Reflections on my conversation with Tess Bloch, Head of Operations & Co-Founder at Spade
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Spade tackles a longstanding issue in the fintech space: the obscurity of transaction data. By providing real-time merchant intelligence, Spade links any card transaction to a real merchant identity, offering detailed insights like merchant category and geolocation. This innovation enables banks, fintechs, and anti-fraud platforms to authorize more transactions, detect and prevent fraud, and create innovative products and services.
Creating Spade’s comprehensive merchant database required forming robust partnerships across the fintech and data ecosystem. Through advanced data science and machine learning, Spade has managed to link merchant identities across datasets, ensuring high-quality and up-to-date information — a continuous effort vital for the company’s success.
Finding the right product-market fit wasn’t straightforward. Initially focused on UI/UX enhancements through transaction data enrichment, Spade soon realized the need for a more mission-critical use case. By pivoting to focus on using their unique data to improve transaction approval processes and fraud prevention, Spade hit its stride as evidenced by shortening sales cycles and increasing customer engagement and revenue.
The demand for Spade’s offerings is underscored by the growing challenges in the card ecosystem, including the increasing rate of card fraud attempts, which saw a 46% year-over-year rise. Financial institutions are grappling with the outdated card network infrastructure, contributing to $60B annual expenditure on fraud disputes and chargebacks. Spade’s solution addresses these challenges head-on, making it a critical tool in the arsenal of modern financial services.
The next milestone I’ll be looking out for is a successful sale into a traditional FI. Spade is not the only merchant enrichment product on the market, which counts Feedzai, Featurespace and ACI Worldwide. I’ll also be closely monitoring their global expansion plans. Given my own experience working to launch Revolut in the US, I’m well acquainted with the challenges of scaling fintech products across borders. Each market comes with its regulatory environment, data standards, and customer expectations, which could complicate expansion efforts. While Spade has somewhat mitigated this risk by forming data partnerships with partners with international reach, it is yet to be seen how scalable the existing platform will be while expanding into new markets.
All in all, this conversation got me really excited about what Spade is trying to build. Their approach which provides clear ROI to FIs today by improving fraud detection opens the door to many other use cases for innovation that leverage these same granular transaction insights, such as personalized financial management tools or enhanced loyalty programs. With a successful Series A funding round of $10 million, Spade plans to grow its team, expand internationally, and launch new features. They’re definitely one to keep an eye on.
About Tess
Tess Bloch is the co-founder and Head of Operations of Spade. In her current role as Head of Operations, Tess leads Spade’s operations, finance, sales, and people teams, and grew the employee headcount 5x. Before co-founding Spade, Tess spent two years at the leading income and employment connectivity API, Pinwheel, where she started as the Chief of Staff before becoming its Head of Operations. In these roles, she helped scale the Pinwheel team 14 to 100 employees and supported growth that helped the company raise a $50M Series B. Previously, Tess also worked for McKinsey & Company in London, where she focused on payments, private equity, and public and social sector work, but her passion for fintech didn’t start there. Already, before graduating from Stanford, she realized her interest in the financial services ecosystem early on in her career, starting an internship at Venmo in her freshman year and taking time off during her junior year to work there full time.
About Spade
Spade provides real-time merchant intelligence for the card ecosystem. Spade leverages its ground truth database to link any card transaction to a real merchant identity — providing granular merchant, category, and geolocation information. Spade leads the market in terms of merchant coverage, geolocation matching accuracy, and speed of transaction enrichment. Customers such as Mercury, Sardine, Ramp, and Unit trust Spade’s data to authorize more transactions, prevent fraud, and build more innovative features.
About the Author
Rhea Advani is an MBA Candidate at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Rhea started her career at Barclays Investment Bank before transitioning to operating roles at Revolut and DoorDash. Her interest in fintech stems from her experiences across traditional financial services, neobanking, and technology, which has revealed numerous opportunities for innovation within the sector. Please reach out with questions, comments, feedback and opportunities at radvani@wharton.upenn.edu.
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