Jose Bethancourt

Jose Bethancourt spends his days on a problem most people never think about and every fintech quietly depends on: getting reliable, real-time access to the accounts where consumers hold their debt. His company, Method Financial, sits underneath apps like SoFi, Robinhood, Credit Karma and Upstart, letting them connect a user's credit cards, student loans, auto loans and mortgages with nothing more than a phone number, then move money against those balances. It is unglamorous infrastructure, and that is exactly the point.

Method's pitch is deceptively simple. Bank-account connectivity has had its moment - screen-scraping gave way to tokenized links, and a handful of aggregators became household names among developers. The liability side, what you owe rather than what you have, stayed messy. Balances live in dozens of legacy servicers, payoff quotes change daily, and paying down a loan through software has historically meant fragile integrations and a lot of manual work. Method's API abstracts that away. As Bethancourt frames the mission, "financial connectivity should be effortless and inclusive."

That belief is not marketing gloss. Bethancourt grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, near the Texas-Mexico border, in what he has described as one of the poorest counties in America. He went to the University of Texas at Austin and studied computer science and business, and he met his long-time co-founder, Marco del Carmen, at a coding bootcamp back home. The two have now built three companies together. When Method's CEO talks about making financial access inclusive, he is describing the community he came from.

A failure that pointed the way

Method did not arrive fully formed. Its origin traces to the summer of 2019, when Bethancourt and del Carmen built GradJoy, a student-loan "co-pilot" designed to help borrowers model payments, weigh refinancing and chip away at their balances. The idea landed. GradJoy was accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch, and both founders walked away from standing job offers - Bethancourt from Cloudflare, del Carmen from MongoDB - to take the seats. Within seven days of going live, the app was managing roughly $20 million in loans.

The traction was real, but so was the wall they kept hitting. To do anything useful, GradJoy had to connect to users' loan accounts, and the plumbing to do that barely existed. The founders spent more time fighting connectivity than building features. They talked to other founders and fintech teams and heard the same complaint everywhere. The problem was not their app. The problem was the layer beneath it.

So in 2021 they stopped building the consumer product and started building the layer. Method was born, joined by co-founder Mit Shah, and by 2022 the company had pivoted fully from an app into developer infrastructure: an API that gives businesses consumer-permissioned visibility into liabilities and the ability to act on them. It was a different customer, a different product, and a different company - carried by the same insight the founders had earned the hard way.

How it works, and why it matters

Under the hood, Method leans on consumer credit-access protections from the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. It stitches together identity data from credit bureaus and telecom carriers with core banking-system data to locate a user's debts, then executes balance transfers, bill pay and payoffs. The user experience is close to magic: enter a phone number inside a partner app, and the accounts appear - no logins, no passwords, no fragile scraping. The engineering underneath is anything but simple, which is why partners would rather rent it than build it.

The traction backs the thesis. Method reports more than 30 million password-less account connections, nearly 4 million Americans served, and over $500 million in payments processed. Its client roster reads like a directory of modern consumer finance - SoFi, Robinhood, Credit Karma, Upstart, Upgrade, Aven, Figure and Bilt among them. One customer, the budgeting app Vola, saw 10x user growth after building on Method's loan dashboards.

Investors noticed. In January 2025 Method announced a $41.5 million Series B led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Avra, Samsung Next, and existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Truist and Ardent. The round brought total funding to roughly $60 million at a reported valuation near $250 million. A year later, Bethancourt landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list - recognition earned not with a flashy consumer app but with the boring, essential plumbing behind dozens of them.

The founder underneath

Bethancourt is a two-time founder with an exit already behind him. Before GradJoy, he co-founded and led engineering at TeacherTalent, which went through Techstars Kansas City in 2017 and was acquired in the fall of 2018. The pattern across all three ventures is consistent: find something broken, build the fix, and be willing to throw out the parts that are not working - even when they are getting traction. GradJoy's pivot into Method is the clearest example. Plenty of founders would have pushed harder on an app that pulled in $20 million in a week. Bethancourt turned around and fixed the wall it kept running into.

He remains close to the technical work and candid about the unglamorous nature of the problem. On the Leaders in Payments Podcast in 2026, he walked through why liability payments are uniquely messy and what it takes to make them feel as seamless as fintech marketing promises. That is the through-line of his career so far: a preference for the hard, invisible layer over the visible, easy one - and a conviction that getting it right widens access for the people who need it most.