Global Fintech Interview with Scott Weller, CTO at EnFI

Scott Weller, CTO at EnFI chats about the trends shaping the global fintech market and how new age fintech is redefining the future of lending:

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Hi Scott, tell us about yourself and more about your fintech journey so far? How did the idea for EnFi come about?

My journey in Fintech started with SessionM, where we built and operated a global loyalty and data platform, highly integrated into payment systems. From there, SessionM was acquired by Mastercard in 2019, and I went on to serve as a SVP of Product within Mastercard’s Data & Services division.

The impetus for EnFi, Inc came from the Silicon Valley Bank crisis of 2024, and the impact it had on companies who held Venture Debt and other Commercial Lines of Credit with the bank. Using our data and AI experience, it afforded me and my co-founders the opportunity to look into the commercial lending cycle, and how commercial lending be stabilized and accelerated using modern data and AI techniques.

In your view, how have new age fintech solutions enabled better lending lifecycles?

Fundamentally, there is a cost to both originating loans and then the ongoing monitoring and maintenance of those loans. New age fintech solutions have driven down the cost of originating, monitoring and maintaining these loans. This opens up the opportunity to scale lending solutions to reach more potential borrowers, without incurring additional costs. This cost efficiency has also enabled institutions to grow their lending product suite.

What latest lending technologies within this space have piqued your interest most?

Hybrid fintech platforms that are also funds / lenders — these teams have the ability to go directly to the consumer with a more differentiated and potentially disruptive approach, at lower costs.

AI-based workflow and workforce accelerators — introducing AI Agents into the common lending workflow to accelerate and drive down the overall cost of screening, underwriting and monitoring.

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Can you share a few observations on AI and how it’s impacting the lending and fintech markets?

Overall AI literacy at the management level is fairly low — and thus the confidence around what AI can do and how it can be deployed is low.

That said, AI curiosity and testing within the industry is very high. There are quite a lot of POCs. People want to learn, and fast.

The AI advancements are moving faster than the POCs. Often, the POCs is “out of date” with current state-of-the-art. Teams working with companies that are keeping up with state-of-the-art technology have been better equipped to focus on business as usual while also achieving longer term gains with AI beyond the concept of a POC.

What about today’s state of fintech most excites you?

With the infusion of AI, the cost of automation has gone way, way down. In the past, innovations to cover new use cases required product management and engineering time/resources. Agentic systems can be implemented to anticipate a broad category of use cases, without having to write code; this means that fintech business users, and ultimately customers, could be the ones in control of gaining access to new automation use cases without significant friction or cost.

Five tips you’d leave every fintech innovator with before we wrap up?

Avoid trying to boil the ocean — there are a lot of fintechs that try to go very wide with multiple products before any one of those products have a clear market fit. It’s ok to focus squarely on a niche first.

Add value to a flow — there are all sorts of flows in fintech — transactions, credit, consumer… make sure your solution is directly adding value to or enabling a better approach to some sort of financial flow.

Distribution makes a product — even the best fintech products fail without the right go-to-market strategy. Whether it’s partnerships, embedded finance, or direct acquisition, have a clear distribution plan to reach your customers effectively.

Know who you serve – it’s so tempting to try to serve a whole without directly serving the parts — listen to your customers and get data-driven about identifying your ideal customer profile.

Monetization is not an afterthought — many fintechs focus on growth and user acquisition but struggle to find a sustainable revenue model. Whether it’s interchange, subscription, lending or SaaS, validate how you’ll make money early to avoid dependency on endless fundraising.

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