Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr, an AI-driven valuation platform for asset-backed lending. He spent his early career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA, where he grew comfortable with the challenge of pricing hard-to-value assets. That thread ran through every role he held until it crystallized into a company built around a simple but structural problem: in asset-backed lending, appraisers give you a price and then spend the rest of their report telling you they're not responsible for it. Barkr is built to change that.

What We Covered

• Thomas's background in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA
• How a common thread across luxury assets led to founding Barkr
• Starting with fine art and private jets before expanding to other asset classes
• The two-part failure in traditional appraisals: accuracy and absence of liability
• How Barkr pairs an AI valuation with a contractual performance warranty
• The progression from Lloyd's of London to AXA to Munich Re
• $2 billion in covered valuations and what patience actually means in this business
• GPUs as a surprisingly durable and long-lived collateral asset class
• How Barkr finds clients, from pavement pounding to Nvidia referrals
• Monthly mark-to-market on hard assets throughout a loan's life
• Building a domain-specific LLM with human review in the loop
• Plans to build an in-house insurance vehicle to unlock capacity

Key Takeaways

Traditional appraisal firms hedge their liability by design. Page one is the price; the rest of the report is the disclaimer. Barkr's contractual warranty flips that model by standing behind the number.

Barkr's data on GPU durability challenges the conventional narrative. Chips five and seven years old are still generating revenue and still have meaningful resale value, which changes the risk calculus for lenders considering AI infrastructure as collateral.

Augmenting, not replacing, is the right positioning for valuation technology. Barkr actively encourages clients to keep using their existing appraisers and treats third-party appraisals as additional data inputs that improve their own accuracy.

Building a reinsurance relationship takes years. Barkr worked through Lloyd's, then AXA, before landing Munich Re, and each step required demonstrating proof of concept at the prior level first.

About Thomas Galbraith

Thomas Galbraith is the CEO and co-founder of Barkr. He began his career in high net worth insurance at AIG and AXA before founding Barkr to bring accountability and AI-driven accuracy to asset valuation in the lending market. Barkr has covered approximately $2 billion in valuations across art, private jets, vehicles, and GPUs.

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Patricia Montesi didn't start her career in payments, she started it in car rental. After nine years at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car, she was recruited into fintech with zero industry experience. That outsider perspective became her edge, and she never let go of it. Today, she's the CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure platform that combines card issuing, money movement, and a bank-grade ledger on a single API-first stack.

What We Covered

• How nine years in car rental shaped Patricia's outsider approach to payments
• Getting recruited into Wild Card Systems with no payments background, and why that fresh lens became an advantage
• The fragmentation problem at the heart of payments infrastructure and why point products create hidden complexity
• Qolo's three-product suite: Quantum Ledger, Qascade money movement, and Qinetic card issuing
• Why Qolo isn't quite a side core, it overlays and integrates with existing bank cores rather than running in parallel
• Rail agnosticism and why Qolo still supports checks in 2026
• The dual go-to-market: commercial banks and B2B fintechs, same platform, different vernacular
• How the Synapse collapse changed the ledger conversation for banks and fintechs alike
• Winning KeyBank in a competitive RFP against much larger players, and launching virtual account management in nine months
• How banks are using Qolo to protect commercial deposits from modern non-bank competitors
• AI inside Qolo: from Glean to Claude, and their internal "Turning Hours into Minutes" program
• 130% year-over-year growth and 142% net revenue retention

Key Takeaways

The moat problem: Patricia set out to build a company where customers stay because of the value delivered, not because switching is too painful. That philosophy shaped every product decision at Qolo.

Ledger first: Most point-product fintechs have basic ledgers that only support one rail. Qolo's bank-grade dual-entry forward-posting ledger underpins every rail, making reconciliation and real-time money visibility a solved problem rather than a vendor management challenge.

Synapse's legacy: The debacle forced banks and fintechs alike to ask harder questions about who actually owns the ledger and where money sits at any given moment. Qolo had been making that argument for years before the market was ready to hear it.

Bank as distribution: KeyBank and Huntington aren't just clients — they're strategic investors using Qolo to defend their commercial deposit base against modern non-bank alternatives.

About Patricia Montesi

Patricia Montesi is CEO and co-founder of Qolo, a payments infrastructure company she built from the ground up after more than 20 years in the industry. She started her career at Alamo and National Rent-A-Car before being recruited into fintech with zero payments background — an outsider perspective she has held onto ever since. At Qolo, she and her team built the ledger, money movement, and card issuing stack as first-party infrastructure, without relying on third-party processors underneath.

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Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, one of the largest financial software companies in the world, serving over 7,000 banks globally including 45 of the world's top 50. He joined the company a little over a year ago, bringing an unusually broad background spanning consulting, Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and several other technology businesses. This is a wide-ranging conversation about where Finastra is headed and why the conventional narrative around AI and software disruption misses something important.

What We Covered

• Chris's path from consulting to Bloomberg, The Weather Company, and beyond
• What attracted him to Finastra and the perception versus reality gap he set out to close
• How he spent his first 90 days listening to customers and internal teams before deciding direction
• The portfolio narrowing strategy, including divestitures of Treasury, Capital Markets, and student lending
• Finastra's core focus areas: lending, payments, and universal banking
• Growth vectors within an existing base of 7,000+ banks, including geography expansion, cross-sell, and data
• The AI center of excellence and why dedicated ownership changes the pace of deployment
• Internal AI use cases: an HR chatbot and automated sales approvals
• Operator Assist, a new product that uses AI to surface and resolve failed payments
• Agentic AI in mortgage origination, targeting documentation discrepancies
• Why Finastra views AI as a growth accelerant, not a cost-cutting tool, and why not all software faces the same disruption risk
• Community bank caution around modernization and why the economics will eventually force full core replacements

Key Takeaways

Companies that are systems of record with long-duration enterprise agreements are far less exposed to AI disruption than the public markets currently assume. The distinction matters, and Chris makes a clear case for why Finastra sits in the less-exposed category.

Dedicated AI ownership changes everything. Spreading AI enthusiasm across everyone's partial attention generates ideas but not scalable execution. The center of excellence model exists precisely to fix that.

Community bank core modernization is inevitable but slow. The banks most likely to win that market are those that can make transitions nearly frictionless, not those with the most advanced technology.

At $7 trillion in daily payments routed through Finastra's systems, the probabilistic nature of LLMs is not a minor technical detail. Chris's post-recording observation about where AI fits and where it doesn't is one of the more clear-eyed takes you'll hear from a CEO in this space.

About Chris Walters

Chris Walters is the CEO of Finastra, which he joined a little over a year ago. Before Finastra, he held CEO and COO roles at a range of public and private technology companies, including The Weather Company and a public wealth management and software business. He also spent seven years in consulting and held senior roles at Bloomberg.

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