Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Dan Schulman is CEO of Paypal. With extensive corporate experience and a lifelong commitment to social justice, Dan Schulman believes the private sector has a responsibility to serve multiple stakeholders and to improve the state of the world. Dan has frequently been recognized by Fortune as one of the top 20 Businesspersons of the Year.

My guest today, John Ryan, is the man of the hour. He is CEO of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, and CSBS is at the vortex of most of the currents of change swirling around the US financial system. What's the future of banking charters? What's the future for fintechs that want to operate nationwide? What's the future for community banks? How will regulators keep up with the technology tha...

My guest is Douglas Arner, who is the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law at Hong Kong University, and the Director and Cofounder of the Asian Institute of International Financial Law. I've gotten to know Doug over the past year or so, and have been amazed by his kaleidoscopic grasp of the entire global landscape in fintech and regtech. So few people do work that is wide and deep at the same time -- e...

America has about 5,000 banks -- more than any other country. My guest today leads their national trade group. He is Rob Nichols, CEO of the American Bankers Association. He joined me for a conversation about how technology is changing banking, and especially community banks.

In our conversation, Paula and Lesley-Ann tell us about the problem they are solving:  if you live in a developing country and do not have a bank account, how do you go about your daily business? Your life is cash-based. It takes a significant transportation effort to get yourself somewhere to make a payment. That process carries significant costs. Holding cash, and traveling with it, carry risks...

My guests today are leaders in the drive to bring the world's poor into the formal financial system. They are Sharmista Appaya, Financial Sector Specialist at the World Bank Group, and Ivo Jenik, Financial Sector Specialist at CGAP. CGAP stands for the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor and sits within the World Bank as essentially a financial inclusion think tank.

Pindar Wong is the chairman of VeriFi (Hong Kong) Ltd, a discreet Internet financial infrastructure consultancy and founder of Hong Kong's Smart Contracts Initiative that pioneered  the 'Belt and Road Blockchain'.  He is a Bitcoin protocol enthusiast and volunteers to help organise ScalingBitcoin.org .  He co-founded the global blockchain research network ' Bsafe ' and organised Coala 's first Blo...

My guests today are Mike de Vere, CEO of Zest AI , and Teddy Flo, the company's general counsel. Zest is seeking to revolutionize credit underwriting by leveraging more information and analyzing it through machine learning. They started out as a lender, but have pivoted to selling tools to banks and other lenders, to equip them to make better lending decisions.

My guest is Maria Gotsch, CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City. The fund's goal is to make New York City a technology innovation hub like Silicon Valley but focused on finance, leveraging New York's role as global financial capital. Maria assembled a group of ten big banks to work with her on how to tap into the innovation wellsprings of tech startups and make them, in effect, the banks'...

My guest today has the answers. She is Susan French, head of Products at BBVA's Open Platform. BBVA, the global bank headquartered in Spain, has long been ahead of the curve in technology innovation in general, and in open banking specifically. "Open banking" is about the movement to make bank accounts easily connectable to other services through API's. It takes a lot of forms, driven by the wide...

When talking about the future of community banks, the elephant in the room is their dependence on legacy core IT providers. Nathaniel has opinions on that technology, the contracts, and its impacts on customers. He shares striking numbers about customer drop off rates in account opening. Consumers today, in their first touch interacting with a new bank (or anything else) instantly size up tech. Th...

My guests are Christopher Giancarlo, former Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Daniel Gorfine, who previously led the CFTC's innovation program, LabCFTC. When they left the commission, they teamed up to found the Digital Dollar Project, advocating for why and how the United States needs to join the 80-plus other countries that are planning to issue Central Bank Digital Curre...

This is our final show of 2020 and I predict it will be an all-time favorite. It is already a favorite of mine. That's because of who my guest is -- Scott Cook, the legendary founder of Intuit -- and also because of what he says. In this conversation, Scott takes us with him in thinking about the roots of innovation, the wellsprings of creativity. Where does innovation come from? How do you turn a...

Today's guest is Alex Lintner, Group President of Experian Consumer Information Services, which provides credit reporting services to lenders throughout the world. In our conversation, Alex shares insights on how the world plunged this year to digital, real time commerce, for people of all ages and backgrounds. He explains the trends we're seeing in consumer debt and savings -- some of which are c...

As the 2020 pandemic continues to threaten America's small businesses, it makes sense to talk with people who are saving them, by serving them through technology. My guests today do just that. They are Ross Buhrdorf, CEO & Founder of ZenBusiness, and his colleague Lamine Zarrad. Lamine, who is SVP of Financial Services, was a guest on Barefoot Innovation last year, when he was CEO of Joust. Joust...

Today's guest has her finger on the pulse of global change in the world of payments, including how the COVID pandemic is changing the world. She is Ann Cairns, Executive Vice Chair of Mastercard. I loved her thinking about the need to develop global standards for technology and data (she said the lack of them is "madness" and I agree!). And she lays out the bedrock principles that need to guide th...

Renaud was one of our earliest guests on Barefoot Innovation when he was CEO of Lending Club , and I'm so happy to have him back today in his new role as CEO and co-founder of Upgrade. I wanted to talk with him about Upgrade, and also to get his thoughts about how the fintech sector has evolved since those days. Upgrade is a neobank with a novel strategy that uses the appeal of credit products to...

In our conversation, Jeremy explains what's behind the meteoric rise of digital dollar stable coins. He describes their expansion in 2019 as the crypto ecosystem gravitated to quality, compliant and trusted digital dollar stablecoins, and as hundreds of companies began to adopt USDC and add it to their products. And he talks about the dramatic growth surge in 2020, driven in part by the pandemic,...

Today's show is a special one because it includes breaking news. My guest is Linda Lacewell, the New York State Superintendent of the Department of Financial Services, and she will not only share her program for innovating in the midst of a pandemic, but will also announce an exciting initiative: that DFS is working with us at AIR to host New York's first-ever regulatory tech sprint, in partnershi...

Today's guest is Sam Graziano, the CEO of Fundation. In this episode, Sam tells us about Fundation's journey, starting with his own very usual mix of skills and then the company's launch as a direct line-of-credit lender to small businesses. He describes their epiphany, a few years back, in realizing that the technology platform they built was exactly what banks need in order to automate their own...

I'm delighted to say that my guests today are Allie Burns, the CEO of Village Capital, and Sarah Willis, Head of Financial Health Work at JPMChase and former Director at the MetLife Foundation. Our conversation focuses on how to bring more capital into fintech ventures that really advance consumer financial health. Allie lays out today's venture capital landscape, which is heavily skewed to a few...

Rebeca Romero Rainey is president and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA), the leading advocacy organization representing community banks. A third-generation community banker born and raised in Taos, New Mexico, she is the former Chairman and CEO of Centinel Bank of Taos.

Shamir and Angela explain the fascinating meanings of the word, Sila. They describe their business model, their customer base, and their back-end infrastructure based on Ethereum. They explain their revenue model -- they say their pricing is so good, especially for startups, that they put it right on their homepage. And they share their vision of the money world of the future. They point out that...

One benefit of my work is that I get to spend time with the innovators who are reshaping regulatory agencies all over the world. I have my favorites, and one of those is today's guest. He is Haime Workie, who leads the innovation team at FINRA. Haimera Workie is the Head of Financial Innovation and Senior Director at FINRA. He is responsible for leading FINRA's Office of Financial Innovation, whic...

The triple crises of 2020 -- pandemic, economic contraction, and racial and social upheaval -- are opening up new kinds of conversations. Today's episode is one of these -- my discussion with Rodney Hood, the Chairman of the National Credit Union Administration.  Chairman Hood is the first African-American, ever, to head a US federal financial regulatory agency -- and one of only eight to hold pre...