Builders & Buyers: Laura Spiekerman of Alloy on the Unconventional Path, Relationships, Risk, and Shaping Company Culture

Builders & Buyers is dedicated to showcasing leading figures in the fintech industry and their contributions. Through candid and in-depth conversations, Stifel Bank’s Managing Directors, Josh Dorsey and Jake Moseley, aim to connect audiences with the thought leaders driving the future of finance. The series will explore personal journeys, company building, investing strategies, and topical macroeconomic conditions.

Notes from Josh Dorsey, conversation moderator:
Excited to share this latest installment of Builders & Buyers, where I had the chance to sit down with Laura Spiekerman, co-founder and President of Alloy. Laura is sharp, thoughtful, and has a knack for making complex fintech challenges sound fun. Throughout our chat, I was hooked as she broke down the twists and turns of her career, from skipping law school to moving to Kenya on a whim to work in microfinance and eventually co-founding Alloy.

What stood out most to me about Laura is her no-nonsense approach to risk and resilience. She’s refreshingly candid about the uncertainty of startup life, the years of grinding before Alloy took off, and what it really takes to scale a company in the fintech space. She’s also got a great sense of humor about it all—there’s an ease in how she tells her story that makes you feel like you’re just grabbing coffee with a friend who happens to run a powerhouse company.

Laura’s insights on culture-building, co-founder dynamics, and navigating the fintech ecosystem are invaluable for anyone who’s ever started something from scratch. Whether you’re deep in the trenches of a startup or just curious about the world of identity risk, I think you’ll get a ton out of this conversation.

Josh: Laura, let’s start with something fun—what are some of your hobbies or interests outside of work?

Laura: As anyone with little kids knows, most of my time outside of work is spent with them. I don’t know if that counts as a hobby, but running around with them takes up most of my free time. Lately, I’ve also been spending a lot of time at my son’s school, which has been fun. When I do get time to myself, I love reading and cooking.

I’d love to hear more about your time in Africa, particularly with Kopo Kopo. Can you start by sharing what Kopo Kopo is?

Kopo Kopo is a startup that built a software program enabling microfinance institutions in Kenya to collect and disburse payments digitally. Before Kopo Kopo, people running small businesses had to physically travel long distances with cash to repay their loans, which was incredibly time-consuming and risky. Kenya had this incredible mobile money system called M-Pesa, which was like an early version of Venmo, allowing people to transfer money digitally. Kopo Kopo leveraged that infrastructure to make microfinance more accessible and efficient.

That decision to move to Africa after college must have been a big one. What pushed you to take such an unconventional path instead of a more traditional career?

Honestly, it wasn’t a well-thought-out plan at the time. I was headed to law school, but at the last minute, I panicked. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to be a lawyer, and the idea of taking on student loans without being certain scared me. I decided to take a year off and asked myself, “What else interests me?” At the time, I didn’t even know what jobs existed outside of being a doctor or a lawyer.

Around that time, some of my friends were getting into startups, and it seemed exciting.

That’s when I met Ben Lyon and Dylan Higgins, the founders of Kopo Kopo, and basically just asked them, “Hey, can I work with you?” They had built something I found fascinating, and I wanted to be part of it. I had previously spent time in West Africa and had written my senior thesis on microfinance, so I was naturally drawn to the idea of digitizing it. I moved to Kenya to help launch the company and learned an enormous amount about startups in the process.

Being the first hire at Kopo Kopo in Kenya must have been a unique experience. What did that role teach you about risk, opportunity, and resilience?

It taught me that non-linear career paths can be incredibly valuable. Looking back now, my journey may look linear, but at the time, it felt completely random. I had moments of insecurity, wondering if I should be going to business school like many of my peers. Ultimately, I realized that doing what I was passionate about led me to meaningful experiences and skills that I still use today.

I also learned that risk is much more tolerable if you enjoy the process. If your only measure of success is whether the startup becomes a billion-dollar company, that’s a tough gamble. But if you view it as an opportunity to learn and grow, the outcome matters less. That perspective has made it easier for me to take leaps in my career.

After Kopo Kopo, you eventually co-founded Alloy. How did you and your co-founders come together to make that happen?

After leaving Kopo Kopo, I worked in impact investing in San Francisco but realized I wanted to get back into startups. I kept meeting startup founders through my job and just felt jealous—I wanted to be doing what they were doing. I found Tommy Nicholas, my now co-founder, pitching a fintech idea around ACH payments, which, as anyone dealing with them knows, can take forever to settle. I found it compelling, so I reached out and joined his team, and that’s where I met Charles, our CTO. Tommy and Charles had gone to high school together, so they already had a strong connection.

You’ve worked closely with them for years. From your experience, what should someone look for in a co-founder?

First, you have to genuinely like spending time with them—you’ll be around them a lot. You don’t have to be best friends, but mutual respect and a shared sense of fun help. Second, enthusiasm and hustle matter more than any specific experience. Skills can be learned, but passion and drive are harder to teach. Finally, communication is key.

We learned the hard way that you have to figure out how to disagree productively. I remember a time early on when Tommy and I got into a heated argument outside the Flatiron Building in New York. It made us realize we needed a structured way to work through disagreements, so we started developing frameworks for decision-making—who owns what, when we need consensus, and when someone just makes the call. Those frameworks have been critical in keeping us aligned as we’ve grown.

Keeping a team aligned isn’t always easy. What key practices have helped you all stay on the same page?

Communication and unstructured time together are really important. We do one-on-ones with very loose agendas so we can check in beyond just the day-to-day tasks. In the early days, when we were all juggling everything, we had to be really intentional about alignment. 

Now that we’re a bigger company, it’s just as important, if not more so, to maintain that alignment across leadership. Another big one was learning how to disagree and commit. We don’t always see eye to eye, but we’ve built a culture where we can debate, make a decision, and move forward without resentment. That’s been crucial in scaling Alloy without losing our momentum.

Let’s talk more about Alloy. What is Alloy, and how does it fit into the fintech ecosystem?

Alloy provides an Identity and Fraud Prevention Platform that enables financial institutions and fintechs to bring together the most innovative sources of intelligence to help them optimize growth while minimizing risk.

One of the things that makes Alloy so valuable and unique is that we are completely agnostic and will partner with any solution or data source our clients find valuable. Today, we have a broad network of prebuilt integrations that all tie into our data orchestration layer. We also have AI algorithms to enrich diverse datasets from over 200 sources in real-time so that we can help our over 650 organizations accelerate the safe delivery of financial products, reduce fraud losses, and unlock superior customer experiences that increase revenue.

Alloy has been around for 10 years. What were some of the biggest moments—both challenges and successes—that shaped the company?

The hardest stretch was between 2015 and 2019. We launched in 2015 but didn’t raise a Series A until 2019. For four years, we struggled—many investors thought we wouldn’t make it. The fintech market was slower at that time, and we were probably three years too early. We also learned the hard way that selling to banks required immense investment in compliance, data security, and risk management—things we hadn’t fully anticipated when we started.

We gradually built credibility by securing smaller fintech clients, but nothing moved the needle significantly. We had some early wins with partner banks, and an article in American Banker helped get us more attention, but we were still barely scraping by.

A turning point was signing a large digital bank. We had the exact solution they needed. They had been considering building something like Alloy internally, but once we demoed for the right decision-maker, things clicked. The sales cycle still took nearly ten months—typical for a large bank—but once we closed, it was transformational. That deal proved we could sell to banks, gave us credibility in the industry, and ultimately helped us raise a competitive Series A.

How would you describe Alloy’s culture, and what steps do you take to nurture it as the company scales?

Our culture has always been a bit quirky and fun. From the beginning, we encouraged people to be themselves at work. One of our earliest engineers, Jeff, played a huge role in shaping this—he gave us a company mascot and started memorable traditions, like performing unique welcome ceremonies for new hires. At the time, we joked about hiding some of our quirks from our banking clients, but those traditions became part of our culture.

As we grew, we had to be more intentional about keeping that spirit alive. We didn’t want to lose the personality that made us who we are. So, we put more structure around maintaining our culture, like hiring an employee experience manager and investing in people-focused initiatives. Culture isn’t just something you set and forget—it’s something you actively build and protect as you scale.

We also made a deliberate effort in our branding. When we rebranded, one thing that was really important to me was making sure our brand didn’t conform to the hyper-masculine aesthetic of so many fintech companies. The industry tends to be very male-dominated, and a lot of the branding reflects that—dark colors, rigid designs, and a serious tone. We deliberately chose a more vibrant, playful, and slightly feminine look. It wasn’t just about standing out but about making fintech feel more inclusive and approachable. 

You introduced the ‘Turnaround Award’ at Alloy. What’s the story behind it?

We wanted to recognize not just big wins but also improvements—things that went from bad to tolerable or from struggling to successful. One example is a product we launched that initially wasn’t gaining traction but eventually became one of our biggest revenue drivers. It started as an underperforming initiative that no one wanted to work on, and over time, with iteration and perseverance, it transformed into a core offering that contributed significantly to our growth.

Another example was the internal shift in how our sales team approached banks. Initially, fintech companies were the hot topic, and banks weren’t considered as exciting to sell to. We had to change that mindset, refining our messaging and approach to help our team see the value in working with banks. Over time, we saw a major cultural shift, and today, banking clients are one of the biggest drivers of our success.

Celebrating those turnarounds reinforces the idea that persistence and learning from setbacks matter just as much as outright successes. It’s not just about launching something new and flashy—it’s about the ability to refine, reposition, and push through challenges to make something truly work.

Beyond finance, do you see a future where identity management is fundamentally different?

Fraud is evolving rapidly, especially with AI and deepfakes. Over the next decade, I expect digital identity will rely on multiple sources—social profiles, transaction history, biometric data—rather than just traditional documents like driver’s licenses. The speed at which fraudsters are adopting AI-driven tactics means that identity management will need to become even more dynamic and adaptable.

We’ve already seen fraud explode in the past four years, initially driven by COVID-19 and then accelerated by AI advancements. Deepfakes and synthetic identities are becoming harder to detect, and traditional verification methods no longer suffice. Financial institutions are looking for more holistic identity models—ones that don’t just verify a snapshot of someone’s identity at onboarding but continuously monitor their interactions and transactions to detect anomalies in real-time.

Another interesting shift is the balance between fraud prevention and privacy concerns. There’s a growing interest in privacy-preserving identity models, such as zero-knowledge proofs, which allow verification without exposing unnecessary personal data. At the same time, companies and regulators are grappling with how much control consumers should have over their own identity data versus how much should be managed by centralized institutions. 

Ultimately, we’re moving towards a world where identity verification will be more fluid, incorporating multiple signals, and fraud prevention will be an ongoing process rather than a single checkpoint. The industry is at an inflection point, and how we navigate these tensions between security, privacy, and usability will define the future of digital identity.

Lastly, have there been any mentors or experiences that have particularly shaped the way you think?

I’ve learned the most from my peers—other founders who were in the trenches figuring things out at the same time I was. One example is Nicky Goulimis from Nova Credit. Our companies grew up together, and we would meet regularly to share insights. We navigated similar challenges—fundraising hurdles, hiring the right people, and balancing growth with financial sustainability—and those conversations were invaluable. We shared strategies for selling to banks, handling compliance issues, and structuring deals. That peer-to-peer learning has been far more valuable than advice from distant mentors who succeeded in different circumstances. Often, when you talk to someone much further along, their experience isn’t as directly applicable, or they succeeded in a very different market environment.

If you’re an entrepreneur, my advice is to find someone going through similar challenges and trade notes with them. It’s incredibly impactful to have a trusted peer who understands the nuances of what you’re facing in real time. Those relationships have shaped many of my key decisions and will continue to be a major source of learning and support.