Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Barefoot Innovation usually explores technology that touches financial consumers - new products and new ways of managing money. Today's episode pivots 180 degrees and looks internally, inside financial companies, at the equally transformative change underway in how financial products are made and delivered. My conversation is with Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset Holdings , and our topic is th...

Barefoot Innovation has been in hiatus in recent weeks because my father passed away. I was in San Francisco and got a call saying he was suddenly ill and might not live through the day. I rushed for a redeye and flew all night home to Boston, where my son Matt met me and we drove to Harford in the wee hours. My brother and sister had rushed to our Dad too, and he had held on. In fact he began to...

In addition to our podcast, please take a look at Raul's keynote at the EMERGE Forum. I am constantly amazed by the fascinating and unpredictable course of our conversations on Barefoot Innovation - and what a fun one I had with Raul Vazquez, CEO of Oportun. I always like to ask my guests to tell us how they, themselves, keep up with technology. With Raul, I asked this just as I thought we were wr...

Welcome to Barefoot Innovation and to a new dimension in the topics we explore. We've talked with many startups in lending, payments, and managing personal finance. Today, we're looking at the most exciting change underway in the investment space - "robo-investing." My guest is Jon Stein, the founder and CEO of Betterment. We met in their fast-growing offices in New York, a converted warehouse ste...

This episode updates one of the very first ones we did in our Barefoot Innovation series, last year. Episode Two featured the two co-founders of Simple, Josh Reich and Shamir Karkal. A year later, we all found ourselves back at the same conference where we'd recorded that program. Shamir has now taken on a new role, leading the open platform innovation of the very innovative bank that bought Simpl...

We have a very special show today. I realized – rather late – that we should do an episode on the CFSI financial solutions lab competition. It's belated, because the contest is open, now, for its second year of applications, and the deadline is April 7  – just a few days from now.  My guests are Ryan Falvey, who heads the lab, plus three of last year's 9 winners. They are Sheri Atwood of SupportPa...

In 1967, the Beatles sang: "I get by with a little help from my friends." That sentiment captures something at the heart of many people's financial lives today, and it embodies the idea behind the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) , the oldest and largest nonprofit credit counseling organization in the U.S. I have known Susan Keating, NFCC's President and CEO, for about 30 years. I'...

I'm calling this episode "Consulting the Source." My guest would be the first to say he is not the source of our consumer financial protection rules -- that would be Congress. Still, no one has had more to do with translating law into regulatory form than Leonard Chanin. When Leonard left the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for his current position at the law firm Morrison & Foerster LLP , it...

Welcome to our first episode focused on Bitcoin, digital currency, and the blockchain. My guest is one of the most thoughtful people anywhere on this topic and on payments overall: Circle CEO and Founder Jeremy Allaire. I met with Jeremy at his office in south Boston's "Innovation District," a few blocks from where I live myself. They have quintessential startup space in an old brick warehouse, an...

This is one of my favorite episodes we've ever done - my conversation with Digit founder and CEO, Ethan Bloch. Digit has set out to solve one of the core problems in consumers' financial lives - how to save. Their solution is to make savings effortless, using an intelligent algorithm that analyzes your spending and income patterns and automatically moves funds into savings. I had dinner with Ethan...

Dominic Venturo, CIO of US Bank Visiting Dominic Venturo is a little like walking onto a James Bond movie set during the Q gadget briefing scene. There is a wonderful "wow" factor in encountering the most fascinating new technologies in banking. The title "CIO" used to mean Chief Information Officer. It still does, of course, but today that "I" increasingly stands for another word too:  innovation...

I am absolutely delighted to share today's episode -- my conversation with Michael Barr. Most of our listeners know Michael as the former Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions who shepherded the Obama administration's efforts on the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Fewer people may know of his role in developing the proposal for, and negotiating the enactment of, the Consumer Fin...

Welcome to Barefoot innovation as we start into a fresh new year. Being appreciated! We are kicking off 2016 with a wonderful guest,  Nitish  Pandey of BMO, and also with exciting momentum for Barefoot Innovation. In December, we were named one of the top 9 fintech podcasts by FintechNews Switzerland . We are delighted to be counted among the best in the world, including the Breaking Banks show of...

My conversation with Chuck Harris, President of NetSpend, is our final episode for 2015. Thinking back on the brief eight months since we launched Barefoot Innovation, I'm struck by the enormous terrain we've covered. As we start into the new year, I'll be sharing my own thoughts on what I've been learning from these discussions.   For now, though, enjoy listening to Chuck Harris, who touched on m...

I'm delighted to be able to share with you this very special episode of Barefoot Innovation, because my guest is the 30th Comptroller of the Currency, Thomas J. Curry. Our conversation is a particular treat for me, because I myself am a proud alum of the OCC. Many years ago I was the first women Deputy Comptroller of the Currency and also the youngest to serve in that role. My worldview has always...

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 an...

This episode adds a new dimension to our discussions with innovators, by taking us inside a huge company - American Express. My guest is Courtney Kelso, who leads the Amex product and marketing team in Enterprise Growth. I talked with Courtney about two things. First, their strategic move into creating an inclusive set of services, through Bluebird and Serve. And second, what it takes to innovate...

Regular listeners of Barefoot Innovation will have noticed that we often mention the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and serve on its board. This year, CFSI celebrated its 11th anniversary. A decade ago there was nothing called Fintech. And yet Jennifer Tescher – who when she first entered the financial services industry couldn't balance her checkbook – joined with former OTS Direc...

This episode takes us fully into grappling with how innovation is impacting community banks and how to respond, through a conversation with one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking people in the field. The community bank is a unique feature of the U.S. financial system, and Brian Graham, CEO of Alliance Partners, is both one of its most eloquent advocates and an innovator with new ideas on...

Richard Davis grew up in Hollywood and entered the banking world on his 18th birthday as a teller. Today, at age 57, he leads America's 5th largest bank as Chairman and CEO of U.S. Bancorp – parent company of U.S. Bank. Headquartered in Minneapolis, U.S. Bancorp has over $410 billion in assets and businesses across the United States, Canada and Europe, including over 3,000 full-service banking off...

Luz Urrutia, the global head of retail at Oportun, has been carrying the same credit card in her wallet for 30 years. Having moved from her native Venezuela to the U.S. to study finance at Georgia State University, Luz was thrilled when she landed her first job in the banking industry – only to have her credit card application rejected by the same bank where she worked! Having little or no credit...

Stoyan Kenderov and I had a truly rich and candid conversation about the evolution of banking innovation and regulation, and though he appears ten episodes into Barefoot Innovation, it was Stoyan who first suggested I record our thought-provoking discussions and offer them as a series of podcasts. Thank you, Stoyan, for your encouragement! In this interview, we travel everywhere from communist Bul...

Episode 9 finds us at the 2015 EMERGE conference in Austin with the winners of the first Financial Solutions Lab competition . The contest is a $30 million, five-year initiative funded by JPMorgan Chase and run by the Center for Financial Services Innovation, or CFSI, the conference sponsor (note -- I serve on CFSI's board). It challenges entrepreneurs to create solutions for the cash flow difficu...

Professor Dog provides inspiration for Greendot Bank's effort to create financial products that serve and safeguard consumers' financial lives. Once known as Streiter the Heater, Steve Streit is now often called the Prepaid Card King . He is the founder and CEO of Pasadena-based Green Dot Corporation and its wholly owned subsidiary bank, Green Dot Bank, described as a "pro-consumer financial techn...

Episode 7: Vouch Founder & CEO Yee Lee Everywhere I go in the fintech world these days, people are mentioning Vouch .  It's new, it's still small, but it has a potentially huge idea, and a team that can make it happen. Vouch is a Bay-area startup that calls itself "the first social network for credit".  Its concept is simple: a borrower asks  his or her social network friends to vouch for repaymen...