Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Today's show is required listening for our regulator audience, and is also packed with practical advice for ANY organization, public or private, that has to transition from the analog to the digital age. The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, or MSRB, is a small US regulatory body that's doing outsized work in technology innovation. Our guests are Chief Data Officer Brian Anthony and CTO Adam...

My guest today is Randal Quarles, Chairman of the Cynosure Group and previously the Federal Reserve Board's Vice Chair for Supervision, a role in which he also chaired the US Financial Stability Board. He left the Fed at the end of last year, which makes this the perfect time to chat with him – I think it's always extra-interesting to talk with government officials shortly after they leave office....

We had hoped to post this episode during Pride Month and didn't quite make it, but, of course, the topic is timeless. My guest is Rob Curtis, CEO and Cofounder of Daylight, a fintech startup that focuses on serving LGBTQ customers. In our conversation, Rob shares the story of why and how Daylight came to be. He talks about the stigma and bias encountered by LGBTQ people in seeking financial servic...

Today's show is different. My guest, Sigal Mandelker, is the former U.S. Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and she talks to us with exceptional reflexion and, frankly, frustration, about why and how we need our government to work better. That's not a novel theme, of course – the world is noisy with critiques of government. Sigal's message is distinct, though,...

Given New York's unique role in global finance, the state always has top notch regulators and is normally at the forefront in addressing market change. It's not surprising, then, that the state is focused today on the technology transformation underway in finance, including crypto. My two guests today are both leaders at the New York state Department of Financial Services – DFS. Kaitlin Asrow is E...

My guests today are Nicole Elam, CEO of the National Bankers Association , and Robert James II, who chairs the NBA's board of directors and is also president of Carver Financial Corporation in Savannah, Georgia.   The NBA is the trade association for Minority Depository Institutions, or MDIs. It was founded nearly a century ago, in 1927, to build on the work being done by a group of Black-owned ba...

How do you solve the biggest, hardest problems in the world? Usually, we just don't. They persist. Today, though, we live in an age that's putting powerful new technologies into our hands, opening up ways to make seemingly impossible solutions suddenly, theoretically, possible – if we can put them to use. These are the challenges that get taken up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In finan...

My guest today is one of the world's leading innovators in this effort. Rashesh Bansal is the CEO of the Reserve Bank of India 's Innovation Hub. In April, AIR worked with the RBIH and other partners on the Swanari TechSprint, named for the Hindi word meaning "self-reliant woman."  I'm excited to have Rajesh on the show today to share a perspective that is  fascinating on so many dimensions. It's...

My guest today is Michael Hsu, the Acting Comptroller of the Currency, and we are talking all things– and only things – crypto. Our conversation covers a lot of other ground:  the lack of interoperability among today's stablecoins; whether and how stablecoin issuers should have bank charters; problems with blockchain technologies; the evolution of Central Bank Digital Currencies; the role of the U...

There are a lot of very rare things about my guest today, Anne Boden.  She is one of a very small group of people who have founded what the U.K. calls challenger banks – banks that were chartered after the financial crisis as part of regulators' newly minted mandate to foster competition in the financial sector. She is one of the very small group of bank CEOs, worldwide, who are women – which make...

This is a special emergency episode of Barefoot Innovation with a call to action for helping to protect Ukrainian refugees from being preyed upon by human traffickers. Yesterday, I got a message from Stuart Watkins, the CEO of Zenoo , in Prague. I got to know Stu two years ago when AIR ran our first TechSprint on the US Paycheck Protection Program , which provided rescue funding for small business...

My guest today is Ian Hollowbread, the Global Innovation Lead for Safe and Compliant at ING Bank . Ian and I have known each other since the early days of regtech, and even fintech, as I visited him in London to see the innovation lab he built at ING, figuring out how to do compliance better, using the best technology.

I started the Barefoot Innovation show in 2015. My guest today is the person who suggested I create a podcast. He is Matt Van Buskirk, Co-CEO of Hummingbird Regtech and also, among many things, a member of AIR's Advisory Council. We are starting a new special series of shows where we'll bring in guests and, instead of having them talk about what they're doing, we'll ask them to talk about what the...

This is a special episode of Barefoot Innovation because I have no guest – it's just me. As we go into 2022, I want to share the advice I have on my mind for everyone (including myself). And I'm also going to share a quick overview of what we're doing at AIR. We are a small organization doing very big work, in the US and worldwide. I'm going to describe the highlights, partly to encourage you to e...

Happy New Year everyone! As we enter 2022 and hope it turns out better than its two predecessors, one of my goals for the year is to invite you on a journey with me to explore the frontiers of change in finance, and of course therefore, financial regulation. We're going to look at Web 3.0, DeFi, crypto, blockchains, tokenization, DAOs, embedded finance, and the whole universe of mold-breaking inno...

Dubbed "CryptoDad" for his celebrated call on the US Congress to respect a new  generation's interest in cryptocurrency, the Honorable J. Christopher Giancarlo served as 13th Chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission.   Considered one of "the most influential individuals in financial regulation,"  Giancarlo also served as a member of the US Financial Stability Oversight Co...

My guests today are Lisa Rice, CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, and Kareem Saleh, founder and CEO of Fairplay. Lisa is a civil rights activist. Kareem is a tech guy who founded a startup that uses AI analytics to deliver what he calls Fairness as a Service. They come from two different worlds, but they have teamed up to work on the problem of unfair lending.

Corey and Todd argue that, as with so many other things, new technology is opening new possibilities. In this case, they think the tough old problem of financial consumer protection and financial health should be looked at afresh because….yes, you guessed it: because we now have digitized data that changes the whole game.

Today I have something different for you. Last spring, I recorded a conversation for the virtual South by Southwest conference with Cleve Mesidor. Cleve founded the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain, among other roles. SX had asked us to talk about the lack of diversity in the tech sector, and what to do about it. We had a great conversation, and we got permission to share it...

My guest today is one of the most high-ranking women in the world of banking. Stephanie Cohen is Global Co-Head of Consumer and Wealth Management, Goldman Sachs. In that role, she co-leads Goldman's digital bank, Marcus.

Melissa Koide is the CEO of FinRegLab, a nonprofit financial innovation and research center that examines how technology and data can help achieve public policy aspirations, address regulatory requirements, and lead to a more efficient and inclusive financial marketplace. FinRegLab provides an independent platform for financial stakeholders and policymakers to dialogue and gain an evidence-based u...

Jesse Morris is the current CEO and former CCO of the Energy Web Foundation. Throughout his career in the electricity sector, Jesse has had one focus: to partner with utilities, technology providers, developers, and regulatory stakeholders to help clean energy become an integral, widely-accessible part of the global electricity system.   Last spring, AIR launched an initiative called the Crypto Cl...

My guest today, Sheila M'Mbijjewe, is the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya and is helping lead the way to a new world of financial services and financial regulation. In our conversation, she describes what it was like for the regulators who faced that cutting edge situation, new terrain that no one had navigated before them. They saw the powerful potential for full financial inclusion....

In our talk, Sultan lays out the themes of the agency's innovation work and says that the most urgent one is financial inclusion. He says the evolution of the banking system has lagged the evolution of the population, and talks about how it needs to be "engineered." He also talks about using technology to build the system's resilience, its ability to "take a punch." He looks, too, at how to "prote...

Amy has had a long career in public service with over 25 years of experience in shaping financial services policy and regulatory issues on Capitol Hill in both the House and the Senate, and at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. From February 2013 to November 2017, she was Senior Deputy Comptroller and Chief Counsel of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, where she oversaw a 2...