Podcast appearances and mentions of chris woolard

In this episode of the GRU Podcast, we host three EY financial practice leaders to discuss findings from the 14th Annual IIF/EY Global Bank Risk Management Survey, entitled "Agility in Volatility: Rebalancing CRO Priorities in a Shifting Risk Landscape." We are delighted to be joined by EY's Tom Campanile, the Global and Americas Financial Services Risk Consulting leader, Joe Mezzadri, a Financial Services Risk Consulting Leader, and Chris Woolard, Chair of EY's Global Regulatory Network to discuss the findings of this edition of the survey. The discussion on the survey's findings focuses on underlying themes - such as increased volatility, widespread uncertainty, and a broadening range of risks - that Chief Risk Officers (CROs) face, the shifting risk landscape and how CROs navigate emerging challenges, how innovative technologies, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, factor into risk analysis and strategies, how risk management teams are evolving through partnerships and talent acquisition, how organizations can proactively combat risk and much more. The full survey in its entirety can be found on the IIF website and on the EY website.

On 31 July 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) introduced a new Consumer Duty, which applies to all open financial products. Designed to ensure that financial services businesses put their customers first, providing ‘good outcomes' and ‘fair value', the regulator expects it to lead to a “major shift in financial services”, boosting competition and considerably strengthening consumer protection. But what do these phrases mean to consumers? What happens when financial services companies' interpretations of Consumer Duty come into contact with customers? And how should we expect the Regulator and customers to hold providers to account in this new regulatory environment?   To answer these thorny questions and more, Edelman Smithfield's Aidan Holloway and Latika Shah speak with special guest Chris Woolard, ex-interim CEO of the FCA, now a Partner at EY and Chair of its Global Regulatory Network.

In this episode of the GRU, we are joined by three collaborators from EY - Jan Bellens, Global Banking & Capital Markets Sector Leader, Bill Hobbs, Managing Director, Financial Services Consulting and Center for Board Matters and Chris Woolard, Chair, Global Financial Services Regulatory Network - to discuss key findings from the 12th Annual EY-IIF Global Bank Risk Management Survey. These findings include changes within how CROs view risks, risk interconnection, developments in Cybersecurity and Geopolitics, and risk management in relation to Sustainable Finance, ESG and Climate Risk.

Join us this morning as Chris Woolard shares with us the importance treating Monday as the mission field God has entrusted us with.

EY financial practice leaders Sonja Koerner, Chris Woolard, and Mark Watson spoke with Martin Boer of the Institute of International Finance to discuss the most interesting findings of the 11th EY-IIF 2021 Report on Global Bank Risk Management Priorities. For the first time since the survey's inception over a decade ago, climate change tops the list of long-term risks for banks. The podcast analyzes the reasons for this development, as well as key considerations and opportunities for banks around the world.  The conversation also features insights around the largest current priorities, including credit risk, cyber security and the impact of rapid advances around new technologies - and what that all means for risk management.

This episode discusses the Socio-Economic Diversity Taskforce, backed by the UK Treasury and the City of London Corporation, with the mandate to increase socio-economic diversity at senior level in professional and financial services. Host Julia Streets is joined by Yasmine Chinwala, a partner at capital markets think tank New Financial and Chris Woolard, Financial Services Partner at EY and Chair of its Global Financial Services Regulation Network. They discuss the rate of progression to senior management, of ethnic minorities and women, looking at data from the Women in Finance Charter. They discuss the importance of socio-economic inclusion and share views on what the finance sector can do to appeal, recruit and retain staff from the widest and sometimes overlooked sections of society, through inclusive initiatives.

An episode recapping the 2019 CXPA Insights Exchange with guests Pat Gibbons and Chris Woolard, hosted by producer Chris Higgins.

This week we have some great stories for you as David and Simon are joined by a couple of great guests: Samantha Bedford, Head of Innovation and New Ways of Working, CYBG Freddie Villis, Google Account Manager: Finance at Snowdrop Solutions Oscar Williams-Grut, Senior Correspondent at Yahoo Finance We kick off the episode by taking a look at Central banks becoming the world's newest climate change activists. An open letter in support of climate change came from the Network for Greening the Financial System (the NGFS). Simon comments that customers are making eco-friendly choices all the time as shown by the growing presence of challenger banks (03:17). You can read up on Simon's views around eco-friendly finance here (https://11fs.com/blog/future-fintech-wealth-esg-most-important-thing-youve-never-heard). Next up, we talk about Open Banking one year on. According to the OBIE, in addition to helping individuals with their finances, Open Banking is using technology to combat societal issues such as access to mortgages and debt advice, with benefits for the UK SME community also being perceived. Oscar remarks that Open Banking will only be a success when we're no longer talking about it (15:16). We also have an interview with Chris Woolard, Director of strategy and competition on GFIN's first eight firms for its sandbox (25:55). Other stories include: GFIN’s first 8 firms Snoop Dogg-backed 'try before you buy' payment firm sees sales jump Women are less aware and trusting of challenger banks Mastercard and Visa to slash inter-regional fees for tourist cards in EU And finally, Man dissolves credit card to make contactless ring All this and so much more on today's show. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and let us know your thoughts on the stories @FintechInsiders on Twitter where you can also ask the hosts questions, or email podcasts@11fs.com This week's episode was produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Alex Woodhouse. Special Guests: Chris Woolard, Freddie Villis, Oscar Williams-Grut, and Samantha Bedford.

We were at the Innovate Finance Global Summit this week to bring you a very special collection of interviews. Sarah sat down with some great guests to get an insight into the breadth of London fintech’s influence on a global scale, she speaks with: Charlotte Crosswell, CEO of Innovate Finance Chris Woolard, Exec Director of Strategy and Competition Rishi Khosla, CEO and Co-founder, Oak North Charles Ng, Associate Director-General of Investment Promotion at Invest Hong Kong. Sarah talks to the interviewees about the summit, now in its fifth year, what the FCA has planned for its sandboxes in the coming year as well as GFIN, commitments that fintechs have made to give back profits and some key insights into the fintech market in Hong Kong with startups finally gaining access to a long-coveted Asian market. All this and so much more on today's show. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and let us know your thoughts on the stories @FintechInsiders on Twitter where you can also ask the hosts questions, or email podcasts@11fs.com This week's episode was produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Alex Woodhouse. Special Guests: Charles Ng, Charlotte Crosswell, Chris Woolard, and Rishi Khosla.

Chris Woolard of Venture Church joins us for a second week to continue the discussion on discipleship.

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

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!

In this very special FCA Takeover Jason speaks to: Anna Wallace - Innovate Head of Department and Nick Cook - Head of Regtech & Advanced Analytics all about Project Innovate and future plans for the sandbox following Chris Woolard's announcement, interview and paper earlier in the week. (For more info on that, check out Ep 182 of Fintech Insider where Jason got the scoop). Next up he and Simon talk PSD2 and Open Banking with Graeme McLean - head of banking and lending policy; and Val Smith - Director of Credit Authorisations. They chat about the successes of Open Banking so far, what could've been better and what the future looks like. And we also had the chance to talk about the FCA’s Competition remit with Mary Starks - Director of Competition and Chief Economist. We hope you enjoy the show - spread the word, tell your friends and don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes. If you want to get in touch, drop us a line at podcasts@11fs.com or on Twitter @FintechInsiders and follow us on Facebook. Special Guests: Anna Wallace, Graeme McLean, Mary Starks, Nick Cook, and Val Smith.

Chris Woolard, Strategy and Competition Director, at the FCA speaks exclusively to Jason Bates about an announcement concerning their regulatory sandbox. Without giving the game away, they discuss the FCA;s latest paper about their future plans for the sandbox, how this will help companies and also take advantage of reg tech. Chris tells us about the success of the previous 4 cohorts of the sandbox to date, and what the future looks like. He explains what the Innovate department of the FCA does and what it focuses on. He tells us about the importance of regulation, especially for start ups and how the FCA is best placed to help start ups, they don't want to appear unfriendly or intimidating so that start ups actively avoid being properly regulated. Additionally they also discuss Chris' background, how he got into the role and the importance of competition in the market. We hope you enjoy the show - spread the word, tell your friends and don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes. If you want to get in touch, drop us a line at podcasts@11fs.com or on Twitter @FintechInsiders and follow us on Facebook. Special Guest: Chris Woolard.

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

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

The third part of Love that we seem to be more timid about than we should be is, speaking up! We need to open our stinkin' mouth and speak with truth and love. To love like Jesus loved the church means to speak up when needed and build each other up in love and that requires conversation between one another. This week we get to hear from two people. The first bit is Venture Church's pastor, Chris Woolard. The second bit is from a missionary Sean Cooper that is traveling to Southeast Asia to communicate the Gospel to people who have never heard anything like it. His family's story is eye opening and worth the listen! Check it out.

This week for our podcast we encountered some technical difficulties with recording the first 5 minutes or so of the audio. I just wanted to let you know the podcast jumps into a story that Chris Woolard (our lead pastor) was talking about his wife Lindsey and he talking on the phone all the time back when they first started dating. Spending a lot of money on long-distance phone calls because after all, that was before you could even bump up your phone plan to able to send more text messages a month. He loved talking to her. He loved spending time with her. Why is it so hard to spend time with God? Why is it so hard to talk to God sometimes? How do you even talk to God? Chris goes in to detail on the matter in this podcast. Take a listen.