THE FINTECH INTERVIEW
Jim McCarthy has been in payments for 25 years, which means he’ s seen processors come and go, watched prepaid transform fintech and knows exactly why credit is hard. Speaking at Money20 / 20 in Las Vegas, the Thredd CEO explained why his company waited this long to enter credit processing in the United States and why getting it wrong would hurt clients more than the processor itself.
Thredd built its business on prepaid, which Jim describes as the foundation for most fintech innovation over the past two decades.“ A lot of the companies of our era came on the back of the prepaid revolution of the early 2000s and prepaid is a wonderful invention,” he says.“ I call it the Swiss Army knife of payments. Most of the fintechs you see here at Money20 / 20, most of the innovation of the last 20 plus years, was built on the back of that innovation.”
But prepaid has limits and Thredd’ s clients kept running into them. The company has now launched both debit and credit ledgers in the American market.“ To service the needs of clients with increasingly complex embedded finance and commercial banks in a compliant way, we needed both,” Jim says.
The question is why now and how Thredd plans to sit between the slow incumbents and the fast-but-fragile startups without becoming either one.
“Credit’ s tough. We know service delivery is everything”
Jim McCarthy, CEO, Thredd
22 January 2026