually looks like

Most processors will quote you 'savings' off a benchmark you can't see. Here's the eight-step diagnostic we use to find real money — and the three traps that make the savings disappear in month four.

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Compliance

BSA/AML transaction monitoring: a tuning checklist

Off-the-shelf rules generate 92% false positives at most institutions. A two-week tuning sprint, properly documented, both lowers alert volume and improves examiner outcomes.

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Strategy

When BaaS is the right answer (and when it isn't)

Banking-as-a-Service is having a moment. We've seen it work brilliantly in three patterns and fail expensively in two. A short field guide for product teams considering the leap.

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Vendor Selection

The one-page processor RFP

If your RFP is forty pages, you're testing the vendor's stamina, not your own thinking. Here's the one-page version we use and the seven questions that actually predict the relationship.

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Operations

Reconciliation design for teams under twenty

You don't need an ERP at $5M ARR. You need three reports, two reviewers and one calendar. A practical reconciliation pattern that scales to about $40M without breaking.

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Firm

Why we don't take referral fees

A short note on the math behind our independence policy — and why we think it's the most important sentence in our engagement letter.

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Quarterly briefing

A four-page PDF, four times a year.

Subscribe to receive our quarterly briefing — a short, opinionated summary of the regulatory and payments developments that actually changed how we advise this quarter. No marketing, no upsells, easy to unsubscribe.