Podcasts about cfsi

Thanks for tuning in to this Tuesday edition of RealAg Radio brought to you by Koch Agronomic Services. Host Shaun Haney is joined by: Kyle Larkin with Grain Growers of Canada to discuss the potential rail strike; Greg Northey with Pulse Canada on how to stop the rail strike; Justin Funk with RealAgristudies on the... Read More

Thanks for tuning in to this Tuesday edition of RealAg Radio brought to you by Koch Agronomic Services. Host Shaun Haney is joined by: Kyle Larkin with Grain Growers of Canada to discuss the potential rail strike; Greg Northey with Pulse Canada on how to stop the rail strike; Justin Funk with RealAgristudies on the... Read More

In this episode of the Microcollege podcast, join me for a fascinating conversation with Eric Schwarz, Co-Founder and CEO of the College for Social Innovation (CFSI), which offers semester-long immersive service learning internships in partnership with community organizations in the Boston area, as well as on college campuses throughout the northeast and midwestern United States. CFSI participants are primarily current college students who receive a semester of college credit from one of several partner universities, while living with other CFSI students and participating in supportive workshops and courses. This year, CFSI is also launching a version of their programming for gap year students.An experienced social entrepreneur, Eric is the Co-Founder and CEO of the College for Social Innovation (CFSI), which seeks to "educate and inspire the next generation of problem solvers for humanity's tough challenges.” CFSI seeks to build a bigger, better prepared, and more diverse talent pipeline for the social impact sector through its flagship Semester in the City experiential learning program in Boston and a new national Semester for Impact program launched in 2023. Eric is also Co-Founder and former CEO of Citizen Schools, an apprenticeship-based model for out of school time learning, which has had a positive impact on the after-school and extended learning time fields across the U.S. Prior to starting Citizen Schools in 1995, Eric served as vice president of City Year, the national service program, and as a journalist at The Oakland Tribune and The Patriot Ledger (Quincy, MA) where he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Eric is a member of the board of Citizen Schools, College for Social Innovation, and Crimson Goes Blue. He is a past board member of First Night, The Breakthrough Collaborative, Do Something, Beyond12, the Harvard Outward Bound Project, and past chair of the FAO Schwarz Family Foundation and of Citizen Schools. Eric is the author of the critically-acclaimed book, The Opportunity Equation, the co-editor of The Case For 21st Century Learning, and the author of numerous articles and book chapters, including “Calling All Citizens” in The New York Times best-selling Waiting For Superman.Eric graduated from the University of Vermont (B.A.) in 1983 and from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (M. Ed) in 1997. He lives in Brookline, MA with his wife and two children.College for Social Innovation: https://collegeforsocialinnovation.org/CFSI Gap Semester: https://collegeforsocialinnovation.org/gap-semesterCitizen Schools: https://www.citizenschools.org/Thoreau College: https://thoreaucollege.org/Driftless Folk School: https://www.driftlessfolkschool.org/The Microcollege Network: https://www.hylo.com/groups/microcollege-network

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of RealAg on the Weekend! On this weekend's show, host Shaun Haney is joined by: Chuck Penner with LeftField Commodity Research on pulse tariffs into India; A spotlight interview with Rob Meijer of Genesis Fertilizers; The big win for Canadian agriculture with the gene-editing approval; and Hear some... Read More

Thanks for tuning in to this Friday edition of RealAg Radio! Shaun Haney is joined by joined by Anne Wasko of the Gateway Livestock Exchange for the Beef Market Update. Haney is then joined by Kelvin Heppner and Lyndsey Smith, both of RealAgriculture, on the RealAg Issues Panel. They discuss a number of topics, including:... Read More

Thanks for tuning in to this Friday edition of RealAg Radio! Shaun Haney is joined by joined by Anne Wasko of the Gateway Livestock Exchange for the Beef Market Update. Haney is then joined by Kelvin Heppner and Lyndsey Smith, both of RealAgriculture, on the RealAg Issues Panel. They discuss a number of topics, including:... Read More

Thanks for tuning in to this Tuesday edition of RealAg Radio. Host Shaun Haney is joined by: Peggy Brekveld with Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council on a new labour report; Lee Klancher author of the “Farmall Century”; Hear a discussion about the October results of the Canadian Farmer Sentiment Index; and, Don’t miss the top... Read More

Thanks for tuning in to this Tuesday edition of RealAg Radio. Host Shaun Haney is joined by: Peggy Brekveld with Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council on a new labour report; Lee Klancher author of the “Farmall Century”; Hear a discussion about the October results of the Canadian Farmer Sentiment Index; and, Don’t miss the top... Read More

Thanks for tuning in to RealAg on the Weekend! On this episode, host Shaun Haney will discuss a number of topics including: The Canadian Farmer Sentiment Index results for May; Viterra and Bunge merger; and, The battle over interswitching. Thoughts on something we talked about on the show? Connect with host Shaun Haney via email shaney@realagriculture.com,... Read More

Tonight's special guest is Cricket (Tammi) Andrews from Easton, Pennsylvania, a survivor of neglect from alcoholic parents who was later abused in foster care.  We really appreciate her telling her story and welcome her back to her NAASCA family. Among other things, she's a Guardian Angel and a Lead Advocate for CFSI Missing (Center for Search & Investigations). Cricket is both a victim's advocate and a missing persons advocate. The US Dept. of Justice reports over 2,100 children go missing each day, and the FBI says one third will be victims of Child Trafficking. CFSI is an organization with a high success rate of bringing missing children aged 11- 16 home safely by assisting and training families and communities in facilitating the search and location efforts worldwide. CFSI's services are always offered free of charge to the parents of missing children whom meet the non-profit's criteria. CFSI for Missing Children is seeking advocates who can join its teams located in each state and assist with such efforts as raising awareness throughout social media, participating in grid searches, neighborhood canvases and blitzing your area with posters. "We hope that you will be willing to give a little of your time when a child in your area goes missing," it says on the web site. "Think about how much you would appreciate the help if your child were missing." Cricket says, "I am writing a book called 'I Should Be Dead: a survivor's journey to becoming a voice for the voiceless.' With my book I'll want to empower others to empower themselves."

Arjan is a trusted and experienced venture investor and founder of Core Innovation Capital, a leading venture capital fund investing in financial services companies that democratize prosperity. He is a passionate advocate for market-based financial access and empowerment.His investments include Ripple, NerdWallet, Bestow, and Oportun. He is a Senior Advisor to the Financial Health Network (formerly CFSI), the nation's leading authority on financial health, which he helped start in 2004. He has served on the CFPB's Consumer Advisory Board and currently serves on the Fed's Consumer Advisory Counsel.Several of Arjan's investments have been acquired or gone public, including TIO Networks (by PayPal), Fundera (by Nerdwallet), Coverhound (Brown & Brown), Oportun (Nasdaq:OPRT), Honest Dollar (by Goldman Sachs), L2C (by TransUnion), AccountNow (by Green Dot), CircleLending (by Virgin Group), and RentBureau (by Experian).Arjan writes regularly, and has been noted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Economist, and in the documentary, Spent. He speaks regularly including at the White House, SXSW, Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.On a local level he serves on the Compton Community Development Corporation Board. Prior, he spent a decade as an operator in several venture backed startups as a technology leader, product- and general manager including Pierian Spring Software, Cognitive Concepts (acquired by Houghton Mifflin), Capella Learning (now NASDAQ: CPLA), and DoTheGood.Arjan joins me today to discuss mainly about a piece he wrote for Medium called How missionary are you actually?, which I think has so many insights per sentence. It is mind blowing, how dense and how much information is in the short piece. I thought it was worth a deep dive on the podcast, especially for founders thinking about how to hold themselves accountable to the mission. How to make sure it lives on past your initial excitement. And those moments when you say, Let's go climb that mountain..“We believe in Occam's razor, so pick the simpler versus the more complex solution, when there's a choice. We believe in creative destruction. And so rather than perfect academic rigor, we're fine to always be tinkering and improving it. Then we put together a small group of folks whose job it is to call our bluff, to hold our feet to the fire to insist on intellectual honesty.” - Arjan SchütteToday on Startups for Good we cover:Misguided perseveranceImpact externalities reportWhy mission driven startups are intent on financial healthThe importance of writing down the company's mission Calculating correlations between social impact and enterprise valueDifferent ways to levy feesUnderstanding your customer betterSharing positive externalities with steak holdersTaking The Founder's PledgeArjan's article in MediumConnect with Arjan through his email at a@corevc.com or at Core's websiteSubscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes!Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.Don't forget to visit our website, connect

On this week's episode of Industry Elites, Natalie and Vicki chatted with guest Brian Mingham, who is Founder & CEO of CFSI Loan Management (CFSI). Since founding the firm in 2012, Mr. Mingham has transformed CFSI to a leading nationwide construction risk mitigation firm by creating key strategies and hiring the best team in the space. Together they had the opportunity to discuss the constant challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, residential renovations and the risks involved. Follow Brian Mingham for more: Website - www.brianmingham.comhttps://www.thinkcfsi.comTwitter - https://twitter.com/brianminghamLinkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-mingham-3804006Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Brian-Mingham-107670634377746To receive updates or to be featured on the podcast, check out www.industry-elites.com. Follow Industry Elites and like us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram for the latest information!Instagram - www.instagram.com/industry.elitesFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/IndustryElitesTwitter - https://twitter.com/Industry_ElitesMedium - https://medium.com/@industryelitesCrunchbase - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/industry-elites

CFSI Executive Director Bill Webb talks about important CFSI initiatives and what fire chiefs – and firefighters at all levels – should know about navigating the world of fire service politics.

Tonight's special guest is Cricket (Tammi Andrews) from Easton, Pennsylvania. She's a returning 'special guest' and a survivor of neglect from her alcoholic parents and abuse in foster care. She relates, “I always felt like I was nothing & unworthy to be loved by anyone! I was always being told I was stupid & would never amount to anything so I believed it! I was basically a prisoner in my last home till I was rescued at 19 then stalked for the next 10 years by my foster father.” Now Cricket is a member of the Alliance of Guardian Angels and a Lead Advocate for CFSI Missing. The Center for Search & Investigations is an approved 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with a high success rate of bringing missing children aged 11- 16 home safely, by assisting and training families and communities in facilitating the search and location efforts worldwide in order to safeguard children from abduction, child trafficking & exploitation. CFSI's services are always offered free of charge to the parents of missing children who meet the non-profit's criteria. The CFSI mission; what every single Advocate and supporter works for are these two words: FOUND SAFE. CFSI's involvement in the community has brought children back to their families. Cricket continues, “I am also a member of a wonderful group Angel Warriors for Children Everywhere who's founder will be helping me on the next chapter of my journey! I'd like to share my journey from the child nobody wanted to becoming the voice for the voiceless!”

To Lend or Not to Lend? How Consumer Needs are Evolving Joe Toms, Freedom Financial Asset Management Stoyan Kenderov, LendingClub John Thompson, CFSI Jamie Saxe, LendingTree Moderator: Mongkha Lu Pavlick, Federal Reserve of SF

In this podcast, Christian Rolon (MBA '19) interviews Garry Reeder, Vice President at the Center for Financial Services Innovation. This episode was recorded live at the Financial Inclusion Summit. Garry leads the Financial Solutions Lab at CFSI. In this podcast, Garry discusses CFSI's mission and investing activities, regulatory developments in fintech, and fintech and blockchain applications for the underbanked. Garry Reeder is the Vice President of Innovation and Policy at the Center for Financial Services Innovation. Garry also leads the Financial Solutions Lab at CFSI. The Financial Solutions Lab is a partnership between CFSI and J.P. Morgan Chase. The Financial Solutions Lab invests in entrepreneurs and startups that are working on improving the financial health of consumers around the world. Past startups that have gone through the program include: Dave, Digit, EarnUp, LendStreet, Nova, Scratch, and WiseBanyan. Prior to his current role at CFSI, Garry had an extensive background in the public and private sector. Within the private sector, Garry has a decade of asset management experience, spanning across Ziff Brothers Investments and Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Garry later went on to co-found Fenway Summer Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in Fintech firms. Garry has also advised a number of financial service institutions around the regulatory landscape, first at BlackRock, where Garry led the Consumer Financial Services Advisory Practice, and then at Chain Bridge Partners, where Garry was a Managing Director. Garry also spent time in the public sector, specifically at the U.S. Treasury. At Treasury, Garry worked on the Auto Team, overseeing TARP's investments in the auto sector, and the General Motors IPO. Garry went on to serve as the Chief of Staff for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, helping to develop Project Catalyst. Garry has his BA from Yale, and his MBA from Columbia Business School. The Financial Inclusion Summit was organized by Rex Salisbury, the founder of Fintech Devs and PMs Meetup. The community has roughly 2,000 members, hosting monthly events highlighting many exciting Fintech firms in the Bay Area. Past Meetups have featured speakers from: a16z, Affirm, Branch, EarnIn, Plaid, SoFi, Wealthfront, and many others. Learn more at: https://www.fintechdevsandpms.com/.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRenton Connect with me on LinkedIn Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

We have come a long way in the past decade when it comes to innovation in financial services. But how is fintech truly improving the financial health of the average American? Not as much as it should be. Changing this situation is the mission of our next guest on the Lend Academy Podcast. Jennifer Tescher […] The post Podcast 169: Jennifer Tescher of CFSI appeared first on Lend Academy.

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!

April 25th, 2018 is Financial Health Matters Day, a.k.a. #FinHealthMatters Day.  This day was created by CFSI to bring attention to America’s financial health.  This year the focus is specifically on the financial health of our students. There are so many financial issues plaguing future, current & past students -Rising tuition costs- -More than $1.3 Trillion in student loan debt- -Lack of financial education in our school system- Because this situation is affects student's financial health in so many ways, this issue cannot be fixed by addressing just one area.  We need to look at the financial situation of our students as a whole. Visit PopcornFinance.com/FinHealth for full show notes   Were you planning on shopping on Amazon?  Help support the show for free using the Amazon link below Support Popcorn Finance on Amazon   How to be featured on the show You can record a voice note and email it to me at Questions @ PopcornFinance .com Send a call in through the Anchor app Use SpeakPipe to leave me a voicemail https://www.speakpipe.com/PopcornFinance Connect with me Instagram -@PopcornFinancePodcast Twitter - @PopcornFinance Facebook - Popcorn Finance

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!

Tonight's special guest is Kattie Andrews from Easton, Pennsylvania, a survivor of child abuse who grew up in foster care. This will be her first time telling her story, so we really appreciate her doing so and welcome her to the NAASCA family. Kattie is a foster care survivor and a victim of childhood abuse. Among other things, she's a member of the Alliance of Guardian Angels and a Lead Advocate for CFSI Missing (Center for Search & Investigations). The US Dept. of Justice reports over 2,100 children go missing each day, and the FBI says one third will be victims of Child Trafficking. CFSI is an organization with a high success rate of bringing missing children aged 11-16 home safely, by assisting and training families and communities in facilitating the search and location efforts worldwide in order to safeguard children from abduction, child trafficking & exploitation. CFSI's services are always offered free of charge to the parents of missing children whom meet the non-profit's criteria. It's simple and easy to make a big difference in a child's life. CFSI for Missing Children is seeking advocates who can join its teams located in each state and assist with such efforts as raising awareness throughout social media, participating in grid searches, neighborhood canvases and blitzing your area with posters. "We hope that you will be willing to give a little of your time when a child in your area goes missing," it says on the web site. "Think about how much you would appreciate the help if your child were missing."

Chris Hutchins from Grove and Rob Erich from MoneyNomad.com sat with me at the hood of a VW Bug to discuss their experience going through the FinX program hosted by CFSI.  The FinX program gives participants the opportunity to go out in to the world and experience life from the perspective of someone left outside of the banking system. Full Show Notes at PopcornFinance.com/42   How to be featured on the show You can record a voice note and email it to me at Questions @ PopcornFinance .com Send a call in through the Anchor app Use SpeakPipe to leave me a voicemail https://www.speakpipe.com/PopcornFinance Help support the show for free at PopcornFinance.com/Support   Connect with me Instagram -@PopcornFinancePodcast Twitter - @PopcornFinance Facebook - Popcorn Finance   Outro Music By Buddha by Kontekst https://soundcloud.com/kontekstmusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Music provided by Audio Library https://youtu.be/b6jK2t3lcRs

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!

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!

Today’s show is very different than what we’re used to. We’re taking a macro look at your average American and trying to understand how they can become (and what’s maybe preventing them from becoming) Masters of Money. My guest today is Rachel Schneider is co-author of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. She’s also the Senior Vice President at the Center for Financial Services Innovation. CFSI is the authority on consumer financial health, leading a network of committed financial services innovators to build better consumer products and practices. Their mission is to improve the financial health of Americans, especially the underserved, by shaping a robust and innovative financial services marketplace with increased access to higher quality products and practices. June 27th is #FinHealthMatters day - a day where the FinCon community and CFSI join forces to bring awareness to America’s financial health. All across the financial blogosphere and podcast space today folks are sharing personal stories of why Financial Health matters. I encourage you to check out the #hashtag #FinHealthMatters and read/listen to all of the stories being shared. So let’s dig in. Let’s meet today’s Master of Money…. The show notes, including links to everything we talked about, can be found at http://ptmoney.com/rachel 

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!

Bringing payments and financial services to those of us with a tenuous connection to the banking system is the goal of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. FinLab, a joint effort by the CFSI and JPMorgan Chase, is a five year effort, now in its third year, that’s using a competition for funding and business support to broaden American financial services options. When nearly half of Americans don’t have $400 ready money, better financial management tools can help. Join FinLab’s Managing Director, Ryan Falvey and Glenbrook’s George Peabody as they discuss the FinLab mission, its process, successes, and what Ryan hopes to see next.

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!

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!

Millions of Americans are facing "a shocking level" of income and expense volatility - much like what's experienced in emerging markets. That's the key finding of a new book by Rachel Schneider, Senior Vice President at CFSI, and Jonathan Morduch of New York University. Called "The Financial Diaries, How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty," the book presents insights gained from tracking the financial lives of 235 low and moderate income households for a full year, exploring in remarkable detail the ways they deal with financial insecurity. Schneider discusses the research and its implications for America's economic, social and political future in this wide-ranging interview.

What happens when you have no savings and you suddenly incur a huge expense like a medical bill or car repair. What happens if you have a job in retail and your weekly paycheck fluctuates while your monthly bills remain steady. The topic today is financial fragility and to explore I’ve invited Rachel Schneider, the co-author of the new book, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. In her book she and her co-author take a deep dive into how 235 low and middle-income families in the U.S. spend, earn and save over the course of a year. How do they deal with inconsistent paychecks, emergency costs and other financial ups and downs? Some more about Rachel: She's the Senior Vice President at Center for Financial Services Innovation or CFSI. She's an expert on financial health and how an innovative financial services marketplace can improve the live for Americans. She is also the co-Principal Investigator on the U.S. Financial Diaries research study that is the basis of her new book. Rachel’s began her career as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. For more information visit www.somoneypodcast.com.

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’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. 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Jennifer Tescher of CFSI sits down with Toni Johnson to discuss how the financial industry is learning to evaluate its own success by measuring its impacts on consumers’ financial health.

My guests today are two of the most thoughtful people in the United States on the topic of regulatory compliance. They are the chief compliance officers of Citigroup and Wells Fargo – Kathryn Reimann and Yvette Hollingsworth Clark. Our listeners include a lot of people who are not fascinated by the topic of regulatory compliance, to put it mildly. The fact is, though, that compliance has shifted, rather suddenly, from being boring to most people, to being fascinating. And whether it fascinates you or not, it has become absolutely critical to whether financial companies can thrive. Becoming great at compliance – both effective and efficient -- has become mission-critical competencies for every financial company, large and small. Let’s step back and think about what’s happening.  Technology is disrupting finance, which means that it’s also disrupting financial regulation, which therefore means that it’s also disrupting compliance, inevitably. It will completely change how financial companies implement the massive set of regulatory requirements that pervade every aspect of what they do. This is going to be – already is – a wrenching process. For better or worse, consumer financial protection regulation has always been hypertechnical. built mainly around highly prescriptive rules. Congress passes laws, the regulatory agencies issue regulations to implement them, and the industry implements the regulations. I’ve spent much of my career in this field and have watched it mature into a major function – major cost center – in every bank, into a profession of experts, and into an industry of technology vendors and consultants and lawyers who help financial companies follow these rules. With a few exceptions, the system is about getting the details right. That’s still true, of course. We still have voluminous, detailed rules aimed at consumer protection. But the financial crisis shifted the ground under this whole system, by supplementing the traditional “rules-based” system with a new “principles-based” overlay that aggressively requires that financial products be not only “compliant,” but also “fair” – able to meet heightened prohibitions on practices that are unfair, deception or abusive (which we in the compliance world, with our habit of using acornyms, call, “UDAAP.” And then, as if that weren’t a big enough change, the financial world has now also been hit with a second huge wave of change, in technology innovation. And it’s even more challenging than the shift from rules to principles, because it’s coming faster, and it’s even more unknowable than regulatory change. All this means we’ve entered into a state of permanent uncertainty. The products and market and technology are changing too fast for the legislative and regulatory process to keep pace. The regulatory process can’t, and won’t, provide clarity on exactly what the industry has to do. Instead, it will review what has been done and will, after the fact, penalize actions that are judged to have been illegal because they’re subjectively determined to have been unfair, deceptive, abusive, or discriminatory in effect. The result is that financial companies are going to have to build a whole new kind of compliance model. They won’t have the luxury of waiting for clear-cut rules. They’ll have to figure out for themselves how regulators may react to rapid change, and make their own decisions, in the absence of clear guidance, about what is risky. This requires a full overhaul of the traditional compliance model. For one thing, it means deeply, actively engaging the CEO, the board, and the business-side leadership of every company in proactively managing regulatory risk. They can’t delegate it and assume that their experts and technology will take care of it. They have to make their own decisions, and they have to do it not reactively, but proactively. Again, they’ll have to think for themselves. And they’ll also have to adopt a new generation of regtech solutions, which are starting to emerge to improve outcomes and cut costs. There’s a lot to say about what’s ahead on all this, but for today, we’re going to pick the brains of two of the most impressive leaders anywhere in the compliance world.  Yvette Hollingsworth Clark is the chief compliance officer of Wells Fargo, and Kathryn Reimann leads this work for Citigroup. I’ve known them both for years, and I was lucky enough to catch them together while we were all at the same event, and carve out some time to talk. Listen to their views on how compliance is changing, the impact of technology, and the need to bring a “fairness” lens to absolutely every regulatory question. They talk about how to do that, including how to integrate teams that can bake it into daily decision-making. They talk about the challenges arising because of the accelerating the speed of change. And they discuss the challenges of working with old legacy IT systems that were created long before today’s regulations and technology. They talk about the need for a level regulatory playing field for banks and nonbanks, how to work with regulators, and advice for regulators. They also talk about their own journeys – Kathryn notes that when she started working as a lawyer, the compliance profession didn’t even exist. We’ve come a long way. These are people who are pioneering new ways of tackling compliance. They’re doing it in some of the world’s biggest, most complex, and most highly-regulated companies, but their insights apply to every financial company – large and small, and old or brand new. Also…. Vote for my panel on the SXSW PanelPicker! I need your help getting my panel selected for inclusion in South By Southwest – SXSW – the huge technology conference that runs in Austin TX each year in conjunction with the famous music and film festival. I attended SXSW (“South by,” as people call it) for the first time last year, and it was absolutely fascinating. It’s unique among the conferences I attend, in that it’s broader than finance. It’s about technology overall. I believe fintech is more tech than fin, in the sense that it’s being driven by enormous and converging technology trends. We in the financial realm tend to underestimate how big these are and how fast they’re moving, because we think of them in terms of the financial products they’re reshaping – but they’re much bigger than those. SX is a great place to go to learn and think about these wider trends, while also seeing the most interesting new things emerging in fintech, as well. So I have proposed a panel discussion there on RegTech – the shift toward using new generation technology to get to win/wins on regulation, by reducing regulatory costs and burdens while improving outcomes for customers at the same time. I’m calling the panel REGULATION INNOVATION and my amazing guests will be Josh Reich, the CEO of Simple; Jennifer Tescher, CEO of CFSI; and Adrienne Harris of the White House. Last year, SX received 4,600 proposals, so, I need you to vote for the session on the SX Panel Picker. Voting opens up on Monday, August 8 and closes September 2. Please Google the SXSW PanelPicker during that time period, and vote for session called Regulation Innovation. And then plan to come to SX, which is 3/6-10 in Austin. I’ve been thinking maybe we should take a group of financial folks. What do you think? You can vote for it HERE   Support the podcast Please support the show! Last but not least, thanks so very much to those who have sent in your “buck a show," as we call it, to support Barefoot Innovation. Donations are essential to keep the show going, since it’s taken on a life of its own and requires a massive effort to produce. And also, please be sure to like the show on whatever ITunes or wherever you listen to it. We’ll see you soon with some incredibly interesting new guests – startups, banks, and even someone from Harvard. Til next time! As Kathryn rightly states, such an overhaul of the system requires updating perspectives of themselves and of their hires. It also requires a great degree of inter-departmental collaboration and communication. This is something that I have seen to be true all across the map of regulation - open dialogue is essential. In a previous podcast, Thomas Curry, the Comptroller of Currency and head of the taskforce on responsible innovation agrees. Kathryn and Yvette explain that compliance officers have a very tough job ahead, and I couldn't agree more. They have to balance a fine line between assessing and preventing massive risk from such huge amounts of data sharing while not becoming an obstacle to innovation. As Yvette states, we want to use innovation to regulate innovation. Important links: Citi Wells Fargo Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

I enjoy all my guests on Barefoot Innovation, but if someone forced me to choose my favorite episodes, this one would be on the list. It’s partly because my guests, the co-founders of Bee, were so fun to talk with, and so thoughtful. And it’s also because they are addressing one of the objections people raise to fintech – the notion that it’s only for millennials. Bee was founded in June of 2015 by Vinay Patel and brothers Max and Alex Grasner as an outgrowth of One Financial Holdings, a 'venture-backed laboratory for innovation in retail financial services'. In pioneering an innovative capital-light model using pop-up kiosks and street teams to sign up customers in-person, Bee is able to offer top quality financial services at a significantly lower cost than traditional brick-and-mortar bank branches. Bee is specifically targeting the lack of quality services for low-and moderate-income underserved people (although my guests point out that 'underserved' and 'underbanked' are not words people use to describe themselves). The product is intended to function as an alternative to checking accounts, structured as a prepaid card paired with a mobile app. Bee partners with Community Federal Savings Bank to offer alternatives to checking and savings accounts to its customers in New York and California.  Part of what makes this interesting is Bee’s specific hybrid model of personal touch and high tech. They’re trying to put the human beings where customers need them the most – in explaining and opening the account. And then they’re trying to drive down costs overall by not providing branches and tellers for routine functions. Bee’s team goes in person into underserved neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and they set up eye-catching mobile kiosks, which they compare to food trucks. They get people interested and then help them through a thorough process of thinking through their needs; opening an account; setting up and learning to use the app; and then, often, letting the new customer stay on to take advantage of the Bee wifi hotspot. The in-person signup process also helps guard against money laundering, since people are seen face-to-face.  I think you’ll be fascinated by Max and Vinay’s insights into these consumers, including their huge financial savvy -- how thoroughly they know their money situations, and how they optimize their spending on their phones (and the challenges of working with such a wide array of phones that may be old or broken). Vinay and Max talk about their customers’ worries about both pricing uncertainties and payment delays (issues that are being tackled by other innovators as well).    One repeated theme is the company’s commitment to treating these customers with respect by providing a product that is obviously high-quality, right down to the thickness of the card, and providing a truly fantastic user experience on the app. They say customers often take selfies with the Bee team, at the end of setting up an account.  Bee’s CEO, Vinay Patel, has a joint law degree and MBA from NYU. He spent 5 years teaching at NYU Business school and at Columbia Public Policy Business School. He then moved on to McKinsey and Co. as a consultant to banks and government.  Max Gasner has a background as an investment stock broker on Wall street from 2007 – part of what motivated this work. He has also worked in the Bay area at an AI company  - Prior Knowledge, and then moved on to a tech company which eventually morphed into Salesforce.  We recorded this episode several months ago. Since then the company has grown. It also won national recognition in New Orleans in June at the Emerge Conference, as one of the winners of the Financial Solutions Lab competition run by the Center for Financial Services Innovation and funded by JPMorgan Chase. Max and Vinay are eloquent on the need for regulators to allow space for robust innovation – just one startup might create the 10X breakthrough that can change people’s lives. They’re also thoughtful on their commitment to earning compelling returns for their investors, including Blumberg Capital, Fenway Summer Ventures and AXA Strategy Ventures.  They aim to do this with their unique formula of delivering personal attention and high value to a huge, largely untapped market, at very low cost.  Enjoy my conversation with Bee. More Links and Information One Financial Holdings Blog Bee card website and access to kiosk locator CFSI CFSI research on consumer financial health and the financial situations of underserved families Blumberg Capital Fenway Summer Ventures AXA Strategy Ventures My blog post on CFSI’s research on underserved consumers, “Underserved and Underestimated”  More about Vinay Prior to Bee, Vinay spent five years at McKinsey & Company, where he advised leaders of US banks and public sector organizations on executing large-scale IT modernization programs. Vinay is a faculty member at both NYU Stern School of Business and Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, where he has taught courses on Enterprise Strategy, Game Theory, and Data Visualization. Vinay holds a J.D. and an M.B.A from NYU, and a B.A. with honors in Economics from the University of Chicago. He is happily married and lives in Brooklyn. LinkedIn Twitter: @patelpost More about Max Prior to Bee, Max built and sold a machine learning company to Salesforce.com and traded equities in NY and London. Max holds a B.A. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, where he graduated after spending two years at Deep Springs College. He lives in West Oakland. LinkedIn Twitter: @gasnerpants More about Bee Bee is a financial technology startup built on the principle that all Americans deserve convenient, high quality retail financial services. Bee has pioneered an innovative capital-light model using pop-up street teams and kiosks to sign up customers in-person for financial services at significantly lower cost than with traditional brick-and-mortar bank branches. Bee partners with Community Federal Savings Bank to offer alternatives to checking and savings accounts to its customers in New York and California. Bee has ambitious plans to expand its product offering and geographic footprint over the coming years. Its major investors are Blumberg Capital, AXA Strategic Ventures, T5 Capital, Fenway Summer Ventures, and Western Technology Investment Websites: www.onefinancialholdings.com and www.beecard.us Support the podcasts - A buck a show! I've decided to distill a lesson from the popular podcast series Hardcore History, by emulating their habit of asking everyone to send them "a buck a show." Some years ago, the show's host Dan Carlin realized the podcast was taking over his life - much as Barefoot Innovation has been doing with mine! He hit on the idea of asking listeners for "a buck a show," and eventually reached the point where he can devote himself to producing the series. Barefoot Innovation is produced part-time by me and two young, very talented helpers. One of them has a day job and the other is a full-time graduate student. If all our listeners will chip in a buck a show, we'll be able to expand our interviews, accelerate our pace (believe it or not, we currently run at a four- to five-month backlog from recording date to posting!), and be able to do some fun new things we have in mind for you. We'll appreciate any and all help to keep the show going, and growing! And remember to post a review on iTunes. Support the Podcast Subscribe to our Mailing List Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

We have a very special show today. I realized – rather late – that we should do an episode on the CFSI financial solutions lab competition. It’s belated, because the contest is open, now, for its second year of applications, and the deadline is April 7 – just a few days from now.  My guests are Ryan Falvey, who heads the lab, plus three of last year’s 9 winners. They are Sheri Atwood of SupportPay; Jerry Nemorin, of LendStreet, and Quinten Farmer of Even. They explain how the competition works, what they are looking for this year, and, from the standpoint of last year’s winners, what they have gotten from participating in the program. FINLAB:  The FinLab is investing about $5 million each year in the contest winners, who also receive a huge array of expert advice and access to networks and resources. Here’s the information on the competition and how to apply by April 7:  Finlab.cfsinnovation.com. And here is an overview of the full list of last year’s winners. For today’s show, we’re featuring these guests: RYAN FALVEY As a Managing Director at the Center for Financial Services Innovation, Ryan oversees the Financial Solutions Lab, bringing together innovators from the fields of technology, behavioral economics, nonprofit services and design to provide guidance, share best practices and develop scalable financial products. He loves to help organizations solve hard problems. Prior to joining CFSI, Ryan was at Silicon Valley Bank, working with leading technology firms to develop innovative payment products and solutions. He also served as the Strategy Group Lead at Enclude Solutions, overseeing its global strategy consulting work in over 30 countries and supporting the development of several of the world’s most successful mobile-enabled financial products. Ryan has a graduate degree from Yale and an undergraduate degree from UCLA.  Twitter: @TheFinLab, @CFSInnovation Personal Twitter: @Ryan_Falvey SHERI ATWOOD Sheri Atwood, Founder and CEO of SupportPay by Ittavi (acronym for “it takes a village"), is a former Silicon Valley executive, single mom and child of a bitter divorce. Atwood, who was raised by a single mother and was the only person in her family to attend college, married at 19, completed her undergraduate degree in less than 4 years and completed her MBA 10 days before her daughter was born. When Atwood herself divorced at 25, she was the youngest Vice President at Symantec. Before SupportPay, there was no easy way for parents to exchange child support -- and Atwood was so determined to create a solution that she taught herself to code and is today an expert in front-end development. Atwood was named “#5 of 50 Women in Tech Dominating Silicon Valley” and a "Top 40 Under 40 Executive in Silicon Valley."  Website: www.supportpay.com Twitter: @SupportPayApp Personal Twitter: @SheriAtwood JERRY NEMORIN Jerry is founder and CEO of LendStreet. He previously worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in its Global Corporate & Investing Banking division, helping major companies restructure their debt during the financial crisis and raise money from the high yield debt market. Jerry is now putting that expertise to use in a way that helps consumers in financial distress deal with their debt and rebuild their credit. Jerry has been a speaker, guest, and advocate for responsible lending and sustainable financial services on Capitol Hill and industry events such as Finovate, SWIFT Innotribe Competition, Experian's Vision Conference and Credit Suisse Impact Investing Conference. Jerry recently served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Darden School of Business Incubator. He began his career in Tyco's Treasury group and received a B.S. in Finance and Exercise & Sports Science from the University of Florida and an M.B.A. from the Darden Graduate School of BusinessAdministration at the University of Virginia. Website: www.lendstreet.com Twitter: @LendStreet Personal Twitter: @JNemorin QUINTEN FARMER Quinten Farmer is Co-Founder at Even. Previously, Quinten ran Client Operations at Taykey, a venture-backed advertising technology company, and was Vice President of Operations at Onswipe, a New York-based startup. Quinten studied Computer Science at Columbia University, and also founded the Open Loans Project, a nonprofit working to bring transparency to the student loans industry. He founded Even to help employers enable workers to even out timing mismatches between paychecks and expenses, especially in volatile or disruptive situations. Website: https://even.com Personal Twitter: @Quintendf Also, be sure to come to the CFSI Emerge Forum on Consumer Financial Health, in New Orleans, June 14-17. The new contest winners will be announced, and there will be an amazing lineup of speakers and events focused on technology solutions to building consumer financial health and well being. As always, please donate to my free podcast series (which seems to be trying to take over my life) and please write a review of it on ITunes! Support the Podcast Subscribe to Our Mailing List Be sure sign up for email notifications on the videos and podcasts and major blog posts if you haven't done so yet Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

In 1967, the Beatles sang: "I get by with a little help from my friends." That sentiment captures something at the heart of many people's financial lives today, and it embodies the idea behind the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC), the oldest and largest nonprofit credit counseling organization in the U.S. I have known Susan Keating, NFCC's President and CEO, for about 30 years. I've been wanting to record a Barefoot Innovation episode with her, because the NFCC is on the front lines of the topics we're exploring here. They work directly, personally, with the people who are not thriving in our consumer financial system. The reasons people don't thrive are complex. We've talked about a lot of them, and I find it's easy to get excited about new technologies or regulatory challenges impacting them, and to lose sight of the real people who are immersed in these struggles. Helping these people is the driver behind much of the search for better solutions by industry, government, and the innovation world, and it's good to pause and think about who they are. As we discussed with CFSI's CEO Jennifer Tescher LINK TO IT, the so-called "underserved" market is enormous -- estimated between 70 and 140 million Americans -- and covers a huge percentage of the middle class. It is also heterogeneous. Data from NFCC, CFSI and others is breaking the old stereotype of a monolithic "low and moderate income" category whose problem is just not being able to afford traditional financial services.  Many underserved consumers, in fact, can afford to pay for high-cost financial services, and are doing so, but are stuck there due to a wide array of issues. Some of their problems are caused by their own errors and difficulties. Some are caused by the difficulties of serving them through the business models and cost structures that prevail in the industry today. Some are a mix of both. Both of these kinds of problems are ripe for improvement today, thanks to the innovations we discuss here on this show. I think, though, that we'll still have a big gap between new financial solutions and the people who need them, unless we build some bridges -- add in some glue -- in the form of human beings who can help people learn to use new technology. NFCC is one of the key organizations able to do this. Susan talks about all this in our conversation. She describes the massive scope of the challenge; the "new face of poverty" in the United States; the NFCC's focus on "breadwinner moms;" and its key new initiative for helping people manage student debt, with a insight into the daunting scope of that challenge. Susan's background: Susan began her banking career in 1974 at First Bank System in Milwaukee, where she became Senior Vice President of retail banking. In 1988 she joined MNC Financial in Maryland and later became President and senior banking executive for Maryland when NationsBank (Bank of America) acquired MNC in 1993. She went on to become the highest-ranking female CEO of a US-bank holding company, as President and Chief Executive of All First Financial from 2000-2002. Then in 2002, she was appointed to the Group Executive Committee of AIB (Allied Irish Banks plc), which is responsible for developing corporate strategy and overseeing management of AIB Group. In 2004 she took on the role of NFCC President. She thought is was a short term move but, to her own surprise, she's still there twelve years later, caught up in the mission. Upon reappointment after her first three-year term, she said, "The NFCC is uniquely positioned to serve the many consumers who are struggling to make ends meet and find their way to a better financial future. I am deeply committed to doing all that I can in order to lead the efforts in the years ahead." Susan also serves on Bank of America's National Consumer Advisory Council; is a board member of the Council on Accreditation; and participates in the Financial Regulation Reform Collaborative, a non-partisan group committed to finding solutions for reforming financial services regulation. NFCC: Last fall I had the honor of joining the NFCC's board on the occasion of the organization's 50th birthday. Today the NFCC works with 90 member agencies through more than 750 offices in communities nationwide. Its certified counselors counsel and provide financial education to three million clients annually, focusing on issues that include seniors and the military and guidance relating to financial literacy, mortgages, and credit cards. It recently launched a key initiative on helping people with student debt, and in helping illuminate that magnitude of that challenge, and plays an invaluable role in consumer financial research overall. Here are some links: 2015 Consumer Financial Literacy Survey 2015 State of the Financial Counseling and Education Sector Student Credit Counseling initiative  Enjoy my conversation with someone on the front lines -- NFCC's CEO Susan Keating. And please note: The video series is launched!  Please come to my new site www.RegulationInnovation.com  where we have launched my video briefing show. It's a practical guide for financial companies trying to figure out how to thrive on disruption-to thrive through the twin, intertwined challenges of technology disruption and regulatory disruption. We're off to a terrific start with the series. The next video will be called, "The 5 Tech Trends." I made it because I think financial people often underestimate the disruption underway, because we tend to think of fintech as a financial topic. In reality, it's mainly a technology topic. That means the forces shaping it lie mainly in the tech world, not the financial world. That in turn means they are mostly over the horizon, outside the field of vision of busy people focusing on finance. I've been spending a lot of time in that world, and am creating this video to explain what these five huge drivers are, how they are converging, and how they will transform both consumer financial services and financial regulation. Again, fintech is way more about "tech" than "fin." I'll also have a light-hearted short video for your entertainment, brought to you from my very own kitchen. I'm going to demonstrate an extremely odd little gadget that contains a big lesson for innovators. Coming episodes: Last but not least, come back next time to Barefoot Innovation, when my guest will be the visionary CEO of Opportun, Raul Vazquez. Among other things, he is totally fascinating on the topic of how he personally keeps up with technology. Up next in the queue after Raul, we'll have a short update with Simple CEO Josh Reich, and then an interview with the founder and CEO of Betterment, Jon Stein. See you soon! As always, please donate to my free podcast series (which seems to be trying to take over my life) and please write a review of it on ITunes! Support the Podcast Subscribe to Our Mailing List Be sure sign up for email notifications on the videos and podcasts and major blog posts if you haven'tdone so yet, at jsbarefoot.com. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Matt Applegate chats with Asad Ramzanali, Manager of the Financial Solutions Lab at the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI). CFSI's Financial Solutions Lab, in partnership with JPMorgan Chase, sponsors a series of competitions for social entrepreneurs to identify and enhance tech-enabled innovations that address consumer financial health needs. https://twitter.com/asad09 https://twitter.com/CFSInnovation http://www.cfsinnovation.com/

This is one of my favorite episodes we've ever done - my conversation with Digit founder and CEO, Ethan Bloch. Digit has set out to solve one of the core problems in consumers' financial lives - how to save. Their solution is to make savings effortless, using an intelligent algorithm that analyzes your spending and income patterns and automatically moves funds into savings. I had dinner with Ethan last summer and suddenly realized he was describing an "Uberization" of savings, paralleling the financial industry's efforts to "uberize" payments, in the sense of making the mechanics disappear, like the non-exchange of money at the end of an Uber ride.  Out of sight, out of mind. With Digit, you sign up, and you automatically start to save. I had always assumed that getting people to save requires fostering mindfulness - getting people to think long term instead of short term. Digit is going in the opposite direction - not mindfulness, but mindlessness. Again, effortlessness. Instead of hoping people will form habits that keep them focused all the time, on saving Digit just lets them decide to save one time. After that, they save. He's trying to drive the "minutes per year" spent on saving to nearly zero. No more budgets, expense tracking, figuring how much you should save and can save and did save. They're breaking all those practical barriers that keep most people stuck. I know it bothers some people to have consumers saving without thinking. We wish, instead, that everyone would become financially educated and focus on their life goals - you could call it developing the financial virtues. There are innovators working on that approach, too, using behavioral economics to get people motivated. Still, if the eat-your-spinach approach was going to work, it probably would have by now. It's time to try new tools. I know other companies working from the same logic. And here's an interesting twist. After Digit gets people started on effortless saving, they actually do switch over to mindfulness. They start texting their customers about daily savings progress. And they do it with humor which, as I've been saying, is a secret weapons of many fintech innovators. They are blowing up the boredom factor that keeps so many people from focusing on their finances. I asked Ethan for examples of this. Unfortunately I didn't get the jokes because they're aimed at millennials, but if you -- unlike me -- happen to know what's cooler than cool, Digit will send you this fun GIF.   Speaking of millennials, Digit's average user is 27 years old. Some people want to dismiss fintech solutions for this group, because so many other consumers need tools too My answer to that is, the millennials are the early adopters of new technology. It makes sense to start with them. As these products get traction, they will broaden.  Listen to Ethan, and many of our other guests, and you hear a big vision about remaking the financial lives of everyone. (And by the way, we do have a show coming up with Bee, which is reaching for a very different market.) At the age of 30, Ethan is at the forefront of the fintech revolution. Digit is a winner of the Financial Solutions Lab competition sponsored by CFSI and JPMorgan Chase, which focused its first year on solutions for the more than one-third of Americans who struggle with managing cash flow management. (Recall that another winner was Ascend - we talked with its founder, Steve Carlson, in Episode 9). Ethan explains how much money Digit has saved people so far (by the way, we recorded this discussion late last year, so his progress data are for 2015, not 2016). He explains how customers are using the savings they build up. He describes their investors and business model and plans. And he talks about how to design great financial tools, that are like smart phones - that people can just pick up and use, without needing manuals, much less lengthy federal disclosure documents. Speaking of those, Ethan really calls out the failures of disclosures. He also discusses the shift underway toward a more principles-based approach (echoing our episodes with other guests, including Thomas Curry). He describes, too, the huge obstacles to innovation that arise from well-intentioned government efforts, including the difficulties innovators face in working with banks. Ethan also had the most surprising answer I've gotten yet to my standard question on how he keeps up with technology change. Finally, for our many listeners who play Barefoot Innovation while you're carpooling to school in hopes it will inspire your kids to grow up and found the next PayPal, I should say I'm rating this episode PG-13, for language. Ethan uses a few words in our conversation that...let's put this way, you hardly ever hear them on National Public Radio. Learn more at www.digit.co and @hellodigit and @ebloch and find further links below: On banks opening up their APIs The book "Rainbow's End" CFSI's research on the U.S. Financial Diaries Note to Our Listeners: If you're enjoying Barefoot Innovation, please be sure write a review on ITunes and also click the Donate button, to help us can keep it growing! Last but not least, I am finally launching my long-in-the-making video series, Regulation Innovation. It's for people in the financial world contending with the top two disruptive challenges - regulation and technology innovation. It for both business and regulatory people, and for both traditional companies and innovators. I'll have much more information coming on this, but please come to www.jsbarefoot.com in March, and check it out!  I promise, there is nothing else remotely like it. If you enjoy our work to bring together thought provoking ideas and people please consider a contribution to support the site. Support the Podcast Please subscribe to the podcast by opening your favorite podcast app and searching for "Jo Ann Barefoot", in TuneIn, or in iTunes.    

I am absolutely delighted to share today's episode -- my conversation with Michael Barr. Most of our listeners know Michael as the former Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions who shepherded the Obama administration's efforts on the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Fewer people may know of his role in developing the proposal for, and negotiating the enactment of, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is when I got to know him.  He is now back at the University of Michigan (my own alma mater) as a law professor, and continues to be very active across a wide spectrum of consumer finance and financial regulation activities, and also on lending to small businesses. Michael has thought hard about the toughest challenges in consumer finance, drawing on both his government experience and his academic activities (among other things, he's a Rhodes Scholar). He also works extensively with innovators and nonprofits. In our conversation he offers insights on some of the most critical topics facing consumer finance. Perhaps the most central principle driving his ideas is behavioral economics - coming to grips with the reality that consumers are not perfectly rational, and don't have perfect information, in making financial decisions. "We ought to design both products and policy around the way human beings actually make decisions and behave," Michael tells me. See below for links to his research on this, including his paper "Behaviorally-Informed Regulation." One result of his behavioral focus is a refreshing readiness to rethink consumer financial education. At one point he says, "just as we couldn't explain how our smartphones operate," financial consumers don't necessarily need to know how financial products are designed, in order to use them effectively. He thinks, as I do, that today's technology can create simple new tools that nearly anyone can use, whether they have a sophisticated financial education, or not. Another issue he raises is his involvement in developing the "small business borrowers' bill of rights" (see our earlier podcast discussing this with Brian Graham of BancAlliance). There is growing concern that online small business lending is creating borrower risks as well as opportunities, especially as America shifts toward the so-called 1099 economy and more people run small businesses in ways that closely parallel consumer finance. Michael also explores the challenge of crafting regulation that enables innovation while still blocking harm. He says regulators sometimes allow harmful practices to emerge and grow until they hit a "tipping point," at which point they drive industry standards so low that good companies can't survive without adopting activities they would rather avoid.  I agree with him that this is a key challenge, especially as innovation accelerates.  If regulators intervene too early and aggressively, we'll have the government designing our financial products, instead of the market doing so.  On the other hand, if they are too passive or too late in addressing really harmful practices - especially if they wait until after that tipping point has actually tipped - they will fail to protect large numbers of people from harm, and they may also find it difficult to act.  Once products are widespread, there are strong political forces ready to defend them, as well as practical problems with potential regulatory impacts on businesses and sometimes even the financial system itself. I asked Michael for his advice about these kinds of challenges, for all the players in this ecosystem. I think you'll find his answers really interesting, including some thoughts he shares about the logic behind the design of the CFPB. I also asked him whether we might be moving toward a fundamentally new market model, in which technology-driven transparency will require financial companies to compete mostly on winning and keeping people's trust. His answer to that is thought-provoking, too. Michael was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Institutions from 2009-2010. He previously served as Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's Special Assistant, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Community Development Policy, as Special Advisor to President Bill Clinton, as Special Advisor and Counselor on the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, and as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter.  He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, an M. Phil in International Relations from Magdalen College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and his B.A., summa cum laude, with Honors in History, from Yale University. His activities today include serving on the boards of Lending Club (in Episode 5 we interviewed CEO Renaud LaPlanche) and Ripple, as well as ideas42, a behavioral economics research and development lab. He's on the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He's on the advisory board of CFSI and has advised its U.S. Financial Diaries Project (see our interview with Jennifer Tescher of CFSI for more). He is also a fellow at the Filene Research Institute. In his current role as Roy F. and Jean Humphrey Proffitt Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Michael teaches courses in domestic and international financial regulation. He's also been instrumental in forming the University of Michigan's Center on Finance, Law and Policy, which integrates finance, law, business, and computer science to work on difficult problems facing the world, including how to make the financial system fairer and safer. I highly encourage you to peruse his faculty website to find more resources. Below you can find links to works referenced in the episode: Small Business Borrowers' Bill of Rights Michael's latest book "No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans" Hamilton Project paper on increasing access to capital for minority and women entrepreneurs Michael's paper on Behaviorally Informed Regulation co-authored with Sendhil Mullainathan, Harvard University and Eldar Shafir, Princeton University And here is the site of the FDIC's Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion                  Enjoy my conversation with Michael Barr! If you enjoy our work to bring together thought provoking ideas and people please consider a contribution to support the site. Donate Please subscribe to the podcast by opening your favorite podcast app and searching for "Jo Ann Barefoot", or in iTunes.    

My conversation with Chuck Harris, President of NetSpend, is our final episode for 2015. Thinking back on the brief eight months since we launched Barefoot Innovation, I’m struck by the enormous terrain we’ve covered. As we start into the new year, I’ll be sharing my own thoughts on what I’ve been learning from these discussions.   For now, though, enjoy listening to Chuck Harris, who touched on many of the major themes we have explored so far: the rise of fintech, prepaid cards, mobile platforms, mission-oriented companies, non-bank providers, partnerships, financial inclusion the underserved and underestimated consumers, regulatory challenges, uncertainty, and most of all excitement. Like some of our other guests, Chuck Harris leads a young company in a field, prepaid cards, that didn’t even exist until well into his career.  He says he feels lucky to have “stumbled” into a role that combines good business with doing good, a mix that is both challenging and rewarding (a sentiment expressed by many previous guests). It’s interesting that this episode follows on the heels of my discussion with the Comptroller of the Currency, Tom Curry, as it shares a common emphasis on the need for a new kind of collaboration as the financial sector undergoes disruption, including between industry and regulators. I think this kind of new dialogue is starting to emerge – a topic we’ll spend time on in 2016. NetSpend was established in 1999 as a way for “college kids to spend money,” and has since grown into a leading provider of reloadable prepaid cards and related financial services. It focuses on consumers that Chuck calls “self-banked” – the people often referred to as un- or under-banked. NetSpend seeks to empower the self-banked with FDIC-insured offerings through its network of over 70,000 distribution locations and 130,000 reload points. They have helped more than 10 million consumers make purchases, pay bills and manage their money without needing a checking account or credit history. In addition to prepaid cards, NetSpend offers a range of services including P2P and standard bank transfers, online and mobile apps, and budgeting tools. You can learn more about them at www.netSpend.com. Chuck joined the company 2010 after serving as general manager of the payment solutions division of Intuit. He previously held multiple positions for Electronic Clearing House, including President and CEO, President and COO, and as a director. He has also held leadership roles with Chase Paymentech, including as President and CEO of Merchant Link, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chase Paymentech.  He holds a B.B.A. in finance from the University of Texas at Austin. We recorded this conversation at the Money 20/20 Conference in Las Vegas, where Chuck and I both were speakers. That fact prompts me to suggest a new year’s resolution for our listeners, especially those in traditional financial fields: attend a fintech conference in 2016. Money 20/20 is the biggest, absolutely packed with energy and ideas and about 10,000 people. And I always recommend CFSI’s Emerge conference, which uniquely explores how new technology can benefit both providers and consumers.   (remember that I serve on CFSI’s board of directors). People often ask me how to learn quickly about innovation. For most, the best first step is to immerse in in the excitement of a tech conference. 2016 preview….and please consider donating: Barefoot Innovation will return in the New Year with a widening dialogue and extremely interesting guests. The early lineup will include one of the architects of Dodd-Frank; a primary author of America’s consumer financial protection regulations; a credit counseling leader; a top bank’s chief innovation officer; our first talk with a company built around Bitcoin, the founder of one of my very favorite startups; and a large bank’s compliance officer with detailed suggestions on how to design a “regulatory sandbox.” The sandbox concept -- the idea that fostering financial innovation will sometimes require a regulatory safe space for experimentation – is generating increasing dialogue among both industry and regulators (in fact, I’m heading today for London for a round table with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority on a sandbox proposal they issued this fall.) We’ll explore it in the coming months. The above list of early 2016 guests includes only the episodes we’ve already recorded! They are full of insights and surprises (I’m even rating one of them PG-13). We have many more people set to talk with us, including leading regulators, bankers, non-bank executives, tech experts, compliance experts, policymakers, and many, many startups and other innovators. The robustness of the schedule reflects the fact that Barefoot Innovation has been growing far faster than I expected, and has in fact evolved into a major undertaking for me and the two young people who help me produce it.  If you’re enjoying the series and want to keep more episodes coming, let me encourage you to provide support for it, in any amount you like.  Meanwhile, I wish you all a holiday season filled with peace and joy, and will look forward to connecting in the New Year. If you enjoy our work to bring together thought provoking ideas and people please consider a contribution to support the site. Donate Please subscribe to the podcast by opening your favorite podcast app and searching for "Jo Ann Barefoot", or in iTunes.    

Financial literacy in the U.S. continues to decline, with the largest gap existing amongst millennials and those in the lower income category.  Jennifer Tescher, President and CEO of the Center for Financial Services Innovation joins Moe to discuss the most concerning consumer obstacles and the role that CFSI is playing to help large financial services providers reimagine how they add value to Americans.

This episode adds a new dimension to our discussions with innovators, by taking us inside a huge company - American Express. My guest is Courtney Kelso, who leads the Amex product and marketing team in Enterprise Growth. I talked with Courtney about two things. First, their strategic move into creating an inclusive set of services, through Bluebird and Serve. And second, what it takes to innovate inside a big company. Interestingly, the two are linked.  Their work on building an inclusive strategy is the engine of innovation at American Express. Think about trying to drive disruptive innovation in an organization that's not only enormous and global, but is also 165 years old - one of the oldest financial brands anywhere. As Courtney says, American Express was a freight company, moving Americans west in the 1800's. Innovation and adaptation are in its corporate DNA, but change at big companies is hard. And then also think about taking a company like American Express, which has always epitomized elite, high-prestige financial services, and shifting it from being an exclusive brand to an inclusive brand. It's a fascinating saga, full of lessons for everyone. Inclusion within a famously "exclusive" brand The story starts about five years ago, when American Express looked hard at the changes underway in how people think about both money and technology, and especially mobile -- the ability to run most of your financial life from your phone. They also pondered the fact that Amex was missing an enormous market in the so-called underserved, estimated to be between 65 and 140 million people in the United States - in other words, not a niche. They realized that the economic problems created and worsened in the Great Recession had converged with an emerging set of technology solutions. American Express responded by launching the Enterprise Growth Group, which Courtney joined immediately. The goal was to go after totally different customers with different product sets. They unveiled an alpha version of Serve in March of 2011 , and then built the Bluebird card, aiming to be part digital wallet, part bank alternative, and part prepaid card . The goal was to reach Americans who struggle to manage and move their money or, as Courtney puts it, the people who are either excluded from the mainstream economy or "unhappily banked." An early move was to create a partnership with Wal-Mart to focus on these needs. Along the way, American Express financed the movie, Spent, which brings these customers' needs to life and demonstrates that "it's expensive to be poor."  If you haven't seen Spent and shared it in your organization, I recommend doing so. In our conversation, Courtney tells us why they made these changes, how they did it, their efforts to "be respectful" to a customer group they didn't know, what they expected, what they learned about them, and what has surprised them.  They undertook a "walk talk chalk," encouraging their leaders to step into the shoes of the kinds of customers who appear in Spent by, for instance, learning what it's like to stand in line on a Friday night to cash to check.  They also connected with the Center for Financial Services Innovation (note that I serve on CFSI's board), to bring its recommended Compass Principles into designing these products. They focused human-centered design thinking on challenges like smoothing out financial "lumpiness" for people who earn enough money to pay their bills, but don't have the right amount at the right time. Courtney describes the fascinating and varied ways customers immediately began using the new tools - including as a bank account alternative and to find ways to save.  She talks about what people want most. She talks about revelations about the preferences of young customers today, and how savvy they are in using mobile services. Today, her group bases every product design decision on the preferences of mobile users (unlike, say, a bank that views mobile as just a new channel for old products). She explains how, with critical mass established on the platform, they can push the envelope with new features, including the first-ever rewards program on a prepaid debit card. And she shares a progress report -- over $7 billion loaded on the platform as of March 2015, with merchant spend up 300% from 2012 to 2013, and 90% of these customers being new to American Express. Innovation In September 2014, these efforts evolved into creation of FILABs - the financial innovation labs - through which American Express brings together researchers and academics with real live products. After inviting proposals, they selected three partners -- a nonprofit in behavioral science called Ideas 42, along with UC Berkeley and a team of researchers from UCLA. The goal is to use design thinking and agile development methodology to make financial products drive financial health. They are testing new ideas for both processes and products, from nudges and alerts to auto savings and debiting, to see what works. Some of this is proceeding under the aegis of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Project Catalyst, which seeks to foster and evaluate fintech innovation. They'll be releasing significant findings in the near future. In our conversation, I asked Courtney how to innovate in a great big company - after all, her Enterprise Growth group, itself, has over 1,000 people. Her answers may surprise you - including her comment that their most exciting recent innovation idea came from (of all places) the general counsel's office. It's fun to hear the excitement in her voice as she talks about what doesn't work, and what does. Two more observations before we listen to Courtney. In our talk she said, "I'll be honest," and explains that launching an "inclusion" strategy raised some worries about potential harm to the invaluable American Express brand, which had been painstakingly built over 165 years to be synonymous with prestige. So, they surveyed their top-tier customer base, asking whether Bluebird and Serve made them think worse, or better, of American Express. The results were resoundingly positive. Second, think about the picture she paints.  She says the company could see, five years ago, that the financial landscape was changing and American Express would have to disrupt, before they were disrupted. She says CEO Ken Chenault launched the enterprise growth initiative to "cannibalize" American Express from inside, through innovation. I'm at Harvard this year writing a book on innovation and regulation, which recently prompted me to read Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen's classic, The Innovators Dilemma and newer related work. One of his insights is that disruptive innovation usually must begin in markets that are lower-margin and less attractive than the ones served by industry leaders. The disruptions gestate and develop in these side-markets, and then eventually burst into the mainstream with a better, cheaper product - often too late for the industry's leading firms to adjust. American Express seems to be following something like this logic, putting its innovation engine in the hands of people trying to reach a separate market that's traditionally been "underserved." The results to date are fascinating. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that Courtney says the whole company now routinely recruits from her team. Here is more on some of the topics we discussed: CFSI's Compass Principles CFPB's Project Catalyst project with American Express Ideas 42 The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries  The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen  Please subscribe to the podcast by opening your favorite podcast app and searching for "Jo Ann Barefoot", or in iTunes. If you enjoy our work to bring together thought provoking ideas and people please consider a contribution to support the site. Donate

Regular listeners of Barefoot Innovation will have noticed that we often mention the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and serve on its board. This year, CFSI celebrated its 11th anniversary. A decade ago there was nothing called Fintech. And yet Jennifer Tescher – who when she first entered the financial services industry couldn’t balance her checkbook – joined with former OTS Director Ellen Seidman and others who had a remarkable insight: that technology trends would create innovative ways to improve the lives of financial consumers. A former journalist, Jennifer became interested in financial services via reporting on urban poverty and inequality issues. That led to her to join ShoreBank, America’s first community development bank, where she explored ways to serve consumers who are deemed risky, in new ways that can be both sustainable and profitable. Fast forward to 2015 and CFSI has become the nation’s authority on consumer financial health, and Jennifer, as President and CEO, leads a network of financial services innovators committed to expanding access to high-quality financial services in ways that are sound and profitable. As you will hear in this episode, a majority of Americans are not financially healthy. Research by CFSI and others paints a “frankly disturbing” picture of the economic lives of millions of Americans. Studies also draw strong links between physical and financial health, including how stress affects decision making.  Jennifer says it best our podcast: “Wow, wow, wow, huge swaths of people are incredibly challenged!” CFSI is aiming to change this, using a lot of tools.  One is seeding new ventures. It founded Core Innovation Capital, which is now an independent VC fund (see Episode 3, where we talked with Core’s Arjan Schutte). And 2015 kicked off a five-year innovation contest funded by JPMorgan Chase, in the CFSI Financial Solutions Labs competition. (See our podcast with one of the contest winners, Steve Carlson of Ascend). Second, CFSI convenes people, including through its new membership model and by hosting the annual EMERGE conference, which presents cutting-edge thought leadership and features innovators, executives, and emerging companies in the financial services industries, including guests of this very podcast! Third, CFSI helps identify standards and practices that can help both providers and consumer thrives, as with the Compass Principles for prepaid cards. And fourth, CFSI is doing unique research in deeply understanding the financial lives of American consumers, including through the U.S. Financial Diaries project conducted with New York University. Jennifer is a nationally known expert on all these themes, with a monthly column in American Banker, frequent interviews and articles in the financial press, and major speaking engagements at industry and policy convenings. I am so happy to bring to you my lively interview with Jennifer, showcasing both her prodigious knowledge and her passion for these goals, which, as she says, has so far has kept her from abandoning it all in favor of a Mexican beach! To bolster your own optimism, here are links to the new data and trends spurring CFSI’s mission, and links their initiatives and research: Find out how CFSI is powering solutions for a financially health America (and for more on the 9 winners of their first Financial Solutions Lab’s challenge). Access to CFSI’s research on the state of consumer financial health, including the U.S. Financial Diaries and their Consumer Financial Health Study. For more on illiquid vs. insolvent consumers: My piece in Banking Exchange called Illiquid? Insolvent? Solutions can differ drastically and Aaron Klein’s article in American Banker on Shifting the Debate on Small Dollar Credit. For my take on the US Financial Diaries work, see my blog post, “Diary of a Mad Financial System”. On new ways of assessing financial well-being: Ron Shevlin’s Financial Health is the New Marketing. And mark your calendar for Emerge 2016, June 14-17 in New Orleans! Please come to CFSI’s website for a wealth of further information. And now, enjoy my talk with Jennifer Tescher! Please subscribe to the podcast by opening your favorite podcast app and searching for "Jo Ann Barefoot", or in iTunes. If you enjoy our work to bring together thought provoking ideas and people please consider a contribution to support the site. Donate Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Episode 9 finds us at the 2015 EMERGE conference in Austin with the winners of the first Financial Solutions Lab competition. The contest is a $30 million, five-year initiative funded by JPMorgan Chase and run by the Center for Financial Services Innovation, or CFSI, the conference sponsor (note -- I serve on CFSI's board). It challenges entrepreneurs to create solutions for the cash flow difficulties facing millions of American middle and lower income-households. Two hundred ninety-eight innovators applied. Nine were chosen. And  -- drum roll - one was Steve Carlson of Ascend Consumer Finance, our guest for this episode. Ascend was recognized for its unique approach to broadening credit access and affordability for non-prime borrowers.  The company wants to drive a new generation of lending with its Adaptive Risk Pricing tool, which actively monitors and rewards customers for positive financial actions throughout the span of their loan, sharply cutting interest costs. I've known Ascend's Co-Founder and CEO Steve Carlson since we both joined the Consumer Advisory Board of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) when it first was formed in 2012. Ascend has benefited - and so does our podcast - from Steve's double background in banking and technology. He has held senior executive roles at HSBC and Washington Mutual and advised global financial services firms as a co-founder of Sung Carlson Associates. He was also the head of marketing and business development at Intuit Financial Services (Mint.com and Quicken). (A side-note on Intuit:  in the recording, Steve  relates its history and I ask if its founder, Scott Cook, got started by making calls from a phone book. Afterwards, I looked up the story and found it in The Lean Startup, by  Eric Ries (pages 88-89). He writes that in 1982 Cook "picked up two phone books: one for Palo Alto, California, where he was living at the time, and the other for Winnetka, Illinois." He randomly called people to gauge interest in his idea, and a company was born. For any listeners who haven't read The Lean Startup, do!) In our conversation, Steve describes the impetus behind Ascend, their current status (including their partnership with Lending Tree), and why he believes banking should be a value-driven proposition. He thinks both consumers and the industry can benefit by improving the financial health of consumers. The company's pioneering product, RateRewards, enables borrowers to earn up to 50% off their interest expense by making responsible financial choices throughout the life of their loan. With Adaptive Risk Pricing, Ascend is able to offer loans at rates that reflect real-time performance instead of past behavior. This, Steve says, is reinventing "the whole concept of underwriting and risk assessment." Indeed, many "non-prime borrowers" - a group that actually represents about a third of the U.S. population - are better candidates than their credit scores would indicate. One-time financial shocks and "thin" files can greatly diminish a consumer's chance of getting a reasonable rate on a loan, or even a loan at all at a traditional institution. Ascend is encouraging borrowers to bet on themselves and prove -- through their actions, rather than their credit history -- that they are creditworthy. As Steve says in the episode: "Everyone today [is] going to be in a different stage in terms of their financial health ... I might be in great shape today; tomorrow could be totally different."  Ascend is trying to make the road to financial wellness smoother -- something Steve says he feels good about. This episode of Barefoot Innovation became a brainstorming session, as Steve and I tried to think through how innovators, banks and regulators can move toward better ideas for financial consumers -- including musings on how innovators should interact with the world of bank charters and regulation. Enjoy it!  And check out more information on Ascend, and on the Innovation Lab winners. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes HERE or by opening your favorite podcast app and searching for "Jo Ann Barefoot".  

Ms. Schneider is an industry expert in the area of the underbanked marketplace. In her role as Vice President, Innovation and Research, at the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), she works with financial services companies, and conducts academic and industry research in order to help meet CFSI’s goal of transforming the US financial services marketplace, and meeting the needs of unbanked and underbanked Americans.