The Hidden Revenue in Bank Data with Oban MacTavish

Spade has raised a $40m Series B, and I was lucky enough to sit down with Oban MacTavish, CEO and co-founder, to learn about how Spade makes merchant data usable, and to hear all about their fundraise. 

The data your bank gets when you swipe your card is shockingly bad - a jumbled descriptor of ~50 characters, a merchant category code that might be wrong, and a "city" field that's sometimes just a phone number. 

In this episode I learn about why payments data hasn't meaningfully changed in 30 years, how Spade built a body of merchant data covering 99.9% of payment-accepting businesses in the US and Canada, and what banks can actually do once their merchant data is good. 

We also discuss Spade's freshly announced $40M Series B led by Oak HC/FT with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, what nearly 500% YoY growth breaks inside a company, and why Oban is saying no to obvious opportunities to stay focused.