The FinTech @ Rocky Top Podcast is a weekly conversation with people who work in finance technology, teach it, or fund it. Short episodes, real specifics, no press releases. They run about half an hour, so you can get through one before your next class.
Follow the show
Video goes up on YouTube first. The audio lands on Spotify and Apple Podcasts the same morning.
Jack Ford is a UT junior majoring in finance and political science, and he built JobWillow without a computer science degree. He explains why his job site caps how many applications a student can send, how he built it, and how Challenge students can use it to find teammates for the build round.
No guest this week. Danny is back, this time as co-host. The idea phase just closed with 187 teams and about 400 students, far more than either of us would have bet on in July. We talk through what we're seeing in the entries, why people in industry keep asking how they can help, and how the build round works starting October 16. If your team doesn't make the top 20, you're not done. We cover that too, including the new internal job market, JobWillow.
Jonathan spent twenty years inside banks before he ended up on the other side of the table, selling to them. He's Senior Director of Corporate Strategy at Jack Henry, which quietly runs the software behind your local bank or credit union. We get into what actually happens when you bring something new to a bank: who's in the room, and who says no. Then the go-to-market side, the part a student team usually skips. His answer for how you find an idea in the first place is blunt: ask people what they hate about their bank. That's your product.
Austin graduated from UT in 2018 with a finance degree, went into M&A, quit, and built an audience on TikTok. In February he sat down with a Mac mini and an Anthropic account and started building a fintech product. Two weeks later it was live, and it has about 200 paying subscribers now. He used the same tools we're handing our students. We get into how he did it, what broke along the way, and the uncomfortable question: how much of it was the product, and how much was the 780,000 people already following him?
Patrick decides which fintech companies his bank will stand behind, so he sees what's getting built before the rest of us do. We start with white spaces, which is his term for the parts of banking nobody serves well yet. He tells the Nubank story, where opening a bank account in Brazil took 45 days and a startup decided that was the whole business. Then the question a lot of students are stuck on right now: if you don't have an idea, where do you look? Patrick's answer isn't the fun one.
We cover what fintech actually means once you strip the buzzword off, and what vibe coding lets a finance student do now that was out of reach three years ago. Then the question most students are really asking: what do you do if you have never written a line of code? Danny also says where he thinks teams will get stuck.
Episodes post on Mondays. These two are booked or in the works, and the order is not settled yet, so check back rather than counting weeks.
Runs the entrepreneurship side of the Challenge and the coaching that comes with it. He has watched a lot of student teams get from a rough idea to something that works.
He builds companies in Knoxville and helped start the place a lot of them run out of. The view from here is what happens to a project after the semester ends.
We're always looking for people who build this stuff, use it every day, or are just good at seeing what's coming. Send them our way through the box at the bottom of Copy. Paste. Build., or email ekk@utk.edu. You do not have to be competing to send one.