Podcasts about lendup

The BragWorthy Culture Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2021 47:07

Ryan Zauk brings you one of the most impactful, information-dense, and fun episodes to date with Chad Beyers, Partner & Co-Founder of Susa Ventures. Susa is a sector-agnostic early-stage VC investing in areas like Enterprise Software, Fintech, Logistics, Healthcare, Consumer & Frontier Tech. Notable investments include Robinhood, Fast, Flexport, PolicyGenius, Okra, LendUp, Nova Credit, Railz, Treasury Prime, and Expanse. Chad was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 for VC in 2015. Prior to Susa Ventures, Chad was the senior director of platform at Integrate.com and held various marketing and product roles at Silver Spring Networks, Bloom Energy, and Electronic Arts. They discuss: - His unusual path to venture and the critical tools he used to become an incredible cold-emailer, meeting a16z's Chris Dixon and BoxGroup's David Tisch - The wild story of turning a Jon Stewart taping into an internet phenomenon! - Susa Ventures and the exciting, Wharton Fintech exclusive release of their upcoming opportunities fund - Critical advice for starting your first fund (or angel investments) - His seed Robinhood investment, including the moment the lightbulb went off - Fintech trends he's most excited ]for - And much more! Mentioned in the Episode: Jon Stewart Tweet Thread: https://twitter.com/chadbyers/status/1273726486973804545?lang=en Robinhood COO: https://bit.ly/3AGEHdi Atom Finance CEO on PFOF: https://bit.ly/3hK0EzI For more Fintech insights, follow us below: Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech Ryan's Twitter: twitter.com/RyanZauk LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/wharton-fintech-club/

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“There's No Playbook for This” - Kimberly Morgan, LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2021 39:35

On this episode of the BragWorthy Culture Podcast, Jordan talks with Kimberly Morgan, the COO of LendUp. Kimberly's mission is to evolve the company's operations to match the growing needs and goals of the organization. With over two decades of experience driving operational excellence, she is smashing barriers by building high-performing, diverse teams that focus on cultural awareness to increase communication and collaboration through human connection. Jordan and Kimberly talk about the challenges and ideas that COVID brought to the table, and how her conversations and expectations about COVID have changed within the year. Kimberly shares how she checks on her people, ensuring that she monitors behavior in addition to listening to how they are feeling via employee surveys. She mentions what feedback has been the most helpful during the pandemic, along with how they have turned feedback into action, creating trust between management and employees. Kimberly also discusses how to create an environment where people won't omit critical feedback and tips on developing a work-from-home people-strategy as well as a self-serve workplace.

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#41 - AUSTEN ALLRED

POD OF JAKE

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2021 51:38

Austen is co-founder and CEO of Lambda School. Lambda School is an online coding school with an income share agreement (“ISA”) model in which students only pay tuition if and after they get a job. Prior to Lambda School, Austen wrote a book called Secret Sauce: The Ultimate Growth Hacking Guide. He previously worked at LendUp and co-founded Grasswire. [0:10] - The basics of Lambda School [4:00] - Lambda’s use of the ISA business model [10:56] - Austen's experiences growing up with an entrepreneurial spirit [16:15] - Lessons learned from Austen’s religious mission in the Ukraine [23:15] - The importance of discipline and its decline in American culture [31:01] - Benefits of fasting and Austen’s fasting experiences [34:47] - Minimalism for a purpose-driven life [40:24] - Tesla’s greatness and the implications of selling too early [46:49] - The role of technological optimism in our society -- Thank you for listening to Pod of Jake! All shares and reviews are sincerely appreciated! LINKS: Twitter: @blogofjake Website: podofjake.com Blog: blogofjake.com Email: jake@blogofjake.com Call: superpeer.com/jake Support: patreon.com/blogofjake Bitcoin: 3ESGQxrJZmGqd2SifqCUiHPvah1uWtN1Zd Ethereum: blogofjake.eth 0xF89aCC1f8c4FeEAc372997006BfE7c0fdD99F80c Bitcoin Cash: qznma8vxf8kjn4v9phsfkhzd0559gm7yfsx0gkl4sf

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Episode 375 Frank Rotman from QED Investors

Bank On It

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 39:26

This episode was produced remotely using the ListenDeck standardized audio production system. You can subscribe to this podcast and stay up to date on all the stories here on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio. In this episode the host John Siracusa chats remotely with Frank Rotman, founding partner of QED Investors. Some of Frank’s investments include companies such as Credit Karma, Prosper, Avant Credit, SoFi, GreenSky, LendUp and ApplePie Capital. Tune in and Listen. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Google , Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio to hear Thursdays interview with Meredith Moss from Finomial. About the host: John, is the host of the ‘Bank On It’ podcast recorded onsite in Wall Street at OpenFin and Million Dollar Startup, a fully remote, high quality pitch competition podcast.. He's also the founder of the remotely recorded, studio quality standardized audio production system ListenDeck. Follow John on LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium

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Frank Rotman, Founding Partner at QED Investors - Past, Present, and Future of Fintech!

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2020 40:28

Miguel Armaza interviews Frank Rotman, Founding Partner of QED Investors, a Venture Capital fund that invests in early-stage, disruptive financial services companies around the world. Frank focuses on financial services and financial technology companies that are credit-oriented or have data analytics foundations at their core and his portfolio includes some of the fintech rockstars of our generation, including LendUp, Credit Karma, Avant, SoFi, and many more. We talk about: - Frank’s experience at Capital One, starting as one of the first employees to senior executive and chief credit officer - The evolution of QED - The state fintech in the US, Latin America, and around the world - His approach to evaluating early-stage fintech startups - His outlook on the road ahead for the industry. - And much, much more! Finally, we also talk about Frank’s Twitter presence. It’s not an exaggeration to say he is probably the most respected fintech voice on Twitter and has become famous for sharing some of the most thoughtful and in-depth twitter threads. In case you’re not following him, I recommend you check him out. His username is @FintechJunkie. Frank Rotman Frank Rotman is a founding partner of QED Investors. His investments are focused on financial services and financial technology companies that are credit oriented or have data analytics foundations at their core. His portfolio of 20+ investments includes many of the emerging next-generation companies in the financial services eco-system such as Credit Karma, Prosper, Avant Credit, SoFi, GreenSky, LendUp and ApplePie Capital. Frank was one of the earliest analysts hired into Capital One and spent almost 13 years there helping build many of the company’s business units and operational areas. With two decades in consumer & small business finance, Frank is widely known in the industry as a Credit Risk and Portfolio Management Expert. His responsibilities have included turning around underperforming business units, building new businesses from concept to market leadership positions, overseeing the credit performance of Capital One as a whole, and creating a Student Lending company after leaving Capital One in December 2005. Frank graduated from the University of Virginia with degrees that included Applied Mathematics (B.S.) and Systems Engineering (M.S.). About QED Investors QED is a leading boutique venture capital firm based in Alexandria, VA, co-founded by Nigel Morris and Frank Rotman. It invests in early-stage, disruptive financial services companies in North America, South America, and the United Kingdom. QED is dedicated to building great businesses and uses a unique, hands-on approach that leverages its partners’ decades of entrepreneurial and operational experience, helping companies achieve breakthrough growth. Notable investments include Nubank, SoFi, Credit Karma, Klarna, GreenSky, Avant, Flywire, Remitly, QuintoAndar, Creditas, ClearScore, and Konfio.

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Creating Pathways to Better Financial Health - Anu Shultes, CEO of LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 14, 2020 46:56

In this episode, Miguel Armaza sits down with Anu Shultes, CEO of LendUp, a mission-driven fintech company focused on expanding access to credit and creating pathways to better financial health. A 25-year veteran of the financial services industry, Anu has a personal mission to lift people out of poverty and infuses her work with her passion for financial inclusion. Anu’s career spans a broad spectrum of roles across subprime credit cards, subprime loans, and prepaid cards. Her significant experience building efficient operational processes and teams to support them has led her to become one of the few female CEOs in fintech. LendUp is backed by a long list of top VCs, including QED, PayPal Ventures, Google Ventures, Y-Combinator, Thomvest, Radicle, Data Collective, Susa Ventures, and many more!

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Episode 90: Austen Allred Founder and CEO of Lambda School - Transforming Education and How We Learn

Startup HandMeDowns

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2020 47:37

(Rerun) This week we sat down with Austen Allred of Lambda School, Fit Marketing, Grasswire, and Lendup. On this episode we discuss: - Growth marketing galore - The free upfront model - When to invest Austen Allred has a super interesting origin story, having dropped out of university himself, he went on to co-found his own school and pushing the envelope for the future of education. For those of you who are out of the loop, Austen created Lambda School, a coding school that asks for no money up front in an exchange for a percentage of your salary after you get a job making more than 50k. Austen got his start in the business world at Stubtopia, a ticket brokering company that he started with his brother at 18. After handing over the reins to his brother, he went on to complete an LDS mission in Ukraine which ended up setting a tone of dedication and perseverance for his whole career. If you’re an entrepreneur trying to make your move, I suggest listening to what Austen has to say as he gives honest advice about growth, product market fit, fundraising, and how to take the right advice. Listen on Spotify, iTunes and anywhere else you listen to podcasts!

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081 | Fintech Growth Teams with Jason Mikula

Snyder Showdown

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2020 74:09

Jason Mikula is the Head of Growth at Merlon - the world’s most advanced AI-powered adverse media research platform for enhanced Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) Investigations. Jason has spent more than 10 years working with consumer finance companies like Goldman Sachs and LendUp to develop and implement impactful growth strategies. Jason chats with Chris Snyder about how fintech companies can gain a competitive edge when it comes to user acquisition and growth.

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Podcast 231: Anu Shultes of LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 24, 2020 34:29

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

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Podcast 231: Anu Shultes of LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 24, 2020 34:26

I think the small dollar loan space is fascinating. When done responsibly it is a difficult business to execute well given the small amount of revenue generated with each transaction. It requires automation, good underwriting and efficient marketing. One of the leaders in this space is LendUp. The next guest on the Lend Academy Podcast […] The post Podcast 231: Anu Shultes of LendUp appeared first on Lend Academy.

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Amias Gerety - Partner at QED Investors

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 26, 2019 25:15

In our latest podcast, Keane Ehsani (WG ’20) is joined by Amias Gerety, Partner at QED Investors (https://qedinvestors.com). In this extensive interview, Amias describes QED’s investment philosophy and how they selectively provide capital and add value to emerging financial services companies. Amias also dives into his experiences at Treasury, the current US regulatory landscape for emerging FinTechs, and how QED’s portfolio companies are disrupting financial services. Amias joined QED as a Partner in 2017 focusing on supporting the portfolio and finding new investment opportunities with a focus on back office technologies and infrastructure companies. Amias brings a deep background in financial markets, compliance, and RegTech to the QED team. Prior to joining QED, Amias served as the President’s nominee and as Acting Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In that role, he was the lead advisor to the Secretary on policies affecting financial institutions. He also oversaw a number of programs focused on supporting small business lending and community development. Prior to Treasury, Amias was a management consultant at Oliver Wyman. Amias is a recipient of the Alexander Hamilton award, the Treasury’s highest honor. Amias graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard with a BA in Social Studies. QED Investors is a leading boutique venture capital firm based in Alexandria, VA. QED focuses on investing in early stage, disruptive financial services companies in the U.S., U.K. and Latin America. QED is dedicated to building great businesses and uses a unique, hands-on approach that leverages their partners’ decades of entrepreneurial and operational experience, helping their companies achieve breakthrough growth. Notable investments include Credit Karma, ClearScore, SoFi, Avant, Nubank, Remitly, GreenSky and LendUp. We want thank Wharton FinTech's platinum sponsor, the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance at Wharton (stevenscenter.wharton.upenn.edu). The Stevens Center is the premier research, education, and thought leadership institution in the world for financial technology.

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E114: Anu Shultes (CEO LendUp) - Always an optimist

Moving Up

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 26, 2019 46:41

Growing up in India and coming to the US for grad school, Anu had no idea of the challenges that lay ahead for her. Letting go of your fear of failure and striving to make a difference every day. A story of crazy obstacles ( financial, health and family) and overcoming them all to achieve her dream of becoming a CEO.

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Becoming Fearless with Anu Shultes

Career Curves

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 10, 2019 46:20 Transcription Available

Careers don't happen in a vacuum, but rather unfold in the context of our lives. Anu Shultes' career journey has included setbacks, hard landings and serious illness. In spite of it all she persisted, found her voice, and earlier this year was named CEO of LendUp, a socially responsible FinTech company redefining financial services for the emerging middle class. Anu candidly shares how she faced adversity head-on and became fearless along the way. Her career decisions not only led her to the helm of a company, but also shaped the leader and person she is today.

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Frank Rotman, Founding Partner of QED Investors

Square One: Conversations with the Best in Business

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 26, 2019 49:24

In our latest podcast, Christian Rolon (WG '19) is joined by Frank Rotman, one of the founding partners of QED Investors. QED Investors invests in early-stage Fintech companies based in the US, UK, and Latin America. Based in Virginia, QED was founded in 2008 by Rotman, Caribou Honig, and Nigel Morris (co-founder of Capital One). QED Investors has invested in Avant, AvidXchange, ClearScore, Credit Karma, Nubank, Remitly, and SoFi. Their exits include Braintree, Klarna, and Orchard. Frank Rotman is a founding partner of QED Investors. Frank's portfolio companies include Avant, Credit Karma, GreenSky, LendUp, Prosper and SoFi. Frank publishes his thoughts on Fintech on his personal blog Confessions of a Fintech Junkie. Frank began his career at Capital One as one of its earliest analysts. At Capital One, Frank spanned a number of roles across subprime and upmarket cards, focusing on managing Capital One's credit exposure and expanding new business lines. After leaving Capital One, Frank created a Student Lending company. Frank received his BS in Applied Mathematics and his MS in Systems Engineering, both from the University of Virginia.

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How to Build a Talent Acquisition Team: Susan Underwood, Envoy, Lendup & Glassdoor.

TechRecruit

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2019 46:12

You've been hired to build a Talent Acquisition Team. Now what? In this informative talk, Susan Underwood, Head of Talent Acquisition, will open her playbook on workforce planning, data utilization, pitching the executive board and hiring recruiters. Learn the tools, tactics and strategies to build a top performing team. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/techrecruit/support

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26: Leo Polovets, General Partner at Susa Ventures

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 9, 2019 43:19

As software eats the world, the idea of moats and the power of compounding have taken a new turn of influence. I chatted with Leo Polovets, General Partner at Susa Ventures on the importance of these two fundamental concepts and why they are so powerful, but yet still so counterintuitive in 2019. In this episode, Leo expanded on his experience from being one of the first dozen employees at LinkedIn to experiencing hypergrowth at Google and how this has enabled him to find and support the next set of generational companies, e.g. Robinhood, Flexport, Andela and LendUp. He expanded on Susa's investment thesis in funding entrepreneurs that are building highly defensible companies that leverage data, economies of scale, and network effects to build value and achieve longevity. We also touched on nuanced philosophical concepts in company creation such as "position vs. momentum" and "ego vs. perception." It was a pleasure to have Leo on the show. He's one of the most thoughtful venture investors I've had the privilege of getting to know.

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Episode 51: Transforming Education and How We Learn with Austen Allred Founder and CEO of Lambda School

Startup HandMeDowns

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2018 47:37

This week we sat down with Austen Allred of Lambda School, Fit Marketing, Grasswire, and Lendup. On this episode we discuss: - Growth marketing galore - The free upfront model - When to invest Austen Allred has a super interesting origin story, having dropped out of university himself, he went on to co-found his own school and pushing the envelope for the future of education. For those of you who are out of the loop, Austen created Lambda School, a coding school that asks for no money up front in an exchange for a percentage of your salary after you get a job making more than 50k. Austen got his start in the business world at Stubtopia, a ticket brokering company that he started with his brother at 18. After handing over the reins to his brother, he went on to complete an LDS mission in Ukraine which ended up setting a tone of dedication and perseverance for his whole career. If you’re an entrepreneur trying to make your move, I suggest listening to what Austen has to say as he gives honest advice about growth, product market fit, fundraising, and how to take the right advice. Listen on Spotify, iTunes and anywhere else you listen to podcasts!

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Competing with Amazon with Laura Behrens CEO Shippo

Leaders in Tech and Ecommerce

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 28, 2018 43:49

Laura Behrens Wu is the founder and CEO of Shippo. Laura, 26 years old, and Simon Kreuz, 28 years old, they started Shippo in 2013. Laura had her first experience with a startup while working as an intern at a startup company LendUp, which was a Y Combinator alumni startup (as the combinator that invested in Dropbox, Airbnb, and many other top startups). She grew up in Germany, China, Ecuador, and Cairo went to school in Switzerland and started Shippo in the U.S.Discover more details here. Some of the highlights from the episode:Shopify, Facebook Marketplace - PartnersOffering shipping options to grow their businessBuilding tech experiencesHelping them FedEx to reach more clients - smallerCompetitor or not - Amazon.com or Alibaba - how do you compete with this guys?Amazon is driving the shipping standard - so our clients come to us for help to competeCustomization and authenticity - tell a certain story - millennialsTalking about a hard time when being an entrepreneur - founders go through a huge amount of pressure.Follow us on:Instagram: http://bit.ly/2Wba8v7Twitter: http://bit.ly/2WeulzXLinkedin: http://bit.ly/2w9YSQXFacebook: http://bit.ly/2HtryLdSupport the show (https://www.alcottglobal.com/category/podcast/)

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#32: Laura Behrens Wu Founder & CEO at Shippo

Leaders in Supply Chain and Logistics with Radu Palamariu

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Nov 28, 2018 42:28 Transcription Available

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20VC: Why Warm Intros Are Mostly Dumb, Why Ownership is Built On First Check and 4 Crucial Elements To Make Cold Inbound Attractive with Leo Polovets, General Partner @ Susa Ventures

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 12, 2018 34:02

Leo Polovets is a General Partner @ Susa Ventures, one of the valley's leading early-stage seed funds with a portfolio including the likes of Flexport, Robinhood, Lendup, Qadium, Rigetti, the list goes on. As for Leo, prior to joining the world of VC, he started his career as the second non-founding engineer at LinkedIn. After two years at LinkedIn, Leo spent 3 years at Google, largely working on real-time payment fraud detection. Finally, his last stop pre-Susa involved spending 4 years at Factual, a location data platform. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Leo made his way into the world of VC from being the 2nd non-founding engineer at LinkedIn? 2.) Why does Leo believe that the hailed "warm intro" is actually dumb? What are the biggest drawbacks to this being commonplace in our ecosystem? What does Leo believe the mindset of investors should be instead? How does Leo filter through cold inbound? What are the 4 elements Leo looks for in all inbound? What can founders do to really make them stand out? 3.) Leo has previously heavily emphasised the importance of moats, how does Leo define moats and defensibility? When do founders have to think about moat building? Pre-product? Pre-launch? Pre-scaling? What questions suggest that a founders mindset is heavily oriented to moat building? With the majority of incumbents being usurped by platform shifts, does that not render moats significantly futile in the long term? 4.) What does Leo believe is the right way for investors to pass on an opportunity and communicate that to founders? What is wrong with the current way many do it? How does Leo present his opinion without getting into an argument with the founder on reasoning? What feedback has Leo been given from founders that has changed the way he thinks about being an investor? 5.) Controversial capitals Round: Ownerships is built on first check? Agree or disagree and why? Whether it is a $6m, $8m or $12m, if it is at seed, it is so early that price really does not matter so much? Agree or disagree and why? There is no point VCs spending their time with struggling companies in the portfolio. At best they return cents on the dollar. Only work with the outperformers to drive returns. Agree or disagree and why? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Leo’s Fave Book: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook Leo’s Most Recent Investment: Interviewing.io As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leo on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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#102: Austen Allred - CEO of Lambda School

Breaking Into Startups

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2018 60:18

Austen Allred is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lambda School. Recently coming out of Y Combinator, Lambda now has thousands of students. Prior to this, he served as a Growth Expert at LendUp. Lambda School is an online bootcamp that gives students the tools and training they need to launch their career in software engineering at no upfront cost. Their end goal is to eliminate all the distractions related to income, living expenses & time so students can focus on transitioning into their dream careers. They also don’t get paid, unless you get a job!

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Tech + Government for an Inclusive Economy

Money and Meaning

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 25, 2018 31:48

Unlikely Allies: Financial services firm LendUp and current Treasurer for City of St. Louis discuss a new partnership to support the emerging middle class.

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Austen Allred - Pioneering New Paths for Higher Education

Future of Living

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 20, 2018 23:24

Austen Allred (@austenallred, TW) believes higher education has it all backward. Students shouldn’t be investing in the school, the school should be investing in the students. With that core belief, he co-founded Lambda School to pioneer a new model for higher education and find untapped or underutilized talent and train them for the most in-demand jobs in the world: computer science. Lambda School strives to make entry into the computer science fields more accessible than ever. Allred is a prolific author, speaker, and YCombinator S17 alum. Prior to co-founding Lambda School he oversaw growth at LendUp, co-founded Grasswire, and lead social at Fit Marketing (now STRYDE). In this conversation, Austen and Blake dive into How Lambda School actually works. What this model might mean for traditional higher education institutions What real estate developers and city planners need to be thinking about when considering how to accommodate students and graduates of institutions like Lambda School. Check out Lambda School at lambdaschool.com and find Austen on Twitter at @AustenAllred. Find more of The Future of Living Podcast online at: https://futureoflivingpodcast.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/FutureLivingPod Instagram: https://instagram.com/futurelivingpod

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Podcast 162: Sasha Orloff of LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2018 36:24

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

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Podcast 162: Sasha Orloff of LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2018 36:21

It is curious to me that 56% of the adults in this country are classified as subprime. Yet, most lenders are focused on prime or near prime consumers. Improving the financial health of the subprime population is clearly a bigger problem but also one that can potentially have a bigger reward. Our next guest on […] The post Podcast 162: Sasha Orloff of LendUp appeared first on Lend Academy.

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Podcast 162: Sasha Orloff of LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2018 36:21

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Data that Deepens Financial Access: Experian and Lendup

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2018 47:56

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

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Regulatory Challenger: LabCFTC and Daniel Gorfine

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2018 65:47

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

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Regulation Revolution: The Financial Conduct Authority and Digitally-Native Regulatory Design

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2018 56:24

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!

united states ceo new york washington los angeles strategy las vegas speaking design identity executive director united kingdom nashville risk revolution congress financial bbc competition excellence native consumer compliance preventing regulation fargo innovate emerge ey regulatory enforcement chief economist thames fca digitally comply london business school experian aml alloys ofcom executive board member group director regtech financial conduct authority know your customer canary wharf european security brett king markets authority mike butler sloan fellow nick cook lendit lendup financial services authority regulatory sandbox global id radius bank cfsi peter renton finreglab chris woolard barefoot innovation lend academy

Innovation and Community Banks: Eastern Bank CEO Bob Rivers

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2018 59:13

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

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The Courage to Change: Former Wells Fargo BSA Officer Jim Richards

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2018 73:25

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

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How to Change the World: The Gates Foundation’s Michael Wiegand

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2018 67:22

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

Affordable Financial Advice: Nerdwallet CEO Tim Chen

#plugintodevin - Your Mark on the World with Devin Thorpe

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2018 40:21

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

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#59 - Providing Fair Financial Products for the 56% of the US Without Access to Them - Jake Rosenberg of LendUp

Y Combinator

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2018 33:49

Jake Rosenberg is the cofounder and CTO of LendUp (W12). They provide access to quality credit cards and loans without hidden fees or debt traps. Their customers are the 56% of Americans that have what is described as a “subprime” credit score, meaning they can’t be approved for credit by most banks.Ali Rowghani is the CEO of YC Continuity.Read the transcript on our blog.

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Is It Ethical To Lend To Working People At A 200% Interest Rate? Lendup's Iyer and Orloff Say Yes - 574

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2017 28:11

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2gR4JCV. We’re all familiar with payday lenders who are providing loans to people who can least afford it at interest rates that shock the greediest of corporate bankers. Can a fintech company that lends at rates up to 200% annual percentage rates ever be considered ethical? In this piece, I’m going to share my conclusion. To help me make this evaluation, I turned to Morgan Simon, a vocal advocate for using a social justice lens for impact investing. She is the author of Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change and Managing Director of Candide Group. She framed the question for me: In general, when we think about fintech, from microfinance in the global south to financial services for working class populations in the US, we think a lot about the question of fairness. It’s common for a social enterprise to focus on providing better rates to a customer compared to what they had access to. But better does not always mean fair. So, we always look at a company and try to assess--is the financing non-extractive, meaning the customer receives more value than the company? Is the operating margin reasonable compared to the consumer value created? Does the product help build assets as opposed to focusing predominately on consumption? Each company and case is different, and hence it’s impossible to say that a certain range of APRs enables fairness. It’s important to take each company case-by-case and try to assess its particular impact. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2gR4JCV. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.info.

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20VC: Investing; A Game Of Access Or Picking, Why Technical DD At Seed Is Irrelevant & Why A Contrarian Mindset Does Not Always Lead To Optimal Returns with Leo Polovets, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Susa Ventures

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 19, 2017 25:10

Leo Polovets is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Susa Ventures, one of the west coast's most exciting new seed funds. They have investments in the likes of previous guests RobinHood, Flexport, Andela, LendUp, and Qadium, just to name a few from their stellar portfolio. As for Leo, Prior to Susa, Leo was one of the first engineers at LinkedIn in 2003, then worked on payment fraud detection at Google, then designed and built the data cleaning and deduping engines at Factual. He is an angel investor in over a dozen companies, including DataFox, Boomtrain, Lumoid, and Momentum Machines. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Leo made the transition from the world of operations with LinkedIn to co-founding Susa Ventures? 2.) How does Leo evaluate the supposed success that comes from investing with a contrarian mindset? This that the only way? Is investing merely a game of access without picking? 3.) If one is to follow the crowd, there is often a high price? What is Leo's approach to valuation sensitivity? At what stage does price become unreasonable? How does Leo instill a sense of disciple and rigor in maintaining this mindset? 4.) How does Leo react to founders who raise large sums of capital on slowly increasing caps? How central should dilution be to the mindset of founders when raising? 5.) Why does Leo think there is very little valuable to be gained from enaging in technical due diligence at seed? What else does need to be examined pre-investment? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Leo’s Fave Book: Traction: A Startup Guide To Getting Customers Leo’s Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily, 25IQ Leo’s Most Recent Investment: TalentIQ As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Leo on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Foundersuite makes the leading CRM for raising startup capital. Since March of 2016, Foundersuite customers have raised over $130M in seed and venture capital. Foundersuite’s CRM sits on a database of over 50,000 investors, which will help you quickly populate your fundraising funnel including a beautiful and easy-to-use investor update tool, and the recently launched a new portal that helps investors and accelerators track their portfolio companies on a single dashboard. For a whopping 40% off a Monthly or Annual subscription use the code “20MinuteVC” at checkout. Greenhouse Software designs tools that help companies hire great people and ultimately build better businesses. Greenhouse works with over 1,500 of the world’s most innovative companies such as Airbnb, Slack, Snap Inc. and Lyft. A wrong hire is not only costly for a company but can also turn an employee into an unhappy one. With Greenhouse’s Applicant Tracking System, companies can make well-informed decisions and hire qualified candidates who are empowered to do the best work of their careers. Anybody who has a company that’s scaling quickly but has trouble hiring and retaining the right people. Visit www.greenhouse.io today to discover how your company can grow.

The Identity Credit Connection

State of Identity

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2017 20:53

Host Cameron D'Ambrosi is joined by Will Wyatt of Whitepages Pro and Ofer Mendelevitch of LendUp to discuss how new identity verification data sources are enabling greater consumer access to the financial services marketplace.

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#29: Charlie Harrington - From Finance to Biz Dev before finally becoming an Engineer at LendUp

Breaking Into Startups

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2017 47:03

A New Jersey-native, Charlie Harrington believes that you can’t find luck unless you take that courage to jump off the train and put yourself out there. From New York to London, Charlie transitioned from finance to business development at a startup. As if breaking into startups via the non-technical route wasn’t enough to quench his thirst for creativity, Charlie ultimately took a deep dive into software engineering by attending a coding bootcamp called Hack Reactor. Charlie currently works at LendUp as a software engineer but it was through a chance encounter that eventually got him the job.

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#27: Jotaka Eaddy - From Senior Advisor at NAACP to Head of Government Affairs at a Tech Startup

Breaking Into Startups

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2017 72:54

Jotaka Eaddy is a concrete example that you can come from political and social activism, take those exact same skills, and use them everyday to help build a business that creates change. Even back as a seventh grader living in a small town in South Carolina, Jotaka was adamant about her commitment to abolish death penalty (that she even wrote this down on her high school yearbook.) Jotaka grew up as an activist and organizer who evolved into a political strategist. Currently, Jotaka serves as the Head of Government Affairs at LendUp. She never would have imagined getting into tech but social impact tech was her driving force for finally joining the bandwagon. She then realized that tech people are not just a bunch of guys in white shirts, but like policy people, they are also dreamers and people who hustle to be transformative.

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Getting People on to the Credit Ladder: LendUp CEO Sasha Orloff

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 15, 2017 52:25

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

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20VC: Garry Tan on The Biggest Takeaways From Advising 700 Companies @ Y Combinator & Why Now Is The Golden Age For The Early Stage?

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2016 29:50

Garry Tan is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Initialized Capital, one of Silicon Valleys leading early stage seed funds. Prior to founding Initialized, Garry was a Partner at Y Combinator where he invested in and directly worked with over 700 companies in 5 years from the earliest possible stage, often just an idea. Garry's portfolio includes the likes of previous guests Tilt, Eero, Flexport, LendUp and many more incredible companies. Before being at YC, Garry Co-Founded Posterous and helped build it to a world-class website used by millions, ultimately acquired by Twitter. Garry also co-founded the engineering team for Palantir Technology's quant finance analysis platform. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Garry made the transition from Founder @ PostHaven to YC Partner to Initialized GP? 2.) What were Garry's biggest takeaways from advising 700 startups at YC that he has taken with him to Initialized? 3.) Why does Garry believe now is the golden age for early stage investing? What opportunity does the mass of late stage capital provide the early stage? 4.) How does Garry approach desired ownership? What level of ownership provides incentive for a VC to work whilst also allowing collaboration with other VCs in a round? 5.) What are Garry's thoughts on the rise of thematic investing? Why does he not believe it to be optimal at the seed stage? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Garry’s Fave Blog: SaaStr Garry’s Fave Book: Chaos Monkeys As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Garry on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield. Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc

Innovation in Small Business Lending: Sam Hodges of Funding Circle

Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 25, 2016 42:05

Welcome to our first conversation with an innovator in small business lending – my guest is Sam Hodges, Co-founder and U.S. Managing Director of Funding Circle. Funding Circle was founded in 2012 and is the world’s leading marketplace lender that’s exclusively focused on small businesses. It has made more than $2.5 billion in loans to 20,000 businesses in the U.S., Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK (where it is based). It customers borrow directly from a wide range of investors, including more than 50,000 people, the UK Government, and divers entities like local councils, a university and various financial organizations. Funding Circle was created because the founders were small business owners themselves and learned how hard it is to access finance, even for a successful business. Even when a loan was approved, they found the process difficult, or the terms unattractive. Sometimes they even felt misled. After opening their 96th loan rejection letter, they decided this was a systemic failure – that the traditional bank loan system was broken – and they set out to build a new solution. The financial crisis created fertile ground for them, as so many business suddenly had trouble accessing capital (the number of small businesses has dropped every year for the past 8-10 years). And their timing fit with the emergence of marketplace lending as a new model. As Funding Circle’s Co–Founder and U.S. Managing Director, Sam oversees the company’s overall strategic direction and its day–to–day operation in the U.S. He was previously Vice President of Business Development at SecondMarket, the leading marketplace for alternative investments, where he was responsible for corporate and business development and the company’s geographic expansion efforts. Sam was also part of the investment team at Pequot Capital, an $8 billion global fund manager, covering investments in financial technology and information services. He started his career as a strategy consultant at Katzenbach Partners, advising financial services and technology companies. He currently serves on the boards of two private companies. He received his MBA and MS from Stanford University and graduated magna cum laude from Brown University. Sam points to three key Funding Circle innovations: One is delivering a superior borrower experience. They can on-board and evaluate customers sometimes in minutes, or a few days, for situations where a bank might need 30 man-hours to reach a decision. Second, they’ve re-architected how they do credit evaluation. Sam says it’s not a silver bullet, but they’ve have created their own rigorous data-driven approach to understanding risk, and they’re using new data, in new ways, to serve more borrowers. And third, he argues that the marketplace model can be more scalable and profitable than the traditional bank approach, enabling them to grow a global business. In our conversation, Sam expresses his continued confidence in the marketplace model. He discusses Funding Circle’s risk analytics (he says they hire world class risk officers from world-class institutions). He explains the role of alternative data in driving more sound and inclusive lending. I was especially interested in how Sam contrasts the U.S. regulatory model with the U.K.’s efforts, especially on P2P lending. He thinks the fragmented American structure makes innovation here difficult. He also has suggestions for regulatory innovation, including sandboxes and a graduated scale of coverage that would allow small innovators to get up and running more easily. He emphasizes the need for interagency coordination and consistency. He says transparency needs to undergird the whole industry, and that requires smart, sound regulation that everyone understands. (To listen to our previous episode about the “Regulatory Sandbox” with Nitish Pandey of BMO, click here.) Sam welcomes smart customer protection regulation – he discusses his involvement in creating the Small Business Borrower’s Bill of Rights we discussed in an earlier episode with Brian Graham of BancAlliance. See also this Harvard research paper by former Small Business Administration head Karen Mills on small business lending. I hear increasing discussion about more regulation of small business lending. It’s partly because the online lenders are transforming the market, and partly because the “1099 economy” is producing more little businesses that arguably are functionally-equivalent to consumer borrowers. The sector is covered by some of the federal laws on consumer protection, but not by most of them. My own view is that regulation will probably need to come, but that we should NOT transplant the existing consumer protection rules into it without first updating them for the digital age. Speaking as someone who helped develop some of these rules, I will say they have a mixed record, at best, of protecting consumers. And complying with them costs a fortune. If we’re going to bring new regulation into the small business sector, let’s use the chance to take a fresh look, and apply some RegTech thinking. Other notes: Newsletter: I also want to share an announcement -- this month we’re launching a newsletter. It will be pithy and punchy and useful, highlighting the most interesting things that have happened, the most exciting things coming up. It will be a way to share some of the fascinating things I’ve been getting involved with. One example is that, this summer, I joined the Netherlands’ Queen Maxima (who leads the UN’s work on global financial inclusion) on her trip to Silicon Valley. Another is that I just returned from a week in Fiji at the global policy forum of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which represents the financial regulators of more than 90 countries in the developing world. I’m also working on ideas for promoting regulatory sandboxes in the United States. And in November, I’ll be speaking in Singapore at Asia’s first RegTech conference. And I’m doing a lot of work on RegTech. In fact, in Fiji I heard a new term – “SuperTech.” It’s a branch of RegTech that means technology-driven solutions for bank supervision. The newsletter will share some of the intriguing things that are going on, outside our poccasts. Don’t forget: Remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep the podcasts coming Support the Podcast Remember to rate us on ITunes. Coming guests: And look for some amazing guests coming up. We have none other than the leaders of Varo, Ripple, LendUp, and Loot (from London)! We have two amazing, mold-breaking innovators from the developing world – eCurrency and OneDollarCellPhone, as well as the head of AFI, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. And back in the US, we’ll have the community bank perspective on innovation. But first, next up, we have Harvard professor and behavioral economics expert, Brigitte Madrian. So, enjoy my conversation with Funding Circle’s Sam Hodges … and come back soon! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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Ep108 – Everything Blockchain. Ever.

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2016 96:44

Key stories this week: Finextra – BBVA says EU Bonus Cap hampers tech talent acquisition : LINK Tech Crunch – LendUp secures $47m to build the “Friendly dolphin” not loan shark of credit cards : LINK Coin Desk – Bitfinex to issue company equity (?!) to refund customers of hack : LINK Coin Desk – One month after the DAO hack millions of dollars worth of funds unclaimed : LINK Coin Desk : Digital Asset to open source “smart contract language” : LINK If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe below using your favourite podcasting app! Got a burning question or just want to shout of how much you’re loving whats in your ears right now? Contact us on @FinTechInsider or @11FSTeam. The post Ep108 – Everything Blockchain. Ever. appeared first on 11FS. The post Ep108 – Everything Blockchain. Ever. appeared first on 11:FS.

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20VC: Why Raising A Fund Is Like Raising A $25m Seed Round with No Product & Why Not All LP Money Is Equal with Chad Byers, General Partner @ Susa Ventures

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2016 24:57

Chad Byers is a General Partner @ Susa Ventures and very exciting news, Susa last week announced the raise of Susa II, a new $50m fund, testament to the quality of fund 1 which included the likes of former guests Lyst, RobinHood, LendUp and many more incredible companies. As for Chad, he focuses on investments in enterprise software, fintech, and healthcare. Prior to Susa, Chad spent time in various marketing and product management roles. As well as being a prolific angel investor in over 30+ companies. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Chad made the transition from angel investor to General Partner @ Susa? 2.) How was the fundraise with Susa 1? How was the fundraise for Susa II? How did the funding rounds change for each fund? 3.) How does Chad assess LP fit? Is all LP money not equal? What does Chad look for in his LPs? 4.) Question from Michael Kim @ Cendana: How does Chad look to establish the mindshare with entrepreneurs and other VCs for Susa in today's competitive environment? 5.) How does Chad approach the reserve structure of Susa fund II? How did Chad come tot hat conclusion as the optimal amount for follow on? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Chad’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Coding VC, Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd Chad’s Fave Book: When Breathe Becomes Air Chad's Most Recent Investment: Modsy As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chad on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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Insure-Tech : QED Founding Partner Caribou Honig

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2016 64:25

Today we have our first-ever episode on Insure-tech. Happily, it also turned out to be one of the most fun, funny and thought-provoking shows we've ever done. I'm pretty sure it's the first one where we've talked about the internet of things, and CRISPR gene research, transportation as a service, and drones. My fascinating guest is Caribou Honig, founding partner of QED Investors. QED is a venture fund cofounded by Caribou, Frank Rotman, and Nigel Morris, who first came together in the early days of Capital One. They have helped launch some great fintech companies - for instance LendUp and DriveFactor. Caribou's investments span an array of marketing, payments, and insurance technology companies, particularly where B2C customer acquisition drives the business success. He developed a passion for data-driven marketing when he led key marketing initiatives at Capital One, including responsibility for a $50 mm marketing budget, managing a 200-person underwriting operation, and cracking the code on digital credit card originations. Recent investments led by Caribou include, Remitly, TheMuse, and KNIP. He also serves on the Advisory Council for the CFSI Financial Solutions Lab. As you'll hear in our conversation, moreover, he's a Renaissance man. He holds a bachelor's degree in Physics and Philosophy from Harvard University, an MBA from the Darden School of Business, and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He and his wife have two children and, what he describes as two occasionally annoying dogs. Over the years He's taken time off to be Mr. Mom and to listen to the universe, as he puts it. And of course, he has an interesting name, which he'll explain in our discussion. I reached out to Caribou because I knew he was working in Insure-Tech, which has been on a slower track than other kinds of fintech but is starting to gain real traction. Caribou is Chairman of the InsureTech Connect, a new conference that's scheduled for October 5-6 in Las Vegas. I found our conversation incredibly interesting, especially in how insurance is being transformed by types of technology that have nothing to do with finance -- because its product is usually about managing risks in the physical world ranging from health to roofing materials to self-driving cars. As it turned out, about half of our talk is on insurance, and half is on his broader thoughts oninnovation, and also on regulation. He really sparked my own thinking on some of the tough regulatory issues, like how to resolve the conflicts between alternative data and fair lending disparate impact, and the pros and cons of state-based regulation, and his advice to regulators. Plus I'm stilling thinking about "parametric insurance" - skipping the adjudication process and agreeing in advance to let outside parameters - big data - determine the appropriate claim. New ideas, everywhere! Finally, for all you innovators in the audience, note that Caribou shares an open invitation to bring him interesting ideas. I know you'll enjoy hearing him. Vote for my SXSW Panel! Also, remember to vote to help get my Regulation Innovation panel selected for SXSW 2017 - it's at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/67829. My panelists will be Simple's Josh Reich, Adrienne Harris of the White House, and CFSI's CEO, Jennifer Tescher. We need your vote - voting is only open to September 2. And please plan to come to SX in Austin. Support Barefoot Innovation! Don't forget to send in your buck-a-show to support Barefoot Innovation -- and leave a review on ITunes. Support the Podcast Upcoming Shows Finally, come back next time. We have fantastic guests coming up, including Lauren Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center, Sam Hodges of Funding Circle, Colin Walsh of Varo, and Harvard professor Brigitte Madrian. 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!

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20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2016 24:48

Sasha Orloff is the CEO and Co-founder of LendUp, a fintech startup offering online and mobile personal loans and credit cards in the United States. Prior to launching LendUp Sasha was on the other side of the table as a VC with Citi Group’s corporate venture capital arm. On the topic of VC funding, LendUp raised an incredible $150m in Jan 2016 from likes of SV Angel, Yuri Milner our friends at Susa and Google Ventures just to name a few. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Sasha come to found LendUp following a stint in VC with Citi Group? 2.) What Sasha learnt from VC about running a successful startup and how he applied them to his founding of LendUp? 3.) Was it difficult leaving the security of a VC job to found a startup? Would you have done the same had you had children at the time? 4.) What trends in FinTech is Sasha most excited for? Why does Sasha think banks are in so much trouble? Is there the potential to co-operate rather than replace banks? 5.) How was the fundraising process for Sasha? What was his preferred round and how did they differ from stag to stage? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode: Sasha’s Fave Book: Banker To The Poor Sasha’s Fave Blog: Sam Altman As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Sasha on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

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What Fintech Gets Wrong about Nonprime Lending

LendIt Rewind

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2016 14:02

What Fintech Gets Wrong about Nonprime Lending at LendIt USA 2016

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QED Investors' Caribou Honig on investing in today's early stage fintech

Tearsheet Podcast: The Business of Finance

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2016 23:17

Our guest for this episode is Caribou Honig, a founding partner of QED Investors. QED has quietly become one of the top investors in the financial technology space -- their investment portfolio includes early big successes like SoFi and Prosper and also firms like LendUp, borro, Orchard, Avant Credit, blooom, and ApplePie Capital. As part of our conversation, Caribou shares his personal path to how he ended up as part of the founding team of QED after a post-MBA career at Capital One where he developed a passion for data-driven marketing,, including responsibility for a $50 mm marketing budget, management of a 200 person underwriting operation, and cracking the code on digital credit card origination. This experience, along with his co-founders which include the founder of Capital One, provides a differentiator for the investment firm when it comes to deal flow and portfolio building. Caribou shares his views on trends in the fintech space, how incumbent financial institutions view startups in the space and how they’re planning for their futures, and we drill down into his portfolio to discuss his holdings and the investment thesis behind them. Lastly, we’ll talk about where Caribou is looking to make investments in the future. You can find this episode and 4 years of our archives on our website, www.tradestreaming.com ***Thanks for joining us on the Tradestreaming Podcast. If you're listening to this episode on iTunes, please give it a ranking and rating so that others know of the value you're finding in it. Thank you ahead of time.****

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Startup School Ep. 28: LendUp's Jacob Rosenberg, Triplebyte's Harj Taggar

Startup School Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2015 53:53

Episode 28 of Startup School Radio: Host Aaron Harris interviews Jacob Rosenberg, the co-founder of LendUp, and Harjeet Taggar, the co-founder of Triplebyte

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The Secrets of FinTech: Jesse McWaters and Rob Galaski, World Economic Forum

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2015 62:08

If I had to choose just one episode of Barefoot Innovation to introduce listeners to the series, this is it. My guests are Jesse McWaters of the World Economic Forum and Rob Galasky of Monitor Deloitte, who co-led the WEF's landmark research project on financial technology (executive summary here). Switzerland-based WEF focuses on public/private collaboration and is best known for hosting the annual global forum in Davos. When I first read news accounts of this report, I reached out immediately to Jesse and (new father) Rob to ask them to join our dialogue. It took some time to get together, but we finally met at the WEF offices in New York. It was more than worth the wait. They launched their study of the global evolution of fintech at the Davos meeting in 2014. By the summer of 2015, they had crystallized the keys to understanding it. Their work is built on extensive interviews and on the technique I increasingly see as the key to progress -- convening disparate participants. They held six meetings with traditional financial institutions, disruptive innovators, and regulators in the same room, grappling with the coming change. In their early meetings, the financial industry executives were interested in fintech and wanted to monitor it, but were not worried - Jesse and Rob call them "tepid" about its urgency. By the end, this view had reversed. My guests use words like "bewilderment," "paranoia," "enemies" and "invading the fortress" as they describe the financial industry's rising concern. They also see these concerns starting to give way to hopefulness about the opportunities. The 193-page study has a global scope, emphasizes the developed world, and looks at eleven areas where innovation is driving transformation. What's working? Here are some of the insights Jesse and Rob share in our conversation: While today's banks feel besieged by disruptors on all fronts, the study shows that innovators are actually mainly targeting specific spots where two key factors intersect - that is, where high friction and customer frustration exist in products that are highly profitable. One participant said they are, "skimming the cream." Recognizing these points of vulnerability can guide traditional companies in what to defend and where to allocate capital. The emerging models have certain key attributes -- they are platform-based, modular, data-intensive, and "capital-lite." The disruptors focus on "shadow" or "fringe" areas, avoiding the heavily regulated core world of deposit-taking financial institutions. They are serious about complying with regulations, but strategically choose the rules to which they will subject their businesses. They are using established assets to scale up, a la Uber, rather than investing in a long, expensive process of creating their own products and infrastructures. They are actively partnering with established institutions for this leveraging of both existing assets and infrastructure and also "regulatory permissions." (Interestingly, this is drawing some major investment companies into retail markets for the first time.) They are focused on controlling the customer experience, using their superior platforms and data analytics. A key subset are "mission-oriented" entities creating inclusive and affordable services to consumers and small businesses. Jesse and Rob mentioned Active Hours and LendUp as U.S. examples, in addition to the huge global potential in emerging markets. Advice to industry: Jesse and Rob discuss how all this is impacting the traditional industry, including this advice: Don't count out banks as an "old world industry." Address the twin pressures of having aging legacy operating systems and processes, clashing with the high demands of today's consumers, especially millennials. People increasingly want personalized, bespoke, low-cost services and are ready to trust online providers. Review and clean out the accumulation of old policies and procedures that prevent banks from creating a great customer experience. Don't make the mistake of viewing fintech as a one-year budget issue. Create a new enterprise-wide, multi-year investment model that is not controlled by the current owners of the business line P&L's. Explore merging models for learning, partnering, and "coexistence." Evaluate the wisdom, or folly, of essentially "outsourcing R&D" to the venture capital world until it figures out the winners and losers. Consider that financial institutions may be major players in shaping what will win and what will lose, especially since they have capital. Use their suggestions on how do innovation inside a traditional company. Expect upward age migration of fintech adoption - don't expect to retain even older customers to the end of their lives in old-style products. Watch for big changes in insurance offering options for bespoke, advisory, concierge models and radically new value propositions (they mention Oscar in the U.S. and Vitality in the UK). Understand the likely sequence in which products will be forced to change, and why - they explain this in our discussion Impacts on consumers: Rob and Jesse predict big changes for consumers, including vastly more choice, hugely better customer experience, better pricing, and much better insight into and control over their own financial lives. They also see rising risks and regulatory needs, including that consumers will be harmed by unsuitable, high risk products. Advice for regulators: Jesse and Rob also have insights for and about regulators. Some of the regulators who joined their meetings were among the most thoughtful people they encountered, but they also warn of a very wide delta between the "leaders and laggers" in the regulatory world. They predict likely regulatory arbitrage if that gap does not close quickly. They also emphasize the need for "regulatory sandboxes" (on that point, watch for our upcoming Barefoot Innovation episode on sandbox innovation with Nitish Pandey of BMO Harris). What next? The project plans to leverage its convening power to tackle further priorities. One is exploring the revolutionary potential of block chain technology and distributed ledgers, including and beyond bitcoin. Another is seeking innovation in managing digital identity, including expanded roles for banks. Might our bank someday help us buy a bottle of wine by sending not only the money, but by verifying our age! Enjoy the episode! References: Here are some of the resources and companies we discussed in this episode: World Economic Forum Full WEF report on The Future of Financial Services ActiveHours (accessing pay that's already earned) LendUp (online lending) Transferwise (payments innovation) Oscar (health insurance in U.S.) Vitality (health and life insurance in U.K.) 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

new york future advice secrets united kingdom explore uber switzerland pl impacts address fintech world economic forum evaluate davos vitality r d wef transferwise monitor deloitte bmo harris lendup jo ann barefoot references here jesse mcwaters barefoot innovation

Podcast 51: Sasha Orloff of LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 23, 2015 31:14

Sasha Orloff, the CEO and co-founder of LendUp, is our next guest on the Lend Academy podcast. LendUp is different to every other company that has appeared on the podcast in that they are firmly entrenched in the subprime area. They are completely focused on serving those customers that traditional financial institutions will not or […] The post Podcast 51: Sasha Orloff of LendUp appeared first on Lend Academy.

ceo lendup lend academy sasha orloff

Podcast 51: Sasha Orloff of LendUp

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 23, 2015 31:14

ceo lendup lend academy sasha orloff

Podcast 51: Sasha Orloff of LendUp