Podcasts about creditease

The Big Ones Germany-based digital insurance provider Wefox completed a $650m series C round that included online lending platform developer Creditease and Salesforce Ventures. The round was led by Target Global and included Omers Ventures, Gsquared, Merian and its Jupiter subsidiary, Horizons Ventures, Eurazeo, Mubadala, Speedinvest, LGT, Alma Mundi Ventures, Victory Park Capital, GR Capital, … Continue reading "07 June 2021 – Wefox Completes $650m Series C" The post 07 June 2021 – Wefox Completes $650m Series C appeared first on Global Venturing Review.

Building Unicorns and Redefining Online Banking - Renaud Laplanche, Upgrade CEO/Co-Founder I sat down with Renaud Laplanche, co-founder and CEO of Upgrade, a neobank that offers affordable and responsible credit to mainstream consumers. Since inception in 2017, Upgrade has surpassed $100 million in revenue run rate and a billion-dollar valuation. The company is backed by some of the best VCs in the industry and has raised over $200M dollars in debt and equity, including Mouro Capital, Ribbit Capital, Union Square Ventures, FirstMark Capital, CreditEase, and many more. Prior to Upgrade, Renaud founded and ran Lending Club, a company that pioneered consumer fintech and that he took public in December 2014 at a 10B dollar valuation. There’s no doubt Renaud and Lending Club inspired a generation of fintech founders around the world and countless of fintech founders repeatedly cite Lending Club as an inspiration for their companies. Renaud is also in a select and exclusive club of founders that have started not one, but two unicorns. Listen to the full interview --> Spotify | Soundcloud | Apple Podcasts Renaud Laplanche Renaud is the co-founder and CEO of Upgrade, Inc. a neobank that offers affordable and responsible credit to mainstream consumers. Under his leadership, Upgrade reached $100 million in revenue run rate, profitability and a billion-dollar valuation within 3 years of launch. Upgrade is the only neobank backed by one of the world’s top 10 largest banks. Prior to Upgrade, Renaud founded and ran Lending Club for 10 years. He took the company public, reaching a market capitalization of $10 billion in December 2014. At Lending Club, Renaud pioneered consumer fintech and grew the company to become the largest provider of personal loans in America. Renaud was ranked #23 in Bloomberg Markets’ 2015 Most Influential List, an annual ranking of the World’s top 50 most influential leaders across technology, finance, and politics. He was also recognized at the Clinton Global Initiative by President Clinton for expanding access to affordable and responsible credit. In 2014, he won the Economist Innovation Award in the consumer products category and was named the "best start-up CEO to work for" by Business Insider. Renaud was named “Fintech Executive of the Year” by Finovate in 2020. He also holds the Newport-Bermuda world speed sailing record. About Upgrade Upgrade is a neobank that offers affordable and responsible credit to mainstream consumers through personal loans and cards, together with credit monitoring and education tools that help consumers better understand and manage their money. Over $3.5 billion in loans and cards have been originated by the Upgrade platform since inception in 2017. Upgrade is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an operations center in Phoenix, Arizona, and a technology center in Montreal, Canada. Personal Credit Lines are issued by Cross River Bank, a New Jersey State Chartered Commercial Bank, Member FDIC, Equal Housing Lender. Upgrade Card is issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. Rewards associated with the Upgrade Card, when applicable, are provided by Upgrade, Inc. More information is available at: https://www.upgrade.com. Wharton Fintech https://www.whartonfintech.org/ | https://twitter.com/whartonfintech | https://www.linkedin.com/company/wharton-fintech-club Miguel Armaza https://www.linkedin.com/in/armaza/ | https://twitter.com/MiguelArmaza

With China past the peak of COVID-19 infection, when and how will its economy recover? We invited four top Chinese thought leaders: Nomura's chief China economist Lu Ting, JD Digits chief economist Shen Jianguang, CreditEase founder Tang Ning and Professor Zhang Jun of Fudan University to find answers in a conversation with Emmanuel Daniel. Please visit the link for the full video: http://www.radio.finance/episodes/impact-of-the-pandemic-on-china-economy

FinTech 2.0 - Unbundling to Rebundling For many years fintech was all about the unbundling of financial services as specialized offerings emerged but today many of these fintech startups are seeking to provide a broad set of services. In this session learn about the different approaches being undertaken and how Curve is attacking this challenge. Shachar Bialick, Curve Moderator: Anju Patwardhan, CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund (CEFIF)

In this series, Julian Birkinshaw, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, cuts through the hyperbole and scaremongering to explore the practical applications of Artificial Intelligence. How are companies actually using AI today? What practical problems is it solving? What are the challenges and opportunities? In this episode, Julian hosts Anju Patwardhan, Managing Director at Creditease, and Narayan Naik, Professor of Finance at London Business School, for a conversation on the applications of AI in the financial sector and global FinTech innovations.

VC Point of View: What's Next in Financial Innovation Tom Loverro, IVP Chris Gottschalk, Santander InnoVentures Anju Patwardhan, CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund Steve Pretre, World Innovation Lab Moderator: Tim Li, Fluid

Our first 2019 show brings us a global perspective on fintech. My guest is Anju Patwardhan, Managing Director of the CreditEase FinTech VC Fund. Anju has an incredible background. I first met her when she was starting at Stanford as a Fulbright Fellow and visiting scholar, at a time when I was a senior fellow at Harvard. We made an instant connection and since then, we’ve often run into each other in interesting places around the world. Late last summer, we finally found time to sit down and talk at her office in San Francisco.

Every week the show host John Siracusa talks with amazing fintech leaders and entrepreneurs, through conversation uncovers the amazing stories behind them, their creations and the most important topics in fintech. You can subscribe to this podcast and stay up to date on all the stories here on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio In this episode the host John Siracusa with Gilles Gade, founder & CEO, of Cross River Bank. Just a few days before this episode aired – Cross River announced a $100 million investment, led by private equity firm KKR & Co Inc. Chinese fintech conglomerate CreditEase, LionTree Partners, in addition to Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures and Ribbit Capital, who returned to join the equity round after a $28 million dollar investment in 2016. At the heart of it all Cross River Bank partners with a number of leading marketplace lending platforms including Affirm and RocketLoans to help people get access to credit. Their payments products are the rails that Coinbase and TransferWise run on.   Tune in and Listen.   Subscribe now on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio to hear Thursday's episode with George Anderson from Enterprise Engineering inc.   About the host:   John is the host of the 2x weekly "Bank On It” podcast recorded onsite at the Carpenter Group offices, which is a strategic branding and positioning firm in the financial services industry. He's a highly sought after fintech, VC and financial services industry enthusiast and connector. He's in the center of the fintech ecosystem keeping current with the ever - innovating industry.   Follow John on LinkedIn, Twitter or Medium  

My guest today is the World Bank’s Harish Natarajan, a leader of one of the most visionary and ambitious efforts underway in the financial world -- to achieve complete financial inclusion. Throughout history, the idea of reaching full inclusion -- enabling everyone to access the mainstream financial system -- seemed like fantasy. Financial services have always been expensive to produce and deliver, making it unprofitable to serve everyone. In addition, they often involve the need to evaluate and risk-rate customers, and to verify their identity information, all of which has always been costly and complex. Mainstream services were for people who had some means and had traditional identity documents. Other people had to rely on high-cost alternatives, or had no access at all. And then, we got cell phones. Suddenly, here was a new delivery system that could reach nearly everyone, through a channel that was already there, already built, and that could, furthermore, serve them inexpensively. No more need to build and staff high-cost branches. Everyone, today, can have a bank branch in their hand. Recognizing this new opportunity, the World Bank set a transformational goal -- that every adult on earth should have financial access by 2020. They defined inclusion as having a transaction account, since for most people, that’s the easiest and most-needed starting point. Once that exists, other services can be added on top of it, from lending to savings to insurance. As the consumer’s financial information becomes increasingly digitized and consolidated in the phone, it becomes possible for financial providers to evaluate that digital profile to extend more products. It also becomes possible to authenticate identity -- which is critical because the anti-money laundering Know-Your-Customer regulations currently block millions of people from the system because they lack traditional ID documents. Technology is making this shift possible, but of course, it isn’t easy, nor is it a panacea. Some people still don’t have mobile phones -- although that problem is rapidly evaporating -- the UN says more people have had access to mobile phones than to plumbing since 2013. Of those who do, many don’t adopt electronic financial accounts, and many who do so become vulnerable to scams and predatory products, especially since hundreds of millions of these consumers are being exposed to financial services for the first time. Those challenges, in turn, create an urgent need for regulatory modernization. Finance is being digitized, and regulation will have to be digitized too in order for government to protect consumers and assure financial stability. So the World Bank’s work includes a focus on modernizing the regulatory infrastructure itself, building up capacity to understand new technologies and address risk. In this episode, Harish describes this whole transformative landscape. He talks about the Financial Inclusion Global Initiative, or FIGI, a three-year program with three partners, and three global themes -- cybersecurity, e-payments acceptance, and digital ID. He explains why people don’t have access to accounts, how digital ID can satisfy documentation requirements, and the varied regulatory models evolving in different counties. He talks the World Bank’s research on blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) as critical components of a better system. The United States has been a relatively slow adopter of mobile phones, partly because most Americans traditionally had landlines. That means cell phone adoption is much more advanced outside the United States, which in turn means that the US can learn many lessons from countries that are leapfrogging over us in digital transformation of finance and financial regulation. Much of this modernization is being driven by NGOs like the Omidyar Network, where I’m a Senior Advisor, and the Gates Foundation. For example, Omidyar and Gates have financed a Regtech for Regulators Accelerator, or R2A, which is bringing technology solutions to regulatory challenges in multiple countries. More on Harish Harish is Lead Financial Sector Specialist in the World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice, heading a global team working on payments and market infrastructures. He is a core member of the cross-sectoral teams addressing Universal Financial Access 2020, ID for Development, government payments, Digital Economy and FinTech. Harish represents the World Bank in the working groups of the Committee on Payment Market Infrastructures (CPMI) at the Bank for International Settlements and FinTech-related working groups at the Financial Stability Board (FSB). Previously, Harish worked with VISA Inc. in the South Asia region in various senior roles in business development, operations and risk management. Prior to VISA, he served in positions at Citigroup, Infosys and other technology companies in the areas of payment systems and retail banking. Harish holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IIT-Madras and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management, from IIM-Calcutta, specializing in IT systems and finance. More links Link to Full Transcription World Bank Financial Inclusion World Bank DLT Report Universal Financial Access by 2020 Financial Inclusion Global Initiative (FIGI) Payment Aspects of Financial Inclusion (PAFI) Findex G20 Digital Principles for Financial Inclusion Access For All: CIIE’s Sanjay Jain and The India Stack How to Change the World: The Gates Foundation’s Michael Wiegand Transforming Identity: GlobaliD CEO Greg Kidd More for our listeners We have great podcasts in the queue. From London, we’ll have a talk with P.J. Di Giammarino of JWG and the Regtech Council. We’ll also have a far-ranging conversation with Peter Renton, who leads Lend Academy and the LendIt conference series. As part of our series focused on global developments in fintech and regtech, we’ll talk to Anju Patwardhan of CreditEase and Stanford University, who describes fintech developments in China. And we’ll have a show with the co-founders of EarnUp, and one with Walter Cruttenden, Co-Founder of Acorns and Co-founder and CEO of Blast. A few places I’ll be speaking this fall include: Singapore Fintech Festival, November 12-16, Singapore LendIt Europe, November 19-20, London Consumer Federation of America Financial Services Conference, November 29-30, Washington, DC ABA Financial Crimes Conference, December 2-4, Washington, DC RegTech Rising, December 3-5, London Fintech Connect, December 5-6, London Boston Regtech Meetup, December 10, Boston, MA I also have a number of events coming up where I’ll be speaking directly to groups of regulators. Watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book, Bank 4.0, which you can now buy on Amazon. I co-wrote the regulatory chapter with Brett, and we’ll have a show and events on that as well. Last year, my autumn conference circuit became a  “world tour” designed to speak in seven countries in seven weeks. I chronicled it with mini-videos about what I was learning, and since a lot of people told me they enjoyed joining in those adventures, I’m doing it again this year. My fall travels will be fewer countries but more events, in America, Europe and Asia. Please follow along with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and come to jsbarefoot.com for more information on it all and to subscribe to my newsletters and get the latest podcasts as soon as they come out. Also, here’s my fall newsletter, titled Whirlwind. Innovation everywhere! 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!

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

There are many VC firms investing in fintech today but most are based in the US or Europe. Our next guest on the Lend Academy Podcast runs a different type of fund that has its origins in China. Anju Patwardhan is a Managing Director of the CreditEase Fintech Fund, which has quietly become one of […] The post Podcast 171: Anju Patwardhan of CreditEase Fintech Fund appeared first on Lend Academy.

One of the biggest challenges in fighting money laundering is satisfying the KYC, or Know Your Customer, rules. These regulatory requirements make sense in concept -- they require financial companies to verify customers’ identities before letting them connect to the system, in order to screen out high-risk people and entities and as a foundation for meeting the legal mandate to monitor financial activity for potential crime. However, the traditional verification process has always been expensive and time-consuming. In recent years it’s also been creating new problems. My guest today has a company that is setting out to fix those. She is Laura Spiekerman, the Chief Revenue Officer of Alloy.   The new problems are two-fold. One is that millions of people lack traditional identity documents and therefore can’t gain access to the system at all. That isn’t actually a new issue -- it’s always been true -- but it’s becoming more acute because mobile technology is making it possible for more and more people to connect to the financial system through their phones, if they can identify themselves.  In much of the developing world, hundreds of millions of people cannot, because they lack formal ID documents (a factor that tends to disproportionately harm women, members of disfavored minorities and people with low incomes). Having large swaths of the population detached from mainstream finance, in turn, undermines economic growth and opportunity. As a result, many central banks throughout the world view KYC modernization as a top priority. For example, see my episode with Sanjay Jain who was one of the leaders of the India stack on their project that is connecting everyone in India to the financial system and mainstream commerce. Some governments are trying to create customer identity through biometric identification. Global organizations ranging from The World Bank to the Gates Foundation and the Omidyar Network (where I am a Senior Advisor) have all elevated AML as a core goal in their efforts to wide financial inclusion. The KYC barrier also impacts consumers in the United States, including many young people and immigrants or, say, people who have moved frequently. If a financial company cannot verify identity by investing a reasonable level of time and effort, it usually will not open an account. The second problem with the current KYC process hits the US and other developed countries even more directly. We still rely on traditional identity information like name, address and Social Security number that is, quite simply, no longer secure -- it’s widely for sale on the dark web. (Re-listen to our episode with Greg Kidd of globaliD) for more insight on that). The solution to both problems -- both access and insecurity -- is the same: more data and better technology. Alloy is bringing these into KYC. The company enables real-time decisioning through an API that lets a financial institution access the data it needs, in a fully transparent way, and that also provides a rules engine to control how to waterfall the data to put it into a rule. I spoke to Laura at the Comply 2018 conference in New York this year -- you’ll hear some of the conference bustle in the background. In our conversation, Laura describes the impact Alloy can make. In retail banking, they’ve been able to automate about 98% of decisions for onboarding, as opposed to a standard of about 50%. Once the remaining 2% are sent to manual review, they have also been able to reduce manual review times by about 95%, while also seeing reductions in fraud and increases in conversions, seemingly a win-win for all. Laura also shares her advice for other fintechs, including how to overcome the many barriers faced by regtech firms in trying to work with financial institutions. She talks about Alloy’s plans for building AI into their solutions. And she offers advice to regulators. Like me, she’s hopeful that the regulatory landscape is increasingly receptive to new technology. I know you’ll enjoy my conversation with Alloy’s Laura Spiekerman! Links Full Transcript of Episode Alloy on Twitter Innovation at a Small Bank: Radius CEO Mike Butler Access For All: CIIE’s Sanjay Jain and The India Stack More for our listeners We have great podcasts in the queue. We have a series focused on global developments in fintech and regtech. One is with Harish Natarajan of the World Bank, who talks about their remarkable work in global financial inclusion. Another is with Anju Padwardhan of CreditEase and Stanford University, who describes fintech developments in China. From London, we’ll have a talk with P.J. DiGiamarino of JWG and the Regtech Council. We’ll also have a far-ranging conversation with Peter Renton, who leads Lend Academy and the LendIt conference series. And we’ll have a show with the co-founders of Earnup...among many others. Last week I spoke at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling’s NFCC Connect in Dallas, where I was very honored to receive their Making the Difference award. I’m on the NFCC board and want to share that we have a visionary new CEO, Rebecca Steele, who is bringing technology more and more into the work of credit counselors -- the people on the front lines of helping consumers make their financial lives healthier. Keep your eye on the NFCC and try to connect with its work. Other places I’ll be speaking this fall include: Online Lending Policy Institute, October 9, Washington, DC P20 Conference, October 10, Atlanta, GA American Banker RegTech, October 15-16, New York, NY Singapore Fintech Festival, November 12-16, Singapore LendIt Europe, November 19-20, 2018 in London ABA/ABA Financial Crimes Conference, December 2-4, Washington, DC Regtech Rising, December 3-5, London Last but not least, Money 2020, is only two weeks away and it’s going to be amazing. I’m chairing and hosting the regulatory track, which is SUNDAY, October 21, starting at 10AM. The day will include amazing speakers, including a fireside chat I’m doing with Lord Digby-Jones of the House of Lords, and an Oprah-style regulator town hall. On Monday, all ten of the senior regulators and former regulators participating in the conference will join in a mix and mingle with anyone who would like to talk with them. And then Monday afternoon at 3:15, I’ll be on the new Revolution Stage speaking on Regulation Revolution. I’m aiming to make it the most interesting speech I’ve ever given. If you’ll be at the conference, be sure to come, and tell your friends to come too. Also, watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book, Bank 4.0, which you can now buy. I co-wrote the regulatory chapter with Brett, and we’ll have a show and events on that as well. Last year, I ended the fall with what I called my world tour designed as seven countries in seven weeks, ending at the Dutch Central Bank right before Christmas, and I tried to share the main takeaways from each by posting mini-videos from the scene. This year I’ll be in fewer countries but at more events, so I’m going to do the videos again -- a lot of people said they enjoyed coming along on those adventures. So please follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and come to jsbarefoot.com for more information. And yes, we’re going to revive the newsletter. One of my colleagues recently suggested we call the next post Whirlwind, because that’s what the year has been. Innovation everywhere! 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 am especially thrilled about today’s guest -- California DBO Commissioner Jan Owen -- because this episode has been years in the making. I’ve known Jan for a long time, and as anyone who knows her will attest, she’s a breath of fresh air in the regulatory world. She’s candid, she’s outspoken, she’s thought provoking, and she's fearless in tackling thorny issues. We’ve been looking for a good chance to sit down and talk, and we finally found one this summer. As it happens, it turned out to be one of Barefoot Innovation’s most fun settings ever (and we’ve had some great ones, including beachside in Fiji at the AFI conference). Jan and I were both in Santa Fe in July for a conference and we decided to record our talk on an outdoor balcony, as a thunder storm approached. It was extremely windy, and we could smell the ozone and coming rain, and you’ll be able to hear the thunder booming, sometimes startlingly well-timed to punctuate Jan’s more pointed comments. We took our chances with the weather, staying outside as the sky darkened and dozens of lightning strikes forked down out of the clouds onto the mountains behind Jan -- I wish I’d gotten a photo of that.  In the end, we had to run for it as the rain began, first with big drops spattering the deck and then, ten seconds later, deluge! So the episode ends a little abruptly! Jan Lynn Owen is one of the most important financial regulators in the US because she heads the California Department of Business Oversight (DBO). Since California arguably leads the world in financial innovation, the DBO is at the forefront in addressing emerging regulatory issues around fintech. Importantly, state regulators, unlike most of the federal ones, oversee both banks and nonbanks. The US federal regulators dominate financial policy, but they don't directly supervise nonbank startups. That means they’re not in close touch with the cutting edge of innovation, which is not in the banks -- it’s in the nonbank startups. So having a regulator like Jan who understands both banking and fintech is invaluable. In our conversation, she shares her diverse background, including having been a banker and regulator. She describes the scope of the DBO, which is breathtaking -- 368,000 licensees, over 4,000 small business and small dollar lenders, over 300 payday lenders, over 400 nondepository mortgage companies - you get the picture. As you would expect, we had a lively discussion about the proposal by the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to create a fintech charter. Jan is famously opposed to it and I have been an outspoken advocate for it - we’ll link in the show notes to my debate on that topic with John Ryan, CEO of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS). Jan is of course a leader in CSBS and in our talk, she describes their efforts to modernize and streamline the state regulatory systems and licensing system in ways that she believes can meet the needs of the fintech sector without the OCC establishing a new type of federal charter. (Note that my discussion with Jan was recorded in mid-July, and so predated the OCC’s July 31 announcement that it is going ahead with the new fintech charter.) Jan points out that the fintech world has transitioned from seeking to avoid regulation to embracing it, in the realization that it helps their business model. She says this shift is putting healthy pressure on government to figure out how to regulate these novel companies, and she’s candid in saying that many of our financial laws and rules are old and out of date. In our talk, she invites input from anyone and everyone on how to fix them. The OCC fintech charter was not the only issue on which Jan and I disagree. If you read the news, you probably already know that she’s been outspoken in her skepticism about regulatory sandboxes -- and our regular listeners know that I think regulators really need them. Much of the issue comes down to how they’re designed, and we had a good conversation about the dos and don'ts of sandboxes, reglabs, and innovation hubs. The key is to give regulators a safe space to do easy experimentation, mainly to accelerate their own learning, while still assuring full consumer protection. (Since Jan and I spoke, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection also announced that it will launch a regulatory sandbox.) Before we fled the rainstorm, I asked Jan to talk about a speech she’s been giving titled “Sex, Drugs, and Skinny Jeans” (a perfect example of her style). The “sex” topic is the #MeToo movement, including Jan’s personal experience with workplace sexual misconduct. The “drugs” issue is, of course, how to regulate the financial issues raised by legal marijuana in states like California, since federal law still bars banks from opening accounts for these cash-rich businesses. And “skinny jeans” is about the culture clash between traditional, suit-and-tie finance and the jeans-and-tee-shirt worldview of Silicon Valley. We’re going to have to bridge that divide, if we want to optimize the technology change coming to the financial world. Enjoy this thunderous episode with Jan Lynn Owen. Links LINK TO FULL TRANSCRIPTION Podcast with John Ryan - Conference of State Bank Bank Supervisors President Recent Speech at Lendit More on Jan Lynn Owen Jan Lynn Owen was appointed the first-ever Commissioner of the California Department of Business Oversight by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. on July 1, 2013, following a merger of the departments of Corporations and Financial Institutions. Previously, Ms. Owen served as Commissioner of Corporations. Prior to becoming Commissioner, Ms. Owen was the principal at The Jan Owen Group; a strategic initiatives manager at Apple Inc.; vice president of government affairs at JP Morgan Chase; state director of government and industry affairs at Washington Mutual Inc.; and executive director of the California Mortgage Bankers Association. From 1999 to 2000, Ms. Owen was acting commissioner of the Department of Financial Institutions, following on her role as deputy commissioner from 1996 to 1999. She also served for several years as a consultant to the state Senate Banking Committee. Ms. Owen is an alumna of California State University, Fresno, where she earned her degree in Economics. More for our listeners We have great podcasts in the queue. We have a series focused on global developments in fintech and regtech, including Harish Natarajan of the World Bank and Anju Padwardhan of CreditEase and Stanford University, who talks about fintech developments in China. From London, we’ll have a talk with P.J. DiGiamarino of JWG and the Regtech Council. We’ll also have a really thought-provoking show with Peter Renton, who leads LendAcademy and the LendIt conference series. We have a regtech firm coming up, Alloy, which has high-tech solutions for meeting the Know-Your-Customer rules in AML. And we’ll have a show with the co-founders of Earnup. So, lots to look forward to! The fall conference circuit is exciting. Some of the places I’ll be speaking are: Finovate Fall, September 26, 2018, New York, NY NFCC Connect, October 2, 2018, Dallas, TX Online Lending Policy Institute, October 9, Washington, DC P20 Conference, October 10, Atlanta, GA American Banker RegTech, October 15-16, New York, NY Money 2020, October 21-24, Las Vegas, NV Singapore Fintech Festival, November 12-16, Singapore LendIt Europe, November 19-20, 2018 in London ABA/ABA Financial Crimes Conference, December 2-4, Washington, DC Regtech Rising, December 3-5, London I’ll also be speaking at several events hosted by US regulators this fall. It’s great to see so many of them really digging into the issues surrounding fintech and regtech. Also, watch for upcoming information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well. If you listen to Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, please leave a five star rating and also remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep it going. Come to jsbarefoot.com for today’s show notes and to join our email list, so you’ll get the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts. As always, please follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Support our podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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

Deals Used vehicle marketplace Souche has attracted $578m in series F capital from investors including Alibaba, Sunshine Insurance Group and CreditEase. The round has brought Souche’s total funding to more than $1.2bn, with Alibaba having also backed a $335m series E in November 2017 and Ant Financial having led a $100m series C in 2016. … Continue reading "10 September 2018 – Used Vehicle Marketplace Souche Raises $578m"

In this episode of our series on financial technology, we sat down with Ning Tang, founder and CEO of CreditEase. Ning has been a leader in the development of China’s peer-to-peer (P2P) lending industry and has a unique perspective on the development of fintech worldwide. Some of the key takeaways from our conversation with Ning include: P2P lending in China has helped borrowers overlooked by traditional financial institutions. Many Chinese fintech firms were initially reluctant to share data, but data sharing has turned out to be a benefit for the entire industry. Regulation of P2P lending has increased as the industry has grown in size. As the industry has matured, banks have become essential partners for P2P firms. A combination of traditional and alternative data sources work best for making credit assessments.   The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or of the Federal Reserve System.

John Kilduff, founding partner of Again Capital, talks about oil prices hitting below $50. David Hammer, head of municipal bonds in New York for Pacific Investment Management, discusses Puerto Rico's backruptcy. Matthew Mish, executive director of global credit strategy at UBS, talks about auto loan defaults and whether they signal broader U.S. consumer loan stress. Ning Tang, CEO and founder of CreditEase, discusses Chinese investors' growing appetite for U.S. investment, the financial technology IPO pipeline and outlook for the credit cycle.

In the fourth episode of our series on financial technology, we sat down with Anju Patwardhan, a Fulbright Fellow researching fintech at Stanford University who previously served as the Chief Innovation Officer for Standard Chartered Bank, one of the world’s largest and most international banks. Anju is currently researching the potential for financial technology to increase financial inclusion, particularly for small businesses, at Stanford University. She also serves as a Venture Partner for the Fintech Investment Fund of Creditease, one of China’s largest fintech firms. We invited Anju to speak with us about her experiences managing fintech activities at a bank, the potential for collaboration and competition between fintech start-ups and traditional banks, and her research activities at Stanford. This conversation touches on a number of interesting subjects. For example, are fintech start-ups competitors or partners for traditional financial institutions? What’s the role of fintech in expanding financial inclusion? Anju also explains how fintech firms are leveraging alternative data sources to improve SME lending. Find Anju on LinkedIn and Twitter. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or of the Federal Reserve System.

Wealth Management in China at LendIt USA 2016

CreditEase Company Demo at LendIt USA 2016

State of the Chinese Fintech Market at LendIt USA 2016

CreditEase's Ning Tang talks about U.S. and China marketplace lending collaboration at LendIt USA 2016

CreditEase Company Demo

State of the Union Address for the Chinese Internet Finance Market in the China Track at LendIt USA 2015 with Ning Tang, Founder & CEO of CreditEase. CreditEase is a national leader in wealth management, credit management, micro-finance investment, and micro-credit loan origination and servicing. In 2006, CreditEase launched the first P2P micro-credit platform in China, bridging urban lenders with extra funds and people with micro-credit needs, such as urban micro-entrepreneurs, salary workers, vocation school students and the rural poor. Ning sees the challenges of the Chinese internet finance market come from software, especially the lack of credit scoring reports.

China: The Largest Internet Finance Market in the World panel at LendIt USA 2015 with Greg Gibb, Chairman & CEO of Lufax; Soul Htite, Co-Founder & CEO of Dianrong; Ning Tang, Founder & CEO of CreditEase; Dr. Zane Wang, Founder & CEO of China Rapid Finance; Daniel Wu, General Manager of Tencent Tenpay; and moderator Jason Jones, Co-Founder & Partner of Lend Academy.