Eight Days
In December 2014, Betsy Cohen retired. She was seventy-two years old, had founded two banks, served as CEO of both, built one into the largest local financial institution in the Philadelphia region and the other into a pioneering virtual platform that onboarded more than 1,600 fintech companies over fifteen years, taught banking law at Rutgers when she was one of two women on a law faculty east of the Mississippi, co-founded a Philadelphia law firm, started a shipping business in Hong Kong, launched a leasing company in Brazil, structured a joint venture with a bank in Spain — all before she turned thirty — and now, after a half-century of relentless institution-building, she was done.
The retirement lasted eight days.
In January 2015, Cohen launched her first special purpose acquisition company. Then a second. Then a third, a fourth, a ninth — twelve in total, raising more than $5 billion in aggregate capital, completing mergers with companies like Payoneer, Paya, Intermex, and Perella Weinberg Partners. Bloomberg would dub her the "SPAC Queen," a title she did not seek but did not refuse, because by the time it was bestowed she had already moved on to the next thing, which was venture investing, which was really the same thing she'd always done — staring at the negative space in financial services and asking what wasn't there yet.
The eight-day retirement is not an anecdote. It is a thesis statement, the irreducible fact of a career that has spanned more than five decades and at least seven distinct professional identities — law professor, law firm co-founder, international dealmaker, community bank CEO, virtual bank architect, SPAC sponsor, venture investor — each one abandoned not because it failed but because it succeeded, and success, for Cohen, is the signal that it is time to reinvent.
"One of my life's themes," she has said, "is reinventing myself every five years."
By the Numbers
The Cohen Record
50+Years in banking, law, and finance
3Banks founded or co-founded
$5B+Capital raised across 12 SPACs
1,600+Fintech companies hosted on The Bancorp platform
8Days of retirement (December 2014)
$5MGift to Bryn Mawr College for data science
The Philosopher Who Hated Philosophy
The facts of origin: Betsy Zubrow grew up in a household organized around obligation. Her father was a physician; her mother, a social worker. Service was not aspirational language in their home — it was the operating system, the thing you did before you did anything else. She attended Bryn Mawr College, the women's institution on Philadelphia's Main Line that has produced an improbable number of women who went on to do things that women, at the time of their doing, were not supposed to do.
At Bryn Mawr, Cohen majored in philosophy. She has described this experience with a candor that borders on comedy: she absolutely hated it. The abstraction, the endless recursion of argument — it left her cold. But the liberal arts education itself, the training in how to think rather than what to think, would prove to be the durable infrastructure beneath every subsequent reinvention. (Decades later, she would give $5 million back to Bryn Mawr, earmarked for data science — the philosopher's revenge, perhaps, funding the precise discipline that turns the world's abstractions into actionable quantities.)
She pivoted to law, she has said, "on a whim." This is almost certainly an understatement dressed as self-deprecation, a rhetorical move Cohen deploys frequently — the casual shrug that precedes the extraordinary decision. She enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she distinguished herself sufficiently to receive a prestigious internship at a prominent law firm upon graduation.
Here the story takes on the texture of a parable. Cohen performed brilliantly during the internship. She was, by every measurable standard, excellent. At its conclusion, her manager delivered the verdict: the senior leadership of the firm was not yet ready to have a woman as a professional colleague.
Not not yet ready to promote her. Not not yet ready to make her partner. Not yet ready to have her as a colleague.
"After that moment," Cohen has recalled, "I swore never to work for someone again."
The Negative Space
What followed was not a retreat but an advance on multiple fronts, conducted with a velocity that suggests Cohen experienced time differently than most people. She went to teach — banking law and antitrust regulation at Rutgers University Law School, making her one of the earliest female law professors on the East Coast. The academic position was not a fallback; it was a laboratory. Teaching banking law required understanding not just the statutes but the architecture of the system they governed, and the architecture of a system reveals where the system is weak, where it is blind, where the negative space lies.
Cohen has called herself "an observer, looking for negative space." The phrase is borrowed from visual art — negative space is the area around and between the subject of an image, the emptiness that defines the form. In banking, the negative space in the early 1970s was enormous. A new federal law had opened the door for new bank charters, and Cohen, who had become the nation's leading expert on the Bank Holding Company Act, saw what almost no one else saw: an opening not just for a new bank but for a new kind of banker.
In 1974, she filed for a charter in Pennsylvania. She was thirty-two years old. Jefferson Bank opened with Cohen as chairman and CEO — the first female bank CEO in the state, and, she has estimated, possibly the only woman holding that title in forty states.
The professional relationships she had built as a law professor — with regulators, with banking officials, with the small community of people who understood the baroque complexities of bank chartering — were not incidental to her success. They were the precondition. This is one of the underappreciated mechanics of Cohen's career: she has never entered a new domain as a stranger. She enters as the person who wrote the textbook, who taught the regulators, who already speaks the language of the institution she intends to disrupt.
Building, Selling, Building Again
Jefferson Bank grew under Cohen's leadership from a single-branch community institution into a public company and the largest local bank in the Philadelphia region. She ran it for a quarter-century — an eternity in an era of consolidation — before selling it to Hudson United in 1999.
Simultaneously — and the word "simultaneously" is doing a great deal of work here, because Cohen's career has never been sequential in the tidy way that biographies prefer — she served as CEO of State National Bank in Washington, D.C., which she sold in the 1980s. She then joined the board of Dominion Bank, a $6 billion institution in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia, and alongside a small team orchestrated its sale to First Union in the early 1990s.
The accumulation matters. By the late 1990s, Cohen had built a bank, sold a bank, run a second bank, sold that bank, sat on the board of a third bank, and sold that one too. Each transaction was a data point in an ongoing education about how financial institutions are created, scaled, valued, and ultimately absorbed by larger organisms. Most people who sell a company experience it once, maybe twice. Cohen experienced it as a practice — a repeatable discipline with transferable principles.
I gained substantial experience in the buying and selling aspects of banking, allowing me to think about the industry more strategically.
"More strategically" is Cohen at her most understated. What she was actually doing was something closer to what a theoretical physicist does when they study enough particular instances to glimpse the general law beneath. The particular instances were banks. The general law was this: the infrastructure of money — how people access it, move it, invest it, relate to it — was about to be completely remade by technology, and the existing banking system was not built to serve whatever came next.
The First Virtual Bank
To understand what Cohen did next, you have to understand what banking looked like in the late 1990s. The internet was exploding, e-commerce was ascendant, PayPal was a scrappy startup processing payments for eBay auctions, and the financial services industry — the industry that had invented the ATM, the credit card, and the wire transfer — was almost entirely unprepared for the digital world. Banks had websites. They did not have digital strategies. The idea that a non-bank company might need a bank's charter, a bank's regulatory apparatus, a bank's FDIC insurance, in order to offer financial services to consumers through software — this was not yet a category. There was no word for it.
Cohen, the observer of negative space, saw it clearly.
"I focused on the future of banking," she has said, "specifically how people would access their money, investments, and relationships a decade later."
In 1999 — the same year she sold Jefferson Bank — she founded The Bancorp. It was, at its inception, something genuinely novel: an FDIC-insured virtual bank that existed not to serve depositors directly but to provide the regulated banking infrastructure that non-bank fintech companies needed in order to operate. The Bancorp was, in the language that would not be coined for another decade, a sponsor bank — the licensed, regulated entity sitting behind the consumer-facing app, making the whole thing legal.
PayPal was among its clients. So were hundreds, eventually more than 1,600, other fintech companies over the fifteen years Cohen served as CEO. The Bancorp did not compete with these companies. It enabled them. It was the plumbing behind the porcelain, the invisible layer of compliance and charter authority that made the gleaming consumer experience possible.
I wondered how banks could serve financial technology companies, and that birthed the Bancorp — a pioneer in what would become the sponsor bank framework.
Daniel Cohen — Betsy's son, who would become her co-founder in multiple subsequent ventures — was instrumental in The Bancorp's development. Daniel had come up through finance with a different but complementary set of instincts: he founded Cohen & Company, an asset management firm with $2.2 billion in assets under management, and possessed the kind of granular capital-markets fluency that paired naturally with his mother's regulatory imagination. Together, they built The Bancorp into something that the fintech industry could not have existed without, though the fintech industry, characteristically, would take years to acknowledge this.
The Bancorp's genius was not technological. It was conceptual. Cohen had understood, earlier than nearly anyone in banking, that the future of financial services would be embedded — woven into the fabric of non-financial companies, invisible to the end user, but utterly dependent on someone, somewhere, holding a bank charter and keeping the regulators satisfied. She built the institution that made embedding possible.
The Quant With a Law Degree
There is a curious tension at the heart of Cohen's intellectual identity. She describes herself as "a quant by nature" — someone drawn to data, to measurement, to the mathematical substructure of financial markets. And yet her training is in philosophy and law, disciplines that prize argument, interpretation, and the irreducible ambiguity of human language. The combination is rarer than it sounds. Plenty of bankers are quantitative. Plenty of lawyers are analytical. Very few people move fluidly between the regulatory text and the spreadsheet, between the statute's intent and the model's output, and treat both as equally real.
This dual fluency explains something about Cohen's career that would otherwise be puzzling: her ability to reinvent across radically different domains. A law professor does not normally become a bank CEO. A bank CEO does not normally become a SPAC sponsor. A SPAC sponsor does not normally become a venture investor. Each of these transitions requires not just new knowledge but a new mode of knowing — a different relationship to risk, to time, to the structure of a deal. Cohen seems to switch modes the way a musician switches keys: the underlying grammar is the same, but the tonality changes completely.
Her board service offers a partial map of this range. She has served on the boards of Aetna, the Asia Society (where she is vice chairman, executive committee member, and secretary), the Brookings Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (as honorary trustee), and the Metropolitan Opera (as treasurer, managing director, and finance committee member). The collection is not eclectic for its own sake. It describes someone who moves comfortably between the quantitative and the cultural, between the boardroom and the concert hall, and finds in each the same fundamental problem: how do you build an institution that endures?
The SPAC Queen
The story of SPACs — special purpose acquisition companies, the blank-check vehicles that raise capital through an IPO and then merge with a private company to take it public — is, in the popular imagination, a story about 2020 and 2021, about frothy markets and celebrity sponsors and companies going public at absurd valuations before collapsing. This is not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete in a way that obscures the real history.
Betsy and Daniel Cohen were doing SPACs before SPACs were fashionable, before they were controversial, before most of Wall Street knew what the acronym stood for. Their first deal — with CardConnect, an integrated payments company that was later acquired by First Data — closed in 2016. By the time the SPAC mania of 2020-2021 arrived, the Cohens had already established a track record across multiple vehicles, raising more than $3 billion through nine SPACs under the FinTech Masala banner (later reorganized under the Cohen Circle name) and announcing six mergers.
The total would eventually reach twelve SPAC vehicles and more than $5 billion in capital raised. The mergers they completed read like a survey of the fintech ecosystem's infrastructure layer: Intermex, the money transfer company serving the U.S.-to-Latin America corridor; Paya, a payments technology company; Payoneer, the cross-border payments platform; and Perella Weinberg Partners, the advisory and asset management firm.
📊
Cohen Circle SPAC Track Record
Select completed mergers from Cohen Circle's SPAC vehicles
| Target Company | Sector | Outcome |
|---|
| CardConnect | Integrated Payments | Merged 2016; later acquired by First Data |
| Intermex | Money Transfer | Successfully merged and publicly listed |
| Paya | Payments Technology | Successfully merged and publicly listed |
| Payoneer | Cross-Border Payments | Successfully merged and publicly listed |
| Perella Weinberg Partners | Advisory / Asset Management | Successfully merged and publicly listed |
What distinguished the Cohen approach to SPACs from the carnival that followed was precisely what distinguished Cohen's approach to everything: depth of domain expertise and a genuine operational understanding of the companies they were acquiring. "Unlike the fund model," Cohen has observed, "the SPAC model enables you to deeply understand the company." This was not a platitude. The Cohens had spent fifteen years running the banking platform that fintech companies plugged into. They knew, from the inside, which business models worked and which were marketing decks in search of a revenue line.
The SPAC mania would eventually cool — the SEC tightened rules, valuations corrected, the market developed a well-earned skepticism about blank-check vehicles generally. Cohen was unperturbed. In a 2023 Forbes interview, she predicted SPACs would make a comeback, not because the hype would return but because the underlying structure — a merger vehicle that allows deep due diligence and a negotiated price — remained sound when used by sponsors who actually understood what they were buying.
When Banks Fail
On March 10, 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. It was the second-largest bank failure in American history, and it triggered a contagion of fear that claimed Signature Bank, destabilized First Republic, and sent tremors through every regional bank in the country. Within days, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the Treasury Department intervened to guarantee deposits and stanch the bleeding.
Cohen — who had founded banks, sold banks, regulated banks, taught the law that governs banks, and built the infrastructure that connects banks to the digital economy — watched all of this with the practiced eye of someone who has seen the cycle before.
Her diagnosis was characteristically precise. On the Bloomberg podcast Odd Lots, she dissected what went wrong:
If you only needed your telephone in order to take out the deposits, the Treasury, the Fed, the FDIC had an obligation to respond with the same alacrity. And they didn't. They didn't give, on that first round, the comfort that a solution would follow. A solution did follow. But that moment of pause, I think was a great contributor to the ultimate outflow of deposits.
The observation cuts in two directions simultaneously — it indicts the failed banks for forgetting what Cohen called "Banking 101" (diversification of deposits, diversification of liabilities, basic risk management) while also indicting the regulators for failing to match the speed of the digital bank run they were supposed to prevent. A bank run in 1933 required people to physically stand in line. A bank run in 2023 required a smartphone and thirty seconds. The regulatory apparatus had not updated its reflexes to match the velocity of the threat.
This was, for Cohen, not just a crisis but a vindication of her career-long thesis: the infrastructure of money and the technology through which people interact with money are inseparable, and institutions that pretend otherwise will eventually be destroyed by the contradiction.
Cohen Circle
In November 2022, Betsy and Daniel Cohen reorganized their various investment activities under a single name: Cohen Circle. The rebranding was more than cosmetic. The prior name, FinTech Masala — whose "strong affiliation to a popular Indian dish," the firm's own team acknowledged with evident amusement, "has caused a lot of confusion over the years, leading many to ask us whether we were based in India or made restaurant investments" — had become an obstacle to communicating what the firm actually did.
What the firm actually did, and continues to do, is invest across the capital stack in fintech and adjacent companies — from Series A venture deals to late-stage growth rounds to public-market transactions through SPACs. The portfolio includes Ocrolus (an AI-driven document analysis platform), Sure (an embedded insurance infrastructure company), BillGO (a bill management and payments platform), Nova Credit (a cross-border credit assessment company), Greenwood (a digital banking platform focused on Black and Latino communities), Maxwell (a mortgage technology platform), Curve (a UK-based financial super-app), and Duetti (a music royalty company that raised a $90 million funding round in early 2024).
Amanda Abrams — who joined the team after the Cohens took CardConnect public in 2016 and has more than fifteen years of experience as an investor, operator, advisor, and lawyer across both public and private sectors — serves as CEO. The firm's team is notably, and intentionally, led by women. An affiliate fund, Radiate Capital, focuses on impact investments at the intersection of health and fintech, led by Corinne Bortniker, a former vice president at Wells Fargo Securities who was named a 2024 Venture Capital Journal Rising Star.
🔄
The Cohen Circle Evolution
From law professor to venture investor — a career of serial reinvention
1974Founded Jefferson Bank; became first female bank CEO in Pennsylvania at age 32
1980sServed as CEO of State National Bank in Washington, D.C.; sold the institution
Early 1990sBoard member of Dominion Bank ($6B); orchestrated sale to First Union
1999Sold Jefferson Bank to Hudson United; founded The Bancorp, the first virtual sponsor bank
2014Retired as CEO of The Bancorp — for eight days
2015Launched first SPAC vehicle
2016Completed first SPAC merger (CardConnect, later acquired by First Data)
The firm's internal culture, as described by founders and investors who have worked with it, centers on a quality that is difficult to quantify but impossible to miss: the Cohens treat investments as relationships rather than transactions. "One founder mentioned how Betsy mentored his adolescent daughters in launching their first business," the firm's own team has noted. "Others recalled how meaningful it was for the team to visit their offices in person. We hear that's not so common these days. For us, it's table stakes."
The Physician's Daughter
There is a thread that runs beneath all of it — the banks, the SPACs, the law school lectures, the boardroom negotiations — that is easy to miss because Cohen does not perform it. It is the thread of service.
She grew up in a home where service was not an aspiration but a given. Her father healed bodies. Her mother healed households. The daughter went into finance, which is not typically described as a service profession, but Cohen has practiced it as one — building institutions that other people and companies need in order to function, creating infrastructure that is invisible when it works and catastrophic when it fails.
Her philanthropic commitments trace the same pattern. She is a trustee of the Brookings Institution. She serves on the executive committee of the Asia Society and its Policy Institute. She is honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and treasurer, managing director, and finance committee member of the Metropolitan Opera. At Bryn Mawr, she served on the board for twenty-nine years, including as vice chair, before becoming an emerita trustee and then, in a characteristic refusal to merely lend her name, writing a $5 million check to fund data science education — because, as she explained it, "as the world's capacity to collect data grows at an exponential rate, we need more smart people across a range of disciplines who can use data as a tool for inquiry."
The gift to Bryn Mawr is worth pausing on. It was not a gift to the business school. It was not a gift to the economics department. It was a gift to embed data science throughout the curriculum — in the humanities, in the social sciences, in every discipline the college teaches. This is the philosophy major's revenge and the quant's dream simultaneously: a recognition that data fluency is not a specialized skill but a liberal art, a way of seeing that belongs everywhere.
Forbes has named her to its Most Powerful Self-Made Women list in 2022 and 2023. The National Foundation for Women Business Owners named her a leading female entrepreneur of the world. US Banker named her one of 25 Women to Watch in 2009. She has ranked in several years among the 25 Outstanding Women Bankers. Bank Director, in an October 2023 profile, called her "the unflappable Betsy Cohen."
Unflappable. It is the right word, but it is also incomplete. Unflappable implies a passive quality — the ability to remain calm when things go wrong. What Cohen actually possesses is something more active and more rare: the ability to see, in the wreckage of one era, the blueprint for the next.
The Circle Continues
In October 2024, Cohen Circle Acquisition Corp. I filed an amended S-1 registration statement with the SEC — a new SPAC vehicle, headquartered at 2929 Arch Street, Suite 1703, Philadelphia, PA 19104, with Cohen listed as agent for service. She was eighty-two.
The filing is unremarkable by the standards of securities law. It is an ordinary document, full of boilerplate language and checkbox compliance. But read it against the arc of a career that began when a young woman was told she could not be a colleague, and the filing takes on a different character entirely. It is a statement of persistence so extreme it becomes its own kind of eloquence.
David Rubenstein — the Carlyle Group co-founder, whose book
How to Invest: Masters on the Craft dedicates an entire chapter to Cohen's SPAC expertise alongside profiles of Larry Fink,
Ray Dalio, and
Sam Zell — has placed her in the company of investors who see their work not as a way to make money but as a craft with intrinsic discipline and meaning. "You will find a career in investing much more rewarding," Rubenstein writes, "if you believe that it is beneficial not only to you but also beneficial to your society, your economy, and your country."
Cohen, who built banks so that fintech companies could exist, who created SPACs so that private companies could access public markets, who now invests in the next generation of founders building the infrastructure she first imagined in the 1990s, would likely agree — though she would say it more simply, and then move on to the next thing.
At Cohen Circle, the team continues to deploy capital into fintech growth companies. They hold webinars where Cohen debates banking crises with Goldman Sachs partners and Columbia professors. They publish investment theses on embedded finance and agentic AI. They mentor founders. An SEC filing here, a $90 million music royalty deal there.
In a fireside chat with the team at Arta Finance — a digital family office platform backed by Eric Schmidt where Cohen serves as angel investor, founding member, and mentor — she was asked how her experience helps her decide what companies to invest in.
Having a platform that had so many fintech companies on it gave me a front-row seat to what worked and what didn't.
A front-row seat. Fifteen years of watching 1,600 companies succeed and fail from the inside of the bank they all depended on. Not a market study. Not a white paper. Not a pitch deck. An operational education in what works, accumulated one compliance review, one deposit account, one regulatory filing at a time.
The office on Arch Street in Philadelphia is not far from where Jefferson Bank once stood. The negative space Cohen first observed in the 1970s — the absence of women in banking leadership, the absence of digital banking infrastructure, the absence of sponsor banks, the absence of fintech-native capital — has been partially filled, in no small part by institutions she created. New negative spaces have appeared, as they always do. She is looking at them now.
