Podcasts about barefoot innovation

In This Episode In a rare and inspiring crossover episode, Breaking Banks teams up with Barefoot Innovation to bring you a special dispatch from Necker Island, BVI. Hosted by Brett King and Jo Ann Barefoot, this episode captures the energy and insight of a one-of-a-kind fintech gathering organized by Virgin Unite: an event bringing together innovators from around the world, from a cross section of industry, exploring what the future of finance could (and should) look like. Podcasts hosts and speakers Brett and Jo Ann share their talks and insights from this carbon neutral event, connecting with Dr. Nick Hughes, OBE, father of M-Pesa, co-founder of M-Kopa and now Managing Director 4rdigital.com, the fourth revolution is digital, to cover all things fintech. Listen as these leaders discuss applications of fintech in other markets and all that is possible if we come out of our silos and collaborate -- the combination of problem solving perspectives, resources, networks and more can make an impact on some of the world's toughest challenges. We have the tech to do what we need to do, the potential is enormous! If you're looking for inspiration and forward-thinking ideas this episode delivers!

To mark Women's History Month, AIR's Shelley Anderson interviews Barefoot Innovation host Jo Ann on her perspective about the progress, and lack thereof, on efforts to drive toward gender equality.

It has been quite a ride since our first episode in 2015. Over more than eight years, this show helped mark AIR's founding, unpacked what the pandemic and other events meant for financial regulation, and hosted so many enlightening discussions about disruptive technology.

We're trying something a little different today. Or actually: a lot different. We've got our first non-human guest on the show. No, I'm not interviewing either of my dogs, Daisy and Penny, although that could get interesting. Today I'm interviewing the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. What is ChatGPT, you ask? I asked it to describe itself briefly, in a non-technical way, and this is what it said: “ChatGPT is like a digital helper that can talk and write in a human-like way. It's powered by a type of artificial intelligence, and it can help answer your questions, write emails, tutor in a variety of subjects, translate languages, and even write poetry. It's like having a very knowledgeable friend to help you out with all sorts of tasks. This tool was created by OpenAI, a research group focused on making AI technology that benefits everyone. ChatGPT was first made available to the public in 2021.” So I got to wondering recently whether ChatGPT might have anything useful to say to those of us who are widowed parents. Because if you're anything like me, you're trying to figure out how to raise kids after their other parent has died – and you're realizing this is hard. And – it's hard to know who can help us figure that out. This idea came up because a family member of mine has a podcast on a totally different topic, and she interviewed ChatGPT on her show. And my dad spotted it and said to me, hey, maybe there's something interesting here in relation to your show, too. So I listened to the discussion my aunt, Jo Ann Barefoot, had with ChatGPT on her show, which is called Barefoot Innovation – and it was fascinating. If you're at all interested in the banking industry, and especially in FinTech and financial regulation, I highly encourage you to listen to her interview with ChatGPT, and to her many other interviews as well. Anyway, I started to wonder: what would ChatGPT say to my listeners? If I asked it to suggest resources for widowed parents, would it have any? Would those resources be any good? Would it have advice on planning for Father's Day, for example, since that is right around the corner? Would it be well-versed on kids' understanding of grief at various ages and developmental stages? Perhaps most importantly: If I posed a bunch of questions, and I shared them on the show, would I have to interject over and over and let you know where its answers were unhelpful, or even incorrect or dangerous? I played around a little first, to get a sense of how to use it. And because I was sitting next to my dog when I signed up, my very first question to ChatGPT was: “can you tell me about Tibetan spaniels?” I asked a few more questions about topics that were top-of-mind: recovery from the type of shoulder surgery I recently had, and how to clean my new Trex decking. Then, it was time to think about what to ask ChatGPT about widowed parenting, and give it a go. Have a listen for yourself, and let me know what you think about how it answers. A note about the methodology and technology used in this interview. I used the most up-to-date version of ChatGPT, called GPT-4. Because it only takes text input, and answers with text replies, I conducted the interview by typing my questions and reading the answers as they came back. In order to share it with you today, I went back and recorded myself reading my questions out loud, and also fed ChatGPT's answers into a text-to-speech tool called NaturalReader (the commercial version). I picked a voice named “Aria” and chose the “friendly” option for her tone. I used another AI tool called DALL-E to generate a “headshot” for today's guest. I had to experiment quite a lot with what type of prompts to give the tool, in plain English, and get the type of image I wanted, and that was fun. As someone who spent 20 years in the tech world in my prior life, I have to say, this experiment was super interesting. I was blown away with how accurate and useful the answers were to the questions that I posed. I don't think that's necessarily always the case with AI tools, even this one. One criticism I hear is that these tools can create great-sounding answers that are entirely wrong. In this case, I'm able to review the answers before sharing them with you, and if any of the answers had been wrong or even dangerous, I would have addressed that. As AI tools become more and more widespread, I think it's important for those of us working in the grief world to realize that the grieving people we serve may begin turning to them for answers. I think it's important that we understand what's out there, what may be coming, and what the possibilities and limitations are. We can't afford to ignore AI – for better or worse, it will likely change the way we do our work in the world, and how grieving people are supported in the years to come. I hope you enjoy my interview with ChatGPT. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

This is a special emergency episode of Barefoot Innovation with a call to action for helping to protect Ukrainian refugees from being preyed upon by human traffickers. Yesterday, I got a message from Stuart Watkins, the CEO of Zenoo, in Prague. I got to know Stu two years ago when AIR ran our first TechSprint on the US Paycheck Protection Program, which provided rescue funding for small businesses hit suddenly by the covid shutdowns. Zenoo, based in London and Prague, worked with the TechSprint teams from a Friday night to a Sunday night, developing tools for banks to use for fast, automated onboarding of PPP loan applicants.  This week, Stu was reaching out for help with a different idea:  a plan for protecting Ukrainian refugees by setting up a system to authenticate the identities of people offering them shelter and transportation.

I started the Barefoot Innovation show in 2015. My guest today is the person who suggested I create a podcast. He is Matt Van Buskirk, Co-CEO of Hummingbird Regtech and also, among many things, a member of AIR's Advisory Council. We are starting a new special series of shows where we'll bring in guests and, instead of having them talk about what they're doing, we'll ask them to talk about what they are seeing, and learning, and thinking. In a way, we'll be going back to the original concept of the show, which was to make it possible for listeners to be like a fly on the wall in a fascinating conversation. I, for one, am having these kinds of conversations almost every day lately, with smart, visionary people who are trying to figure out the uncharted territory ahead, and how to navigate it. 

This is a special episode of Barefoot Innovation because I have no guest – it's just me. As we go into 2022, I want to share the advice I have on my mind for everyone (including myself). And I'm also going to share a quick overview of what we're doing at AIR. We are a small organization doing very big work, in the US and worldwide. I'm going to describe the highlights, partly to encourage you to engage with us if we have points of connection. In addition, I want to invite you all to tell us what you would like to hear about this year on Barefoot Innovation. What kinds of guests should we have, and what kinds of issues should we explore? Come to www.regulationinnovation.org and let us know!

Nina Mohanty is a "visionary". Specifically speaking, she is one at the upcoming "Women's Economic Empowerment TechSprint & Conference", which she now showcases in our podcast, providing awareness to our audience on this great initiative brought by the Alliance for Innovative Regulation (AIR) in partnership with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). We invited Francesca Hopwood Road and Jo-Ann Barefoot to tells us the goals, operations, and available resources created by this initiative to our audience. More on the initiative here: https://regulationinnovation.org/womens_empowerment_sprint/ More on our guests:Jo-Ann BarefootJo-Ann is the CEO & Founder of AIR - the Alliance for Innovative Regulation and host of the global podcast show Barefoot Innovation. A noted advocate of “regulation innovation,” Jo Ann is Senior Fellow Emerita at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business & Government. She has been Deputy Comptroller of the Currency, partner at KPMG, Co-Chairman of Treliant Risk Advisors, and staff member at the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. She's an angel investor, serves on the board of Oportun, serves on the fintech advisory committee for FINRA, is a member of the Milken Institute U.S. FinTech Advisory Committee, and is a member of the California Blockchain Working Group Advisory Board. Jo-Ann chairs the board of directors of FinRegLab, previously chaired the board of the Financial Health Network, and previously served on the CFPB's Consumer Advisory Board. She was a co-founder of Hummingbird Regtech.Linkedln: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbarefoot/ Francesca Hopwood RoadFrancesca leads the FCA's RegTech and Advanced Analytics function responsible fordeveloping and embedding data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence tools and capability across the organization. She also runs the FCA's RegTech activities, including the FCA's TechSprint events, the first of their kind convened by a financial regulator. Since joining the regulator in 2010 she has led a number of strategic transformation programmes. Prior to joining she worked in the third sector and private sector using data and intelligence to identify and mitigate harm for consumers.Linkedln: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesca-hopwood-road-ab040b15/

In this new episode of Breaking Banks, JP Nicols is joined by friend and regular contributor Jo Ann Barefoot, Chair of the Alliance for Innovative Regulation, CEO of Barefoot Innovation Group, host of the Barefoot Innovation podcast, and former Deputy Comptroller of the Currency to discuss a new era ushering in Joe Biden’s White House. What does this mean for fintech and banking?  Then stay tuned as Jason Henrichs hosts Jacob Haar, managing partner of Community Investment Management, an impact investment firm that provides debt capital to fintech companies to support underserved small businesses. Jason and Jacob explore the role of impact investors, responsible fintech, and public policy in financial inclusion during the time of COVID-19.

As the 2020 pandemic continues to threaten America’s small businesses, it makes sense to talk with people who are saving them, by serving them through technology. My guests today do just that. They are Ross Buhrdorf, CEO & Founder of ZenBusiness, and his colleague Lamine Zarrad. Lamine, who is SVP of Financial Services, was a guest on Barefoot Innovation last year, when he was CEO of Joust. Joust was acquired by ZenBusiness earlier this year. In our conversation, Ross and Lamine explain that their target market is service businesses with zero to ten employees. They explain that, in order to thrive, these little enterprises need to digitize every aspect of their activity, from marketing to legal to finance. Reflecting a pattern that I’m seeing everywhere, ZenBusiness is seeing the demand for this digitization soaring in the pandemic, which is driving activity of all kinds into digital and online channels. I’ve been saying that, in finance and financial regulation, we’re seeing a decade of technology adoption and innovation squeezed into a few short months.

In this episode, Miguel Armaza sits down with Jo Ann Barefoot, CEO & Founder of the Alliance for Innovative Regulation and host of the podcast Barefoot Innovation. Jo Ann is a famous advocate of “regulation innovation,” and is one of the most active and visible fintech leaders working to improve and modernize financial regulation around the world. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business & Government and in the past was Deputy Comptroller of the Currency of the United States and a staff member at the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. Jo Ann Barefoot Jo Ann Barefoot is CEO & Founder of AIR - the Alliance for Innovative Regulation and host of the global podcast show Barefoot Innovation. A noted advocate of “regulation innovation,” Jo Ann is Senior Fellow Emerita at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business & Government. She has been Deputy Comptroller of the Currency, partner at KPMG, Co-Chairman of Treliant Risk Advisors, and staff member at the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. She’s an angel investor, serves on the board of Oportun, serves on the fintech advisory committee for FINRA, is a member of the Milken Institute U.S. FinTech Advisory Committee, and is a member of the California Blockchain Working Group Advisory Board. Jo Ann chairs the board of directors of FinRegLab, previously chaired the board of the Financial Health Network, and previously served on the CFPB’s Consumer Advisory Board. She was a Cofounder of Hummingbird Regtech. About Alliance for Innovative Regulation AIR is a nonprofit dedicated to modernizing the financial regulatory system. We believe that the regulatory framework needs to migrate from a largely manual to a Digitally-Native Design. This will ensure financial stability, protect consumers from harm, promote financial inclusion, curtail financial crime, and enable continuous innovation. AIR works at the intersection of technology, innovation, and regulation to help regulators better understand emerging technologies that can help improve financial health. Examples like cash-flow underwriting can expand safe and affordable credit to people with no credit history, increasing credit access and a creating a more fair financial system. AIR’s Regtech Manifesto Financial regulation needs to convert from analog to digital design. This seminal thought piece calls for gradual, but urgent, conversion of the financial regulatory system to a “digitally-native” framework. The Manifesto is a Request for Comments (RFC). It calls for discussion about a system that will be rebuilt over time to leverage the power of digitization and make regulatory outcomes better, faster, and cheaper, all at once. Join the conversation.

Renaud was one of our earliest guests on Barefoot Innovation when he was CEO of Lending Club, and I’m so happy to have him back today in his new role as CEO and co-founder of Upgrade. I wanted to talk with him about Upgrade, and also to get his thoughts about how the fintech sector has evolved since those days. Upgrade is a neobank with a novel strategy that uses the appeal of credit products to attract customers, and then offers more services. It aims to move borrowers off of revolving credit and into loans that people can successfully pay off, incentivizing good consumer financial behavior and discipline. In our conversation, Renaud notes that despite all the innovation in the lending world, consumers still have massive credit balances outstanding in high-interest debt products -- a consumer burden that he thinks shouldn’t exist anymore, now that better products are available.

The triple crises of 2020 -- pandemic, economic contraction, and racial and social upheaval -- are opening up new kinds of conversations. Today’s episode is one of these -- my discussion with Rodney Hood, the Chairman of the National Credit Union Administration.  Chairman Hood is the first African-American, ever, to head a US federal financial regulatory agency -- and one of only eight to hold presidentially-appointed roles in these agencies since the New Deal.  As we continue our Barefoot Innovation special series on financial regulation after the pandemic, we focus closely on the challenges of racial disparity in the financial system, and what to do about them.

Today’s episode of our special series on the future of regulation after the pandemic takes us   across the Atlantic (virtually) to talk with one of my favorite Barefoot Innovation guests. He is Christopher Woolard, the interim CEO of the UK Financial Conduct Authority. In our conversation, Chris talks about the opportunity to come out of this crisis and “build back better.” He discusses how the FCA has converted to the work-from-home environment and what adjustments may last beyond the crisis. He shares the worry that the economic downturn will follow the common crisis pattern of strengthening large incumbent firms at the expense of smaller ones, and how to avoid wiping out a decade of innovation. He talks about impacts on vulnerable consumers and on the UK’s fabled fintech sector, and describes the government’s efforts to build a bridge over the crisis and get as many people across it safely, as possible. 

This morning, Brian Brooks is starting his new job as acting Comptroller of the Currency. I’m fortunate to know Brian well, and over the years he and I have spent many hours talking about all the themes that we explore here on Barefoot Innovation. As he takes on his new role, I’m delighted that we were able to sit down together (virtually) and share some of that conversation with you.

We have the perfect show to kick off the new year and new decade in 2020. This is one of the most interesting conversations we’ve ever had, in our hundred-plus episodes of Barefoot Innovation. My very special guest is Congressman Bill Foster, who represents the 11th District of Illinois. He is a member of the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, and was appointed by Committee Chair Maxine Waters to lead the special task force she set up to examine how artificial intelligence will transform finance. And, maybe better yet, he is Congress’ one and only PhD physicist (you’ll enjoy hearing his list of credentials). As he explains in today’s show, he went from working on theatrical stage lighting, to high energy particle physics, to politics -- in our talk, he shares the inspiring family story of what prompted him to enter public service. I love talking with people who “cross the lines” -- who transcend the silos and straddle multiple realms of knowledge. Congressman Bill Foster, the scientist politician, is one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking guests we’ve ever had on the show. I know you’ll enjoy our conversation.

I think this is my all-time favorite episode of Barefoot Innovation. We have two guests. Nick Cook has been on the show twice before in his former role as head of regtech at the UK Financial Conduct Authority. He now leads the FCA’s newly-created division-level unit on innovation. I believe this model is unique in the world-- a financial regulatory agency establishing a high-level unit that, when staffed out, will have 200 people. Reporting to Nick are two groups. One is the group called Innovate, which includes the FCA’s famous regulatory sandbox. The second is the group on regtech and advanced analytics that Nick used to head, himself. And my second guest is his successor in leading that regtech group -- Francesca Hopwood Road. If you’re interested in regulatory innovation, today’s show may be the single most valuable source you can find on how to do it. Every minute is packed with both fresh information and rare insight about how regulators, themselves, will have to change to keep pace with changing technology.

This is the second time I’ve sat down with Karen Mills for a conversation on Barefoot Innovation. Karen is a Senior Fellow at both the Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School (where I got to know her), and previously was the head of the US Small Business Administration. She is also probably the foremost expert, and most eloquent voice, anywhere, on using technology to strengthen small business. We got together, on a very rainy day on the Harvard campus, shortly after Karen published her newest book, Fintech, Small Business, and the American Dream. It’s the most definitive and thought-provoking work I have seen on today’s historic opportunity to develop a vastly better financial world for small businesses. Karen believes, as do I, that we are at a transformative moment. 

Jo Ann Barefoot, CEO at Barefoot Innovation group and Cofounder at Hummingbird Regtech, shares her thought provoking insight on how organizations are handling third party risk management in this industry interview. Using her extensive experience in the industry, Jo Ann shares best practices for dealing with regtech vendors – including tips for the vetting process and cybersecurity management.

Our conversations on Barefoot Innovation always grapple with the regulatory challenges arising as technology transforms finance. Most of our guests have good ideas about this, but very few are in a position to make things happen. Today’s guest is different. He is Craig Phillips, who is the Counselor to the US Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnunchin. The Counselor role spans everything from fiscal operations to America’s debt management, but for our audience he is best-known for leading the office that issued last year’s landmark Treasury report on fintech.

An interview with Jo Ann Barefoot, CEO at Barefoot Innovation and Co-Founder at Hummingbird. Jo Ann's career has taken her from the regulatory world to the world of high growth entrepreneurship and everywhere in between. Helpful links: Jo Ann TwitterJo Ann LinkedinBarefoot Innovation PodcastHummingbirdHarvard Research Paper: Regulation Innovation: Using Digital Technology to Protect and Benefit Financial ConsumersFintex Foxes

Today is International Women’s Day, and we’re honoring it with a very special bonus episode of Barefoot Innovation, on Women in Fintech...and with Women in Fintech. My four guests are Laura Spiekerman, the CRO of Alloy, Melissa van Kluyve, Associate at Clocktower Technology Ventures, Zoe Chaves, the Product Manager of Splitwise, and Lyn Farrell, the Regulatory Strategy Advisor of Hummingbird Regtech.

One of the things I love about our Barefoot Innovation conversations -- and about fintech, for that matter -- is the passion you find in so many founders, these people who really believe they can do better for consumers. You hear it in the voices of many of the guests we’ve had on the show, the note of excitement, the sense that they can almost see a better future. They’re often people from the technology world who looked at some traditional, stuck feature of the financial system and said to themselves, I can do better than this. Today’s guests are wonderful examples. They are Matthew Cooper and Nadim Homsany, cofounders of EarnUp.

I am especially thrilled about today’s guest -- California DBO Commissioner Jan Owen -- because this episode has been years in the making. I’ve known Jan for a long time, and as anyone who knows her will attest, she’s a breath of fresh air in the regulatory world. She’s candid, she’s outspoken, she’s thought provoking, and she's fearless in tackling thorny issues. We’ve been looking for a good chance to sit down and talk, and we finally found one this summer. As it happens, it turned out to be one of Barefoot Innovation’s most fun settings ever (and we’ve had some great ones, including beachside in Fiji at the AFI conference). Jan and I were both in Santa Fe in July for a conference and we decided to record our talk on an outdoor balcony, as a thunder storm approached. It was extremely windy, and we could smell the ozone and coming rain, and you’ll be able to hear the thunder booming, sometimes startlingly well-timed to punctuate Jan’s more pointed comments. We took our chances with the weather, staying outside as the sky darkened and dozens of lightning strikes forked down out of the clouds onto the mountains behind Jan -- I wish I’d gotten a photo of that.  In the end, we had to run for it as the rain began, first with big drops spattering the deck and then, ten seconds later, deluge! So the episode ends a little abruptly! Jan Lynn Owen is one of the most important financial regulators in the US because she heads the California Department of Business Oversight (DBO). Since California arguably leads the world in financial innovation, the DBO is at the forefront in addressing emerging regulatory issues around fintech. Importantly, state regulators, unlike most of the federal ones, oversee both banks and nonbanks. The US federal regulators dominate financial policy, but they don't directly supervise nonbank startups. That means they’re not in close touch with the cutting edge of innovation, which is not in the banks -- it’s in the nonbank startups. So having a regulator like Jan who understands both banking and fintech is invaluable. In our conversation, she shares her diverse background, including having been a banker and regulator. She describes the scope of the DBO, which is breathtaking -- 368,000 licensees, over 4,000 small business and small dollar lenders, over 300 payday lenders, over 400 nondepository mortgage companies - you get the picture. As you would expect, we had a lively discussion about the proposal by the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to create a fintech charter. Jan is famously opposed to it and I have been an outspoken advocate for it - we’ll link in the show notes to my debate on that topic with John Ryan, CEO of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS). Jan is of course a leader in CSBS and in our talk, she describes their efforts to modernize and streamline the state regulatory systems and licensing system in ways that she believes can meet the needs of the fintech sector without the OCC establishing a new type of federal charter. (Note that my discussion with Jan was recorded in mid-July, and so predated the OCC’s July 31 announcement that it is going ahead with the new fintech charter.) Jan points out that the fintech world has transitioned from seeking to avoid regulation to embracing it, in the realization that it helps their business model. She says this shift is putting healthy pressure on government to figure out how to regulate these novel companies, and she’s candid in saying that many of our financial laws and rules are old and out of date. In our talk, she invites input from anyone and everyone on how to fix them. The OCC fintech charter was not the only issue on which Jan and I disagree. If you read the news, you probably already know that she’s been outspoken in her skepticism about regulatory sandboxes -- and our regular listeners know that I think regulators really need them. Much of the issue comes down to how they’re designed, and we had a good conversation about the dos and don'ts of sandboxes, reglabs, and innovation hubs. The key is to give regulators a safe space to do easy experimentation, mainly to accelerate their own learning, while still assuring full consumer protection. (Since Jan and I spoke, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection also announced that it will launch a regulatory sandbox.) Before we fled the rainstorm, I asked Jan to talk about a speech she’s been giving titled “Sex, Drugs, and Skinny Jeans” (a perfect example of her style). The “sex” topic is the #MeToo movement, including Jan’s personal experience with workplace sexual misconduct. The “drugs” issue is, of course, how to regulate the financial issues raised by legal marijuana in states like California, since federal law still bars banks from opening accounts for these cash-rich businesses. And “skinny jeans” is about the culture clash between traditional, suit-and-tie finance and the jeans-and-tee-shirt worldview of Silicon Valley. We’re going to have to bridge that divide, if we want to optimize the technology change coming to the financial world. Enjoy this thunderous episode with Jan Lynn Owen. Links LINK TO FULL TRANSCRIPTION Podcast with John Ryan - Conference of State Bank Bank Supervisors President Recent Speech at Lendit More on Jan Lynn Owen Jan Lynn Owen was appointed the first-ever Commissioner of the California Department of Business Oversight by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. on July 1, 2013, following a merger of the departments of Corporations and Financial Institutions. Previously, Ms. Owen served as Commissioner of Corporations. Prior to becoming Commissioner, Ms. Owen was the principal at The Jan Owen Group; a strategic initiatives manager at Apple Inc.; vice president of government affairs at JP Morgan Chase; state director of government and industry affairs at Washington Mutual Inc.; and executive director of the California Mortgage Bankers Association. From 1999 to 2000, Ms. Owen was acting commissioner of the Department of Financial Institutions, following on her role as deputy commissioner from 1996 to 1999. She also served for several years as a consultant to the state Senate Banking Committee. Ms. Owen is an alumna of California State University, Fresno, where she earned her degree in Economics. More for our listeners We have great podcasts in the queue. We have a series focused on global developments in fintech and regtech, including Harish Natarajan of the World Bank and Anju Padwardhan of CreditEase and Stanford University, who talks about fintech developments in China. From London, we’ll have a talk with P.J. DiGiamarino of JWG and the Regtech Council. We’ll also have a really thought-provoking show with Peter Renton, who leads LendAcademy and the LendIt conference series. We have a regtech firm coming up, Alloy, which has high-tech solutions for meeting the Know-Your-Customer rules in AML. And we’ll have a show with the co-founders of Earnup. So, lots to look forward to! The fall conference circuit is exciting. Some of the places I’ll be speaking are: Finovate Fall, September 26, 2018, New York, NY NFCC Connect, October 2, 2018, Dallas, TX Online Lending Policy Institute, October 9, Washington, DC P20 Conference, October 10, Atlanta, GA American Banker RegTech, October 15-16, New York, NY Money 2020, October 21-24, Las Vegas, NV Singapore Fintech Festival, November 12-16, Singapore LendIt Europe, November 19-20, 2018 in London ABA/ABA Financial Crimes Conference, December 2-4, Washington, DC Regtech Rising, December 3-5, London I’ll also be speaking at several events hosted by US regulators this fall. It’s great to see so many of them really digging into the issues surrounding fintech and regtech. Also, watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well. If you listen to Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, please leave a five star rating and also remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep it going. Come to jsbarefoot.com for today’s show notes and to join our email list, so you’ll get the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts. As always, please follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Support our podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

What if regulations were machine-readable? What if, when regulatory changes come out, financial companies wouldn’t have to download hundreds or thousands of pages of rules and read them all? What if they didn’t have to rely on lawyers -- their own, and also the legions of legal experts and consultants who translate rules for the industry as a whole, to help them understand what to do? What if, instead, they could run new rules through a machine-based review, and get all those answers automatically? For very little money? Banks would be able to update compliance processes much more easily. Startups could easily find out what rules apply to them. The results could feed into other new, high-tech tools, to automate and streamline implementation. A lot of people are working on this concept, both at regulatory agencies and at regtech firms. One leader in that effort is my guest today, Kayvan Alikhani, Co-founder and CEO of Compliance.ai. We both were speakers this year at the Comply 2018 conference in New York, and while we were there we found a chance to sit down and talk. Kayvan and Compliance.ai set out to solve the problem that today’s solutions are aging, rigid, slow, and expensive. Among other things, these systems fall behind the deluge of regulations that hit the financial sector every year. Compliance.ai looked at which industry most needed its new tech and chose finance, in part, based on research findings that compliance teams spend at least 30% of their time just chasing changes. Compliance.ai aims to automate the manual work of collecting, cleaning up, and parsing data and figuring out what is relevant to its customers, using machine-readable technology. Their software can speed up and simplify much of the work done today by traditional GRC -- governance, regulation and compliance -- systems. More basically, they are trying to redesign the whole model of importing data manually, analyzing it in spreadsheets, communicating on it via email, and all the rest. While today’s regtech innovation is mostly point solutions for particular use cases, remember that they’re converging. Machine-readable technology will meet up with other new ways of capturing and using data, from cloud computing to blockchains, and we’ll see big breakthroughs when these connections really take. Kayvan is especially thoughtful about artificial intelligence. AI has incredible power to save massive time and money in compliance processes. I myself have no doubt that AI and machine learning are the future of regulation and compliance. However, getting to that future is a journey, and Kayvan describes how it is likely to go, and especially steps that will be needed to surmount reluctance by both industry and regulators to adopt AI they don’t fully understand, by gradually building up understanding and trust and by assuring that AI meets the standards needed for accuracy and fairness. Significantly, regulators themselves are working on machine-readable regulation too. In particular, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is aiming to “digitize the rulebook” by tagging regulations with machine-readable markers. In the US, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is exploring the same concept. We’ll link in the show notes to our episodes with both agencies.   Regtech firms like to emphasize the time and money they can save the industry, which in turn sometimes leaves compliance professionals worried about robots taking their jobs. One lesson from my talk with Kayvan is that there’s a mountain of human compliance work ahead. The machines are going to do the rote tasks, and the higher math. The people, with their deep expertise in both rules and the complex systems around them, are going to be freed up to do ever-more meaningful work, better than ever before. They will be busy shaping these new tech tools, and they will be using them to tackle the work only they can do -- the deep dive analysis, the hard cases, the systemic reforms. They’ll have less frustration, less boredom, and more traction in achieving the big goals that our laws and regulations were written to further, from protecting consumers to expanding financial inclusion to catching money launderers. At my regtech firm, Hummingbird, we say our mission is to give compliance people superpowers. Compliance leaders are going to emerge as heroes in their companies as they produce better results, cut costs, cut risks, and help lead their organizations, especially banks, into the twenty-first century. I asked Kayvan to help us envision a day in the life of a compliance professional a few years into the future. He paints a fascinating picture, and he says it’s going to be beautiful. That’s not usually a word we associate with regulation and compliance. Links LINK TO FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION A day in the life of a compliance officer - Part 1 A day in the life of a compliance officer - Part 2 A day in the life of a compliance officer - Part 3 Chris Woolard and Nick Cook Podcast Podcast with Nick Cook Podcast with Dan Gorfine, LabCFTC Chief Innovation Officer and Director Podcast with CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo More on Kayvan Alikhani With more than 25 years of experience in hi-tech, Kayvan leads operations, strategy, sales, and marketing for Compliance.ai. Most recently, Kayvan led the identity strategy at RSA, and represented EMC on various industry alliances such as the FIDO board. He is Co-Founder and CEO of PassBan (acquired by RSA), a company focused on mobile identity assurance. Kayvan also led strategy at LiteScape (as CTO and later as CEO), creating security and mobile identity solutions for VOIP-based networks. He was Co-Founder and CTO at BeNotified, a cloud mobile communication service provider. Prior to that, Kayvan co-founded AVIRNEX, a cloud-based enhanced fixed- and mobile-communication service provider. More for our listeners We have great shows coming up. We have a wonderful episode with the California Banking Commissioner, Jan Lynn Owen. We’ll also have another regtech firm, Alloy, which has high-tech solutions for meeting the Know-Your-Customer rules in AML. We have one with the co-founders of Earnup. From the global perspective, we’ll have the World Bank’s Harish Natarajan; one with Anju Padwardhan of CreditEase focused, among other things, on fintech developments in China; and one with P.J. DiGiamarino of JWG and the Regtech Council. We also have a great show in the queue with  Peter Renton of LendAcademy and the LendIt conference, one of the most thoughtful people we’ve talked with. I’ll be speaking this fall at some great events: Finovate Fall, September 26, 2018, New York, NY NFCC Connect, October 2, 2018, Dallas, TX P20 Conference, October 10, Atlanta, GA American Banker RegTech, October 15-16, New York, NY Money 2020, October 21-24, Las Vegas, NV Singapore Fintech Festival, November 12-16, Singapore LendIt Europe, November 19-20, 2018, London ABA/ABA Financial Crimes Conference,  December 2-4, Washington, DC Regtech Rising, December 3-5, London If you listen to Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, please leave a five star rating to help us continue to build the show, and remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep it going. Also come to jsbarefoot.com for today’s show notes and to join our email list to get the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts. As always, please follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I’m so grateful that you listen to Barefoot Innovation. Our audience is growing rapidly all over the world, and hardly a day goes by without someone telling me how much they enjoy the show or how they were helped by an insight shared by one of our wonderful guests. Let’s keep that going -- and let’s all keep innovating! support our podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

It’s always extra fun when we have a show where the guest talks about the days when Jack Dorsey hacked him and lived in his backyard. For today’s conversation, I’m joined by my friend Greg Kidd, Co-founder and CEO of globaliD. I’m predicting right now that this one is going to be a Barefoot Innovation fan-favorite. Greg has an unusual background. He was involved from the early days of Ripple, Twitter, and Square. Unlike most Silicon Valley innovators, though, he’s also been a banking consultant and worked for the Fed Reserve Board. He is famously a big thinker (I like to tell him that people sometimes have no idea what he’s talking about, although I promise that doesn’t happen in this show).  I remember the first time I met him -- we walked into a party at the same time one night in San Francisco, and were still talking, barely inside the door, two hours later. This is actually the longest episode we’ve ever done, because he’s just fascinating to listen to -- I couldn’t tear myself away. We recorded it this spring in globaliD’s space at the Digital Garage in San Francisco, where Greg shared his vision of what’s ahead in finance, commerce, and technology. We talked about the magnitude of the shifts he sees, and his passionate belief that new technology should be used to empower people, not control them. The secret to that, Greg says, is decentralization. He thinks blockchains and distributed ledgers are as revolutionary as the internet was. And he thinks, above all, that we should decentralize control over people’s identities. As he says, government-issued identities are inherently insecure -- they create huge centralized “honeypots” of data that attract hackers -- and they can invite misuse by government itself. Greg's firm globaliD is building an alternative. Its software can be downloaded to the phone to create an individual token of identity that can attach a unique name, which then can collect identity proofs, or “attestations,” based on the person’s electronic footprint and relationships. The individual can customize how to share identity information for different purposes, shielding sensitive information for some uses and revealing it in others, in order to protect privacy. Because the underlying information lives in the individual’s device, not a government or corporate database, it’s relatively secure from cyber-attack. As mobile phones approach ubiquity worldwide, this kind of system can also expand financial inclusion by authenticating millions of people who lack traditional credentials and therefore can’t enter the mainstream financial system. We've done other shows on this (I suggest re-listening to the one on the India stack and Aadhaar card with Sanjay Jain). Governments throughout the world are working on this, especially in countries where much of the population (often, especially, women) lack documents and therefore can’t satisfy the bank Know-Your-Customer regulations. A few years ago I ran into Greg in Fiji at the annual summit of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. He was speaking there on how to use mobile phone-based data to help refugees identify themselves to authorities, to make it easier to screen people even in the midst of mass migrations and humanitarian crises. The US needs updated identity methods too. Our analog-era systems like social security numbers are no longer secure -- too often buyable on the dark web. Digital solutions will be coming here soon. Greg also gets excited about making innovation work with regulation. He says we don’t have to end up in George Orwell’s world, nor in Mad Max’s, as he argued in this memorable piece. I promise this episode will leave you with some new ideas. Links Link to Episode Transcription www.hardyaka.com Podcast with Anne Boden More on Greg Kidd Greg Kidd is the CEO of globaliD and the former chief risk officer at Ripple. His work taking his own startup public (Dispatch Management Services) on the Nasdaq is book-ended by time at Booz Allen, Promontory, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. He was an initial investor and advisor for both Twitter and Square, and his investment firm Hard Yaka continues to back many fintech and regtech companies. His leadership pursuits include work at Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). More for our listeners We have many more great podcasts in the queue. We have a wonderful episode with the California banking commissioner, Jan Owen (which is extra exciting because we recorded it outside with lightning and thunder through the whole thing). We’ll also have other regtech firms, including Compliance.ai, which is creating machine-readable regulations, and Alloy, which has high-tech solutions for meeting the Know-Your-Customer rules in AML. And we have one with the co-founders of Earnup. There are many more in the works. The fall events schedule is filling up. Some of the places I’ll be speaking are: Finovate Fall, September 26, 2018, New York, NY NFCC Connect, October 2, 2018, Dallas, TX P20 Conference, October 10, Atlanta, GA American Banker Regtech Conference, October 15-16, New York, NY Money 2020, October 21-24, Las Vegas, NV Singapore Fintech Festival, November 12-16, Singapore LendIt Europe, November 19-20, 2018 in London ABA/ABA Financial Crimes Conference, December 2-4,  Washington, DC Regtech Rising, December 3-5, London If you listen to Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, please leave a five star rating on the show to help us continue to grow. Come to jsbarefoot.com for today’s show notes and to join our email list, so you’ll get the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts. As always, please follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. support our podcast Meanwhile, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

We have such a special guest on today’s show. Gregory Meeks is the United States Congressman representing the Fifth District of New York. He is also a leading member of the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services. I was able to sit down with him, in his Capitol Hill office on one recent, hot summer day, to talk about how technology is changing consumer finance and, especially, how it can expand financial inclusion. Congressman Meeks has been bringing breakthrough leadership to this issue on Capitol Hill.  As he says in our conversation, his views are grounded in his own experience growing up in public housing in Harlem, where he learned firsthand the struggles faced by low-income families in making ends meet, and also in getting access to credit. He talks about his own parent’s situation in being able to purchase a home, and the effect it had on his family. As a passionate advocate for these communities, it’s hugely important that he believes some of the solutions for them lie in fintech. I think it’s fair to say that many advocates for financial inclusion are still skeptical that fintech is a good thing. Obviously it sometimes isn’t, and clearly there are many questions that need to be  addressed as these new technologies expand. As someone who has worked with financial inclusion efforts for decades, however, I think these new tech innovations are actually the best hope we’ve ever had for building a truly affordable, accessible and healthy financial system for everyone. As we’ve discussed in other shows, fintech is attacking all the things that cause people to have unhealthy financial lives, other than lack of money itself. It is sharply reducing the costs of providing financial services, by leveraging both mobile delivery channels and new kinds of data. It’s enabling accurate underwriting of the millions of people who can’t qualify for good loans because they lack traditional credit files -- again, using new data and data analytics. It’s helping people build digital identities, which equips them to satisfy the Know-Your-Customer rules of the banking system and thereby access transaction accounts (this progress is especially dramatic in the developing world). Fintech innovation is also creating a wide array of tools that just make it easier to manage money wisely, regardless of your level of financial education. New tools are simplifying everything from saving, to budgeting and bill-paying, to new solutions for people with “gig” jobs, to getting alerts when funds are getting low. Fintech is not a panacea, obviously, but my view it that it can accomplish many of the goals we’ve been pursuing for decades through regulation, with mixed results at best. Congressman Meeks is focusing on this powerful potential. We had a wide ranging conversation, including talking about modernizing the Community Reinvestment Act which the Congressman has called for -- here is his op-ed on that challenge. And you’ll hear his passion for building a bipartisan approach to crafting solutions that work for everyone, including how both rural and urban communities’ financial health can benefit from fintech. The Congressman has a keen sense for how we need to embrace technology, rather than fighting it. He’s optimistic, as am I, that we are on the verge of finding truly superior ways to use new technologies to better communities. More Links Link to Full Episode Transcription Fintech Charter and Financial Inclusion Op-Ed Corporate Board Diversity Op-Ed Twitter @repgregorymeeks Facebook @repgregorymeeks Congressman Meeks’ Office - 202-225-3461 More on Gregory Meeks Congressman Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY) is now in his tenth term serving the 5th District of New York, which is one of the most diverse constituencies in the nation. He is known for working with Democrats and Republicans alike and is one of sixty-one pro-growth Democratic members who comprise the New Democrat Coalition (NDC). He co-chairs the NDCC Trade Task Force. Congressman Meeks is a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, having previously served as a Dodd-Frank conferee. Key provisions in the Wall Street reform law – including its stress testing requirement, the creation of the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion at the financial regulatory agencies, and the requirement that U.S. public companies that use natural resources must report their due diligence in stamping out conflict minerals– were authored by Congressman Meeks and remain in the law today. The Congressman is also a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he is the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats. A multilateralist with decades of experience in foreign policy, he believes the United States should build coalitions around our interests and work with other countries to build a stable and prosperous future. He co-chairs several international organization caucuses, including the European Union Caucus.   More for our listeners We have many more great podcasts in the queue. We’ll have a really thought-provoking discussion with my friend Greg Kidd, Founder of GlobaliD.  We have a wonderful episode with the California banking commissioner, Jan Owen (which we recorded amidst a gathering thunderstorm that adds some drama). We’ll also have two regtech firms -- Compliance.ai, which offers machine-readable regulatory compliance, and Alloy, which has high-tech solutions for meeting the Know-Your-Customer rules in AML. And we have one with the co-founders of Earnup. There are many more in the works. The fall events schedule is filling up. Some of the places I’ll be speaking are: Finovate Fall, September 26, 2018, New York, NY Money 2020, October in Las Vegas. Among other things, I’ll be speaking on the Revolution Stage about the regulation revolution NFCC Connect, October 2, 2018, Dallas, TX LendIt Europe, November 19-20, 2018 in London. Regtech Rising, December 3-5, London I’ll also be speaking again at AFI, in Russia, if we can make the schedule work. Also, watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well. If you listen to Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, please leave a five star rating on the show to help us build it. Also please remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep it going, and come to jsbarefoot.com for today’s show notes and to join our email list, so you’ll get the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts. As always, please follow me on Twitter and Facebook. support our podcast And tell me what you’re thinking about fintech and financial inclusion. Let’s widen this dialogue to more people, and more and more ideas! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today’s guest is Michael Butler, CEO of Radius Bank in Boston. As with our recent show with Bob Rivers of Eastern Bank (which is also based in Boston), Mike belongs to a small, but growing, group of CEOs who are truly transforming their community banks through technology. When conversation turns to the tech future for community institutions, these two banks’ names always come up. We’ll link in the show notes to the Eastern episode and you’ll notice many common themes -- especially that both CEOs focus first and foremost on full embrace of a tech culture. Not a mixed culture, not one that’s hampered by pockets of resistance, but full embrace. We all know it’s hard for smaller banks to keep up with cutting edge technology. I know some community bankers who say they have given up. I know many others -- maybe most -- who hope they are keeping up enough to please their customers, but can’t tell for sure how well they’re doing. And I think many worry that they have no clear idea of what the road ahead looks like. For Radius Bank, Mike explains how they analyzed this challenge. Their conclusion was that in today’s market, in which customers expect Amazon-type technology, their small bank was not going to be able to offer fully competitive full-service retail banking products. As a result, they shifted quite radically to a new strategy. In this show, Mike tells the story of that journey, beginning in 2008 at the height of the Great Recession. He shares their reasoning that a full-service, branch-based, locally-confined strategy would actually be more risky than offering a narrow product set to a wide market, with a very low cost structure. He argues that a small bank like Radius has powerful advantages over larger ones that have more complex and rigid systems that slow them down. And he talks about how they tackled the task of building, as he puts it, a great tech platform, including for attracting deposits from a very specific niche of customers -- those who don’t want a branch, and actually prefer to bank through their phone, if the experience is wonderful. You’ll enjoy listening to Mike describe the internal debates they undertook, including the fears around offering something like, for example, a free ATM. He says they concluded that the whole banking industry’s platform is wrong, if you want to offer a virtual product. They also realized that a key to their future is fintech companies, both as customers and as partners. He says they now think of their “branches” as being located at the “corner of Radius” and the partner company, not on a physical street intersection where they would be competing with other banks’ street. Mike says it’s “a beautiful place to be.” He also talks in depth about making the tech great. For example, he describes getting the deposit account opening process streamlined from fifteen or twenty minutes down to three or four. He says that, behind the scenes, Radius Bank does things like Amazon, and delivers an Amazon-like experience. He also has tips on how to attract tech talent (hint -- it includes empowering young employees). Mike has thoughts on how to modernize the Community Reinvestment Act for the digital age. More broadly, he shares insights on overall regulatory challenges which, as he says, are “not easy.” He describes tasking the bank’s risk people to figure out how to work with new-generation vendors, because, as he puts it, “we can’t just go with the big guys that look good and look safe,” if they have old and inferior technology. He describes the checklist they’ve developed to handle this modernized third-party risk management for partnering with fintechs and regtechs. He says one secret is to have a “rock star compliance person.” Another is to interact constantly with the regulators. Listen especially closely to how he thinks about the risk in these partnerships, and specifically his thought process on how these newer tech partners are able to make any needed course corrections quickly and nimbly, and at low cost, so that even if things don’t work perfectly the first time, the bank is still ahead for having experimented or for trying a new approach. I’m hearing this thinking more and more from innovative banks, including the point that while older technology may look safe, it’s actually high-risk because much of it is too rigid, and changes too slowly, to keep up with the market. I’ve long believed that the two top challenges facing banks, and especially community institutions, are, first, keeping up with technology and second, regulatory burden. The good news, which is sometimes hard to see, is that new technology can be the answer to both. Radius bank is pioneering a new pathway to reaching those solutions. I know you’ll enjoy my conversation with Mike Butler. More Links Link to Full Transcription Radius Bank Website Podcast with Citi Fintech - Citi Fintech Global Head of Policy, Andres Wolberg Stock Podcast with Eastern Bank CEO Bob Rivers More on Michael Butler Michael Butler is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Radius Bank. Since joining Radius Bank in March 2008, he has transformed Radius into an innovative leader in the financial services industry, focused on delivering superior customer service and leading-edge technology to its clients. He is an experienced banking executive with an extensive background in all facets of commercial and consumer banking. Prior to joining the Bank, Mike served as President for National Consumer Finance at KeyCorp in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a graduate of Providence College and the ABA's Stonier Graduate School of Banking. Mike serves as a member of the Financial Services Committee for the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, on the Board of Trustees for Thompson Island Outward Bound, on the Advisory Board for FinXTech, and has been active with the Habitat for Humanity program. More for our listeners We have many more great podcasts in the queue. They include a number of leading government officials, including Congressman Gregory Meeks and Jan Owen, the banking commissioner of California, as well as World Bank official Harish Natarajan. We’ll have an amazing show with Greg Kidd, Founder of Global ID; a show with the co-founders of EarnUp, and two regtech firms -- Alloy and Compliance.AI. The fall events schedule is filling up. Some of the places I’ll be speaking are: Get Smart On Blockchain, US Chamber of Commerce, August 1 in Washington Finovate Fall, September 26, 2018, New York, NY NFCC Connect, October 2, 2018, Dallas, TX Money 2020, October 21-24. Among other things, I’ll be speaking on the Revolution Stage about the regulation revolution LendIt Europe, November 19-20, 2018 in London. Regtech Rising, December 3-5, London Also, watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well. If you listen to Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, please do leave a five star rating on the show to help us build it. Also please remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep it going, and come to jsbarefoot.com for today’s show notes and to join our email list, so you’ll get the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts. As always, please follow me on Twitter and Facebook. support our podcast And tell me what you’re thinking about digitizing regulation. We want to widen this dialogue. Until next time, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today’s show brings us two fascinating guests.  Alex Lintner is President of Consumer Information Services for Experian, and Sasha Orloff -- who is a previous guest on Barefoot Innovation -- is founder and CEO of LendUp. They recently joined forces to explore using new kinds of data to widen financial inclusion. We all sat down to discuss it at the LendIt conference this spring in San Francisco. Credit scores are a great tool for evaluating the creditworthiness of many consumers, but as Alex explains, not for all of them. He and Sasha think -- as do I -- that we need a fuller view into what Alex calls the consumer’s financial “reputation.” Experian estimates that 100 million people in America need this kind of broadened evaluation. We know that many consumers with low or no credit scores are actually creditworthy, and in fact could prove it if we had systems that could look closely at their financial behaviors and situations beyond reported credit history. Traditionally, though, we didn’t have efficient ways to get that information because, in the analog age, when the current systems were designed, data was scarce and costly. Today, in contrast, we have massive volumes of digital information we can access and analyze, instantly and efficiently. This creates the ability to do what used to be impossible -- make financial services more inclusive, without sacrificing lending soundness. Toward that goal, LendUp and Experian undertook a joint research project to look at the benefits of capturing data on customers’ performance on single-payment loans. The study produced really striking results -- the overwhelming majority of consumers in the study came out with positive impacts on their credit scores. And as Alex explains, single-payment loans are just one kind of nontraditional data. In today’s digitized world, there are many other factors that we can begin to capture methodically and build into routine credit scores. Experian is now routinely doing this, offering a new score called Clear Early Risk. In our conversation, Alex and Sasha share insights drawn from their own lives and talk about the many situations in which people have trouble accessing credit when they need it. Some of these consumers are young people or new immigrants with thin or no credit file. Some are facing life changes like a family death or divorce. Some are contending with emergencies like loss of a job or medical bills. Our discussion also tied these kinds of individual challenges into big shifts underway overall in lifestyle and in technology -- the advent of mobile financial services, the rise of the gig economy, and expanding use of artificial intelligence.  In addition, we touched on the future of the Community Reinvestment Act, which is due for much-needed, tech-driven modernization. Using alternative credit risk data has complex implications for fair lending regulation, especially in the US and especially regarding “disparate impact.”  US policy bars use of credit practices that have a disproportionate adverse effect on “protected classes” like women and minorities, unless the lender can demonstrate a business need and show that less-discriminatory alternatives are not available. The criteria for proving this are not clear today, and I’m among the many people who think that clarifying them is essential to expanding financial inclusion by fostering use of new data. Despite having the best of intentions, policymakers have inadvertently made hard-to-score consumers the riskiest market to serve, due to the regulatory risk arising from uncertainty. That chills efforts to address these customers’ needs by many mainstream and high-quality lenders. The CFPB is exploring this issue through its evaluation of alternative data and issuance of a “no action letter” for Upstart. A similar effort is underway, also, at the new nonprofit FinRegLab, which is run by Melissa Koide and funded by the Omidyar Network. I chair FinRegLab’s board, and we’re conducting empirical testing of alternative data -- specifically cash flow underwriting -- including how these new methods relate to disparate impact. Today’s show is a glimpse of a promising future, harnessing innovative technology to produce lending that is more inclusive, and also more sound. More Links Episode Transcription Podcast with Al Ko - Episode recorded last year with Al Ko of Intuit LendUp Infograph Alternative Credit Data trends and reports Op-Ed by Sasha on innovation in credit scoring More on Sasha and Alex Sasha Orloff is CEO and co-founder of LendUp. LendUp’s mission is to provide anyone with a path to better financial health. The company builds technology, credit products, and educational experiences that haven’t existed before for the emerging middle class -- the 56% of Americans shut out of mainstream banking due to poor credit or income volatility. It has originated more than $1 billion in loans. With offices in San Francisco, CA and Richmond, VA, LendUp is backed by debt and equity financing from venture and social impact investors including Y-Combinator, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Victory Park Capital and Yuri Milner’s Startfund. In June, both Nigel Morris and Frank Rotman of QED Investors joined the LendUp board of directors. Prior to founding LendUp, Sasha held roles in risk management, finance, online acquisitions and customer insights on Citi’s consumer credit team, and most recently served as Senior Vice President on Citigroup's Venture Capital team. He previously worked for the Grameen Foundation Technology Center and The World Bank. He has a B.S. in applied math and economics from the University of California, San Diego and an MBA from Georgetown University. Alex Lintner is President of Experian’s Consumer Information Services, overseeing the company’s US consumer credit bureau and the National Consumer Assistance Centre (NCAC). He’s responsible for all aspects of Experian’s consumer credit activities within the business-to-business marketplace, including delivery and management of value-added credit risk, marketing, and collection products to help clients manage and optimize their customer relationships. Alex was previously CEO and President of Vertafore, a $450+ million revenue insurance industry technology provider. Prior to that he was President of Intuit’s Global Business Division and also Senior Vice President of Strategy, Government Affairs and Corporate Development. He’s also spent 15 years as a consultant, starting as a Business Analyst at Dr. Hoefner & Partners in Munich, Germany and later serving as Vice President of The Boston Consulting Group in their London and San Francisco offices. More for our listeners Our next guest on the show will be another community bank CEO, Mike Butler of Radius Bank in Boston.  Upcoming episodes include a fascinating conversation with Congressman Gregory Meeks on financial innovation and policy; a talk I recorded this year at LendIt with my friend Greg Kidd of Global ID; and three discussions with regtech firms -- JWG in London, Compliance.ai, and Alloy. Speaking of LendIt, I was a guest this month on Peter Renton’s Lend Academy podcast, and he’ll be on our show soon as well. I was also a guest in June on the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation podcast, CFTC Talks, with Andy Busch. And here are my two podcasts with the CFTC, one with Chairman Giancarlo and a recent one with innovation head Dan Gorfine. It’s not too early to register for the fall’s premier fintech event, Money 2020, in October in Las Vegas. I’ll again be MC for the regulatory track, which, remember, is on Sunday -- be sure to plan accordingly!  I’ll also be speaking on the Revolution Stage, which is new this year, about regulation innovation. Also watch for Regtech Rising in December, which I’m helping to plan. We’ll also be posting information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well, and I’ll be a guest on Brett’s great radio show Breaking Banks this week, on July 5. Please remember to give Barefoot Innovation a five-star rating on iTunes to help us expand the show. I hope you’ll sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at www.jsbarefoot.com.  Follow me on Twitter and our Facebook fan page. And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going! SUPPORT OUR PODCAST Until next time, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

This week on CFTC Talks, we speak with fintech innovation expert Jo Ann Barefoot from Barefoot Innovation and co-founder of Hummingbird Fintech. Ms. Barefoot has been a regulator, a Senate staffer, and industry consultant and a volunteer in the financial regulatory and consumer movement space. We discuss why she believes we’ve been doing it all wrong and what are the best practices for these areas: fintech, regtech and innovation.

Some organizations are so interesting that we come back to them more than once. Among US regulatory agencies, the most fascinating may be the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Last July we ran a podcast conversation with the Commission’s Chairman, Christopher Giancarlo, which goes into greater depth about the role of the CFTC and it also contains Chairman Giancarlo’s thought-provoking statement that the top priority facing every regulatory body is to convert the rule book from analog to digital design. The CFTC is at the forefront of regulatory innovation in part because its leader is so passionate about the importance of it. In that spirit, they recruited the perfect person to lead the LabCFTC innovation project -- today’s guest, Daniel Gorfine. Luckily for us, the CFTC was able to attract Dan into government from the fintech sector – I first met him when he was at OnDeck – and he’s been bringing an innovator’s mindset and working models to this venerable government agency. This episode has three very meaty topics, each of which could have been a whole show. First, Dan talks about the vision and work of LabCFTC, sharing insights about how it’s organized that I know other regulators will find helpful. He talks about how they track and facilitate innovation in the financial markets, including a “primer” they issued on rules applying to cryptocurrency. He also explains how they explore new technology for use by the agency, itself -- they call that CFTC 2.0 -- as well as “Digital Reg,” an internal think tank for rapid learning and sharing of tech insight. Second, Dan talks with me about an exciting initiative they’ve just launched, issuing the first-ever CFTC Science Prize Competition Act challenge. They discovered this law empowering agencies to run competitions to solve regulatory problems in science and technology, and they decided to crowdsource ideas on both the problems to tackle and the process to use. Public comments are due July 24. In our conversation, Dan throws out some of the ideas he and his colleagues have thought of -- maybe regulatory data visualization tools, or machine-learning for market surveillance, or machine-readable and machine-executable regulation -- but they want to hear from you. Our listeners are among the most thoughtful people anywhere on regulation innovation, so please comment. You could even become CFTC Innovator of the Year! Our third topic is one that rarely surfaces in the innovation dialogue, and solely needs discussion: the legal and procedural obstacles to government agencies that want to embrace innovation. We could call the topic, government modernization. Think about it. If you were a federal agency wanting to keep up with technology innovation, you would want to be able to do a few things. You would want to be able to try out new technologies, hands-on. If the innovation was something you might adopt for your own agency, you would want to test it before you had to commit to a major procurement budget and procedure. You would also want to be able to brainstorm with a wide range of people, learning from them, thinking through ideas with them. All of this is stunted today by well-intentioned rules that were designed long ago -- for good reason -- to prevent inappropriate influence, backroom deals, and the like. Dan talks in particular about the Anti-Deficiency Act, which restricts procurement activities and prevents the CFTC from being able to try out new kinds of tools. Another issue is the procurement process itself. I met a few months ago with people from a different agency, showing them some innovative technology that could make their regulatory work easier, and one of them said, “If we decided today that we should adopt this, we would have it in seven years.” I’ve talked with other agencies that cite the Federal Advisory Committee Act, with its restrictions on meetings, and the Administrative Procedure Act, which structures the rule-making process and, at some stages, limits interactive dialogue. Agencies have raised concerns about various “government in the sunshine” rules, which again make it difficult to talk informally. Some can’t readily attend a breakfast or lunch event. They have to ask about the value of the meal being served and if it’s more than, I think it’s $15, they can’t eat it, or they have to go through paperwork to pay for it. And of course, there are complex approval processes for participating in various kinds of forums. More than any show we’ve done, this one puts you in the shoes of the regulatory agency and shows how their hands are tied by procedural prohibitions and requirements. I’d love to see someone do a study, maybe a graduate thesis, on how rules that were written in an older, slower era may now undermine the ability of regulators to keep up with exponential change in technology. We could use suggestions on updating them for the digital age. And remember, it’s an issue much broader than finance. I’ve been in and around Washington for decades and can remember the bad old days before some of these rules were created -- indeed, I remember some of the bad old practices that led to them. Still, we don’t need to straightjacket our regulators. Other countries have a much more fluid discussion between agencies and industry, and also have the ability to try things. One model is the Bank of England’s Fintech Accelerator, which explores new technology for the bank itself. And Dan and I both participated in London last month in the amazing AML Tech Sprint run by the UK Financial Conduct Authority -- which is a stunning model of innovative regulatory process. Its leaders were my guests on the last podcast we posted (which my friend Peter Renton of LendAcademy and LendIt called the “most fascinating discussion he’s ever heard on the future of financial regulation” -- if you missed it, check it out). Meanwhile, here’s some great news. Just a few days ago, Congressman Austin Scott (R-GA) introduced the CFTC Research and Development Modernization Act, H.R. 6121. Dan refers to it in our talk – it’s bipartisan legislation to address some of these hurdles at the CFTC. We’ll link to it in the show notes. The bill would permit the Commission to collaborate on projects with fintech developers. It would also allow it to receive “gifts” for R&D purposes, including software to try out, subject to common sense safeguards. The bill echoes work by Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who has sought to facilitate innovation by all the financial regulatory agencies. And the US agencies, themselves, are all moving ahead, too. The CFPB’s Acting Director, Mick Mulvaney, plans to launch a regulatory sandbox. The FDIC held a tremendously impressive technology forum. Five US agencies attended the UK tech sprint. Regulation innovation is coming, and no one is more thoughtful about it than Dan Gorfine. More links Our Podcast with Christopher Woolard of the UK Financial Conduct Authority Our Podcast with Nick Cook, the FCA’s head of regtech FinRegLab, which is leading regulatory innovation in the US Link to transcription of this episode (Note that transcripts may sometimes contain errors and that transcript timing notations do not match the posted podcast) More on Dan Gorfine Daniel Gorfine is Chief Innovation Officer and Director, LabCFTC at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. LabCFTC is dedicated to facilitating market-enhancing financial technology (FinTech) innovation, fair market competition, and proactive regulatory excellence and understanding of emerging technologies. Daniel is also an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center where he teaches a course on ‘FinTech Law & Policy.’ Daniel was most recently Vice President, External Affairs & Associate General Counsel at OnDeck, and previously served as director of financial markets policy and legal counsel at the Milken Institute think tank where he focused on technology-driven financial innovation, capital access, and financial market policy. Earlier in his career, Gorfine worked at the international law firm Covington & Burling LLP and served a clerkship with U.S. District Court Judge Catherine C. Blake in the District of Maryland. A graduate of Brown University (A.B.), Daniel holds a J.D. from George Washington University Law School and an M.A. from the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. More for our listeners We have many more great podcasts in the queue. We’ll talk with another community bank CEO, Mike Butler of Radius Bank.  We’ll have two more episodes that we recorded this year at LendIt. One is a discussion of new research by LendUp and Experian, on credit reporting, and the other is with Greg Kidd, Founder of Global ID.  We also recorded two episodes at last month’s Comply 2018 conference in New York, with two regtech firms -- Compliance.ai, which offers machine-readable regulatory compliance, and Alloy, which has high-tech solutions for meeting the Know-Your-Customer rules in AML. Speaking of LendIt, I was a guest last week on Lend Academy podcast, and Peter Renton will be on our show soon as well, so watch for those. I’m also excited we’ll have several leading members of Congress on the show in the coming weeks. So, stay tuned! The summer conference slowdown is nearly upon us, but I hope to see you at upcoming speeches and events including: American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville, TN Money 2020, October in Las Vegas. Among other things, I’ll be speaking on the Revolution Stage about the regulation revolution Also, watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well. If you listen to Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, please leave a five-star rating on the show to help us build it. Also please remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep it going, and come to jsbarefoot.com for today’s show notes and to join our email list, so you’ll get the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts. As always, please follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Support our Podcast And tell me what you’re thinking about digitizing regulation. Let’s widen this dialogue to more people and more and more ideas! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

This is the most unique, and the most consequential, show we’ve ever done. If our thousands of listeners all think about it and especially if you share it widely, it has the most potential to actually change the financial regulatory world for the better and also in turn, therefore, to improve the financial world, too. It goes right into the heart of the most important work, being done by the most innovative people, on redesigning regulation for the digital age. My guests are Chris Woolard and Nick Cook of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. We sat down to record it on the last night of their enormous, ambitious, mold-breaking tech sprint held in London a few weeks ago. This regtech sprint, the fifth one they’ve done, focused on how to use new technology to combat financial crime. The sprints -- which are hackathons -- play a dual role, both sparking new ideas on specific regulatory challenges and also innovating in regulatory process, itself. I’ll set the scene for you. It was a Thursday night, dinner time, in the London offices of EY, in the Canary Wharf section of the city on the Thames, just a few blocks from the FCA’s building. EY generously offered their beautiful training facility for the sprint, because the FCA’s building is too small to hold the 400 people who were there by the end, or even the 260 who had been there for three days, working feverishly, day and night, to invent new solutions for money laundering. Those people had arrived on Tuesday morning and had self-formed into sixteen small teams, usually with total strangers, in a format mixing organizations and most importantly, mixing knowledge and skill types. Regulatory experts and AML experts and lawyers had worked elbow-to-elbow with tech experts, brainstorming ideas together and then translating these, live, into computer code, using test data provided by the participating tech companies. We sat down for this recording in a quiet conference room, just as the main gathering began to shift into post-conference socializing and bonding and celebrating over food and drink. It was one of those special moments where everyone feels elated and excited, and at the same time, completely drained. For me, as I think I say two or three times in this show, the sprint was the most fascinating and inspiring thing I’ve ever experienced. I hope that listening to it will inspire you to take up the FCA’s challenge to build on it in your own country and with your counterparts in other countries, and perhaps to take up their offer to help. People came to the sprint from all over the world, including, I’m especially happy to say, a substantial contingent of both regulators and financial companies from the United States (and also a new nonprofit, FinRegLab, with which I’m affiliated and which is building an empirical testing environment for regtech concepts in Washington). The FCA is at the forefront of a global regulatory awakening about the need to innovate regulatory models as technology increasingly outpaces the speed at which government can change. Its most famous innovation is its Regulatory Sandbox, which enables fintech innovation to be tested in a controlled experiment under the regulator’s close scrutiny and is being emulated throughout the world. Less well-known is their equally important innovation on the regtech side, for which they invented this creative new format, the regulator’s TechSprint.   Both the sandbox and the sprints have three key elements essential for regulatory innovation. First, they make collaboration happen, especially between the regulatory and tech worlds. Second, they enable very fast learning by the regulator, through direct, hands-on experience. And third, and most crucially, they use experimentation. They provide a safe space for trying things out, testing, learning, shaping -- quickly and cheaply. They apply the techniques that technology innovators figured out years ago, about the need to start small, try something, adjust as you learn, and if some ideas are going to fail, let them “fail fast” in a controlled setting where critical lessons can be learned early, and no harm can be done. These ideas are hard for people to grasp in the abstract, especially the notion that regulators need to get comfortable with learning through trial and error because there’s no other way to learn fast enough. I’m a former bank regulator and I know this idea is completely alien to regulatory culture and tradition, which have been designed, for good reason, to be careful and thorough and deliberate. A couple of years ago, a senior U.S. bank regulator told me that her agency had figured this out by spending time on the FCA’s website, reaching this epiphany that, the regulator doesn’t need to have all the answers -- even can’t have all the answers on tech change, before moving forward. It’s really the other way around. You have to move forward, to get to the answers. Chris and Nick describe the very same process -- as Chris calls it, the light bulb turning on, suddenly realizing it was riskier NOT to move, even though you’re not sure exactly what to do and what will happen. To me, the most interesting thing you’ll hear in this show is their voice as they describe this journey, the struggle toward creating a new way to work. Again, this was the fifth tech sprint. Be sure listen to my two earlier FCA shows, one with Chris that explains the FCA’s regulatory sandbox and one with Nick on regtech. The regtech one featured the breakthrough, two-week sprint held last November, successfully proving that regulatory reporting requirements could be updated directly, computer-to-computer, by issuing a rule change in the form of code, rather than words. That one was like a regulatory moonshot -- it could eventually change regulation, itself. This new sprint last month, by contrast, focused on the specific use case that’s most ripe for regtech transformation -- anti-money laundering. The UN estimates that there’s $1.6 - $2 trillion in annual global financial crime, and that we catch less than 1 percent -- despite spending tens of billions of dollars each year. And it’s getting worse. The criminals and terrorists today use sophisticated technology and operate as networks, while banks and governments use old technologies, with data trapped in silos. As Chris and Nick said, it will take a network, to beat a network. Chris also said that a million children are trafficked, each year. There’s a moment, in our conversation, where Nick says the sprint brings people to realizing that collectively, we can actually DO something about money laundering -- and you can hear the tone of excitement in his voice. For decades, we couldn’t really do much better, because we’ve had analog-era technology. Today we can use digitally-native tools. We can use them to fight crime and also to tackle nearly every other aspect of financial regulation -- all the areas where problems are so hard to solve. Financial inclusion. Consumer education. Preventing discrimination and predatory finance. Identity verification. Risk assessment. Financial reporting. New technology can make it all work better, and cost less, at the same time -- something that in the past was completely impossible. Believe it or not, I’m actually curbing my enthusiasm for this. This is the tamped down version. I think this is a regulatory revolution, beginning to move. Please listen to this episode, share it with everyone you know, and join in the dialogue. More on Chris Woolard Christopher Woolard is Executive Director of Strategy and Competition and an Executive Board Member of the Financial Conduct Authority. He’s responsible for policy, strategy, competition, market intelligence, consumer issues, the Chief Economist's department, communications and the Innovate initiative. He is chair of the FCA's Policy Steering Committee and a non-executive board member of the Payment Systems Regulator. Christopher joined the FCA in January 2013. Previously he was Group Director and Content Board member at Ofcom. He has spent most of his career in regulation or policy development including working at the BBC and in government as a senior civil servant. He is a Sloan Fellow of London Business School. More on Nick Cook Nick Cook leads the FCA’s RegTech activities, including the FCA’s TechSprint events - the first events of their kind convened by a financial regulator. He is responsible for creating the FCA’s Analytics Centre of Excellence to drive the organization’s use of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence.  Nick is the FCA’s representative on the European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) Financial Innovation Standing Committee and an advisor to the RegTech for Regulators Accelerator Programme. Nick joined the Financial Services Authority (the FCA’s predecessor) in 2009, initially in its Enforcement and Market Oversight Division. Prior to joining the regulator, Nick qualified as a chartered accountant at KPMG Forensic. More for our listeners Full interview transcript. We have many more great podcasts in the queue. We’ll talk with another community bank CEO, Mike Butler of Radius Bank.  We’ll have two more episodes recorded this year at LendIt. One is a discussion of new research by LendUp and Experian, on credit reporting, and the other is with my friend Greg Kidd of Global ID.  We also recorded two episodes at last month’s Comply 2018 conference in New York, with two regtech firms -- Compliance.ai, which offers machine-readable regulatory compliance, and Alloy, which has high-tech solutions for meeting the Know-Your-Customer rules in AML. Speaking of LendIt, I’ll also be a guest on Peter Renton’s Lend Academy podcast, and he’ll be on our show soon as well, so watch for those. I’m also excited we’ll have several leading members of Congress on the show in the coming weeks. So, stay tuned! I hope to see you at upcoming speeches and events including: CFSI’s Emerge, this week in Los Angeles, CA North Dakota Bankers Convention, June 10-12, Fargo, ND American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville, TN Money 2020, October in Las Vegas. Among other things, I’ll be speaking on the Revolution Stage about the regulation revolution Also, watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well. If you listen to Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, please leave a five star rating on the show to help us build it. Also please remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep it going, and come to jsbarefoot.com for today’s show notes and to join our email list, so you’ll get the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts. As always, please follow me on Twitter and Facebook. And tell me what you’re thinking about digitizing regulation. Let’s widen this dialogue to more people, and more and more ideas! Support our Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

One of my goals for Barefoot Innovation is to amplify the voice of America’s community banks about the future of financial innovation and regulation. Today’s guest is perfect for this. He is Bob Rivers, CEO of Eastern Bank in Boston. At age 200, Eastern is the oldest and largest mutually-owned bank in the United States. At the same time, it is one of the most “young” and nimble community banks in adopting new technology. Mutual savings banks were once common, especially in New England. Most have converted to stock ownership, but Bob points to Eastern’s mutual structure as a key advantage in its strategy, which includes a strong focus on social mission. He explains the bank’s roots in Salem, Massachusetts, serving people who had no bank, and describes how it evolved to emphasize empowering marginalized customers, including women. He also tells the story of his own rise to leading Eastern, from a start 36 years ago that included cleaning bank branches at night. It’s a classic community banking story, for both Eastern and its leader. What mainly drew me to Eastern’s offices, though, on a cold day in Boston last February, was its reputation for innovation. When people talk about community banks and the technology change that’s transforming banking, Eastern’s name always comes up. In this episode, Bob describes how their innovation strategy began six years ago, when he invited Eastern’s Chief Technology Officer, Don Westermann, out for “walkabouts” in Kendall Square, a Boston neighborhood noted for innovation. Bob and Don just introduced themselves, cold, to tech firms, hoping “to understand the mindset of the disruptive innovator” -- their goals and approaches, and also how to reach their networks. Two years into that process, they met PerkStreet Financial, which Bob describes as similar to Simple (we’ve done two shows with Simple CEO Josh Reich, who just stepped down this month -- they are here and here, still great listening.)  In Boston, PerkStreet was giving up (actually as a result of regulatory changes), when Bob met its CEO Dan O’Malley, and they went into business together. The resulting Eastern Labs set out to digitize the lending application process for small businesses, including on SBA loans. Three years later, Eastern spun off that enterprise as Numerated Growth Technologies -- whose website describes it as “Built For Banks, Incubated Inside A Bank.” Now Eastern has opened a new Lab 2.0 with plans for additional tech solutions. In our conversation, Bob gives a road map for how a community bank can undertake this kind of innovation -- how to position it, structure it, staff it, fund it, and run it; how much capital it needs; how to price the services; how much to integrate the innovation team with the bank versus leave it independent; and how to use tech-world concepts like agile design and minimum viable products, or MVP’s. He also explains how an initiative like this can radically transform a small bank’s ability to attract tech talent, and how it can remake the bank’s culture, itself. Bob also has views on how regulation factors into innovation. Notably, Eastern recruited Steve Antonakes, former Deputy Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former Massachusetts Commissioner of Banks, to lead its enterprise risk function. Bob has a range of insights into what regulators are doing right, along with suggestions. This bank has cracked the code on one of the most critical challenges facing community institutions, namely how to partner with innovators to leverage the respective strengths and weaknesses of each. As he says, fintech startups used to see themselves as replacing lumbering old banks, but most now hope instead to work with them, because these two groups need each other. Few banks of any size can innovate the way startups can. Yes, banks have always innovated, but today’s changes, coming so fast, driven by trends erupting in the wider tech world, are simply not in basic banking DNA. Few banks can build a world-class, digitally-native user experience. Few can afford and attract the data scientists for new-generation risk analytics.  Conversely, though, very few fintechs can readily get the building blocks needed to scale up, like rapid, affordable customer acquisition, or accessing stable, low-cost funding, or deeply understanding financial products, markets and regulations -- all of which are strengths every bank can bring to the table. And the good news for community banks, specifically, is that they also have natural advantages over large banks, despite having less sophisticated technology, precisely because they’re small. They can be nimble. They don’t have to turn the proverbial battleship. They can chart and follow a new course, as Eastern is doing. Smaller banks see this logic, but most struggle to know where to start. Bob Rivers has the answer. It’s simply, start where you are and just move forward. You don’t need to figure it all out first. Really, you can’t. Instead, start small. Try things. Immerse in rapid learning. Talk to people. I’ll add, go to tech conferences and read tech publications. Do the walkabout! I recently spoke at a state bankers association conference. On the hotel elevator, coming down to the event before my talk, I chatted with a former bank CEO, now a director. When he learned my speech was on technology, he laughed and said, “I’m too old to learn it!” I told him I was going to try to change his mind about that, because, here’s the reality: banks’ CEO’s must lead this. They don’t have to be techies -- Bob Rivers isn’t. He says he still balances his checkbook with a calculator. But he’s leading his bank into a new digitized financial world, by knowing it needs to change and embracing innovation with boldness and imagination. More about today’s show Link to Full Transcript of This Episode Our podcast episode with John Ryan, CEO of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, on banks and communities. My cover story in Texas Banker, with tips for community banks on digital transformation. More about Bob Rivers Bob Rivers is Chairman and CEO of Eastern Bank, America’s oldest and largest mutual bank with two centuries of service to the communities it serves. During Bob’s tenure, Eastern has built on its long legacy of community service and philanthropy by developing a robust advocacy platform in support of various social justice and sustainability issues. In 2014, Bob co-founded Eastern’s innovation venture, Eastern Labs, which earlier this year spun out Numerated Growth Technologies, a new fintech company offering a state-of-the-art small business lending platform. Bob has also been personally recognized for his work in championing social justice and sustainability issues by organizations and outlets like The Boston Globe, Boston Business Journal, The Partnership, Get Konnected!, Color Magazine, the Massachusetts Immigration & Refugee Advocacy (MIRA), Asian American Civic Association (AACA), Association for Latino Professionals For America (ALPFA), El Planeta, the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, The Theater Offensive and The Ad Club. Since the podcast was recorded, Eastern Bank has opened a new branch in Roxbury Crossing, the first bank in that community to open in 20 years, reflecting the bank’s work in underserved communities. More for our listeners We have many more great shows in the queue. We’ll talk with the CEO of another community institution, Mike Butler of Radius Bank, which is much smaller than Eastern and is pursuing a fascinating innovation strategy.  We’ll have two more episodes recorded this year at LendIt. One is a discussion of new research undertaken jointly by LendUp and Experian, on credit reporting, and the other is with my friend Greg Kidd of Global ID.  We also recorded two episodes at this month’s Comply 2018 conference in New York, with two regtech firms -- Compliance.ai, which offers machine-readable regulatory compliance, and Alloy, which has high-tech solutions for meeting the Know-Your-Customer rules in AML. Speaking of LendIt, I’m also going to be a guest on Peter Renton’s Lend Academy podcast, and he’ll be on our show as well, so watch for those. I’m also pleased to say we’ll have several leading members of Congress on the show in the coming weeks. In addition, we’ll record a very special show at the upcoming, global AML tech sprint being run by the UK Financial Conduct Authority in London this week -- which will be, in my view, the most important regtech development in memory...for reasons we’ll talk about. So, stay tuned! I hope to see you at upcoming events including: Financial Conduct Authority AML TechSprint this week -- May 22-25, London, UK (By invitation only) American Bankers Association Payments Forum, June 1, Washington, DC CFSI’s Emerge, June 6, Los Angeles, CA North Dakota Bankers Convention, June 11-12, Fargo. ND American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville, TN Money 2020, October in Las Vegas. Among other things, I’ll be speaking on the Revolution Stage about the revolution in...what else?  Regulation! Also, watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well. As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.   Support the Podcast And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

We’re moving into a new era of regulation and compliance that will be driven by new technology. Most of our listeners know I’ve co-founded a regtech firm, Hummingbird, to help bring this new model, first, to anti-money laundering, which is widely seen as the arena where the old compliance model is most broken, and where new technology could go the farthest, fastest, to solve everyone’s problems -- by both improving outcomes and cutting costs. There is a growing global “regtech” community, in both the public and private sectors, aiming to transform financial regulation and compliance, and specifically to make them both digitally-native, with all the power of digitization to make everything better, faster, and cheaper, all at once. Executing this transformation will take imagination, vision, wisdom and even courage, which is why I invited today’s guest to join us.  He is Jim Richards, founder of the new firm, RegTech Consulting, and I think he used the word “courage” six times, in our talk.  We sat down together at this year’s LendIt conference in San Francisco, just a few days after Jim had retired from his position as the Bank Secrecy Act Officer and Global Head of Financial Crimes Risk management at Wells Fargo, a job he held for more than twelve years. He’s also an attorney and a deep expert in financial crime. Jim is famously outspoken. He’s also funny (he says the book he wrote on transnational financial crime sold more copies in Russian than in English. Most of all, though, he’s frustrated. He thinks we can do better in fighting financial crime. I do too. According to the United Nations, there’s about $2 trillion in global financial crime each year, and we’re catching less than 1 percent of it. To achieve these paltry results, the financial industry spends around $50 billion a year. In other words, launderers can fund terrorism and amass wealth by trafficking in drugs, weapons, and human beings, with very little risk of getting caught. No wonder financial crime is a growing global business. Jim says that the heart of this problem is that incentives are misaligned, which means resources are too. He thinks we’ve built a regulatory system that does not reward effectiveness but instead prizes compliance “hygiene.” The theory of the system, of course, is that banks’ careful compliance with the AML regulations should lead to high levels of effectiveness in helping law enforcement stop financial crime. Possibly, in an earlier era, it did. Today, though, there is a massive mismatch between the compliance activities required by our regulations and the desired outcomes -- partly because the technology of both money laundering, and anti-money laundering, has shifted under our feet. And today’s methods can’t scale up. Like many people in the AML world -- including me -- Jim envisions a better system in which, mostly through newer technology, we could take some of the thousands of people and billions of dollars devoted to this effort and redirect them to drive better results, and cut the costs, too. He has lots of ideas. They include updating the rules on Currency Transaction Reports; fixing the Know Your Customer process through more information standardization, prescreening, and data sharing; addressing the new beneficial ownership requirements (which he calls a tsunami hitting banks and their small business customers; and resolving what he calls “The Clash of the Titles” -- the four titles of the US Code that govern financial crime. He suggests getting law enforcement input into financial regulators’ enforcement efforts. He has thoughts on how AML and fraud detection overlap and differ. He says there’s a lot to learn from how fintech companies do AML since they generally have good data and new systems. Like our previous Barefoot Innovation guest, Ripple’s Chris Larsen, Jim sees a useful model in how global trade was transformed by the advent of standardized shipping containers, as explained in Marc Levinson’s book, The Box. A key issue is transaction monitoring (although Jim vigorously argues that term is obsolete). The law requires banks to monitor their customers’ activity and report suspicious patterns.  Today, this process, systemwide, produces huge over-reporting of meaningless alerts that drown both bank personnel and law enforcement in low-value information they don’t have the tools to analyze. It’s a perfect use case for AI, which Jim says Wells Fargo began using in AML as early as 2008 and is now building further under his successor, Graham Bailey (whom Jim calls a genius, the best AML technologist in the industry). Jim says that banks like Wells Fargo devote less than ten percent of their AML compliance people to working on sophisticated, complex crime, while the other 90+ percent do regulatory compliance, just “crunching through the volumes.”  This is at a time when the crime itself is getting more and more sophisticated because the worst criminals are adopting new tech and are building global networks, most of which we can’t find with current methods. He makes the case that it would be good to flip that and deck the 90 percent against the big problems. We already have the technology to do that, both in process and analytics. We just need to enable the system to adopt it, for both government and industry. The original AML law in the United States, the Bank Secrecy Act, is approaching the half-century mark. It’s been modernized and automated along the way -- FinCEN has brought in a lot of automation -- but the system doesn’t yet leverage the newest technology. It needs to shift to digitally-native design, probably with open source technology that can enable new, efficient, effective approaches, system-wide. A few weeks after we recorded this episode, I hosted a roundtable in Washington where experts from across the AML ecosystem -- large and small banks, fintechs, regtechs, bank regulators, trade groups, Congressional staff, academics and, crucially, law enforcement -- spent a day together thinking through next-generation AML. The new Comptroller of the Currency, Joseph Otting, has made AML modernization a top priority. Change is coming. And it’s attracting great people, including great tech people, into solving these problems, including many who, a year ago, would surely have laughed to hear Jim Richards say, as he did to me, that BSA Officer is “the most fascinating job you can have in banking.”  People think compliance is boring. They’re wrong. It’s fascinating, and it’s important. Jim has founded his new firm, RegTech Advisors, to, as he puts it, “develop the next generation of professionals, technologies, programs, and regimes and really make a difference.” He thinks doing that will take courage... including the courage to make some mistakes. That’s a type of courage that doesn’t come easily to the regulatory sector, but we’re going to have to develop it. More on Jim Richards James R. Richards, B.Comm., JD, CAMS Principal and Founder, RegTech Consulting, LLC www.regtechconsulting.net Richards@ThinkRTC.net (925) 818-6612 Author, “Transnational Criminal Organizations, Cybercrime, and Money Laundering” (CRC Press, New York, London, Boca Raton, ISBN 0-8493-2806-3) Jim Richards is Principal and Founder of RegTech Consulting, LLC, a private consultancy aimed at developing the next generation of BSA/AML and financial crimes professionals, technologies, and programs. Services include BSA Officer coaching, program reviews, crisis management, director support, non-financial institution development and awareness, and FinTech due diligence. From 2005 to April 2018 Jim was BSA Officer, Global Head of Financial Crimes Risk Management, Wells Fargo & Co., where he was responsible for governance and program oversight of Bank Secrecy Act and AML for Wells Fargo’s global operations, including quarterly reporting to the Board of Directors. As Director of the Global Financial Crimes Risk Management group, Jim oversaw governance and program execution of BSA, AML, External Fraud, Global Sanctions, Financial Crimes Analytics, and High-Risk Customer Due Diligence. He was a member of the Wells Fargo Management Committee and Enterprise Risk Management Committee, and he represented Wells Fargo with the Bank Secrecy Act Advisory Group (BSAAG) of the US Department of the Treasury. Jim previously held AML and financial intelligence positions at Bank of America and FleetBoston. He was also an Assistant District Attorney, Special Investigations Unit, Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office, in Cambridge, MA, investigating and prosecuting cases involving narcotics, organized crime, white-collar crime, and economic crime in the largest county in Massachusetts.  Investigations and prosecutions included felony embezzlement, attorney fraud, public corruption, computer-based larceny, gambling, money laundering, and organized gambling cases. He was Supervisor of the SIU’s Narcotics Forfeiture Group, with carriage of and supervision over the Group’s civil and criminal forfeiture caseload. Jim has prior experience in private legal practice at Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston, as a Barrister in Ontario, Canada, and as Special Constable, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, E Division (British Columbia). More for our listeners Article I co-authored with Hummingbird Cofounder Matt Van Buskirk on how to fight human trafficking My podcast on the India Stack with Sanjay Jain The Box, by Marc Levinson Thank You For Being Late, by Thomas Friedman We have great shows in the queue. We’ll talk with the CEO’s of two community banks -- Bob Rivers of Eastern Bank and Mike Butler of Radius Bank, both of which are leading the way in innovation by smaller institutions. We’ll also have two more I recorded at LendIt. One is a discussion of new research undertaken jointly by LendUp and Experian, on how to improve financial access through credit reporting. The other is with my friend Greg Kidd of Global ID.  I’m pleased to say we also will have several members of Congress in the coming weeks, and also several guests I’ll record at the upcoming, global AML tech sprint being run by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. I hope to see you at upcoming events including: Comply 2018, May 16, New York, NY FCA TechSprint, May 22-25, London, UK (By invitation only) American Bankers Association Payments Forum, June 1, Washington, DC CFSI’s Emerge, June 6, Los Angeles, CA North Dakota Bankers Convention, June 11-12, Fargo. ND American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville, TN Money 2020, October in Las Vegas where, among other things, I’ll be speaking on the Revolution Stage about the revolution in...what else?  Regulation. As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.   Support the Podcast And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

My guest this week is Michael Wiegand, Director of the Financial Services for the Poor strategy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. If you had new ideas for solving the world’s toughest problems, and ample resources to devote to pursuing them, you might do what Bill Gates did when he stepped back from running Microsoft in order to apply what he’d learned there, especially about the power of technology, to problems that have long seemed unsolvable. He and his wife launched their foundation to tackle age-old challenges like eliminating malaria, or combating disease that’s spread by lack of clean water and sanitation, or... achieving worldwide financial inclusion. Anyone who spends time with the developing world’s financial inclusion efforts is in constant contact with the Gates’ Foundation, both directly and indirectly through the many projects and entities they fund. Their efforts are always notable for incisive analysis and insight. Like their counterparts at the Omidyar Network, which works in the same space (and with whom I often work), they have a genius for finding the critical, concrete, doable things that, if accomplished, will set needed change in motion across an entire complex ecosystem, drawing in the efforts and energy of more and more people with leverage on the problem. Michael and I met at the Asian Development Bank summit last winter in Manilla, and then both went on to the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s enormous FinTech Festival, where we recorded this conversation. Anyone interested in emerging markets will find it fascinating, but I also recommend it to everyone who cares about consumer finance, financial protection, inclusion, and technology in the developed world as well. As I’ve said in other shows, developing countries are in many ways ahead of the larger economies in both fintech and regtech. That’s mainly because their consumer financial markets are already mostly digital -- i.e. delivered through the mobile phone -- and therefore easier to regulate through digital means. It’s also because the rush of new, lower-income consumers into these markets makes it critical for regulators to figure out how to protect them. That is going to require new regulatory tools that are already being designed. The World Bank has set the goal that every adult in the world should have financial access -- essentially a “bank” account in their phone -- by 2020. Michael discusses where we stand in that effort -- nearly two billion people short -- and describes Gates’ goals for progress by 2030. He explains what the pathway toward it looks like -- the most critical things that have to happen, including the technology, the infrastructure, and the trust. The pathway starts with payments, since payments innovation like Kenya’s M-Pesa has been the first step in mobile financial access almost everywhere and, once established, makes everything else possible. Michael describes Gates’ Level One project, which includes offering workshops for central banks on how to develop electronic systems that will function safely and well in replacing cash and other forms of payment. (As Michael explains, a key is to use “push” payments initiated by the sender of the money, rather than the more common arrangement in which payees “pull” the funds.) They also have launched the Mojaloop initiative, using blockchains and digital payments with partners like Ripple (Mojaloop is the Swahili word for “one.”)   Michael talks about how phone-based payments activity can accumulate a data footprint for people who lack one, so that the combination of their growing data identity and the mobile delivery channel can enable other financial services to begin to stack on top of the payments capability, in the phone -- lending, savings, insurance, financial management, and the rest. He answers the often-asked question of whether any of this can work, when most people now do have phones, but not yet smartphones. He cites a McKinsey Global Institute study estimating that digital financial services could add $3.7 trillion to the GDP of developing countries by 2025. He also talks about the disproportionately positive effects of all this on women, including how the men in their own lives view them -- a key focus of Gates’ work. We also talked about digital identity in the context of the Know Your Customer, or KYC, anti-money laundering rules that create such barriers for people trying to come into the financial system without traditional identity documents. (Here is my episode with Sanjay Jain about this point, on the India Stack and Aadhaar card.) Again, if you think these developments aren’t relevant to the United States, ask yourself this: how are we going to protect consumers’ financial data from cyberthreats, when we’ve built our identity verification around outdated paper-based systems like social security numbers -- which are now widely for sale on the dark web? We too will have to move to protectable digital identity over time, and we’ll learn a lot from the advanced efforts underway now in other parts of the world. The Gates work, again often teamed up with others like the Omidyar Network, includes helping regulators innovate, themselves. He talks about the Regtech for Regulators initiative, or R2A, that’s using technology to help several countries solve their main regulatory pain points, with solutions ranging from digitized AML to creating a complaint chatbot on consumers’ mobile phones. He talks about funding the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, or AFI, which consists of the central banks and financial regulators of the Global South (here’s my podcast with AFI’s leader, Alfred Hannig.) Michael talks about how Gates chooses which countries to work with as learning laboratories, where they can develop lessons that may apply everywhere. He also talks about supporting C-GAP, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, under the umbrella of the World Bank’s financial inclusion work. And also the Better Than Cash Alliance, under the umbrella of the United Nations. I could go on -- again, they are touching nearly all the important innovations underway. There’s a genius here for figuring out what needs to happen, including what needs to happen first, and second and third; learning through small, concrete experiments; and then seeding and building coalitions or where needed, new institutions, to make progress actually...happen. It’s breathtakingly ambitious, and yet, it’s practical. Here’s the thing. This is not an old-style charitable effort to chip away at a problem that will always be there. It’s an actual effort to solve it. In other shows I’ve talked about “wicked problems” -- problems too complex to be solved -- and how sometimes technology solves them. That’s the Gates vision on the problem of financial inclusion. More for our listeners We have more great shows coming up. We’ll talk with the CEO’s of two very innovative community banks -- Bob Rivers of Eastern Bank and Mike Butler of Radius bank. I also have three wonderful episodes I recorded at this year’s LendIt conference in San Francisco. One is with Jim Richards, recorded just a few days after he retired from his role as global head of Anti-Money Laundering for Wells Fargo. Plus I had an incredibly fascinating conversation with my friend Greg Kidd of Global ID. And we’ll have an overview of new research done jointly by LendUp and Experian, on how to improve financial access through credit reporting. We also will have several members of Congress in the coming weeks, which I’m really looking forward to. And we’ll have a show with the head of innovation at the CFTC, Dan Gorfine, who is going to talk about WHY it’s so hard for government to change -- some of the barriers that, while well-intentioned, may need to be rethought for today’s fast-changing technology environment. I hope to see you at upcoming events including: Women Corporate Directors Global Summit, May 10, New York, NY Comply 2018, May 16, New York, NY Financial Conduct Authority AML TechSprint, May 22-25, London, UK (By invitation only) American Bankers Association Payments Forum, June 1, Washington, DC CFSI’s Emerge, June 6, Los Angeles, CA North Dakota Bankers Convention, June 11-12, Fargo. ND American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville, TN As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.   And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going! Until next time, keep innovating! Support our Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Tim Chen is the founder and CEO of NerdWallet, and he’s a classic American story. In today’s episode, he describes the remarkable journey he’s taken so far in his still-young life, which has had dramatic ups and downs -- (as he says, when one door closes, a bigger gate may open). NerdWallet, which he founded at age 26, now helps more than 100 million people every year shop for and choose financial products that meet their needs. NerdWallet is a matchmaker, guiding consumers to find the financial products that fit them best, and doing it in a way that automates large swaths of the financial advisory process in order to make advice affordable for people who don’t qualify for a personal wealth manager. Tim says, “Money is so complicated” and he talked with me about how to make it all simpler, especially for people with relatively simple financial profiles. One key is automate the process of learning about their situation and needs, without making that process intrusive or too burdensome to be practical. In our conversation, he talks about how to do this, finding the areas where people’s situations are fairly similar versus those where there’s huge variation. He talks about doing living room visits, and how surprised he’s been by the vast differences among people who look the same if you just consider top-line factors like income. He talks about how much people struggle just to know where they stand, and about being humbled by how little we know. Tim says traditional finance has been opaque, and he wants to change that. Among other things, he wants to break the “entrenched behaviors” around, as he puts it, people basically just taking what they’re given.  As a man who founded a company in his mid-20’s, Tim has ringing advice for other entrepreneurs, including that it really helps to be “delusionally optimistic” about your product. As a startup cofounder myself, I’ve often recalled another bit of advice, on how to set priorities and stay focused on what counts the most. Tim also has interesting thoughts on regulation, and had recently written an op-ed on the future of the CFPB (note that we had this conversation late last year). Finally, he shares his secrets of personal effectiveness, which I suspect you will find surprising.   More for our listeners We have great shows in the queue. They include my talk in Singapore with Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor. We’ll also talk with the CEO’s of two community banks -- Bob Rivers of Eastern Bank and Mike Butler of Radius bank. I was able to record three wonderful episodes at this year’s LendIt conference in San Francisco. One is with Jim Richards, recorded just a few days after he retired from his role as global head of Anti-Money Laundering for Wells Fargo. Plus I had an far-ranging conversation with my friend Greg Kidd of Global ID. And we’ll have an overview of new research done jointly by LendUp and Experian, on how to improve financial access through credit reporting. We also will have several members of Congress in the coming weeks, which I’m really looking forward to. I hope to see you at upcoming events including: Bank Director, The Reality of Regtech, April 18, New York, NY Texas Bankers Association Annual Conference, May 3, Houston, TX Women Corporate Directors Global Institute, May 10, New York, NY Comply 2018, May 16, New York Financial Conduct Authority AML Tech Sprint, May 22-4, London CFSI’s EMERGE, June 6-8, Los Angeles, CA American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville -- I’ll be moderating a general session panel on regtech, and also teaming up again with the ABA for some special podcasts. As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.     And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going!   Support our Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

My guest today is pioneering a crucial innovation within the innovation landscape in finance -- by providing banking services to fintechs through a platform-based financial services model known as the sponsor bank, or partner bank. In today’s episode, Gilles Gade tells the story of founding and building one of the leading sponsor banks, Cross River. Most fintech companies are licensed by their states, but are not banks. That means that every one of them has to find a bank through which to clear payments and connect to the payments system (which only banks can do). That’s not easy -- many fintechs struggle with this because banks are required by their regulators to set up complex systems for due diligence and risk management in dealing with any kind of third party that could affect the bank’s soundness or its customers’ wellbeing. Over the last decade or so, this challenge, combined with the enormous potential of the fintech market, prompted a number of banks to focus on meeting this need -- Gilles points to Webbank as leading the way. These banks have to meet a range of specialized needs including, crucially, taking responsibility for the partner fintechs’ compliance with regulatory requirements. Gilles describes founding Cross River in 2008, when the financial crisis had curtailed many kinds of consumer and small business credit, and talks about how new companies emerged to fill the gap, with either new kinds of products, or new ways of creating access to old products. He points to fintech lenders -- like Affirm, Lending Club, and Sofi -- and also to payments-focused companies like Coinbase, Transferwise and ActiveHours, as innovators that are opening up more inclusive finance. Gilles is especially thoughtful on regulatory issues, which he calls “by far” the biggest challenge for the fintech world. He emphasizes that the single biggest difficulty is sheer uncertainty, as technology change outstrips traditional regulatory change mechanisms. Gilles cites the Madden v. Midland litigation, with its controversy over national versus state interest rates, and the “valid when made” doctrine, as issues that need clarity so that lenders can build stable business models. Gilles also has thoughts on the Comptroller of the Currency’s proposal for creating a special fintech charter (note that we recorded this discussion during the tenure of Keith Noreika as Acting Comptroller of the Currency). Gilles laments that we have no fewer than 12 federal regulators involved in these issues (I myself have actually counted twice that many, directly and indirectly involved). Like me, he’s optimistic about the innovation efforts of the regulatory agencies -- he mentions the OCC in particular -- and of congressional leaders like Congressmen Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and Gregory Meeks (D-NY) -- both of whom, I’m delighted to say, are going to be guests on our show. Cross River’s emphasis on policy issues has led it to a number of leadership initiatives, including creating the Online Lending Policy Institute, which sponsors an outstanding Online Lending Policy Summit in Washington each fall, and also sponsoring the policy programming at the LendIt conference, which is coming up next month -- I’ll be there, by the way, and I hope you will too! More on Cross River and Gilles Gade Video about the bank Gille Gade: Gilles Gade is a founder of Cross River Bank (CRB) and has served as its Chairman, President and CEO since its inception in 2008 as an innovation-driven state-chartered bank and a provider of fully compliant financial solutions to the marketplace lending and payments sectors. Gilles has over 20 years of experience in investment banking and venture capital including as Co-Founder and Managing Director of Chela Technology Partners and Chela Internet Ventures, a boutique investment bank and venture fund focusing on emerging technologies and telecommunications; technology investment banker at Barclays Capital; and FIG investment banker at Bear Stearns. He started his career in 1990 at Citicorp Venture Capital, after graduating from the MBA Institute IMIP (Groupe IPESUP) in Paris with an MS in International Management. More for our listeners Our upcoming shows will include Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen; Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor; and the CEO’s of both Eastern Bank and Radius Bank. As I mentioned we’ll also have shows soon with two members of Congress, one a Republican and one a Democrat, and some other very special guests. I hope to see you at upcoming events including: Lendit Fintech USA, April 9-11, San Francisco, CA Bank Director, The Reality of Regtech, April 18, New York, NY Texas Bankers Association Annual Conference, May 3, Houston, TX Women Corporate Directors Global Institute, May 10, New York, NY Comply 2018, May 16, New York CFSI’s EMERGE, June 6-8, Los Angeles, CA American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville -- I’ll be moderating a general session panel on regulation and AI, and also teaming up again with the ABA for some special podcasts. Support our Podcast As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today’s episode is like a crystal ball glimpse into the future of banking, narrated by my guest, Anne Boden, the thoughtful and charismatic Founder and CEO of Starling Bank in the UK. Anne has years of experience at large banks, including in IT roles. At one of them, she led an effort to develop an innovation transformation. It brought her to a critical conclusion:  that the only way to create a really innovative bank is to start “from scratch.” When the UK government in 2013 responded to the financial crisis with a new type of charter, Anne founded Starling. Starling was the first of what the UK calls “Challenger Banks,” designed to foster increased market competition. It is also a “digitally-native” bank, built as a fully digital business, for the digital age. Starling is mobile-only. It operates on open platform principles and leverages the new personal data rules in Europe. These say that financial data belongs to the consumer, not the bank, and require companies to implement the customer’s instructions to share account information with any entity the consumer chooses. Among other things, this makes bank accounts “portable,” and also give customers the right to terminate such arrangements and to control how the data can be used. Building on this is a new emerging business model that is, again, essentially a platform. In Starling’s case, they take deposits and do payments, and then they operate what they call a “marketplace” with specialized partners that offer their customers everything from mortgages to insurance, to an array of financial management tools. One result is efficiency.  Anne says 100 or 150 people can do work that needs 10,000 at a large bank. Another is innovation. She talks about how hard it is to seed and propagate an innovation culture at traditional banks, and why they can’t just buy the technology they need and plug it in. As she puts it, “some poor CIO somewhere has to be brave enough to press the button.” Anne also notes that the as the platform model disaggregates traditional functions, the front end of the chain -- the customer relationship and interface -- might separate off and end up in the hands of Google, Facebook or Twitter. Our conversation included her insights on how this new model will evolve; the roles of each partner; why Starling chose to become a bank instead of offering a prepaid card; and how hard it is to do that -- the high attrition rate among those that attempt it.   Starling customers (who, by the way, are not just millennials) have a new kind of financial life. They can simply ask Starling, by voice, whether they can afford to buy a car. They can opt to have bank statements itemize by a given shop, right down to the cheese sandwich and the diet coke. Anne says they could add calorie counts to that and can integrate it with health information from the fitness app, and suddenly, money, lifestyle, and health are integrating in new ways. More on Anne Boden Three decades ago, Anne Boden pioneered the UK’s first same-day payment service – and in the process transformed the future of electronic money. Today, that revolutionary zeal continues to inform her work at Starling Bank, the mobile-only current account app she launched earlier this year. Recently recognized as one of the Global Power Women in FinTech, Anne’s worked at a senior leadership level across some of the world’s best-known financial heavyweights, among them Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland. It was during her tenure as CEO of Allied Irish Banks, however, that she began to explore the exciting potential of financial technology for transforming customer’s everyday lives. At heart a tech startup with a banking license, Starling is a challenger bank built on a foundation of disruptive emerging technology, competing with traditional legacy banks and helping people develop a healthier relationship with their money. More for our listeners Upcoming shows will include Cross River Bank CEO Gilles Gade; Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor; NerdWallet CEO Tim Chen; and the CEO’s of two community banks -- Eastern Bank and Radius bank. And there’s much more in the pipeline!. I hope to see you at upcoming events including: CFSI’s Fintech and the Federal Government: How Policymakers and Startup Companies are Exploring Financial Innovation, March 15, U.S. Senate, Washington Innovate Finance Global Summit, March 19-20, London, UK Regulation and Innovation in the Age of FinTech, with FSD Africa, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and RegHub, March 22-23, London, UK Lendit Fintech USA, April 9-11, San Francisco, CA Bank Director, The Reality of Regtech, April 18, New York, NY Texas Bankers Association Annual Conference, May 3, Houston, TX Women Corporate Directors Global Institute, May 10, New York, NY Comply 2018, May 16, New York CFSI’s EMERGE, June 6-8, Los Angeles, CA American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville -- I’ll be moderating a general session panel on regulation and AI, and also teaming up again with the ABA for some special podcasts. As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going! Support our Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

I always love it when we find innovation in unexpected places, not just in the financial products and channels and regulatory issues we discuss, but also in people inventing new ways to get things done. Today’s guests talk about taking a very old kind of entity -- the industry trade association -- and updating it for the 21st century financial world. As often happens with innovation, the thing that’s new is actually very simple, maybe even obvious, and yet when you set it in motion, things change. That’s what has happened in the UK in 2014 with the creation  of a new trade group called Innovate Finance. As its name conveys, it focuses on fintech innovation. What makes it so innovative and interesting to me, though, is that it has drawn members from the whole financial innovation ecosystem. They have startups, and also banks, and also the other players in the space like consulting and law firms, all actively working with regulators -- and with like-minded companies and governments throughout the world -- all on the same issues at the same time. My guests are the group’s CEO, Charlotte Crosswell, as well as Dan Morgan. At the time of our recording, Dan was the head of policy for Innovate Finance. He has since moved on to be the FinTech Sector Specialist at the UK Department for International Trade, still working on the same issues. His move was already in progress when we recorded this episode, and I’m glad we were able to get his thinking into the dialogue. When I find myself admiring innovation outside the U.S., I always have to note that other countries have a simpler system than we do here, in terms of both industry structure and regulatory framework. Our listeners have often heard me worry that the U.S. system, and especially our multi-agency federal regulatory design, is holding us back. The UK has both a less complex banking system and basically only two regulators, which has clearly helped make them the world leader on the regulatory side of innovation (I’ll link to our podcasts with two of their top regulators in the show notes) and also one of the leaders in fintech, too. It may be that this regulatory environment is one reason that Innovate Finance could form around the full spectrum of financial entities. In the US, our established trade associations are of course working hard to address both industry and policy issues in fintech and regtech. We’ve also had new trade groups form in the last few years, organized by fintechs and/or by big tech companies interested in the financial space. So far, though, we don’t have anything like Innovate Finance (although I know a few people thinking about starting one). Whatever structures emerge over time, I think everyone can learn lessons from how Innovate Finance operates, and especially how it brings both incumbents and newbies into the very same discussions, the same problem-solving, together. The more I work with financial innovation, the more I know for sure that the main solution is in collaboration. Choose your metaphor -- it can be breaking down silos, or cross-pollination, or weaving separate strands together. The only way to figure out what to do, and to move quickly, is by getting the disparate kinds of players together, all the time, as a new way of life. So, you’re going to enjoy hearing Charlotte’s and Dan’s thinking. They talk about the secrets to making this happen, why it’s easier in the UK, and why it’s getting easier for banks to innovate (hint -- that too is about breaking silos). They describe regulators who are not merely accepting change, but are helping to drive it proactively, and who have explicitly adopted an “ecosystem” approach. They describe an emerging world of shared problem-solving in areas like AML, identity and consumers owning their own data. They talk about trends among regulators around the world. Importantly, they also describe their upcoming conference, the IFGS -- Innovate Finance Global Summit in London, March 19-20. I spoke last year and will this year again, and can say with confidence it’s one of the world’s very best. It will be back again in the beautiful, historic Guild Hall, where somehow old and timeless meets new and thrilling in a very happy mix. More on Charlotte Charlotte Crosswell is CEO of Innovate Finance. She has spent most of her financial services career in market infrastructure roles, including as CEO of Nasdaq NLX (“NLX”), a London-based startup derivatives market, and serving on the board of LCH Ltd. She’s also held management positions at Nasdaq and London Stock Exchange across international capital markets, equities, xed income, OTC derivatives trading and clearing. In addition to her current work with Innovate Finance, Charlotte advises and sits on the boards of a number of technology and FinTech startups. She holds a BA with honors in French from the Southampton University and has been included in the list of top 100 Women in Finance over many years. More on Dan Dan Morgan is the FinTech Sector Specialist at the UK Department for International Trade. At the time we recorded this episode he was Head of Policy and Regulation at Innovate Finance, where he led development of member policy specialist groups in digital currencies and Blockchain, payments, access to finance and data. Dan also led the Innovate Finance FinTech 2020 Manifesto and secretariat support for the FinTech APPG. He previously held senior policy roles at a number of business groups including the CBI, BRC and ABI. Dan has worked across a range of sectors and policy areas including insurance, SME finance and retail tax reform. More links Podcast with Sanjay Jain Podcast with UK regulator Chris Woolard Podcast with UK regtech lead Nick Cook More for our listeners Here are some of the shows coming up. We’ll have Cross River Bank CEO Gilles Gade, talking about the “sponsor bank” model for fintechs working with banking partners. We’ll be back in London with the CEO of Starling Bank, Anne Boden. We also have conversations with Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor. Back in the US we’ll have shows Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen and the CEO’s of two community banks. I hope to see you at upcoming events including: CFSI’s Fintech and the Federal Government: How Policymakers and Startup Companies are Exploring Financial Innovation, March 15, U.S. Senate, Washington Innovate Finance Global Summit, March 19-20, London, UK Regulation and Innovation in the Age of FinTech, with FSD Africa, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and RegHub, March 22-23, London, UK Lendit Fintech USA, April 9-11, San Francisco, CA Texas Bankers Association Annual Conference, May 3, Houston, Texas Bank Director, The Reality of Regtech, April 18, New York, NY Texas Banker’s Association Annual Conference, May 3, Houston, TX Woman Corporate Directors Global Institute, May 10, New York, NY Comply 2018, May 16, New York CFSI’s EMERGE, June 6-8, Los Angeles, CA American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville -- I’ll be moderating a general session panel on regulation and AI, and also teaming up again with the ABA for some special podcasts. As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going! Support our Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today’s guest is a familiar name and face for everyone who follows U.S. politics. He is Tim Pawlenty, CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable. Tim was previously Governor of Minnesota and became well-known to most of us when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He’s been a prominent voice on public policy for many years. He was also a speaker on a panel I moderated last fall at Money 2020 on financial innovation and regulation. We decided to continue that conversation back in Washington at his office at the Roundtable, which is the trade association representing the largest U.S. banks and financial companies. Tim is one of the most thoughtful people we’ve had on the show, with perspective on all the issues and strong opinions, clearly expressed. He shared his predictions for how fintech will, and won’t, change banking, including its competitive structure, and including the likelihood of rising competition for the customer’s trust. He talks about the big tech companies competing with banks not in terms of whether it will happen -- he thinks that’s a given -- but rather when and how, and how that will ultimately be regulated. He has thoughts on the respective strengths and weaknesses of banks versus companies like Amazon or Apple. He thinks cybersecurity is the top challenge and talks about the foundational, structural difficulty of taking the internet -- which was designed to be open and distributed -- and trying to plug its security gaps with patches (he cites a Roundtable event where Steve Wozniak offered somewhat discouraging advice on this). Tim is an optimist that technology will make financial services vastly better for most people. He’s also an optimist about banks and fintechs finding synergies and increasingly partnering. He thinks a few -- a very few -- fintechs, will change the world. He’s less optimistic about U.S. financial regulators getting good at truly coordinating as technology changes finance. As he puts it, the regulatory structure is horizontal, not vertical. That will make it hard to develop the harmonized thinking, and actual standards, that could help the system move forward. Big banks will play an enormous role in shaping the digital transformation of finance. More than small banks, they have the resources to be innovation leaders. More than fintechs, they have both resources and also expertise in how to be regulated companies, which takes some learning. More than either, they’ll be going head-to-head with big tech entrants into finance. At the same time, more than any of these other players, big banks are hard to change, by virtue of sheer size and history and also the legacy of being, in some ways, creatures of regulation. They are often on the defense on regulatory and political and public concerns about banking. Tim Pawlenty says banking is the “plumbing” of the economy, and therefore needs to work. I would add that big banks are the main pipes. When they do innovation well, their many millions of customers will benefit -- most financial consumers today are served by these large institutions. If they do innovation badly, or if the regulatory process impedes the move to modernize them, the future will be a whole lot more complicated. As he says, the plumbing has to work. Here are other episodes we’ve done with innovation leaders at large banks -- Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and US Bank. More on Tim Pawlenty Tim Pawlenty is President and CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the leading financial service companies in the United States. He previously served as Governor of the State of Minnesota (2003-2011), overseeing a $50 billion biennial budget, 30,000 employees and over 20 agencies and departments. As governor, he was also responsible for disaster preparedness and response, appointment of judges, and serving as Commander-In- Chief of Minnesota’s National Guard. His work as governor included promoting international business opportunities through trade missions to nine countries. He chaired the State Board of Investment, which addressed more than $60 billion in investments. His education, health care and energy initiatives were widely cited as among the most innovative in the nation. Mr. Pawlenty served as Chair of the National Governors Association (2007-2008), Chair of the Education Commission of the States (2008-2010), and Chair of the Midwest Governors Association (2006-2007). From 1986 to 2000, Mr. Pawlenty practiced law in the areas of criminal prosecution, civil litigation and appeals. He was also Vice President of Corporate Development for Wizmo, an early stage technology services company. He has been a board member of numerous companies. Mr. Pawlenty served in the Minnesota House of Representatives (1993-2003) where he was elected Majority Leader by his colleagues (1999-2003). He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota with Phi Beta Kappa and PhiKappa Phi honors. He received his J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School. More links The Roundtable’s BITS organization The lending company Tim mentioned: https://www.greenskycredit.com/ The conference at which we both spoke the next day: http://www.regtechenable.com/ More for our listeners In case you missed it...be sure to listen to our recent show with Nick Cook of the UK Financial Conduct Authority on The Future of Regulation. Especially if you’re a regulator, or know some regulators, this one is recommended listening on how we can move to digitally-native regulation. We have wonderful shows coming up. One is with Cross River Bank CEO Gilles Gade, talking about the “sponsor bank” model for fintechs working with banking partners. We’ll have two in London, with the CEO of Starling Bank, Anne Boden and another with Innovate Finance CEO Charlotte Crosswell. We also have conversations with Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor and Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen. I hope to see you at upcoming events including: Harvard Kennedy School Business and Government Club, February 14, Cambridge, MA Innovate Finance Global Summit, March 19-20, London, U SWIFT Business Forum, March 21, Toronto, ON Bank Director, The Reality of Regtech, April 18, New York Texas Bankers Association Annual Conference, May 3, Houston, Texa Comply 2018, May 16, New York CFSI’s EMERGE, June 6-8, Los Angeles, C American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, June 26, Nashville -- I’ll be moderating a general session panel on regulation and AI, and also teaming up again with the ABA for some special podcasts. Support our Podcast As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

This is the most fun show we’ve done in ages, or maybe ever. My friend Jean-Stephane Gourevitch offered to gather some really interesting people in London to talk about the data economy. We finally sat down last fall, during London’s Regtech Rising conference, and wow, did we talk. Jean-Stephane himself is French, based in London, and works with fintech startups throughout the world. His guests were, first, Edward George, who leads both research and the UK representative office for the pan-African bank, Ecobank. We also had Fiona Ghosh, a top London lawyer in the financial and fintech space -- Fiona is a partner at Addleshaw Goddard. Our other two participants have both founded young fintechs. Lukas Zoerner is CEO of Mespo, a fully independent robo money saver. And Luca Schnettler, from Germany, has founded HealthyHealth, which uses data to change the insurance world and to make people...healthier. We had an incredible conversation. We talked about how Europe’s new data regulations -- PSD2 and the GDPR -- will change banking and fintech (which, by the way, is a revolution that’s being under-discussed in the United States). We covered the opportunities that fintech is opening up in the developing world and especially Africa, where suddenly it’s possible, through the mobile phone, to bring banking to hundreds of millions of people who couldn’t be profitably served before. We talked about the future of cash. We figured out what regulators need to do. For me, probably the most riveting moments were a debate that broke out between the two fintech CEO’s -- both millennials -- who turned out to have strikingly different views about how data should be used, and also about consumers’ responsibility for securing their own wellbeing. I’ve never heard a discussion quite like it. So, we had six people around the table, counting me. It was a yeasty mixture of nationalities, languages, ages, continents, professional expertise, products, and target markets -- and with everyone having a whole lot to say. More about today’s guests Jean-Stephane Gourévitch Jean-Stéphane is an expert of the strategic, public policy and market aspects of digital/mobile payments, mobile money, digital/mobile banking, digital/mobile commerce, fintech, the data economy and innovation ecosystem with over 25 years global experience at senior management levels and a mix of corporate and entrepreneurial experience. He has held senior management positions with International telecom operators including Everything Everywhere Ltd. (EE), Orange, France Telecom, Verizon Business, Colt Technology Services Ltd. He has worked for OFCOM, the UK digital communications regulator. He also has held senior positions with Deloitte Consulting and with strategic marketing and PR/Communications firms. Jean-Stephane created his own management consulting company 5 years ago, combining strategic, public policy and commercial vision about digital convergence, fintech, insurtech and the data economy. He also has global experience mentoring and advising entrepreneurs and start-ups, in particular very young entrepreneurs. A frequent speaker on fintech, payments and insurtech, Jean-Stephane has addressed events such as Fintech Connect Live, Pay Expo, and Money2020. He is also an independent conference director, creating programs/content for major conferences such as Fintech Connect Live in London, INPAYCO Digital Payments in Toronto and Paris, Mobile Payments: Regulation, Risks and Opportunities in Berlin and London, the Africa Fintech Forum in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. As a mentor and advisor to 24 fintech, insurtech and digital technologies startups and to young entrepreneurs in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin and North America, Jean-Stephane’s expertise lies in strategy, business development, regulatory affairs, public policy, Government Relations, stakeholder relationships management, communication and PR. Edward George Twitter @DrTeddGeorge Dr. Edward George is the head of the UK representative office of pan-African bank, Ecobank, as well as being head of group research. Edward oversees the teams in the London office, with a focus on corporate banking, financial institutions/international organisations and research. As head of research he also manages a team of nine analysts based across Middle Africa covering the fixed-income, currencies and commodities space. His specialties include soft commodities and agribusiness, trade and trade finance, and disruptive technology. Edward is also the bank’s specialist on Francophone West Africa and Lusophone Africa. Prior to joining Ecobank in March 2011 he worked for The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) for seven years as a Senior Editor in both the Commodities and Africa Departments. There he was responsible for producing and editing reports on Lusophone and Francophone Africa, as well as on 25 industrial raw materials, food, feedstuffs and beverages. Before joining the EIU, Edward worked as a freelance writer covering the politics and economics of Sub-Saharan Africa. A linguist by training, Edward is fluent in French, Spanish and Portuguese and holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Bristol. His PhD thesis on the Cuban intervention in Angola was published as a book by Routledge in 2005 and as a paperback in December 2012. Luca Schnettler Luca started HealthyHealth  in January 2017 to realize his vision of using digital means to innovate the insurance sector and help customers become healthy individuals. Before having any partners or advisors, Luca was able to persist and focus on the objective, following his goal and passion of building a company that truly changes customers perception on Insurance and helps them to improve their health. Lukas Zoerner Twitter @lczoerner Lukas Zoerner is the Founder and CEO of Mespo, a fully independent robo money saver that detects and executes savings opportunities for consumers. Mespo has established a UK's market first partnership between a FinTech such as Mespo and a Credit Union, My Community Bank. Mespo won the UK's Fintech For All 2017 Financial Inclusion challenge in the category "New Fintechs". Lukas previously worked in Morgan Stanley's investment banking division advising Power & Utility companies across EMEA. He holds a degree in business administration from the University of Mannheim in Germany. Fiona Ghosh Fiona is a Partner in Addleshaw Goddard's Commercial Group, specialising in complex commercial, IS, payment and FinTech arrangements, particularly in the financial services sector where she has focused her practice for more than a decade. Fiona heads the firm’s FinTech Group. Her work has included bringing new payment solutions, including ApplePay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay, to market. She is an appointed expert on the editorial board of the Payments & Fin Tech Lawyer journal. Fiona's expertise also includes outsourcing and other complex commercial arrangements in the investment banking, retail banking, insurance and asset management sectors. She has longstanding experience in strategic advisory work, negotiation and drafting of multijurisdictional business process outsourcings, including back and middle office, platform integration, facilities management and global administration services for multinational corporations, banks, asset managers and global insurers. A leader in her field on advice relating to strategic alliances and joint ventures, Fiona has led several international joint venture arrangements for the provision of pensions, credit cards, loans, mortgages and related insurance products acting for both retailers and for providers. She also specialises in advising in the field of retail payments including payment services and commercial arrangements relating to digital and mobile payment solutions, payment aggregation and merchant acquiry in the UK, US and further afield. Fiona is a regular speaker at international conferences and events on FinTech and payments law including Pay Expo Europe, the Westminster Forum Projects and Digital Payments Intensive. More Links Ecobank Research portal Ecobank Twitter account: @ecobankresearch Edward George: ‘Banks are in danger of becoming utilities’ Africa FICC      It’s the disruption that matters All Hands on Bank: How Mobile Banking is Changing Personal Finance AG Elevate GDPR PSD2 Sanjay Jain Podcast on Barefoot Innovation AFI Podcast on Barefoot Innovation More for our listeners Watch for our upcoming shows, including two more from London. One is with the charismatic CEO of Starling Bank, Anne Boden (who was referenced in today’s show with high praise), and the other is with Innovate Finance CEO Charlotte Crosswell. Back in the U.S., we’ll have three fascinating CEO’s -- Financial Services Roundtable head Tim Pawlenty; Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen, and Cross River Bank CEO Gilles Gade. We also have an inspiring conversation with Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor. And we’re going to do a special one in San Francisco with my cofounders of Hummingbird Regtech -- so, stay tuned! I’ll hope to see you at upcoming events where I’ll be speaking: March 19-20 - Innovate Finance Global Summit - London April 18 - Bank Director, The Reality of Regtech - New York, NY May 3 - Texas Bankers Association Annual Convention - Houston, TX (and here’s the cover story I wrote for their magazine, on innovation and community banks) May 16 - Comply 2018 - New York, NY June 26, American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference - Nashville TN As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Till next time, keep innovating! Support our Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

What if regulation, as we know it, might disappear? Regulation will never stop, of course, but what if some of it will take on a new form, shaped by technology?  What if we’re entering into a new era of what we could call “digitally-native” regulation, that’s as agile and intuitive about regulation as digitally-native consumers are about consumer technology? Of all the shows we’ve ever done, I think this is the most mold-breaking and thought-provoking. My guest comes from the agency that is leading the world in modernizing financial regulation for the digital age, and he leads the team that’s doing it. Nick Cook is the head of Regtech and Advanced Analytics for the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority. The FCA’s innovation leadership is world-renowned, especially for their Project Innovate and its “regulatory sandbox,” which allows careful testing of new financial technology that could benefit consumers. Less well-known, though, is a newer initiative, launched about 16 months ago, to explore regtech. As we’ve discussed in other shows, the term “regtech” is used in two ways. It refers both to regtech for regulators -- technology to enhance their own activities, and to regtech for the industry, to improve or streamline regulatory compliance. The FCA is working on both halves of this equation, and true to form, they’ve invented an innovative way to explore it. They aren’t using a sandbox for regtech (although the Bank of England has a sandbox-like “Fintech Accelerator”). Instead, Nick’s team has been convening what they call “tech sprints.” They invite a diverse set of participants -- banks, fintechs, tech companies, lawyers, consultancies, academics and others -- to come together for problem-solving exercises designed like hackathons. Sometimes for a day or two, and sometimes longer, they work on how new technology could be applied to a regulatory challenge like “digitizing” the rule book or streamlining regulatory reporting. Nick and I recorded this discussion at the Regtech Enable conference in Washington in December, where he had just shared an update on their work from the stage. At the time, they were in the midst of a two-week sprint that had two objectives. The first is to try to make regulatory reporting requirements “machine-readable,” and therefore much easier to navigate, including for innovative companies that often struggle just to know what rules apply to them. The second -- even more profound -- is to explore whether some regulations can also be made “machine-executable” -- could regulatory guidance, in some cases, be issued in the form of computer code, and therefore be self-implementing? This is an idea that’s been under discussion for about a year, including at a regtech roundtable I hosted last spring as a Senior Fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business and Government. The same conversations have included a second concept the FCA is also pursuing, namely that new, high-tech regulation should be introduced gradually and should be optional for the industry. Gradual rollout would enable policymakers to start small and learn, while voluntary adoption opens up a practical road to changing our complex system with minimal disruption.   The FCA’s tech sprint on machine executable reporting ended a few days after we recorded this podcast. They will be sharing its results in the coming months, so be sure to watch for it! Let’s step back and think about what’s underway here. Finance is being transformed from analog to digital design. And, right behind it, so is regulation. Digitization will do for both -- for finance and financial regulation -- what it does for everything else. That is, it will make them faster, better, and cheaper, and will create a new foundation on which people will innovate further, in ways we cannot yet envision. A striking thing about my talk with Nick is how different he sounds from traditional regulators. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why, but I think it’s mainly the comfort he displays with uncertainty. The same trait was evident in my earlier podcast with Christopher Woolard, who heads the FCA’s innovation strategy. Somehow this agency manages to be simultaneously bold and humble. They know they don’t have this all figured out. They even know they can’t figure it out by themselves. But they also know they can move forward, and that the way to do so is by engaging a community of diverse experts to work together. As Nick says, that can be scary, but the risks come way down, for regulators and everyone else, when solutions are developed collaboratively by people who believe in its potential to make regulation better. I hope this episode finds its way to many regulators, including those in the US where our agencies are actively exploring innovation agendas. Nick says regtech should be easier for regulators than fintech change is. For one thing, the companies leading it are generally not regulated entities, which makes them easier to work with. In addition, no consumers are affected by regtech experimentation. It’s about how the regulators can do their own jobs better, and/or can enable financial companies to do the same. As he puts it, regulators can, therefore, put “a toe in the water,” in regtech, and then move forward. My friend Andrew Burt of Imuta and Yale Law School helped design the FCA’s December sprint and has put out a white paper on it. And here is the FCA’s great video on how tech sprints work. So, I’m not naive. I’ve been a bank regulator, a U.S. Senate staffer, and I’ve worked in regulatory compliance for decades. Technology won’t magically make regulation easy. These solutions won’t fit some types of regulation, and where they do fit, they will inevitably create new problems. We all know all that. Still...Digitally-native regulation. Think about it. More on Nick Cook Nick leads the FCA’s RegTech activities, including the FCA’s TechSprint events - the first events of their kind convened by a financial regulator. He is responsible for creating the FCA’s Analytics Centre of Excellence to drive the organization’s use of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence.  Nick is the FCA’s representative on the European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) Financial Innovation Standing Committee and an advisor to the RegTech for Regulators Accelerator Programme. Nick joined the Financial Services Authority (the FCA’s predecessor) in 2009, initially in its Enforcement and Market Oversight Division. Prior to joining the regulator, Nick qualified as a chartered accountant at KPMG Forensic. Other links Podcast with Sanjay Jain on the “India stack” technology Podcast with Miles Reidy on regtech More for our listeners Just before Christmas, I finished my 7 week, three-continent “World Tour.” I think 2017 was the pivotal year for moving both fintech regulation and regtech toward becoming priority issues at regulatory agencies throughout the world. 2018 will take it all to the next level. We’re starting the year with amazing shows in the queue. We’ll have a fascinating London conversation with the charismatic CEO of Starling Bank, Anne Boden; another with Innovate Finance CEO Charlotte Crosswell; and another with a group of amazing innovators working in Europe and Africa, including Ecobank. In the U.S. we’ll have one with Cross River Bank CEO Gilles Gade; with Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor; with Financial Services Roundtable CEO Tim Pawlenty; and with Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen...and many more! I hope to see you at upcoming events including: OCC Bank Information Technology Conference, January 9-12, Washington, DC Innovate Finance Global Summit, March 19-20, London, UK Bank Director, The Reality of Regtech, April 18, New York Texas Bankers Association Annual Conference, May 3, Houston, Texas Comply 2018, May 16, New York As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. And keep innovating! Support our Podcast Jo Ann Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

I could tell I was walking into an innovation lab even before I saw the space, because I could hear the ping pong game underway as I stepped off the elevator. It was great fun to be in San Francisco, on a sunny day in early fall, to talk with Braden More, Wells Fargo’s head of partnerships and industry relations -- and to see their fascinating innovation facility, which includes what they call their R&D Garage. As Braden explains in our talk, Wells Fargo has reorganized to establish an integrated digital strategy for payments, under the leadership of their famous innovation head, Steve Ellis -- whom Braden described as the Steve Jobs of banking. They know that today’s customers expect a great digital experience, which means they won’t put up with processes that break down as they hit the old silo walls between traditional bank product groups, nor processes that merely automate old paper based, linear designs. Banking has to become fully digitized -- with all the gains in speed, cost, accuracy, and innovation that comes with digitizing anything. Not surprisingly, a lot of this episode focuses on the challenge of how you change a large organization. Big banks are anything but nimble. It’s not their fault, it’s just their nature -- their size, their complexity, and their reliance on legacy IT systems that have accumulated, in most cases, over years and decades of mergers and acquisitions, and never been fully integrated with each other. On top of that, every move that big banks make faces regulatory requirements and close regulatory scrutiny, and regulators, for good reason, tend to frown on fast change -- especially the kind championed by small fintech innovators who love concepts like “minimum viable product” and (God forbid), “fail fast.” However, all the big banks know they do have to change, and also that they have to speed up -- dramatically. That’s because the technology change is speeding up. Its curve is exponential, which means that both the opportunities and risks are outstripping organizational models and cultures that were hard-wired many years ago -- even decades or centuries ago -- for linear change. A big bank innovation model is now emerging. It usually has a few elements. There’s an innovation team, which is usually small, is charged with rapid learning. Some of it is typically walled off, so that the big organization won’t accidentally smother it. There’s a lab-type effort, with a mandate to reach beyond short term, practical applications and do some dreaming. These sometimes have an actual playful edge to them -- hence the popularity of ping pong tables and bean bag chairs. Meanwhile, other parts of big banks today are busy with projects trying to smash down some silo walls and push people into the same rooms, to work knee-to-knee on shared challenges. And there’s usually an accelerator or incubator that brings in startups and tries to learn from them, sometimes making venture investments. Wells Fargo has all this underway, and Braden explains their philosophy on how to get the best of both worlds -- both isolating ninja-style disruptors while also making innovation central to everyone’s job. If you’re a fintech, he describes their accelerator and some of its successes, including Eye-verify, which verifies customers’ identity by scanning the whites of their eyes with a phone camera, and which has been acquired by China’s huge payments innovator, Ant Financial -- Alibaba. He also tells the story of Wells Fargo incorporating Zelle’s instant payment service into the bank, and its importance to customers who need quick cash. Our conversation ranges widely, from the future of fast payments and crypto-currency to the evolution of skills needed at banks. Braden also previews coming attractions for 2018. One key:  he says active online and mobile users connect with the bank every 42 hours on average -- vastly more often than traditional branch customers. Converting this rich relationship into more value for both customer and bank is a key to the future. Big banks have unique challenges in embracing innovation, but they also unique resources for solving them. A highlight of my visit was seeing the toy room. Pepper is there -- the charming talking robot. So are 3-D printers, biometric safes, and drones -- Braden gives an example of how bank can use a drone. He even talked, intriguingly, of occasionally seeing the folks in The Garage busy making things with soldering irons. You hardly ever used to see that, in a bank office. More Information Wells Fargo’s accelerator: https://accelerator.wellsfargo.com/ Podcast with Citigroup’s innovation lab Podcast with US Bank’s innovation lab Sanjay Jain Podcast Pepper the robot More on Braden More Braden More is the head of payment strategy at Wells Fargo. He and his team work across Wells Fargo to coordinate payment strategy, incubate new initiatives, and represent Wells Fargo in the payments industry. Braden also serves as the portfolio manager for the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator, a program that mentors and invests in innovative companies. Before assuming his current role, Braden was the head of strategy and planning for Wells Fargo Treasury Management. Previously he was with Wells Fargo’s Internet Services Group, and before that held positions in public accounting, management consulting, venture capital, and competitive strategy with Deloitte, Wit Capital, and Intel. Braden graduated magna cum laude from Bowdoin College with a degree in government and legal studies. Subsequently, he earned an M.B.A. with distinction from NYU’s Stern School of Business, and a CPA license from the state of New York. Braden lives in San Francisco, where he is active as an advocate for experiential science education. He has served on the board of directors for the Exploratorium Lab and Marin Academy. His Twitter handle is @BradenMore. More for our listeners I’m about to finish what I’ve called my World Tour -- travels all over the world this fall making speeches, meeting fascinating people and, happily, collecting podcasts. I’ve learned so much, so fast, about fintech and regtech, it’s hard to absorb it all. I’ll be sharing lots of thinking in the new year. The upcoming podcasts are amazing. We’ll have one with Nick Cook, who leads the FCA’s innovation work on regtech, recorded at Regtech Enable in Washington. We’ll have Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen, and Cross River Bank CEO Gilles Gade. We’ll have one in London with the charismatic CEO of Starling Bank, Anne Boden and one with Innovate Finance CEO Charlotte Crosswell. We’ll also have a lively discussion with a group of amazing innovators working in Europe and Africa. We’ll have one with Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor. And back in the U.S., we’ll have a show with Financial Services Roundtable CEO Tim Pawlenty...to name a few! The 2018 schedule is filling up fast. I’ll share those events next time. As always, please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Again, follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. And keep innovating! Support our Podcast I want to thank you for all your wonderful support this year, and I wish you a peaceful and joyous holiday season to you and yours! Jo Ann Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

I’ve been looking forward to today’s show since my very first visit to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, over two years ago. It was clear even then that they were doing something completely new for a regulatory agency. They were innovating. Not just creating new regulations, but actually rethinking how to create them. Reinventing the regulatory process itself. Specifically, they were responding to the novelty and especially the rapid pace of technology change in finance by creating an innovation initiative and soon thereafter, the world’s most famous regulatory sandbox. Today’s guest is Christopher Woolard, the FCA’s head of Strategy and Competition. In this episode, he tells the story of how they first realized they had to change, how they did it, and, importantly, what they’ve been learning so far. We sat down together last month during the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas, where we also did a fireside chat on the regulatory stage and where, for the first time, Chris shared their new report on lessons drawn from their first several cohorts of sandbox companies. Most of our listeners know what these sandboxes are -- they’re also sometimes called reglabs, greenhouses, or a new generation of pilot projects. They’re being adopted by a leading cadre of regulators, including a few in the United States, who have realized that the speed of innovation today is outstripping traditional regulatory processes, which means policymakers are going to have to invent something new to keep up. Part of what they’re inventing are these small, safe “testbeds” where they can get hands-on with new ideas, understand them, shape them if appropriate, and generate insights to feed back into mainstream regulatory activities. The original version, really, was in the United States in the CFPB’s Project Catalyst, which inspired the FCA to build something similar. But it was the UK’s much bigger and bolder effort that then caught the world’s attention and has now inspired several dozen imitators around the world, according to Aspen Institute research. Here is an article I wrote with more on how the program is designed. The FCA itself grew out of the financial crisis, as the UK decided to separate prudential banking oversight from a new entity focused on “conduct.” In some ways the restructure mirrors the U.S. decision to create the CFPB after the crisis, except that the FCA’s remit is not limited to consumer protection. The UK Prudential Regulation Authority is now housed in the Bank of England in the old City, while the FCA inhabits contemporary offices out in Canary Wharf, in an area burgeoning with startups and financial companies converting old warehouses to cool new space. In our talk, Chris describes what the FCA is doing in both the sandbox and the agency’s wider set of innovation initiatives -- and again, what they’re learning so far. He cites the FCA’s advantage over many regulators in having a mandate that includes fostering competition. He debunks some misconceptions about the UK sandbox, including that it waives or dilutes consumer protections. He touches on their work in regtech (a topic we’ll soon return to with the FCA’s regtech head, Nick Cook, in an upcoming show). He talks about the sandbox’s global imitators and also how the UK cooperates directly with other countries to ease the path for their respective innovators. And he shares his concern that if even one of these global sandbox experiments “catches a cold,” we could see a contagious loss of confidence that could undermine regulatory innovation, worldwide. I admire the FCA’s deft mixing of a very high-profile, exciting initiative with, simultaneously, a strong note of humility. They always emphasize that they don’t have all the answers, that they’re just learning as they go. But this, you see, is actually the key. The thing they figured out -- and believe me, it doesn’t come easily to regulators (or to anyone, for that matter) -- is that it’s not going to be possible, anymore, to figure things out before acting, in the way policymakers used to do. Instead, regulatory institutions are going to have to learn to navigate permanent and daunting, technology-driven uncertainty. They won’t have the option to hold still and wait for clarity to materialize...because it won’t. They need to find ways to move ahead iteratively and collaboratively. Testing -- sandboxes and reglabs -- will be essential to that. It’s a huge change, in both process and culture, for both regulators and industry. The sooner everyone starts making this shift, the better. The FCA’s humble tone is right and wise, but my view is that this regulator has shown not only vision, but also courage. They decided to take the risk to strike out in uncharted territory, to begin to blaze a new kind of policy pathway, and they’re inspiring many others to follow them. More on Christopher Woolard: Christopher Woolard is Executive Director of Strategy and Competition, and an Executive Board Member of the Financial Conduct Authority. He’s responsible for policy, strategy, competition, market intelligence, consumer issues, the Chief Economist's department, communications and the Innovate initiative. He is chair of the FCA's Policy Steering Committee and a non-executive board member of the Payment Systems Regulator. Christopher joined the FCA in January 2013. Previously he was Group Director and Content Board member at Ofcom. He has spent most of his career in regulation or policy development including working at the BBC and in government as a senior civil servant. He is a Sloan Fellow of London Business School.   Here are resources and links to items mentioned in the episode: Financial Conduct Authority Website FCA Project Innovate FCA Innovation Hub FCA Regulatory Sandbox FCA Report on Sandbox Results My podcast with Wai-Lum Kwok on Abu Dhabi’s Reglab More for our listeners I’m in the midst of a busy set of travels that will produce some fascinating podcasts. Between November 1 and December 20, I’m traveling to seven countries -- three in Asia, three in Europe, and one in Africa -- to speak on fintech and regtech for both industry and regulators. As I mentioned, we’ll have a podcast with the Nick Cook, who leads the FCA’s innovation work on regtech, recorded at Regtech Enable in Washington. We have one coming up with Wells Fargo’s Braden More on payments innovation. We’ll have Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen, and Cross River Bank CEO Gilles Gade. We’ll have one in London with the charismatic CEO of Starling Bank, Anne Boden and with the trade association Innovate Finance, and also a lively discussion with a group of amazing innovators working in Europe and Africa. We’ll have one with Michael Wiegand, who heads the Gates Foundation’s work on financial services for the poor. And back in the U.S., we’ll have a show with Financial Services Roundtable CEO Tim Pawlenty...to name a few! Plus, I’ll be recording a special series straight from the floor of the American Bankers Association conference on financial crimes, in December. I hope to see many of you there and at other upcoming events, including these: S&P’s Fintech Intel, December 13, New York The African Fintech Forum, December 18-19 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast www.africafintechforum.net Dutch Central Bank, December 20, Amsterdam Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. See you soon! Support our Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

If you spend a lot of time in Washington, as I do, you see a lot of issues framed around statistics about people, especially medians, and averages. For instance, policies aimed at helping lower-income people typically stratify Americans into categories, in bands above and below median income, or median incomes in their census tracts. I’ve worked with programs like this for decades -- HUD housing and mortgage programs, the Community Reinvestment Act, and many others. And then one day, someone comes along and goes inside those data categories, and finds out what’s really happening in the lives of the people covered by them. And it turns out to be surprising. That is exactly what today’s guest did. She is Rachel Schneider, Senior Vice President of the Center For Financial Services Innovation and co-author of the new book, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty.  Some years ago, Rachel joined a CFSI study trip to South Africa where she learned about financial diaries methodology -- intimate research that tracks the daily financial lives of individual consumer households. With funding from several organizations including the Omidyar Network, she and NYU Professor Jonathan Morduch undertook a diaries project in the United States. They identified a cross-section of America -- 235 families in a wide variety of circumstances, in communities ranging from Mississippi to Ohio to California to New York City, and had a team spend over a year with each one, mapping every bit of money that flowed into and out of each household. Not surprisingly, they found some alarming trends, which other research has revealed as well. A full fifty-seven percent of households today are considered financially unhealthy -- including a third of those with incomes over $100,000 a year. But by looking closely, they found much more. In particular, they spotlighted a huge issue that had been traditionally masked by the statistical averages -- namely that for many people, the most pressing problem is not actually lack of money, but rather volatility. It turns out that millions of Americans live within their means, in that they spend less than they earn, but struggle nevertheless because they have volatile and unpredictable earnings and expenses. Since they also lack savings, they can’t cushion or smooth out their expense spikes and income troughs without relying on high-cost services like payday loans and checking account overdrafts. It’s worth pondering the irony that these consumers can afford financial services, as evidenced by the fact that they do -- they actually pay more in interest and fees than other people do. But they are not well-matched to our current models of products, pricing, money management, and risk assessment. CFSI’s research has also revealed something else: families that appear identical in the statistical averages may actually be in completely different situations. Some are rising while others are sinking. And some are overwhelmed and confused by financial management, while others are the best money managers in the population, because they have to be -- have to know exactly how much money they will earn, and when it will be in their account, and exactly how much they must pay, and precisely when, and which bills have timing leeway and grace periods and which don’t, and then must strategically plan and execute the daily, weekly, and monthly financial plan. As we’ve discussed in other shows, innovators are working on all these problems -- more affordable smoothing solutions, easier saving, better saving psychology, effortless financial management, ladders toward good credit scores, new data that more accurately evaluate credit risk, and more. We’ve talked about those in past shows and will cover many more going forward. Most of these innovators begin by trying to understand customers’ real-life ways of using money, including by bringing in behavioral science -- recognizing that finance is not just a cerebral process but also an emotional, and social, one. The financial industry will do even better as it aligns the products offered with the ways people think and feel about them. For this deeper understanding, nothing is more illuminating than Rachel’s book. In today’s show, she helps us get to know some of the people the Diaries tracked, see a little bit into their lives, and learn the strategies they use to make ends meet. In the process, she gives us a lot to think about, beyond the statistics. So...buy the book! It’s in the show notes at jsbarefoot.com. And meanwhile, enjoy my conversation with Financial Diaries author Rachel Schneider. More about Rachel and her work Rachel Schneider is a Senior Vice President at CFSI, and co-author of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. The Financial Diaries connects the findings of the ground-breaking U.S. Financial Diaries research project, which collected highly detailed data about how 235 households save, spend, borrow and plan over the course of a year, with the broad trends upending the economic lives of American families. It uncovers the emergence of a hidden inequality, in addition to disparities in income and wealth – an inequality in access to steady finances. It provides a framework for how to develop products and policies that can help. Rachel is highly sought-after as a consultant and speaker, Her research has been featured in the nation’s top publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many others, and she speaks frequently at a broad spectrum of events. Though she began her career as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co., Rachel credits her commitment to the potential for innovative finance to solve major social problems from her days as a VISTA Volunteer (now AmeriCorps). She holds a J.D./M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. She lives in New York City with her husband and their two children. She occasionally “competes” in triathlons, which are getting easier to “win” as the number of competitors in her age group shrinks. She says the same cannot be said for improvement in her piano skills. Here are other resources, including items mentioned in the episode: My 2015  blog post on the Diaries project:  http://www.jsbarefoot.com/blog/2015/1/5/diary-of-a-mad-financial-system My podcast with CFSI CEO Jennifer Tescher My podcast with Colleen Briggs, JP Morgan Chase My podcast on CFSI Innovation Lab Even:  https://even.com/ Omidyar Network Todd Baker’s Research at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business & Government More for our listeners The next two months will bring a podcast bonanza to Barefoot Innovation, with amazing shows coming up. I just recorded a fascinating one with Christopher Woolard of the UK Financial Conduct Authority on the FCA’s innovation initiative, including lessons learned so far from their famous regulatory sandbox. We’ll also have one with the Nick Cook, who leads the FCA’s innovation work on regtech. We have one coming up with Wells Fargo’s Braden More on payments innovation. We’ll have Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen, and Cross River Bank CEO Gilles Gade. We’ll record one in London with the trade association Innovate Finance, and on this side of the pond, we’ll have a show with Financial Services Roundtable CEO Tim Pawlenty...to name a few! And, I’ll be recording a special series straight from the floor of the American Bankers Association conference on financial crimes, in December. I hope to see many of you there and at other upcoming events. My speech schedule is packed solid from now to the end of the year, which is an indicator of the fast-growing interest in fintech regulation and in regtech. I recently spoke at five events in four cities in four days, and here is some of what’s coming up. Central Bank Summit on blockchain and digital currency, October 30 in New York Regtech Rising, November 2, London Asia Finance Forum, Fintech and Sustainable Development, November 8-10, Manilla Monetary Authority of Singapore Fintech Festival, November 13-17, Singapore RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC UN/ITU conference on financial inclusion in Bangalore (invitation only) Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London American Bankers Association Financial Crimes Enforcement Conference, December 3-5, National Harbor Maryland S&P’s Fintech Intel, December 13, New York The African Fintech Forum, December 18-19 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast www.africafintechforum.net Dutch Central Bank, December 20, Amsterdam Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast Meanwhile, don’t stop innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

My guest today is Andres Wolberg Stok, Global Head of Policy at Citi Fin Tech. We got to know each other this year on a panel at FinXTech in New York, and something I immediately noticed is that he has a special way of talking about innovation -- a very fresh way with words. It might be because he’s lived all over the world, or because he was once a journalist -- see his biography below for a sampling of his journalism adventures, which sound like plots of action/adventure movies. All large banks have innovation initiatives -- labs, accelerators, incubators and the like. They’re all looking at issues like blockchains, big data, artificial intelligence and human-centered design -- such as, creating a user experience that customers will actually love. Banks have plenty of innovative people, of course -- in our talk, Andres quotes CEO Michael Corbat saying that Citi is actually a technology company with a banking license. However, very few banks of any size have really innovative cultures. This is partly because most are mature organizations, and also because banking has been heavily regulated for so long, which tends to foster conservative, risk-averse cultures and decisionmaking. In today’s world of rapid technological change, banks need innovation (and many innovators need banks as well). It’s important that the big banks are investing in learning how to do this well. Citi Fin Tech was formed in late 2015 to pursue what Andres calls “fintegration.” The impetus was a critical insight: they realized that their customers’ standards had fundamentally changed. Instead of comparing Citi to other banks, there was a new yardstick -- comparison to technology firms. That set a new, high bar. Andres explains how they’re tackling this challenge. He describes the new kinds of skills they hire. He explains their focus on agile methodology and co-creation of products and learning to experiment. He talks about building multidisciplinary teams that work concurrently on initiatives, instead of sequentially in the old waterfall-style process that could divert an innovation from what had originally made it exciting. He talks about obsessing on the consumer experience and doing thousands of focus groups to understand what customers really think. He also talks about how the bank should “feel in the palm of the customer’s hand.” He calls mobile an “exoskeleton” for the human mind, connecting us to all the world’s information, all the time. He talks about the issues ahead in AI, privacy, and data aggregation, including the challenges for regulators. He says the key, for regulators, is to understand the upside benefits of technology, not just the risks. Andres explains how Citi Fin Tech works with innovators, including startups -- note that he invites people to come and work with them using their API’s and data. That site is at https://developer.citi.com. I think my favorite insight is that banks need a new model that’s open, not closed. He says the customer relationship used to be one-to-one between a bank and its customers -- and of course, the regulations are still mostly built for that. Now, though, there are multiple parties -- consumers use apps and “modular” financial relationships. If the bank wants to continue to be at the core of that customer relationship, they will have to build an open model -- and regulators will have to change with it. As you listen, think about how regulators and also community banks could get access to this kind of hands-on experience with financial innovation. The sooner they do, the faster the system and its customers will benefit from, as Andres puts it, “breaking a few windows and letting in fresh air and sunshine.” More on Andres Andres Wolberg-Stok interfaces with regulators and policymakers around the world as the Global Head of Policy for Citi FinTech, a new unit spearheading the transformation of Citi’s Global Consumer Banking business into a mobile-centric “Bank of Tomorrow”. He joined Citi from an international personal finance startup and has served in a variety of digital roles, first for Citi Latin America, then for Citi's U.S. consumer businesses, and now globally. Andres was one of the founders of Citi FinTech from his previous role as Global Head of Emerging Platforms and Services for Citi’s Consumer businesses. In 2015, Andres turned Citi into the world's first bank with an Apple Watch app. Earlier, as Citi Consumer's first global head of mobile banking, he invented Citi Mobile Snapshot, a patented 2014 breakout feature that made Citi the first major U.S. bank to offer no-login account access. Prior to becoming a banker, Andres was an international correspondent and senior news executive. He had tea with mass-murderer military dictators; was driven, blindfolded and at gunpoint, around the capital of Paraguay after midnight; was arrested in Tierra del Fuego on suspicion of being a British spy; and raced in a car at 120 mph along the edge of a minefield in Croatia. He finds most days in banking very manageable. More for our listeners Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast It was great seeing lots of you at the Online Lending Policy Summit this week in Washington. I’ll hope to see many more of you at upcoming events: Source Media’s RegTech: Compliance Transformed, October 3-4th, Brooklyn, NY BAI Beacon/Fintech Stage, October 4-5, Atlanta, GA CFSI Network Summit, Fireside Chat with Thomas Curry, October 5, Chicago, IL FISCA, October 5-8th, Las Vegas, NV Money 20/20, October 25th, Las Vegas, NV Central Bank Summit on blockchain and digital currency, October 30 in New York Regtech Rising, November 2, London Monetary Authority of Singapore Fintech Festival, November 13-17, Singapore University of Michigan, November 17, Ann Arbor, MI RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC UN/ITU conference on financial inclusion in Bangalore (invitation only) Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London S&P’s Fintech Intel, December 13, New York Dutch Central Bank, December 20, Amsterdam We have wonderful shows coming up. One is with Braden More, who leads an innovation payments initiative at Wells Fargo. Another is with Giles Gade, CEO of Cross River Bank. And we’ll have several from Money 2020, including Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen and the FCA’s Chris Woolard, whom I’ll also be talking with there in a fireside chat. Speaking of Money 2020, I’m excited that the AML regtech firm I’ve cofounded, Hummingbird, has been selected to do a startup pitch there. Be sure to come and watch! See you there! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

This episode is a special treat because it’s both fascinating and fun. My guest is Miles Reidy, partner at QED Investors in Alexandria, Virginia. Many people know that QED was founded by former leaders of Capital One, including Cap One co-founder Nigel Morris. They have a terrific track record of investing, focused mainly especially on fintech. Miles and I discussed two topics. One is the outlook for regtech, which he’s excited about and so am I. The other, which I know is going to be an audience favorite, is how to find and work with a venture capital firm. On regtech, Miles talks about the technology that’s about to make compliance both more accurate and less expensive, at the same time. He talks about compliance costs rising at 20% a year, the impossibility of traditional compliance systems preventing human errors, and how we can now move beyond old sampling-based compliance processes to 100%, real-time data that enables a financial company to know, for sure, if it’s compliance or not. I’m excited about it too, because technology is breaking the old binary choice between spending more for better results, or spending less and sacrificing performance. Innovators are making it possible to be better and cheaper, both. On regtech, he also has a cautionary note for the U.S., where our regulatory complexity creates headwinds for innovation. The second half of the show is about working with VC’s. I talk all the time with venture firms and have done some angel investing myself, but most of Miles’ insights were new to me. He shares what he’s learned, especially, from seeing people do all these things wrong, at every stage, from how to approach a VC firm cold (he describes one thing to be sure NOT to do), to how the startup should evaluate the VC, to how to work with the VC when your firm hits problems, which it will.   He’s especially interesting, I think, on what questions to ask a VC directly, from where their funding comes from and where the fund is in its maturity cycle, to how it handles adversity (he describes the four typical scenarios, three of which are bad!). He also has advice on truly doing diligence on them, including by talking with their companies. The typical startup is so eager for money that it gets seduced by it, and can pick the wrong firm.   Miles also explains how he evaluates potential investments. Which factors count more than others? What key metric does he want to see that the founders totally understand?  What weaknesses are fatal? And once the company is funded, what are the common mistakes? What mistake is most dangerous for a young CEO? How do you avoid the death trap of hitting the end of the funding runway before you can take off (hint: “sip” on your funds). After we turned off the mic, I asked one more question that people often raise, which is whether fintech and financial regtech firms should focus on the great east coast VC’s that specialize in the field -- Miles mentions several in the episode -- or try to get backing from the big, famous firms in the Bay Area. There are pros and cons to each, in terms of sector knowledge, sector network, reputation “glamor,” and drawing in talent. Miles has the answer:  get both. If we were scoring shows by how many times the guest makes me laugh, I think this one might be the winner. I know you’ll enjoy my fascinating conversation with Miles Reidy. More about the episode This is the November conference QED is co-sponsoring (I’ll be speaking) RegTech Enable Here is the past podcast I mentioned with Sanjay Jain on the India Stack Sanjay Jain Podcast And here’s more on Miles: Miles Reidy is a Partner at QED. Previously he was the Chief Financial Officer for Audax Health, Inc., which offered a digital health engagement product.Miles reoriented the business strategy, built out the analytics functions, raised capital, and oversaw the sale of the company to United Health/Optum.  Prior to Audax, Miles was Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer for Network Solutions, one of the largest domestic providers of Internet hosting and marketing services to small businesses, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Sears Holdings Corporation. Miles spent almost a decade in several executive roles at Capital One Financial Corporation, including Executive in Charge of Banking Integration, Chief Corporate Planning / Financial Strategy Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Capital One Bank and Credit Card. His responsibilities included development and implementation of the corporation’s capital and financial strategies, oversight of the card businesses’ financials and consumer analytics, and strategic planning. Miles serves on the Boards of the Royal Bank of Canada, US, Heinz School of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Easter Seals of Baltimore/Washington. He is also a investor in Fenway Summer. He holds a B.S. from Georgetown University and a M.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University. More for our listeners Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast I’ll hope to see you at the events where I’ll be speaking this fall: Online Lending Policy Summit, September 25, Washington, DC RegTech: Compliance Transformed, October 3-4th, Brooklyn, NY BAI Beacon/Fintech Stage, October 4-5, Atlanta, GA CFSI Network Summit, Fireside Chat with Thomas Curry, October 5, Chicago, IL FISCA, October 5-8th, Las Vegas, NV Money 20/20, October 25th, Las Vegas, NV (I’ll MC the Sunday regulatory track, host a town hall with senior regulators, moderate a panel, and do a fireside chat with the FCA’s Chris Woolard. Be sure to come for Sunday!) Regtech Rising, November 2, London Monetary Authority of Singapore Fintech Festival, November 13-17, Singapore University of Michigan, November 17, Ann Arbor, MI RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC UN/ITU conference on financial inclusion in Bangalore (invitation only) Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London S&P’s Fintech Intel, December 13, New York Dutch Central Bank, December 20, Amsterdam We have wonderful shows coming up. I’ll be talking with Andres Wolberg-Stok of Citi Fin Tech. We’ll have a show based on my recent fascinating experience with a U.S. Army Threatcasting exercise, learning how to creatively imagine cyber risk and then pinpoint how to prevent it. At Money 2020 I’ll record a show with Christopher Woolard, who heads strategy for the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, and one with Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen.                                                                                                                                                     I’m very proud to say that the firm I co-founded, Hummingbird Regtech, has been selected to present at Money 2020 in the startup pitch session. Be sure to come and watch! Meanwhile, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

I love having guests on the show who look at something that everyone takes for granted and said, why do we do it that way? That’s what today’s guest, Jason Gross, has done with credit cards. Jason is the CEO of Petal. He and his co-founders have designed a card that has a different business model and aims at a different market. Credit cards have always sparked mixed feelings among consumer advocates and policymakers. On the upside, they provide incredible convenience and safety, over cash. On the down side, critics worry that that convenience factor is a double edged sword -- making spending too convenient and fueling over-consumption and under-saving. People also worry that cards are hard to understand. For decades, policymakers have tried repeatedly to solve that by regulating card disclosures and practices with requirements to  disclose the annual percentage rate and fees; make key information prominent in the so-called Schumer Box (named after New York Senator Charles Schumer); require a grace period; bar retroactive raising of interest rates; limit marketing to college students; disclose the long-term costs of paying only the minimum balance and much more. Concern about credit cards prompted Senator Elizabeth Warren, back when she was a Harvard Law professor, to begin fighting what she called “tricks and traps” in financial products, and also business models that rely on penalty fees or interest for their profitability. That concern led to the CARD Act of 2009, and then to the creation of the CFPB itself. The Petal card is trying to solve these challenges. It’s offering simpler, more transparent terms. It addresses the overspending problem by designing the card to encourage customers to pay the full balance each month, rather than revolve. And it’s tackling a third problem, which is reaching the tens of millions of people who don’t have a credit card. For most people, these cards are the first rung on the ladder to building a credit record so that they can later get a car loan or mortgage. Millennials have tended to avoid them, partly due to coming of age in the financial crisis and becoming leery about incurring debt. Jason notes that some young people are “sponsored” into the system by parents who provided them with cards, but for those who aren’t, it’s hard to build credit. That’s a catch 22 -- you can’t get a card because you don’t have a credit record, and you can’t build a credit record because you don’t have a card. Petal is solving that with one of the most important kinds of innovations underway in finance, namely, use of alternative data to evaluate risk. They are looking at the person’s own payment and income history, as reflected in their bank account, to determine ability to pay. Accessing that information has become controversial, as banks worry about allowing a third party to see this data even with the consumer’s permission, in case something goes wrong. However, the ability of consumers to allow such access is the life’s blood of most of the innovation underway in consumer finance. The CFPB is evaluating the issues arising around this, including questions like who really “owns” consumers’ bank account data, whether third parties’ data uses should be regulated, and whether we need to clarify where liability should fall in the event data is misused or breached. A lot of people are working on this issue. Solving it is one of the most important steps we can take toward making finance more inclusive. Listeners have often heard me say that I’ve spent most of my career working with efforts to promote consumer financial health and inclusion by regulating the financial industry, and that I think the results have been mixed at best! A few years ago, I realized that technology could do most of what we’ve been trying to do through policy (if we get the policy right). Petal is trying to do that -- use new data and technology to offer a product that they think will be highly profitable -- despite leaving some kinds of revenue on the table -- because consumers will choose it. Watching them will be fascinating. More information Articles on Petal’s September launch: https://www.paymentssource.com/organization/simple https://bankinnovation.net/2017/09/no-credit-score-say-hello-to-petal-card/ http://paybefore.com/finance-and-strategy/petal-uses-machine-learning-underwrite-credit-without-credit-score/ http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2017/9/8/introducing-petal-providing-access-to-credit-to-thin-file-consumers https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/your-money/new-credit-card-option-for-those-with-scant-credit-histories.html?mcubz=1&_r=0 Jason's Article in Medium: https://medium.com/@jasonbgross_/petal-ba2bb74718f4 My podcast with Digit CEO Ethan Block (another example of innovators leveraging bank account data) http://www.jsbarefoot.com/podcasts/2016/2/25/effortless-saving-digit-ceo-ethan-bloch More for our listeners Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast I’ll hope to see you at the events where I’ll be speaking this fall: Finovate, September 13th, New York City RegTech: Compliance Transformed, October 3-4th, Brooklyn, NY BAI Beacon/Fintech Stage, October 4-5, Atlanta, GA CFSI Network Summit, Fireside Chat with Thomas Curry, October 5, Chicago, IL FISCA, October 5-8th, Las Vegas, NV Money 20/20, October 25th, Las Vegas, NV Monetary Authority of Singapore Fintech Festival, November 13-17, Singapore RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC UN/ITU conference on financial inclusion in Bangalore (invitation only) Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London S&P’s Fintech Intel, December 13, New York I’ll also be speaking in December to the Dutch Central Bank on financial innovation in December. I do many presentations for regulators and welcome those invitations. Regulators, in my view, have the hardest and most important role to play in financial innovation. We have wonderful shows coming up. I’ll be talking with Andres Wolberg-Stok of Citi Fin Tech. And I’m going to do one on one of the most fascinating experiences I’ve had in years -- I participated this month in the U.S. Army’s Threatcasting exercise  -- sort of a war-gaming process where we “threatcast” technology risks ten years into the future, and then “backcast” thinking about what we could do, today, to prevent the problem. It was off the chart fascinating.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    We also have a show coming up with Miles Reidy, Partner at the venture firm QED. Miles and I had a fun and fascinating talk about two topics -- the investment outlook for regtech, and then how to find and work with a venture capital firm. Speaking of RegTech, we’re going to have a show with Merlon Intelligence, an AML regtech firm, and also a special show with my own co-founders -- at Hummingbird RegTech. I’m proud to say that Hummingbird has been selected to present at Money 2020 in the startup pitch session. Be sure to come and watch! Meanwhile, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Gift from Gene Ludwig - Compliance isn't Mickey Mouse This is a very special show because we recorded it directly from the bustling floor of the American Bankers Association’s 2017 Regulatory Compliance Conference. The RCC has long been the preeminent gathering of compliance professionals in the United States and, not surprisingly, it’s growing -- with another attendance record this year at 1800 people. That makes it one of the largest events of the US banking industry. We gathered in Orlando this summer to grapple with the huge array of challenges facing compliance professionals, from bank compliance officers and attorneys, to industry vendors, to the regulators themselves. The episode departs from our usual format. Instead of having one in-depth discussion with one guest, I had eight short conversations with a diverse group of compliance leaders. Each discussion is about twenty minutes. My guests, in order, are: Part 1 Gene Ludwig - Watson Financial and Promontory Financial Group Alistair Rennie - Watson Financial Kristi Grant Hart - Spark Compliance Consulting Andy Sandler - BuckleySandler, Treliant Risk Advisors, and Asurity Technologies Richard Harvey - Colonial Savings Part 2 Elizabeth Snyder - Plante Moran Brian Levy - Katten & Temple Rajeswari Sathappan - The Mercadien Group Daniel Stipano - Buckley Sandler The episode kicks off with a lively discussion with Eugene Ludwig and Allstair Renee. As many listeners know, Gene was previously the Comptroller of the Currency and then founded Promontory Financial. Last year, he surprised the financial world by selling Promontory to IBM Watson, to form Watson Financial. At the conference, I also moderated a fireside chat with Gene and Allistair Rennie.  It was the RCC’s first-ever session on regtech. -- and I predict it won’t be the last. On stage for our fireside chat, Gene Ludwig presented Alistair and me with...wait for it...Mickey Mouse ears (again, we were in Orlando). For better or worse, everyone in the room got the joke. People in finance have long complained about “Mickey Mouse” regulations that impose massive, hyper-technical requirements but produce only limited benefits. Gene’s gift signaled that technology is attacking that problem. We’re shifting from an analog-era regulatory approach to a digital-era one that will use data and machine learning to make compliance effective and efficient, through regtech. Watson Financial is part of a fast-growing regtech industry that is completely rethinking how compliance is done. Compliance isn’t Mickey Mouse anymore. To the contrary, in fact, there was a theme at this year’s conference about compliance officers as heroes. I’ve talked in past podcasts about this idea of “heroic compliance” -- that compliance people will increasingly be leaders in shaping the future of the industry. That’s counterintuitive, since compliance has traditionally been seen as a side issue in banking. Today, however, as technology transforms both finance financial regulation, we will see compliance executives at the front, shaping how the industry moves forward. They will be gatekeepers on what innovation can and cannot take hold, blocking harmful change but also opening the doors of the banking industry fortress to allow in new, better, more affordable products, and delivery channels, that can serve more people, profitably and at scale, in ways that actively foster consumer financial health. I think we should all begin to use the hashtag, #HeroicCompliance.   In the fireside chat, Alistair took this idea further, arguing that compliance officers may actually be the people who keep the banking industry competitive in a high-tech world. Why? As they adopt regtech, they’ll be at the forefront of innovating in how banks use data and AI -- and therefore leading the charge to break banks’ data out of it legacy silos and putting it to use -- first to transform compliance, and later, who knows? ...maybe to transform banking, itself. The conversations in this episode vary widely. We talked about regtech; the regulatory burden on community banks (including how regtech can help); how banking is changing; how compliance is changing; how regulators should balance use of rulemaking, supervision and enforcement; the grounding of compliance in mission and ethics; and the psychology of compliance, including that people sometimes look the other way on ethical failures in order to get along. We also discussed some of the top issues of the day, like AML and TRID. My guests have a mix of experience as regulators, lawyers, compliance officers, auditors, and compliance leaders, working with a wide range of large and small institutions. They have a wealth of insight into where we’ve been, where we are today, and where we should be going. More links ABA Regulatory Compliance Conference (plan to come next year -- June 24-27, Nashville!) Compliance resources from American Bankers Association www.ABA.com The artificial intelligence movie Her Kristi Hart Grant’s books, How to Be a Wildly Effective Compliance Officer and Wildly Strategic Compliance Officer Conference Andy Sandler mentioned (I’ll be speaking there) Regtech Enable, November 27-29 in Washington DC More on IBM www.IBM.com My previous podcast on Heroic Compliance with Treliant’s Lyn Farrell Lyn Farrell’s new podcast show, Compliance Hero Richard Harvey  RichardH@ColonialSavings.com Elizabeth Snyder  ElizabethSnyder@plantemoran.com Brian Levy BLevy@KattenTemple.com Raji Sathappan RSathappan@mercadien.com Daniel Stipano DStipano@BuckleySandler.com More for our listeners Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast Meanwhile, I’ll hope to see you at the events where I’ll be speaking this fall: Finovate, September 13th, New York City SourceMedia’s RegTech -- Compliance Transformed, October 3-4th, Brooklyn, NY BAI Beacon/Fintech Stage, October 4-5, Atlanta, GA CFSI Network Summit, Fireside Chat with Thomas Curry, October 5, Chicago, IL FISCA, October 5-8th, Las Vegas, NV Money 20/20, October 25th, Las Vegas, NV Monetary Authority of Singapore Fintech Festival, November 13-17, Singapore RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London S&P’s Fintech Intel, December 13, New York Meanwhile, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

From the main stage This is a very special show because we recorded it directly from the bustling floor of the American Bankers Association’s 2017 Regulatory Compliance Conference. The RCC has long been the preeminent gathering of compliance professionals in the United States and, not surprisingly, it’s growing -- with another attendance record this year at 1800 people. That makes it one of the largest events of the US banking industry. We gathered in Orlando this summer to grapple with the huge array of challenges facing compliance professionals, from bank compliance officers and attorneys, to industry vendors, to the regulators themselves. The episode departs from our usual format. Instead of having one in-depth discussion with one guest, I had eight short conversations with a diverse group of compliance leaders. Each discussion is about twenty minutes. My guests, in order, are: Part 1 Gene Ludwig - Watson Financial and Promontory Financial Group Alistair Rennie - Watson Financial Kristi Grant Hart - Spark Compliance Consulting Andy Sandler - BuckleySandler, Treliant Risk Advisors, and Asurity Technologies Richard Harvey - Colonial Savings Part 2 Elizabeth Snyder - Plante Moran Brian Levy - Katten & Temple Rajeswari Sathappan - The Mercadien Group Daniel Stipano - Buckley Sandler The episode kicks off with a lively discussion with Eugene Ludwig and Allstair Renee. As many listeners know, Gene was previously the Comptroller of the Currency and then founded Promontory Financial. Last year, he surprised the financial world by selling Promontory to IBM Watson, to form Watson Financial. At the conference, I also moderated a fireside chat with Gene and Allistair Rennie.  It was the RCC’s first-ever session on regtech. -- and I predict it won’t be the last. On stage for our fireside chat, Gene Ludwig presented Alistair and me with...wait for it...Mickey Mouse ears (again, we were in Orlando). For better or worse, everyone in the room got the joke. People in finance have long complained about “Mickey Mouse” regulations that impose massive, hyper-technical requirements but produce only limited benefits. Gene’s gift signaled that technology is attacking that problem. We’re shifting from an analog-era regulatory approach to a digital-era one that will use data and machine learning to make compliance effective and efficient, through regtech. Watson Financial is part of a fast-growing regtech industry that is completely rethinking how compliance is done. Compliance isn’t Mickey Mouse anymore. To the contrary, in fact, there was a theme at this year’s conference about compliance officers as heroes. I’ve talked in past podcasts about this idea of “heroic compliance” -- that compliance people will increasingly be leaders in shaping the future of the industry. That’s counterintuitive, since compliance has traditionally been seen as a side issue in banking. Today, however, as technology transforms both finance financial regulation, we will see compliance executives at the front, shaping how the industry moves forward. They will be gatekeepers on what innovation can and cannot take hold, blocking harmful change but also opening the doors of the banking industry fortress to allow in new, better, more affordable products, and delivery channels, that can serve more people, profitably and at scale, in ways that actively foster consumer financial health. I think we should all begin to use the hashtag, #HeroicCompliance.   In the fireside chat, Alistair took this idea further, arguing that compliance officers may actually be the people who keep the banking industry competitive in a high-tech world. Why? As they adopt regtech, they’ll be at the forefront of innovating in how banks use data and AI -- and therefore leading the charge to break banks’ data out of it legacy silos and putting it to use -- first to transform compliance, and later, who knows? ...maybe to transform banking, itself. The conversations in this episode vary widely. We talked about regtech; the regulatory burden on community banks (including how regtech can help); how banking is changing; how compliance is changing; how regulators should balance use of rulemaking, supervision and enforcement; the grounding of compliance in mission and ethics; and the psychology of compliance, including that people sometimes look the other way on ethical failures in order to get along. We also discussed some of the top issues of the day, like AML and TRID. My guests have a mix of experience as regulators, lawyers, compliance officers, auditors, and compliance leaders, working with a wide range of large and small institutions. They have a wealth of insight into where we’ve been, where we are today, and where we should be going. More links ABA Regulatory Compliance Conference (plan to come next year -- June 24-27, Nashville!) Compliance resources from American Bankers Association www.ABA.com The artificial intelligence movie Her Kristi Hart Grant’s books, How to Be a Wildly Effective Compliance Officer and Wildly Strategic Compliance Officer Conference Andy Sandler mentioned (I’ll be speaking there) Regtech Enable, November 27-29 in Washington DC More on IBM www.IBM.com My previous podcast on Heroic Compliance with Treliant’s Lyn Farrell Lyn Farrell’s new podcast show, Compliance Hero Richard Harvey  RichardH@ColonialSavings.com Elizabeth Snyder  ElizabethSnyder@plantemoran.com Brian Levy BLevy@KattenTemple.com Raji Sathappan RSathappan@mercadien.com Daniel Stipano DStipano@BuckleySandler.com More for our listeners Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast Meanwhile, I’ll hope to see you at the events where I’ll be speaking this fall: Finovate, September 13th, New York City SourceMedia’s RegTech -- Compliance Transformed, October 3-4th, Brooklyn, NY BAI Beacon/Fintech Stage, October 4-5, Atlanta, GA CFSI Network Summit, Fireside Chat with Thomas Curry, October 5, Chicago, IL FISCA, October 5-8th, Las Vegas, NV Money 20/20, October 25th, Las Vegas, NV Monetary Authority of Singapore Fintech Festival, November 13-17, Singapore RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London S&P’s Fintech Intel, December 13, New York Meanwhile, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

My guest today is Sanjay Jain, Chief Innovation Officer at the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE). Among many high-impact achievements, Sanjay helped lead creation of one of the most ambitious government infrastructure initiatives ever undertaken -- the so-called India Stack that is connecting everyone in India to the financial system and mainstream commerce, by providing a biometric ID. I met Sanjay at the Jakarta international regulator meeting I’ve mentioned before sponsored by the Omidyar Network and Gates Foundation and put on by FintechStage. I sat next to him at dinner one night, and was astonished to hear him explain the project and to hear others at the table describe how it’s already changing India. I’d been vaguely aware of it and knew it was huge, but had no idea how fast and transformational it is. At the conference the next day, we ducked into an idle meeting room to have this talk. We usually think of innovation as driven by the private sector. We think of government’s role as either to protect people from innovation-related harm or as just to avoid blocking good innovation. In reality, though, government has another critical role, which is to provide the infrastructure within which new technology can work.. A core component of infrastructure is a system through which people can be accurately identified. People need to be able to prove who they are, quickly and easily and inexpensively, and in ways that can’t be faked, so that no one else can pretend to be them, and so that they won’t be excluded from opportunities because their identities are in doubt, or are too complicated to be worth the effort to verify. This identity infrastructure doesn’t necessarily have to be provided by government -- we’ll do a show at some point with my friend Greg Kidd of Global ID, who argues passionately that it’s better to have a decentralized identity authentication system. Traditionally, though, government has played this role by giving people identity documents like birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and passports, and also unique, standardized identity markers, like social security numbers. With old technology, that approach was the best we could do, and it worked pretty well for people who had the right documents. However, it’s never worked well for people who don’t, including many new immigrants, and certainly refugees, and of course, the very poor. The very poor have, always, been locked out of the mainstream. All that has changed today thanks to what is arguably the most democratizing technology ever invented -- the mobile phone. As of 2013, more people have access to cellphones than to toilets. As we’ve discussed before on Barefoot Innovation, we are headed toward total financial inclusion through the phone. This means that, technologically, everyone can be connected, easily and completely and inexpensively, to everyone else. In most of the developing world, a top goal is to enable full access to the financial system and commerce, through the phone, as a primary engine for economic growth and prosperity. However, people can only connect to the financial system if they can be reliably identified. So UIDAI -- the Unique Identification Authority of India -- has undertaken one of the largest government projects ever -- the collection of biometric identity information on every adult and every child in the world’s second most populous country. They have gathered ten fingerprints, two iris scans and facial recognition data for about 1.2 billion people. And they have done it fast! The “IndiaStack” is being implemented in phases around four “layers”: “presenceless” identity, paperless records, cashless transactions, and consent-based use of data. At its heart is the Aadhaar card, which contains the person’s unique identity number, authenticated through the biometric ID. With this tool everyone can, among other things, open and use a bank account. Needless to say, all this has raised concerns about privacy and data security. The project has critics, and even its advocates agree that the challenges are daunting. India’s leaders, however, believe the risks can be managed and that they are massively outweighed by the opportunity to open the doors of the economy to everyone. I’ve spent time in rural India, including with an NGO called Rising Star Outreach that focuses on micro-finance, education and health services for leprosy communities. India is curing leprosy, but leprosy-affected people and their families still face daunting challenges. As I listened to Sanjay, I found myself remembering people I’ve met in remote villages where families live in one room, sometimes in huts with thatched roofs and dirt floors, and I also thought back to being in Chennai, in southern India, with the streets teeming with cars and lorries and motorcycles carrying five people and bicycles carrying three or four and auto-rickshaws and people carrying bundles of goods on their heads. And I thought about all the languages -- India has twenty-two official languages -- thirty that are spoken by more than a million people -- and hundreds of minor languages and dialects.  What it took these IndiaStack teams to find every single person in this huge country, and document them all -- it’s stunning. And thanks to their effort, all these people can be connected up with everyone else in India, and eventually everyone else in the world, through a cell phone and a reliable identity. Listeners outside the developing world may be thinking this is interesting but not very relevant to them. However, the challenge of creating reliable and safe digital identity is one of the top issues facing finance. The digital age is not only enabling new forms of identity, it’s also undermining the old forms. The dark web runs a thriving market in selling and buying personally-identifiable information including social security numbers. In the U.S., the 2015 Office of Personnel Management data breach, alone, compromised identity information like social security numbers for over 20 million people. Banks are increasingly caught up in fighting fraud and crime based on fake identities -- security experts tell me that criminals are more likely that real customers to accurately provide identification information, because they don’t make typos. Meanwhile, regulatory “de-risking” standards for Anti-Money Laundering “Know Your Customer” rules have been cutting off whole sectors of people from financial access because they come from places, industries or groups that raise disproportionate risk, and banks find it too difficult and costly to sort out the good people from the bad ones Financial companies and regulators everywhere will need better ways to identify people, and India is blazing a trail that will yield fascinating lessons. Sanjay’s Biography SANJAY JAIN, Chief Innovation Officer, Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) Sanjay Jain leads efforts to help create, promote, and encourage entrepreneurship in areas around digital technology. Sanjay is also a volunteer with iSPIRT, the software product industry think tank. He has been an active member of the India Stack, Open API, and Cashless teams. He has been working with the NPCI to define the next generation payment systems (the Unified Payment Interface), as well as with regulators and other bodies to help entire processes go paperless. He has been one of the key contributors to help create, and evangelize various government open APIs, which are collectively referred to as the India Stack. Sanjay has been responsible for the development of many large scale, high impact systems. He was the Chief Product Manager at the UIDAI, where he led the product development efforts from its early days till well after launch. The UIDAI has issued over a billion numbers to Indian residents. Sanjay was also responsible for the creation and launch of Google Map Maker - a crowd-sourced mapping product that is responsible for Google Maps data for 170+ countries (including India). He’s been a part of many entrepreneurial teams through his career, including most recently at EkStep, Khosla Labs, and as a founder of Novopay Solutions. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science, from the University of California, Los Angeles and a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. More for our listeners I’ll be speaking this fall at these events:    Finovate, September 13th, New York City SourceMedia’s RegTech -- Compliance Transformed, October 3-4th, Brooklyn, NY BAI Beacon/Fintech Stage, October 4-5, Atlanta, GA CFSI Network Summit, Fireside Chat with Thomas Curry, October 5, Chicago, IL FISCA, October 5-8th, Las Vegas, NV Money 20/20, October 25th, Las Vegas, NV Monetary Authority of Singapore Fintech Festival, November 13-17, Singapore RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London S&P’s Fintech Intel, December 13, New York Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast Keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

I met today’s guest, Sopnendu Mohanty, about 18 months ago. I moderated a panel on blockchain for last year’s MIT Fintech Conference, and Sop, who is the Chief Fintech Officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, was a panelist -- explaining how MAS was building a regional innovation hub that included blockchain strategies. Since then I’ve seen him three more times -- once at Harvard, which he visited with the visionary head of MAS, Ravi Menon; once when I spoke at MAS’s enormous conference last fall in Singapore; and last at a regulator gathering in Jakarta this year, where we recorded this short conversation. The thing that strikes me most is that, when I first met Sop, he was way ahead of nearly everyone else in thinking about regulating fintech and regtech for regulators -- and that the last time we talked, he had widened that lead even further. On these issues, he might be the most forward-thinking regulator in the world. The Jakarta meeting was extraordinary. Funded by the Omidyar Network and the Gates Foundation and organized by the amazing Fintech Stage, it drew regulators from six continents, all coming together to share problems and solutions on how to modernize regulation as technology transforms finance. Many were from the developing world, where rapid mobile phone adoption and mobile money services have outstripped traditional regulatory frameworks. Many, though, were from developed countries grappling with how to become innovative, themselves. Notably absent was the United States. In Jakarta, Sop and I ducked into an empty conference room during a short break and had this talk, as a teaser for a longer episode on his next trip to the U.S. Singapore is widely regarded as a top world leader in regulatory innovation, right up there with the UK Financial Conduct Authority that started the worldwide movement toward governments adopting innovation agendas. That movement is burgeoning -- recent research by the Aspen Institute finds that more than twenty nations have launched or are exploring regulatory innovation initiatives. MAS was either the second or third one, depending how you count (Australia was early too). MAS has built a “tech stack” that includes giving innovators wide latitude to try new things, as well as “co-creation” of some regulatory change with industry and a sandbox for experimentation. I’ve become convinced that regulators actually need sandboxes and reglabs, because hands-on testing will be the only way they can learn fast enough to keep up with today’s technology change. Here’s my recent article making that argument! In our talk, Sop explains MAS’s  “pragmatic” approach, which emphasizes small-scale experimentation, partnering with industry to solve specific problems, and learning from industry which, he says, generally knows more than government does. When you talk with Sop, you feel a palpable sense of urgency. I think that’s why his thinking is evolving so fast -- he believes we’re running out of time. He worries that the financial system will suffer a calamitous cyber attack and that we have to move much more aggressively to “future-proof it.” Of course, Singapore has an easier challenge than we do in the U.S., since it’s smaller and has a vastly simpler financial system and regulatory framework (every country has a much simpler regulatory framework than the United States). When I pointed this out to Sop, though, he had a response that has been haunting me ever since. I think you’ll find it thought-provoking. I’ll be speaking again at the MAS Fintech Festival in November and urge you to come. Last year it drew a stunning 13,000 people. This year, he thinks that could double!  That would surely make it, by far, the world’s largest financial conference. It will be an exciting place to be. So, enjoy my conversation with Singapore’s Sopnendu Mohanty! More for our listeners I hope to see you at some of my upcoming speaker events, including:   Finovate, September 13th, New York City SourceMedia’s RegTech -- Compliance Transformed, October 3-4th, Brooklyn, NY BAI Beacon/Fintech Stage, October 4-5, Atlanta, GA CFSI Network Summit, Fireside Chat with Thomas Curry, October 5, Chicago, IL FISCA, October 5-8th, Las Vegas, NV Money 20/20, October 25th, Las Vegas, NV RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London Meanwhile, remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast We have great new shows coming up. We’ll be posting the series I recorded from the floor of the ABA’s annual Regulatory Compliance Conference, including one with Gene Ludwig and Alistair Renee of IBM’s Watson Financial on how artificial intelligence will transform compliance. In addition we’ll have Sanjay Jain, who helped build India’s revolutionary “tech stack” project to capture customer identity on more than a billion people. We’ll have the exciting startup, Petal, and we have several coming up on anti-money laundering. Keep innovating!

My favorite episodes of Barefoot Innovation are the ones that take a philosophical turn. That happened with John Ryan, the thoughtful president of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, which is the organization that coordinates America’s state-level financial regulators. As you would expect, John and I began by discussing the events that have CSBS in the news these days. One is the launch of its Vision 2020 project to streamline state licensing and examinations for nonbank fintechs, to address the costly and monumental task these companies face in trying to grow to national scale by getting licensed state by state. The other news, and bigger controversy, is CSBS’ litigation against the Comptroller of the Currency, seeking to block the OCC’s proposal to create a national bank charter for fintechs. From these themes, though, we went on to far-ranging pondering about the future of banking, community banks and America’s communities. On the OCC charter proposal, as John knows well, I’m for it. After talking with him, I still am, but this conversation is the best case I’ve heard anywhere about what could be at stake if such a charter were to bring more consolidation of the banking system. I don’t think it would, but his insights are hearty food for thought. On Vision 2020, let me say that CSBS’s innovativeness amazes me.  At one point in the podcast John said, “we’re not very imaginative, but we get the job done.” Actually, I think they’re very imaginative, and I think the 2020 effort deserves its “visionary” labeling. CSBS is a century-old body and it is, after all, a body of regulators. Neither of those factors makes it a likely leader in innovation, nor does its daunting mandate of coordinating fifty wildly diverse state regulatory systems. And yet it plans to design and execute a high-tech transformation of how states license and supervise nonbanks (a process that, as John notes, is often still paper-based). I think other regulators can learn a lot from watching this model, both in how to design new systems and how to build buy-in from a complex set of stakeholders. This innovativeness shouldn’t be surprising because, since these states are the regulators of financial innovation. With some exceptions, the cutting edge of innovation is not in the banking system (partly because banks are so highly regulated), but rather in the nonbanks -- the startups and some of the large tech firms. And those are all almost entirely regulated by the states -- the federal government plays almost no direct role and in fact has very little contact with them. (This is one reason I support the OCC fintech charter -- because it would be the single best way for the federal regulators, who dominate national financial regulatory policy, to become expert about the technologies that are rapidly transforming all of finance. Today, they have little first-hand interaction with it. All that expertise resides in the states that license and oversee the firms that are pushing out the frontiers of the financial industry. For me, this puts a huge priority on the need for the U.S. to evolve new regulatory models, because our uniquely complex and fractured regulatory structure cannot effectively cross-fertilize the rapid learning regulators need to keep up with today’s technology. John offered plenty of philosophical thinking about all these topics, but late in the discussion we moved on to even bigger challenges, including the stresses facing America’s rural communities -- the kinds of places where people voted for disruptive change in last year’s election. John grounds his thinking about CSBS in his concern about the seemingly inexorable centralization and consolidation of banking. He worries about the role regulation plays in that, and about the future of local lending, and about the future of America. My home in New Mexico is in a small town, and I’ve done a lot of consulting in them. Years ago, I did extensive strategic planning consulting with small banks, mostly in the Midwest. I spent a many days in little towns where, when lunchtime comes and you walk to the sandwich place with the bank president, half the people on the sidewalk greet him by his first name. There’s a reason why these banks are called “pillars of the community.”  It’s because if they disappeared, things would collapse. Talking with John made me remember one holiday-season visit with a little bank, where the management team told me they’d had to cover an emergency year-end budget shortfall for three local nonprofits, which would have failed without the help. One was a health clinic, one the library, and I can’t recall the third. The giving was a significant hit to the banks earnings, but they’d done it anyway because, quite simply, no one else could -- and because without these facilities, the town’s population would continue to shrink, and age. Think about this question….What would happen to America’s rural communities if they lost their banks? And what would happen to America, if we lost our rural communities? These places are the wellspring of much of our unique national heritage. It seems to me they matter, in ways both visible and invisible. Their problems are hard to solve. They deserve new thinking, and the future of community banks has to be part of it. More information on John Ryan John Ryan is president and chief executive officer of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, the national organization of financial regulators from all 50 states and U.S. territories.  Prior to becoming president and CEO in 2011, he was CSBS’s Executive Vice President, and Assistant Vice President of Legislative Affairs. Mr. Ryan also led the financial services consulting practice at a public affairs firm and worked on the U.S. House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs committee. He has a B.A. in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley. More links Banking Exchange - Reglabs: Time for a major regulatory experiment? (My new article advocating for a new collaboration model for U.S. bank regulators, including through reglabs and a new alternative regulatory channel.) Karen Mills’ Harvard paper on small business lending and fintech, and my podcast with her. More for our listeners I hope to see you at some of my upcoming speaker events, including:   Finovate, September 13th, New York City SourceMedia’s RegTech -- Compliance Transformed, October 3-4th, Brooklyn, NY BAI Beacon/Fintech Stage, October 4-5, Atlanta, GA FISCA, October 5-8th, Las Vegas, NV Money 20/20, October 25th, Las Vegas, NV RegTech Enable, November 27-29th, Washington, DC Fintech Connect Live, December 6th, London Meanwhile, remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at  jsbarefoot.com. Be sure to follow me on twitter and facebook.  And remember, on the website, to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast SUPPORT OUR PODCAST We have new episodes coming up. We’ll be posting the series I recorded from the floor of the ABA’s annual Regulatory Compliance Conference, including one with Gene Ludwig and Alistair Renee of IBM’s Watson Financial on how artificial intelligence and machine learning will transform compliance. Those also include an interesting discussion with prominent regulatory attorney Andy Sandler. In addition we’ll talk with Sanjay Jain, who helped build India’s revolutionary “tech stack” project to capture customer identity on more than a billion people. And we’ll talk with Sopnendu Mohanty, the Chief Fintech Officer of Singapore. Keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Brett King and I see each other often, partly because we often speak at the same conferences and partly because we’re both on the board of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. For some reason, though, we went for over a year trying unsuccessfully to find time to record a podcast. So we we ended up getting together in London. We both participated in the wonderful Innovate Finance Global Summit at the Guildhall, in the old City, where we carved out some early morning time, met at a restaurant and, and over plates of hearty eggs and bacon and mushrooms and tomatoes, had a conversation unlike any previous one in the fifty-four episodes we’ve done so far on Barefoot Innovation. As most listeners know, Brett is a four-time best-selling author of an acclaimed series of books on the future of banking and hosts the global podcast and radio show, Breaking Bank$ -- on which I enjoyed being a guest in May. He is also the founder of the fintech firm Moven. He is a prominent media voice, and he is certainly the most popular speaker anywhere on the future of financial technology, both for his insightful content and his entertaining, unforgettable style. In recent years, Brett has also reached beyond banking to become an overall futurist, especially in his book Augmented, looking ahead at how technology will change our lives. I usually introduce each show by pointing out some highlights of my guests’ comments and sharing some of my own thoughts about them. With Brett, though, I’m going to skip that, because the whole discussion is a highlight. My suggestion is that you listen to all of it, and then listen again. And maybe take some notes, because this might be the easiest way to get a glimpse of the future of finance, from someone who has been exploring far beyond the mapped frontiers for many years. On that note, be sure to watch for his next book, Bank4.0, which will go even further in predicting a transformation of finance. More on Brett King Brett King is a four times bestselling author, a renowned futurist and keynote speaker, the host of "BREAKING BANK$, the First Global Fintech Podcast" and the founder of Moven, with its concept of a downloadable bank account that incorporates mobile payments and banking capability, along with a gamification based money management system. King was voted as American Banker's Innovator of the Year in 2012, and was nominated by Bank Innovation as one of the Top 10 "coolest brands in banking". His books Augmented, Breaking Banks (based on the podcast), BANK 3.0 and Bank 2.0 have al ranked as a finance bestsellers and have been released in several languages in 19 countries. King has been featured on FoxNews, ABC, CNBC, Bloomberg, BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, ABA Journal, Bank Technology News, The Asian Banker Journal, The Banker, Wired magazine and many more. He contributed regularly as a blogger on Huffington Post. He has spoken to more than a quarter of a million finance professionals in over 40 countries in the last 3 years alone. Breaking Banks Book Bank 3.0 Book Branch Today, Gone Tomorrow Book Bank 2.0 Book More for our listeners I hope to see you at events where I’ll be speaking this year, including:  Finovate in New York September 13; Money 20/20 in Las Vegas in October; SourceMedia’s Regtech Compliance Transformed, in New York in October; Fintech Connect Live in London in December; and others -- watch the website. I’m also speaking at a lot of regulator events. For all the regulators listening, it’s great to see you all at these, and I’m glad that there are more and more of them.   For everyone, remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at  jsbarefoot.com. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter @JoAnnBarefoot. Support our Podcast And watch for upcoming podcasts. These include a special series I recorded from the floor of the ABA’s annual Regulatory Compliance Conference, including one with Gene Ludwig and Alistair Renee of IBM’s Watson Financial on how artificial intelligence and machine learning will transform compliance. We’ll also have a provocative discussion with John Ryan of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. We have a lively discussion with prominent regulatory attorney Andy Sandler. We’ll  hear from Sanjay Jain, who helped build India’s revolutionary “tech stack” project to capture customer identity on more than a billion people. And we’ll talk with Sopnendu Mohanty, the Chief Fintech Officer of Singapore. Meanwhile, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today’s program is a very special one -- a conversation about regulatory innovation, with the very innovative acting Chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Christopher Giancarlo. As regular listeners know, I’ve spent many years in and around Washington where there is a deeply entrenched belief that regulations, and regulators, simply can’t change very much. Regulators are generally, by both nature and design, deliberate, and cautious, and risk-averse. That’s exactly how they’re supposed to be. The slowness of regulatory change can be frustrating, but I think most would agree that, broadly speaking, it’s been better to err on the side of carefulness than boldness, or inventiveness, when taking regulatory actions that will ripple through big swaths of economy and often force change on whole industries and, often, millions of customers. Today, though, the tilt toward slow and careful under stress in finance, because the world that our regulators oversee is changing too fast for the old system to work well. Our familiar regulatory models -- stable, steady, solidly-rooted -- are being bombarded by technology that is knocking them off their axes. These technology trends, which are much bigger than finance, are developing so fast, and are so powerful, that they are moving us toward a tipping over, into a new world. And in that new world, we’ll face a new paradigm -- namely, that if our regulators are going to be risk-averse, they will have to address not only the dangers of changing, but also the rising dangers of not changing. Technology is growing exponentially, pulling finance along with it, and we’re still trying to regulate it with brains and institutions hard-wired for linear change. We will increasingly face the danger of getting things wrong -- very wrong -- due to falling behind. Fortunately, a growing group of regulatory leaders, in the United States and other countries, see this shift and are taking on its challenge. One of them is Christopher Giancarlo. Last summer, he and I spoke at the same conference in New York  and happened to sit together at lunch, where he began talking about technology and innovation in ways I’d never heard before from a financial regulator. At the time, he was a commissioner at the CFTC -- he’d been named to that role by President Obama and confirmed unanimously by the Senate. This year, President Trump appointed him Acting Chairman and has now nominated him to be the Chairman going forward. Senate action is expected soon on that -- it may well be that, by the time this show is posted, he’ll be confirmed as the Commission’s chairman. This spring, he launched an initiative that’s called LabCFTC. Its goal to focus and build the Commission’s extensive work in fintech and regtech innovation. As he explains in our conversation, the Lab will pursue a wide range of activities, from guiding innovators about how to work with regulatory requirements, to participating in research, to building stronger collaboration among financial agencies. I knew it would be fascinating to have Chairman Giancarlo as a guest on Barefoot Innovation, but I wasn’t prepared for the full vision that he laid out in our discussion. I think this is the single most thought-provoking and eloquent case I’ve ever heard from a senior official about why and how regulators, of all kinds, absolutely have to change. Remember...the CFTC plays an enormous role today in overseeing financial markets. Its mandate was expanded after the financial crisis, far beyond its traditional focus on commodities. It now oversees the derivatives markets and works to reduce risks to the economy associated with the futures and swaps markets -- areas where, as he explains, technology is rapidly changing everything. I know you’ll enjoy hearing the Chairman’s far-ranging insights, from the historical reasons why payments are cleared in three days to his eye-opening experience visiting a modern-day, high-tech family farm. More for our listeners Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at  jsbarefoot.com.  Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter @JoAnnBarefoot. And watch for upcoming podcasts. These include a special series I recorded from the floor of the ABA’s annual Regulatory Compliance Conference, including one with Gene Ludwig and Alistair Renee of IBM’s Watson Financial on how artificial intelligence and machine learning will transform compliance. We’ll also have a provocative discussion with John Ryan of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors; will hear from Sanjay Jain, who helped build India’s revolutionary “tech stack” project to capture customer identity on more than a billion people; and last -- but not least --  we’ll have breakfast in London with the great Brett King. Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

“Sandboxes.” “Greenhouses.” “Pilot tests.” “Labs.” These are not words we normally associate with financial regulation. Yet suddenly, all over the world, regulatory agencies are giving these novel names to a new,  unconventional kind of initiative. The break from tradition is being driven by a realization:  they are going to need to find new ways to do their jobs well, in the face of fast-moving technology change and fintech innovation. My guest today oversees one of these fascinating programs -- Abu Dhabi’s Reglab. He is Wai-Lum Kwok, Executive Director for Capital Markets at the country’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority. The world’s most famous regulatory sandbox is run by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (which was inspired, in turn, by the CFPB’s Project Catalyst in the United States). We will have a podcast this fall with the FCA, which has just put out a new progress report. Speaking as a former regulator myself -- I was once Deputy Comptroller of the Currency -- I view the FCA’s effort as a remarkable case of regulatory leadership. (Here’s an article I wrote about it for Fintech Law Report.) When the FCA’s initiative was launched it quickly caught the attention of other regulators around the world. As of today, approximately twenty countries have some form of innovation hub or sandbox underway or on the drawing board, including notably Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The Aspen Institute will soon issue a report with a global overview, which we’ll link to in this episode’s show notes when it’s published. These sandboxes have a wide variety of designs and specific objectives. As Wai-Lum explains in this episode, the Abu Dhabi initiative accepts a wide range of companies and gives them two years to demonstrate that their innovations will be beneficial and safe. The Abu Dhabi approach, like the UK’s and others, links to a wider national strategy to attract capital and companies wanting to do business in a regulatory climate that welcomes responsible innovation. Some of these countries are cultivating regional and even global leadership positions in fintech. Note that we recorded today’s episode late last year. In May of 2017, the Abu Dhabi Reglab announced its first cohort of companies. We had this conversation in the bustling exhibit hall at the Fintech Festival sponsored last fall by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (think about that for a moment -- a central bank ran a 14,000-person fintech meetup, and this year’s will be even bigger).  Our discussion was short, but the topic is one of the most important ones we’ve ever discussed on Barefoot Innovation. I’ve been thinking hard about how regulators are going to keep up with technology innovation in finance, and the answers are not going to be easy. Our regulatory frameworks are designed to be deliberate -- and therefore slow-moving. And to be conservative, and to focus on preventing risk, not fostering change. Some countries have mandates to foster competition, but most, including the United States, don’t. I’ve been researching this challenge in the book and paper I’ve been writing for the past two years as a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business and Government. Over that period I’ve talked with regulators, innovators, and incumbent companies throughout the United States and all over the world. I’ve come to an opinion that might be controversial, but here it is. I think regulators will not be able to do a good job of overseeing emerging technology change, unless they create mechanisms for doing empirical testing. I think sandboxes, in some form, are not just helpful, I think they’re necessary. Of course, it’s far too early to tell how well they will work and which models are best. The regulators running them emphasize that they are figuring this out as they go along. No one thinks sandboxes are panaceas. Nevertheless, the very process of undertaking these experiments is moving a community of regulators forward in deeply understanding fintech innovation -- both its promise and, importantly, its perils. Despite the sandbox movement sweeping the world, the term sandbox, itself, has fallen out of favor among many in the United States. For one thing, sandboxes sound, well, unserious. For another, there has been talk of using sandboxes to waive or suspend consumer protection rules while companies experiment on real, live human customers. In practice, such suspensions aren’t happening anywhere to my knowledge, but the issue is obviously politically sensitive. (Also, Innovate Finance in London is working on a “virtual sandbox” that could work by modeling innovations using pooled data, so that real consumers would not be affected). So, fine. Let’s not suspend consumer protections (even though a lot of these laws don’t actually protect people very well). And let’s call these initiatives greenhouses, or pilots, or, as Abu Dhabi does, laboratories. In our conversation, I told Wai-Lum that I too came up with the name “RegLab” for a project I’m working on, exploring the idea of creating a non-profit that could function as an interagency regulatory sandbox in the United States. The U.S. is unique in the world in our dizzingly complex, fractured regulatory structure (five federal financial supervisory agencies, plus dozens of other federal agencies, plus 50 states). We’re going to have to figure out two things -- how to coordinate a coherent fintech regulatory strategy and how to keep up with exponentially growing technology change. If we don’t, we’ll lose our global competitive edge. There is much more to say on all this -- again, I think it’s one of the most important issues facing the regulatory community -- and we’ll have more shows on it coming up. For now, please listen to my fascinating conversation with Wai-Lum Kwok about the Abu Dhabi RegLab. More about Wai-Lum Kwok Wai Lum joined the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) in June 2015.  He heads up the Capital Markets division responsible for admission and supervision of financial market infrastructures and capital market intermediaries.  The division also regulates the offering of securities, collective investments schemes. Wai Lum also spearheads FSRA’s strategy and efforts to support the supervision of innovation in Financial Technology (FinTech) and development of the FinTech ecosystem in ADGM. Wai Lum has more than 10 years of supervisory experience.  Prior to ADGM, Wai Lum served as the Director of the Capital Markets Intermediaries Division of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.  Wai Lum graduated from Imperial College, London with an M.Eng in Electrical Engineering and holds an M.Sc in Applied Finance from the National University of Singapore.  He is a CFA charterholder. More links  The Abu Dhabi Reglab -- www.ADGM.com, or email fintech@ADGM.com  ADGM’s Reglab consultation paper  My podcast on sandboxes with BMO’s Nitish Pandey June 2017 Treasury Department  summary of proposed financial reforms including enhanced interagency coordination Bill proposed by Congressman Patrick McHenry (in last Congress) to require financial regulators to coordinate on fostering innovation More for our listeners Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and sign up to get email notifications for new podcasts, the newsletter, and blog posts at jsbarefoot.com.   Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going, and join my facebook fan page. I hope you’ll also follow me on twitter. Support our Podcast Meanwhile, watch for a summer of amazing shows, including CFTC Acting Chairman Christopher Giancarlo; John Ryan of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors; and breakfast in London with the one-and-only Brett King. And watch for our special show that I recorded at the ABA’s Regulatory Compliance Conference in Orlando, including a talk with Andy Sandler and one with Gene Ludwig and Allistair Renee of Watson Financial. Here’s my perhaps counter-intuitive takeaway from the ABA conference:  #ComplianceIsCool! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today’s guest is Colleen Briggs, Executive Director for Community Innovation and Corporate Responsibility at JPMorgan Chase. Colleen leads a visionary effort that is part of JPM’s commitment to building “more inclusive growth,” globally, by finding innovative models that build financial access and economic expansion. Our timing is great because just last week, the Center for Financial Services Innovation announced its new class of winners for the Financial Solutions Lab competition. The Finlab is funded by a $30 million, five-year commitment from JPMorgan that Colleen oversees, aimed at finding, supporting, and scaling innovative ways to promote consumer financial health. This is part of a $1 billion program that the bank has undertaken globally.   Here is a link to the JPMorgan press release on this year’s competition, which includes an overview of the winners, and here is a further article by the American Banker. Colleen comes to this work from a diverse background at nonprofits, on Capitol Hill, and now in the private sector, searching for better solutions for lower-income financial consumers. In listening to her, I was struck by the degree to which she has her finger on the pulse of the trends underway, both globally and in the U.S.  She shares insights on how to make it profitable to serve low income customers; how to win the trust of consumers who are wary of digital products; on the failures of traditional financial education; on the primacy of behaviorally-based product design; on the need for new business models; on how to build partnerships between banks, fintechs and community organizations; on how innovative cultures can take root in big banks; on platforms that can get new solutions to scale; on the business opportunity for banks -- and their corporate customers -- from building global inclusion; on mixing high tech and high touch and the limits of automation; and on how to shift the whole marketplace. She has wise advice for all the players. Since we recorded this episode, I’ve become the board chair at CFSI. Last week we held the Emerge Forum in Orlando, where a record audience talked about exciting new ideas for financial health. There was huge enthusiasm there about the new Finlab winners. In a sign of the maturing of the fintech startup world, three companies in this year’s class are reaching beyond the typical millennial customer base and instead building new tools for seniors. Watch for their progress. Here are my other podcasts with the Finlab and past winners Digit, Ascend, and Bee.   More on Colleen Briggs Colleen Briggs is Executive Director of Community Innovation within the Office of Corporate Responsibility and Global Philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase & Co, a global leader in corporate philanthropy with $200 million invested in communities annually. She is responsible for helping establish and execute the firm’s global philanthropic and corporate responsibility financial capability, including the Financial Solutions Lab, and community development strategies, including PRO Neighborhoods. The Lab is a $30 million, five-year initiative that convenes leading experts in technology, behavioral economics, and design to improve consumer financial health. PRO Neighborhoods is a five-year, $125 million program that works to increase the availability and accessibility of vital economic opportunities in vulnerable neighborhoods across the country. Colleen also manages the Foundation’s portfolio of global financial inclusion grants, impact framework and grant guidelines and works with the lines of business to share best practices to improve the firm’s products and services.     Prior to joining, Colleen was the Economic Policy Advisor to Senator Debbie Stabenow. In this role, Colleen managed the Senator’s economic portfolio, including policy related to financial services, tax, small business, job creation, community development, manufacturing, and housing. Colleen managed the Dodd-Frank market reforms for the Senate Agriculture Committee, and helped draft the Recovery Act, TARP, the Dodd-Frank Act, and healthcare reform. Colleen is a member of the Asset Funders Network Steering Committee and the Innovations for Poverty Action Policy Advisory Group. She earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More links Some organizations Colleen mentioned: Neighborhood Trust / FlexWage / Lending Club / LendStreet / Propel And more for our listeners Please remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at  jsbarefoot.com.   Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support our Podcast - Send "A buck a show" And watch for upcoming podcasts. My guests include Christopher Giancarlo, Acting Chairman of the CFTC; Brett King, founder of Moven; John Ryan of Conference of State Bank Supervisors; and a special series we recorded at the American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference this month. The ABA show includes a conversation with Promontory CEO (and former Comptroller of the Currency) Gene Ludwig and Alistair Renee of IBM Watson, who have teamed up to bring artificial intelligence to compliance through regtech. See you soon! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Here’s a question: Would you like to file your taxes with just a keystroke, after your electronic devices automatically organized all your information and prepared the return? Here’s another -- do you think you’ll still be driving, five years from now? Today’s episode is a far-ranging conversation with Al Ko, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the Consumer Ecosystem at Intuit. Among other things, he heads up Mint, which is deeply innovating about healthier ways for us to live our financial lives. Al reminds us that Intuit founder Scott Cook pioneered PFM -- personal financial management that leverages technology to simplify financial tasks (That story is recounted memorably in Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup.)  Intuit then acquired Mint. PFM tools work wonderfully, if you have the time and motivation to pay active attention. Unfortunately, though, most of us don’t. It’s been estimated that maybe two percent of people actively use PFM tools. The other 98% struggle, and juggle our many financial tasks, and sometimes drop those balls. Al says American consumers pay $77 billion a year, just in credit card late fees. Just for, basically, forgetting to send in even the minimum payment by the due date. Fortunately, big trends are bringing new solutions are starting to make the juggling easier, or even unnecessary. Finance will still be complicated, but it will feel simple. This is critical, because complexity is one of the main drivers of people’s financial problems and bad financial health. Financial services are just inherently complicated, intrinsically hard to understand and hard to manage. If we can make it easy, a lot of problems simply go away. The foundational breakthrough is that technology can now easily consolidate our disparate financial information in one place, electronically. Once it’s all there, technology tools can easily organize and analyze it. Then that consolidated information can be teed up, through new PFM tools, to give us at-a-glance insight on where we stand -- comprehensively, always up to date, and also benchmarked, if we want, against our goals, like what we’re saving for, or against emerging standards that can help us know whether we’re financially healthy, or not. Next, and crucially, new tools can also easily take the initiative to send us alerts, reminders, to do things like paying a bill, or like pausing before we make a payment that will cause us to fall short on the next rent payment.  Not wait for us to look up a bill or find a statement, but initiate a reminder, in the midst of our busy lives. Now add in behavioral science-based tools, so that, instead of being boring, our financial management can become engaging, even entertaining and fun, or even funny (see my past podcast with Digit). Behavioral science can also “hook” us on good behavior through rewards and reinforcement that are psychologically effective. And then, as Al explains in this episode, all this will become universally accessible across all our devices.  We’ll be able to get those reminders, or get our questions answered, anywhere, anytime, all the time -- in our house, our car, our phone, our watch. And we’ll be able to do it, when we want to, just by talking. We’ll use smart voice assistants like Alexa, the Amazon Echo, or Google Home.  No need to open apps, or look things up. No need, even, to find the phone, or even press a button. We’ll simply be able to speak, into the air. That may not seem like a big deal to you if you’ve been using, say, Siri, but back to the point on behavioral psychology, the tiny nuance of easiness can make a huge difference in actually using a solution. Your voice assistant increasingly will be your full financial assistant (Capital One customers can already use Alexa for banking). If you want it to, it will greet you as your pour your morning coffee and say, “The electric bill needs to be paid today. It’s $28.” And you’ll say, “Okay, pay it.” And then you can say, “What’s my account balance?” And, “Have I saved enough for my vacation?” And, “Where am I on my savings goals?” Now add in geolocation. For better or worse, our phones know where we are. So we’ll soon have financial apps that will send us a text, or vibrate the watch on our wrist, with a message:  “I see we’re at the grocery store. We can spend $75 here today.”  Or, “I see we’re walking toward the coffee shop. You asked me to remind you that this week’s latte budget has already been spent. Keep walking!” We’ll also be able to give our assistant, our helpful bot, a personality, an avatar, with a persona that is most motivating for us, whether it’s, say, a basketball coach or a friendly dog. As Al explains in today’s show, Mint has a new bill-pay app that already does some of these things,  and it has many more tools like these on the drawing board. They are not science fiction. These technologies already exist, and innovators are working fast to bring to us. Are there new risks in these new tools? Sure. There are risks and drawbacks in all innovations, and we should be working on addressing them. But here’s how I view that trade off. I’ve spent my whole career working with efforts to protect and empower financial consumers through regulation. And now, I look at these new technologies and realize, these are the solutions. With tools like these (and many more that are emerging) everyone will be able to live a healthy financial life, in the sense of easily understanding and managing their money. Easy budgeting, easy bill-paying, easier saving, easier investment, easier selection of the best product, easier self-discipline -- all of it. To make that happen, there’s a key challenge to solve for:  how will tools like these become profitable enough that providers will offer them to everyone? What are the business models that will evolve, and how can we be sure they’re transparent and fair? I talked about that with Al Ko, and about the need for consumer empowerment on using financial data, and about what Mint does today, and will be doing soon, and about its ambitious future vision around for Powering Prosperity and Financial Freedom, globally. More information My past podcast with Colin Walsh of Varo, which offers a financial assistant chatbot. More for our listeners Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at  jsbarefoot.com.   Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support our Podcast - Send "a buck a show" And watch for upcoming podcasts including John Ryan of Conference of State Bank Supervisors, Colleen Briggs of JPMChase, and a series I’ll be recording from the ABA Regulatory Compliance Conference in Orlando. My guests will include Andy Sandler of BuckleySandler, and also Gene Ludwig and Alistair Renee of IBM’s Watson Financial on how artificial intelligence and machine learning will transform compliance. Last but not least, I’m now the chair of the board of CFSI, the Center for Financial Services Innovation. Be sure to join us at the Emerge conference in Austin. There’s nothing else like it! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Bitcoin began in 2009 -- only eight years ago -- and set forces in motion that are only starting to show their potential power. One was a byproduct -- the creation of the blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, DLT, is now on its way to disrupting activities far beyond payments, from  value chains to contracts. The intentional innovation was establishing a new form of currency -- virtual or digital currency -- that functions as alternative payments system that operates on the internet rather than through banks and the ACH.  The financial system is still in the early stage of grappling with the potential benefits and risks arising from this mold-breaking model (I wrote about some of those issues three years ago in my blogpost on The Benefits of Bitcoin.) My guest for today’s show brings yet another angle -- a unique one -- to rethinking money. He is Jonathan Dharmapalan, Founder and CEO at eCurrency Mint, Ltd. Jonathan spent 25 years in telecommunications field, including becoming Head of Enst & Young’s Global Telecommunications Center in 2011. His insight, at eCurrency, is that the best way to capture the power of digital currency is to have governments, themselves, issue it. Jonathan and I met during the annual meeting of AFI, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, in Fiji, and he explained his vision for building a new system based on government-issued e-currency. He argues that this concept can capture the best of both worlds, combining the stability and confidence that comes with well-managed traditional currency, and adding the advantages of virtual money such as speed, ease of use, and infinite divisibility. I loved this conversation because it exemplifies how innovative thinking in finance, once it gets “released into the wild,” can spark more and more creative thinking, far beyond what the originator innovators had in mind. Often, it leads to solving problems we don’t even realize we have, because, well, we just assume the world is a certain way and we can’t picture anything else. It reminds me of the quote attributed to Henry Ford -- apparently erroneously -- that if he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said, faster horses. More about eCurrency Jonathan’s Background: Jonathan Dharmapalan is Founder and Chief Executive Officer at eCurrency Mint Limited. He became Head of the Global Telecommunications Center at Ernst & Young LLP in May 2011, responsible for leading a team of over 2,000 telecoms specialists across the world. He has had a 25 year career in telecommunications and the related sectors of technology, media and entertainment, and led Ernst & Young's Telecommunications Center in Beijing. He began his career in telecommunications at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Mr. Dharmapalan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University and a Masters of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from The California Institute of Technology. More for our listeners Many exciting things are happening. First, I’m happy to say that I recently became chair of the board of directors at CFSI -- the Center for Responsible Innovation.  If you haven’t signed up yet to come to our Emerge conference in June, be sure to do so! Also come, that same week, to the ABA’s Regulatory Compliance Conference. The ABA is innovating in its format this year, including by having me record some very special podcasts straight from the conference floor. I’ll also be holding a fireside chat on the main stage with Gene Ludwig of Promontory and Alastair Renee of IBM Watson, on how regtech will change compliance, including through their formation of IBM Financial to bring Watson’s artificial intelligence to regulatory challenges. And it’s not too early to put Money 2020 U.S. on your agenda for October. I’m going to MC the conference regulatory track, which has some fabulous speakers. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at  jsbarefoot.com.   Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support our Podcast - Send "A Buck a Show" See you soon! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

There is no question that AI presents exciting new solutions and happy additions to our lives. But in order for us to truly take advantage and prepare for a future when cars are not privately owned and are self-driving, energy is green, abundant, and cheap, and robots replace workers at a dramatic rate, changing the nature of work forever. To talk about this future and how fundamental “fintech” principles are to it, Brett is hosting thought leaders – JoAnn Barefoot of Barefoot Innovation, Greg Cross of Soulmachines, and Tony Seba, Author of “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation”  

In the early days of Barefoot Innovation, one of my guests said something very provocative, that I knew would not sit well with some of our listeners. I considered whether to edit it out. Someone on my team pointed out that my website features a quote from Carl Sagan about the importance of truth-telling, and we decided that it’s the essence of this show to have a wide range of guests and let them speak as they want, without editing, and with the understanding that it’s their opinions rather than mine. It’s a good thing we have that policy, because otherwise, I would have quite the project figuring out what to do with my very lively conversation with Bill Harris, the former CEO of Paypal and Intuit, and Founder and Chairman of Personal Capital. Bill and I got together, in a little office I was using at Harvard, and had a very far-ranging conversation. By the time we finished, I told him I’ll probably have to offer equal time to all the people he -- shall we say, critiqued -- during our talk.   Seriously -- if anyone Bill mentions would like to come on the show to offer opposing views, please reach out. A lot of Bill’s outspoken views these days focus on the controversy over customers’ right to use and share their financial data. Much of today’s most promising innovation works by having people give permission to a fintech to access their bank account, so that the fintech can help them save, invest, or manage their money. This is the model behind everything from Mint (podcast with them is coming soon), to Digit (see our past episode with Ethan Bloch). For the past year or so, banks have been raising concerns that these arrangements can be risky to customers because the fintech may have inadequate security, and/or because there may weak controls on how the fintech uses the data. The innovators are countering that many of them have better security than banks do -- basically because they have new technology rather than the aging, siloed IT at most banks. They also argue that the potential risks can be managed, including through best practice by data aggregators like Yodlee. Bill is part of a newly-formed fintech group on Consumer Financial Data Rights  (which I have advised) and which is trying to build consensus on how to provide consumer protection while also assuring that consumers can access and use their data freely. The core argument is this information belongs to the consumer, rather than to the company that’s holding it. There are huge stakes in this, because data is the life’s blood of financial innovation. Regulators and the financial community must assure that it’s protected and not abused, but also have to enable it to flow freely, with the consumer’s permission. If it doesn’t, most of the best innovation underway with wither and die. In our discussion, Bill talks about this challenge, including the fact that the Dodd-Frank law authorized the CFPB to set out guidance on it. (Here is the CFPB’s request for information on the data rights issue.) Even more basically, he talks about the underlying problem, which is how to actually secure consumers’ data and establish reliable identity verification. Bill has helped to found three major security companies and shares his deep thinking about a security world beyond passwords (which he calls “stupid”).  He also warns against universal data security standards that are rigid or one-size-fits-all. And he offers a vision for how we will really solve identity authentication and security problems -- through the phone. We talked about his current company, Personal Capital, which provides personal financial management software to about 1.3 million users, for free. For customers that want more help, the company then provides fee-based investment advisory services tailored for people with complex financial situations. It arose from Bill and colleagues deciding that people’s biggest financial challenge is the “chaos” that leaves people leading “unexamined financial lives.” Personal Capital has designed a solution that is simultaneously high-tech and high-touch. Bill has wide-ranging views (including some praise) about new models emerging in investment management and robo-advising. (Here is the earlier podcast I mention in our talk, with Jon Stein of Betterment.)  Our discussion also included a look into how Bill starts businesses and scales them up, and about the challenges of legacy bank IT systems (stuck together with “bubble gum and sealing wax”). I think you’ll especially enjoy his stories about past adventures, including the early days at Intuit, and the hair-raising startup of PayPal with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, in a “small second floor thing over a bakery on University Street outside of Stanford.” And listen closely as he recounts an intriguing dinner conversation with Steve Jobs, about financial services. More for our listeners: Watch for our upcoming shows, including Colleen Briggs of JPMorgan Chase; Wai Lum Kwok, who leads the regulatory sandbox in Abu Dhabi; Jonathan Dharmapalan, founder of eCurrency; Al Ko, who leads Mint; and the one and only Brett King, among others. Please review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes. Also sign up to get emails when the new podcasts come out and to get my newsletter and blog posts at  jsbarefoot.com. And go there to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast - Send "a buck a show" I hope you’ll also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

This episode is incredibly special, in two ways. First, Lyn Farrell is not only my former colleague, but one of my very best friends. We had such fun recording this at my apartment in Boston one weekend late last year. In many ways, it’s just a slice of a long conversation we’ve been having more or less continuously for years, including over countless meals on the road together, in the consulting life we used to share Second, I love it when our podcast discussions are actual brainstorming sessions. This one hit the jackpot on that front. In our back and forth, Lyn came up with an insight that neither of us had when we started, and both of us have found it reshaping our thinking ever since. It comes late in the episode -- you’ll know it when you hear it. I hope you find it as powerful as we did.   Lyn Farrell is former Managing Director, and now Advisory Board Member, at Treliant Risk Advisors.  She is arguably the foremost expert in the United States on regulatory compliance matters regarding consumer financial protection. As we note in our discussion, she literally “wrote the book” on compliance as the author, for more than twenty years, of the Reference Guide to Regulatory Compliance, published by the American Bankers Association as the foundation material that candidates must master in order to become Certified Regulatory Compliance Managers. Lyn is an attorney, in-demand public speaker, prolific writer, and consultant who has worked with every imaginable regulatory challenge, from the world’s largest banks to small community institutions and fintech startups, and from positive, proactive clients to cleaning up grizzly enforcement problems. She has, simply, seen everything. Fortunately for us, she has opinions about it all and shares them with bracing candor in our talk. She describes what’s failing in our current regulatory regime and explains what everybody is getting right and getting wrong, from Congress and regulators to bank CEO’s to compliance and risk professionals to IT departments, to her fellow lawyers, to fintech innovators. She offers a cogent indictment, from the inside, of the weaknesses of what we’ve built -- the disclosures no one reads, the high costs of compliance, and the tragic mismatch between where we expend resources versus what consumers actually need. She’s also expert in bank IT operations. It’s an open secret that most banks have antiquated IT, often accumulated through decades of mergers and acquisitions in which older systems were never integrated but rather, as Lyn puts it, stuck together with “bailing wire.” (We explored solving some of this through blockchain technology in my earlier Podcast with Blythe Masters of Digital Asset Holdings.) These old systems are a hotbed of compliance errors, for reasons she describes. It’s another area where startups have a counterintuitive advantage over banks, thanks to having no creaky legacy IT. In our discussion, Lyn explores the regulatory present and past (it’s been a long time since I’ve heard anyone mention Regulation Q!), but she’s most thought-provoking about the future.  She works extensively with innovators and has a vision for how we should be using new data and technology to do better. I always urge people interested in innovation to break out of their work silos and reach across disparate realms.  Lyn does this better than anyone I know. If it weren’t for her, I would never have attended a LEAN seminar, or done free-writing exercises to inspire creative thinking, or read Deep Work by Cal Newport, or watched the Amy Cuddy Ted Talk on “presence.” Since we made our recording, Lyn has stepped back from her full time role at Treliant to serve on its advisory board, spend more time in the beautiful house she and her husband Brian are building in Colorado Springs, and lead the Treliant Institute for Strategic Compliance Leadership, her brainchild.  Lyn asked me to speak at it, which inspired me to create a dinner talk I call “Heroic Compliance.”  It’s about the need for compliance officers -- even though they often seem more like Clark Kent than Superman -- to save their banks, customers, and industry by leading them into the high-tech innovation age. No one embodies that leadership more than Lyn, and I’m titling this episode with the same name -- Heroic Compliance. The same day we recorded this episode, Lyn told me she’s launching her own podcast show, aimed at compliance professionals. She said my dinner speech prompted her to give it the name, “Compliance Heroes.” You’ll find it on ITunes and the Android Market. Here are two more titles in Lyn’s recommended reading: Emotional Intelligence 2.0  by Travis Bradberry Presence by Amy Cuddy     And here is more on her background…. Kathlyn L. Farrell, CRCM, CAMS, AMLP Senior Advisory Board Member Lyn Farrell is an experienced Regulatory Compliance executive, with over 35 years of experience in banking law and compliance. She is a Senior Advisory Board Member at Treliant Risk Advisors, LLC. Lyn has led many diverse and complex compliance projects for large financial institutions, including: Developing a regulatory compliance strategic plan for a financial institution that primarily operates in the Fintech space; Assisting the CCO of a top 10 U.S. bank to make the regulatory compliance program more proactive, strategic and integrated with the businesses and other risk management disciplines within the organization; Designing and building a comprehensive Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices (UDAAP) audit program for the internal audit division of a top 10 U.S. financial institution, including developing the annual audit plan, scoping the individual audits, and writing the audit scripts; Assisting a top 20 bank implement all aspects of the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure Rule (TRID), including revamping business processes, enhancing risk controls, writing policies and procedures and creating job aids to assist first line staff to implement this complex regulation; Developing the “UDAAP University” training program for the compliance departments at three of the top 20 financial institutions and for the internal audit departments at 3 of the top 20 US banks; Overhauled the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) program for a top 20 US financial institution, including writing a new program document, reviewing its assessment areas and investments, and implementing a shift in the critical focus of its nationwide community development staff; Reviewing the potential acquisition by a top 20 U.S. bank of a large non-bank financial organization and provided advice on limiting the company’s regulatory risk by integrating and expanding the current compliance function and making it more strategic in its execution. Lyn has a passion for leadership development and has designed the Treliant Institute for Strategic Compliance Leadership, a leadership program exclusively for compliance professionals in financial institutions She is a frequent speaker at banking events and regularly publishes articles on a variety of banking-related topics. Her recent publications include: “Strengthening the First Line of Defense” in ABA Bank Compliance magazine, September-October 2016“TRID: A Checklist for Successful Compliance” in Mortgage Banking magazine, March 2016 Reference Guide to Regulatory Compliance, published by the American Bankers Association, the official study guide to the CRCM examination “Is this UDAAP or Not?” in  ABA Bank Compliance magazine, July-August 2015 “FCRA: A Sleeping Regulation Awakes” in Banking Exchange, August 2015 “Effectively Managing UDAAP Compliance in Mortgage Servicing” in Mortgage Banking magazine, April 2015 “Managing UDAAP Compliance Risks in Financial Institutions” in Journal of Taxation and Regulation of Financial Institutions, Nov/Dec, 2013 She received her undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University and her JD from the University of Houston.  Lyn is a Certified Regulatory Compliance Manager (CRCM), and an attorney, licensed in the state of Texas.   Lyn was the 2012 recipient of the ABA’s Distinguished Service Award. More for our listeners: I'll hope to see you all this week at FinXTech Summit in New York and of course CFSI’s Emerge in June. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at  jsbarefoot.com.   Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support our Podcast - Send "a buck a show" I’m just back from London -- more on that later -- but one highlight is I recorded an episode with the one and only Brett King. Coming soon! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. If you want to drill deeper into the topics we discuss weekly here on the show, check out our latest event, Tearsheet Money. We'll be convening June 5th in New York City to hear about the state of the art in fintech and read some of the industry tea leaves with talks from senior executives at firms like JP Morgan, BlackRock, Silicon Valley Bank, Umpqua Bank, and Citizens. I'm excited — I hope you'll join us. Go to http://www.tearsheet.co/events to learn more. I think you can still qualify for early pricing. This week's guest on the podcast is Jo Ann Barefoot. She's the CEO of Barefoot Innovation Group, where she writes, speaks, and advises on technology and regulation, in the U.S. and globally. Jo Ann is a Senior Fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government's Center for Business & Government. Previously, she was the first woman Deputy Comptroller of the Currency. Jo Ann is also the host of the**** **Barefoot Innovation (http://www.jsbarefoot.com/podcast/) **podcast**.** You can get this episode of the podcast, as well as 150 previous episodes in our archive, at our website, www.tearsheet.co. If you get value out of these episodes, please take a minute to rate us on iTunes. Doing so, helps other people find us. We're also available on SoundCloud. Also, if you're not signed up for our newsletter, subscribe now. 10,000 industry professionals read our Tearsheet newsletter every week to explore the impact technology is having on the financial services industry. http://www.tearsheet.co/subscribe Here's Jo Ann.

I’m excited to share today’s conversation with Alfred Hannig, Executive Director of AFI. When you hear of an organization with a name like The Alliance for Financial Inclusion, you might picture a nonprofit advocating for credit opportunity or community reinvestment. AFI, though, is unique. Its members are governments -- central banks and financial regulators -- representing over 90 countries in the developing world. They all work at the cutting edge of financial transformation, because the mobile phone is suddenly bringing real financial inclusion. Think about that statement. Throughout history, a large percentage of people have been excluded from, or marginalized by, the financial system. That’s mainly because it simply hasn’t been very profitable to serve them. Finance evolved with a business model that serves people in buildings -- traditionally it was grand buildings with lots of marble -- and by giving them personalized attention. It was mainly for wealthy people, and then for the middle class as technology -- streamlined branches, ATM’s, and telephone and online banking were added to the mix. Generally, though, finance, and especially banks, could not readily reach people with lower incomes, including the rural poor, or at least could not offer them affordable pricing. A lot of public policy has aimed at getting banks to serve those customers despite the challenging economics. The cell phone is changing that, and fast. The World Bank has a goal of enabling every adult in the world to have a bank account by 2020 -- three years from now. Whether or not that deadline is met, the fact is that access is spreading fast. Significantly, it’s spreading fastest in the developing world. One reason is that cell phone adoption has been so rapid there, mainly because most people never had landlines. Another is that telcos began offering financial services through those phones, creating a fast and efficient delivery channel. A third is that these new systems often arise in settings that lack traditional regulatory systems, making it easy for innovators to move quickly, but of course raising many kinds of novel regulatory risks. AFI and its members are dealing with all of this -- both the opportunities and the risks. They’re doing this from the perspective of financial regulators and also with the insight that financial inclusion is a key engine of economic growth, and of empowerment for women and other groups that have historically lacked access. I had the chance to join in this dialogue at AFI’s Global Policy Forum in Fiji last year, a beautiful event highlighting traditional cultures of the Asia Pacific. More than 80 countries participated, working across diverse languages, cultures, demographics, and economic challenges to distill the keys to fostering inclusion and regulating change. While there, I recorded this episode with AFI’s visionary leader, Alfred Hannig. I’ll leave it to him to tell you his story. For more information, also check out our episode with Theo Cosmora, CEO of the One Dollar Smart Phone. And here’s a (bad) photo of me with Vuli the Vanu, Fiji’s mascot for financial literacy! More for our listeners: This month I’ll be in Jakarta for a global discussion of regulation and financial inclusion. In April I’ll speak at the FinXTech Summit in New York, and in London at both the Innovate Finance fintech conference and the International FinTech Investor Conference sponsored by the Financial Conduct Authority. And I hope everyone is registering to come to CFSI’s Emerge in June. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at  jsbarefoot.com.  My latest post tells you about Hummingbird, the RegTech firm I cofounded late last year. We’re aiming to use new technology to transform both halves of the regulatory equation -- both how to regulate and how to comply -- starting with anti-money laundering. We’ll do a podcast on this, sometime soon. Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support the Podcast - Send a "Buck a show" And watch for upcoming podcasts, including with Wai Lum Kwok, Executive Director of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Abu Dhabi Global Market, Colleen Briggs of JPMorgan Chase, Bill Harris, former CEO of both PayPal and Intuit, and now CEO of Personal Capital, and Jonathan Dharmapalan, founder of eCurrency. Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today’s show features one of the most  interesting startups in London. I was there in in late 2015 and looked up someone I’d been wanting to meet -- Jean- Stephane Gourevitch, (see more on Jean-Stephane below -- he is behind many of the most interesting fintech developments in Europe and will be on the show one day soon).  We met for coffee on the south bank of the Thames, near the Shard hotel, and he brought along a young entrepreneur, Ollie Perdue of Loot. Ollie showed me a quick Loot demo on his phone, and ever since, I’ve been avidly watching their progress. A year later, I had a chance to do a podcast with Ollie. Sitting amidst their whiteboards marked up with problem-solving sketches and waiting list queues, he filled me in on their progress. Loot is an app paired with a prepaid debit card, offering tremendously useful tools for easy budgeting, payments, and simple ways to set financial goals and get coached about how best to meet them. They also analyze the customer’s spending patterns and benchmark against peers -- helping the huge numbers of people who simply have no idea where they stand compared to where they should be, in financial health. In our conversation Ollie describes how it all works, including how he got going and how he’s managed to launch something so impressive while still in his early twenties.The company has gotten a lot of attention, including raising an additional $3.13 in venture funds late last year. It’s aimed at young people and is one of the best offerings I’ve seen in hitting that sweet spot. That includes having an in-app ability to do customer service by text with (what else?) GIF’s. Skeptics often argue that fintech is too narrow because so much of it aims for millennials. To that, I’d say two things. First, startups, out of sheer financial necessity, have to target early adopters -- markets that are likely to pick up a new product quickly and share it virally. That means a high percentage are starting with millennials. However, I don’t know any that plan to stop with them. Secondly, millennials are the largest generation in the history of the world, both in the U.S. and globally. They surpassed the baby boomers a couple of  years ago. By sheer numbers alone, they’re going to dominate commerce and culture, just as baby boomers did as they came of age. I made a speech last month to AFSA, who asked me to talk specifically about millennials as customers. Working on it made me think more deeply, myself, about how important it is that new financial technology is emerging concurrently with the rise of this huge generation -- whom we know, as both consumers and employees, want everything to be optimized by technology -- to be well-designed, fast, easy, friendly, engaging, and all the rest. If technology was changing, but customers weren’t, we can imagine slow adoption of innovation. Instead, today, both halves are transforming together -- the product and the user. That will change the market, not only for young customers, but for everyone, and in some ways, faster than we might think. Millennials should not be underestimated -- especially thoughtful, energetic entrepreneurs like Ollie Purdue. More Links: IInterview with Ollie: http://www.businessinsider.com/loot-bank-ceo-ollie-purdue-interview-2015-8 Jean-Stephane’s 2017 conference FintechConnectLive! More for our listeners: I'll hope to see you in March at LendIt in New York and SXSW in Austin. Also come to the FinXTech Summit in April and of course CFSI’s Emerge in June. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at  jsbarefoot.com.  My new post says 2017 will be the year of RegTech. Go there too to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. See you next time! Support the Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today we’re expanding beyond our usual Barefoot Innovation focus on consumer financial innovation, to explore the parallel issues arising for small businesses. We’ve touched on this before, but are so fortunate, today, to have a guest who deeply understands the whole range of these issues. She is Karen Mills, former head of the Small Business Administration and now senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, where she has just released a comprehensive paper on fintech and small business. We recorded today’s show in her office on the business school campus, which is just across the Charles River from my fellowship’s home base in the Harvard Kennedy School. She and I first met in Washington a few years back, when she issued a research paper on the state of small business lending. That was in conjunction with the group that issued the Small Business Borrowers’ Bill of Rights (which we covered in our episode with Brian Graham of BancAlliance. In 2016, much to my delight, Karen and her co-author Brayden McCarthy put out an update on her paper, and this time it’s mostly about fintech. Technology is changing small business lending in the same ways it’s transforming consumer finance, but with different twists. On the positive side, innovators are using technology to do better for SME’s -- small and medium-sized enterprises -- by adopting low-cost online platforms, becoming much smarter about getting and using data, speeding up service, and creating a vastly better user experience than was possible in the past. The data issue is crucial. Thanks to new technology (including Square), small businesses increasingly can give lenders solid, up to date information on their financial positions and cash flows. Innovative lenders can analyze this, determine with precision what the borrower can afford, and often can create a flexible repayment schedule that works with the rhythm of the business, including seasonal ones. These innovators are filling an enormous gap -- which Karen clearly demonstrates -- because banks just cannot profitably make the smaller loans that so many businesses need. There are  downsides, though. One is that whereas local banks interact with their business customers face to face,  these new relationships are online. For lenders, this creates higher risk of fraud. And for borrowers, there is rising danger that these entrepreneurs will be harmed by confusing terms and, sometimes, by downright predatory practices online. And here’s a little-known fact:  small business borrowers have almost no regulatory protections, at least at the federal level. There is no federal regulator for small business lending, as there is for consumers, and even if there were, there are very few regulations that apply. Generally speaking, there are no requirements for standard disclosures to small business borrowers, and no rules against unfair and deceptive practices, beyond those that cover commerce in general. This is significant, because today’s small businesses are more similar to consumers than ever before. The “1099” or “gig” economy has led to more and more people starting small businesses as their main work, or to supplement tight household budgets, or to tide them over after losing a job. It’s a mistake to assume that, simply because they’re business people, they are therefore financially sophisticated. Listeners to Barefoot Innovation have probably figured out by now that I’m not a fan of the current regulatory apparatus for protecting financial consumers (even though I myself have been involved in developing some of it). Broadly speaking, disclosures are failing, and regulations are choking desirable innovation. The last thing I think we should do is to transplant our whole system of consumer protection laws into the fresh, green field of small business lending, and have it put down roots there -- like crabgrass. I think we should be deeply rethinking our consumer laws. In the process, though, we should also be thinking about whether and how to create protections and tools for small businesses to use, too. Karen does recommend extending some consumer-type protections to these firms, including APR’s (we had a good exchange on the pros and cons of that). She also has tremendous insights into the structure and nature of the market, and on what to do about what she calls the “spaghetti soup” of regulatory agencies and rules, which now make it so hard to move toward a smarter system. She focuses, too, on the critical need for clearer, updated regulatory guidance for banks that want to work with fintechs on small business lending. A wide spectrum of new models are emerging, partly because these two industries need each other -- they complement each other. Both sides will suffer, and so will business borrowers, if banks can’t navigate the third-party risk rules of their prudential regulators. (As I often say, the regulators have the hardest job in all this.) More information on Karen: Karen Gordon Mills served as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2009 until August 2013.  She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School and at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School focusing on U.S. competitiveness, entrepreneurship and innovation. As SBA Administrator and a Cabinet member, Mills served on the President’s National Economic Council and was a key member of the White House economic team.  At the SBA, she led a team of more than 3,000 employees and managed a loan guarantee portfolio of over $100 billion.  Mills is credited with turning around the agency during the financial crisis and with streamlining loan programs, shortening turnaround times, and reducing paperwork.  In addition, Mills helped small businesses create regional economic clusters, gain access to early stage capital, hire skilled workers, boost exports, and tap into government and commercial supply chains.   Prior to the SBA, Mills held leadership positions in the private sector, including as a partner in several private equity firms, and served on the boards of Scotts Miracle-Gro and Arrow Electronics.  Most recently, she was president of MMP Group, which invested in businesses in consumer products, food, textiles, and industrial components.  In 2007, Maine Governor John Baldacci appointed Mills to chair Maine’s Council on Competitiveness and the Economy, where she focused on regional development initiatives, including a regional economic cluster with Maine’s boatbuilding industry.    Mills earned an AB in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. Additionally, she is a past vice chair of the Harvard Overseers, and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Harvard Corporation. And listen, too, to our episode from last year with Sam Hodges of Funding Circle, a leading example of platform lending to small businesses. More for our listeners We have some amazing shows coming up, including one with Chase’s Colleen Briggs, several focused on global trends, at least one with a CEO of a community bank, and one that I will call a barn-burner with the former CEO of PayPal and Inuit, Bill Harris. Don’t miss them! Remember to write a review of Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up at www.,jsbarefoot.com to get email notices when new podcasts come out, as well as my newsletter and blog posts.  Go there too to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. And remember to  join my facebook fan page and follow me on twitter. Support the Podcast Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Today’s episode is about new ideas about a very old problem in consumer finance -- high-cost lending to high-risk borrowers. My guest is LendUp CEO Sasha Orloff, who is one of a new generation of fintech founders building alternatives to traditional payday lending. In public policy, there has been a long-standing assumption, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, that widespread access to credit -- especially mortgages -- is a good thing. A host of government regulations, programs, and bank supervisory activities aim to promote more credit, because we’ve assumed that wider credit access is, broadly speaking, good. Is it, though? Most people would agree that up to a point, it’s good, and beyond some point, it becomes bad. It definitely becomes bad at the point where the borrower can’t realistically repay the loan. It can also become bad if the pricing is so high that the person ends up worse off for borrowing, instead of better, especially if the borrower doesn’t understand the terms We could do many episodes on the tough issues embedded in this question. One is whether it’s better to have high-cost loan options that are legal and subject to regulation, or to outlaw them, knowing that shutting down legal options will drive some desperate people to use illegal ones, which hurt them even more. Another is the philosophical question of how much the government should protect people from themselves. If the price of a high-cost loan is clear, and borrowers understand it, should the government respect their decision on whether to take it, or substitute its judgment for theirs and remove the option? Again, public policy has been debating these issues for decades --  maybe centuries -- and still is, including through many of the initiatives taken to date by the CFPB. In this podcast, we won’t tackle those questions, but will instead ask a very different one: What if we didn’t need to resolve them? What if, thanks to technology, we could solve the problems surrounding high-cost credit -- or a big chunk of them -- not through regulation, but in the marketplace. LendUp.  Sasha Orloff founded LendUp to provide more affordable credit to the 50% of Americans with credit scores below 680. He had worked at a big bank, and at an NGO in the developing world, and had a brother in the technology world who kept telling him that better software could create better products. He finally founded LendUp, to build them. LendUp offers credit products online -- which means it has, automatically, a lower cost structure than the traditional bank model of branches. As Sasha explains in our discussion, it has also designed its products to offer borrowers a gateway to better credit scores, credit options, and financial health. LendUp is backed by major investors including Y-Combinator, Google Ventures, QED Investors, Startfund, Kleiner Perkins, A16Z seed fund, Thomvest Ventures, Kapor Capital, Bronze Investments, Founders Co-Op, Data Collective, Susa Ventures, and Radicle Impact. Sasha and the firm have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, NYTimes, Financial Times, CNN, NBC, TechCrunch, Venturebeat, Inc, Wired, Bloomberg, Fortune, Dow Jones, American Banker, Marketplace and many others. He has presented at TEDx, and LendUp, and they won Finovate Best In Show. FastCompany named the firm as one of the World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Personal Finance, and it won runner up in Webbys for best website design. They have presented at LendIt, Emerge, Money20/20, The HubSF, NBC News, and Huffington Post Live, and participate in The Clinton Global Initiative on Financial Inclusion. Sasha also serves on the Consumer Lending Advisory Board for TransUnion (one of the three major credit bureaus) A regulatory note.  After Sasha and I recorded this episode, the CFPB announced an enforcement action against LendUp. The order is, among other things, a warning flag for startups about the importance, and the great challenges, of maintaining complete regulatory compliance in the midst of rapid growth. The company has responded with a massive expansion of compliance staff. Following the announcement of consent order last fall, it issued this statement: We started LendUp because the traditional banking system wasn’t working for more than half of Americans. From day one, we’ve committed ourselves to offering better, safer and more transparent credit products and to aligning the success of our business with the success of our customers. We genuinely believed the product features that were identified by the CFPB and the California DBO– like optional expedited funding and a 30 cent per day discount for early repayment—were in the best interests of our customers. But we fell short in the execution and in meeting the expectations of our regulators.  We have since taken action to resolve every issue they’ve raised, including beginning to refund customers prior to entry of the Consent Order and Settlement Agreement. We’ve also made significant investments to build out our legal and compliance operations. In this respect, we are a different company today, with a completely new legal and compliance team that is larger now than our entire company when we started these exams. Importantly, those teams are brought in at the beginning of the development lifecycle for every new product and feature. We are proud of the progress we’ve made to expand access to credit, lower borrowing costs and provide credit-building opportunities to our customers. LendUp has: Graduated more than 20,000 borrowers to the highest rungs of the LendUp Ladder in more than 11 states Saved Californians alone more than $18M in 2016 (and an estimated $40M to date nationwide) Delivered over 800,000 free credit education classes; and Helped LendUp customers improve their credit scores: according to TransUnion data, 66% of LendUp customers showed a credit score increase – more than those in the control group using similar types of products from other lenders. We are eager to keep building on this track record, and look forward to continuing our work to put our customers on paths to better financial health. I have found Sasha to be one of the most thoughtful people in fintech. I think you’ll be fascinated by his overview of the shrinking of the American middle class, the impact of the smartphone revolution; innovation models fort startups versus banks; how making financial education interesting; and how to redesign regulation for the 21st century, The loans at Lendup cost less than traditional payday options, but more than loans to prime customers, because the borrowers are simply higher risk. If lenders can’t charge enough to cover that risk, they won’t serve these customers. If they can, though, and if they can leverage technology to gain efficiency and underwriting accuracy, and if they can enable high-risk borrowers to build and repair credit records, and if they can educate people about managing their finances, and can also make a great return on capital and then truly scale up…. then seemingly unsolvable problems can, maybe, begin to.get solved. More links: Study on LendUp impact on credit scores. LendUp education on credit scores. More for our listeners: I'll hope to see you at "LendIt in New York in February, SXSW in March, FinXTech Summit in April and of course CFSI’s Emerge in June. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at jsbarefoot.com.  My latest post argues for some healthy regulatory disruption as a new administration takes office. Go there too to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my Facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support the Podcast And watch for the next podcast, because we’re going to turn to innovation in small business lending. My guest will be Karen Mills, the former Administrator of the SBA and at Harvard Business School, where she has just issued an updated study on small business lending This one is focused mainly on fintech. We had a fascinating conversation. See you then! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!