Barefoot Innovation Podcast

My guest is the one-and-only Chris Skinner. Chris, the CEO of the Finanser , began writing a daily blog in 2007. Every single day since then, for twelve solid years, he has written a blog post. It's said that journalism is the first draft of history. Chris has written that daily first draft of the history of fintech, almost from the start. He's the bard, or minstrel, or troubadour of fintech, tell...

My new nonprofit, the Alliance for Innovative Regulation , or AIR (about which you'll soon hear much more), collaborated with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority to run the first-ever US regulatory "Tech Sprint." A tech sprint is a hackathon. It puts subject matter experts together with software developers, lets them form themselves into teams, and has them work side by side -- sometimes day and...

I'm calling today's show "agile regulation." I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but today, agile regulation is actually on its way. Financial regulators all over the world are realizing that they will have to update their tools, digitize their information and, above all, speed up, to keep pace with the exponential rate of technology change in the industry they regulate. In the United States, the...

We know that the money launderers are winning. We know that law enforcement is losing. By now, you've probably heard the UN's statistics on this, that we catch less than 1% of these crimes, which add up to an estimated $1.6 trillion a year. At the heart of this problem is asymmetrical technology. The bad guys have sophisticated, networked, rapidly improving technologies, and the good guys are stuc...

There are some challenges in fintech and regtech that transcend the others -- problems that have to be solved in order to "unstick" numerous other kinds of exciting innovation. Of these core enabling solutions, none is more important than digital identity. A few months ago I sat down with one of the people leading the work in this field. David Shrier is founder and CEO of Distilled Identity, an AI...

Our conversations on Barefoot Innovation always grapple with the regulatory challenges arising as technology transforms finance. Most of our guests have good ideas about this, but very few are in a position to make things happen. Today's guest is different. He is Craig Phillips , who is the Counselor to the US Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnunchin . The Counselor role spans everything from fi...

Bill Gates famously said, "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction." That gets quoted often these days, because it so well captures the times we live in. In that vein, it was a special pleasure to be invited recently to a roundtable aimed at envisioning the finan...

If you're ready for a breath of fresh air, today's show is for you. It's fun, it's fascinating, and it's filled to the brim with ideas that many of us haven't heard before. NBKC bank is a community bank that thinks and acts like a start-up company.  My guests are its CEO, Brian Unruh, and Zach Pettet, who is the bank's Fintech Strategist and who heads its Fountain City Fintech affiliate, which is...

Today's show is a bonus episode, and an extra-special one, because I sat down with my friend, the futurist and financial technology guru Brett King. This is our second show with Brett -- we also had one we recorded over a delightful breakfast in London a while back. We wanted to talk again because he's put out his new book, Bank 4.0 , for which I co-wrote the chapter on financial regulation. We ma...

I have a real treat for you today. Brian Brooks is the Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase and is also one of the smartest and most thoughtful people anywhere in the financial world. His past roles include being General Counsel at Fannie Mae and Vice Chairman of OneWest Bank, where he worked with both now-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and now-Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting. If his name s...

Today is International Women's Day, and we're honoring it with a very special bonus epi sode of Barefoot Innovation, on Women in Fintech...and with Women in Fintech. My four guests are Laura Spiekerman, the CRO of Alloy , Melissa van Kluyve, Associate at Clocktower Technology Ventures , Zoe Chaves, the Product Manager of Splitwise , and Lyn Farrell, the Regulatory Strategy Advisor of Hummingbird R...

I love how technology is bringing new kinds of people into finance. Today's guest, Lamont Young, is a great example. He started his career in the fashion industry. Today, he is at Citizens Bank, as the Head of Digital and Multi-Channel Marketing.

I had a fascinating conversation in Boston this winter with Steve Cohen, who is Cofounder, EVP, and COO of Basis Technology . Basis is a world-leading innovator in text analytics and the branch of artificial intelligence known as natural language processing. Over the last two decades. they have built a suite of tools that can analyze information produced by people in text form, in virtually any la...

Amidst all the collective angst about our political discourse, I found myself, one afternoon last fall, in a meeting with the leadership team of the government affairs group at the law firm, Arent Fox. One partner, Jon Bouker, is a Democrat. Another, Dan Renberg, is a Republican. And as we talked, they kept making me laugh. Watching them interact, watching them brainstorm together, watching them r...

Today's show is a bonus episode that we added to the schedule because it has a deadline connected with it. My guest is Paul Watkins, Assistant Director of the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Director of its new Office of Innovation. And the deadline is February 11, which is the last day that the CFPB will be accepting public comment letters on its proposals for organizing a Product S...

Today's guest is Walter Cruttenden, cofounder of Acorns and founder of the gaming company, Blast.

Today's show is a special treat because my guest is brilliant and funny and original, and he's also a friend. Dave Birch is a London-based author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services and Global Ambassador for Consult Hyperion. We often run into each other in different parts of the world, and in December we found time to sit down and catch up in London's old City.

Our first 2019 show brings us a global perspective on fintech. My guest is Anju Patwardhan, Managing Director of the CreditEase FinTech VC Fund . Anju has an incredible background. I first met her when she was starting at Stanford as a Fulbright Fellow and visiting scholar, at a time when I was a senior fellow at Harvard. We made an instant connection and since then, we've often run into each othe...

This is our second show with Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief Fintech Officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore .  We recorded it at the MAS annual fintech festival in Singapore, which is a remarkable event. I think it's probably the world's largest financial conference, with an incredible 45,000 people attending this year from all over the world. Maybe even more surprisingly, it's a "fintech festival...

One of the things I love about our Barefoot Innovation conversations -- and about fintech, for that matter -- is the passion you find in so many founders, these people who really believe they can do better for consumers. You hear it in the voices of many of the guests we've had on the show, the note of excitement, the sense that they can almost see a better future. They're often people from the te...

Today's show is coming to you from London. I'm here to speak at the LendIt Fintech Europe conference, and I'm delighted to say that my guest is the cofounder of the LendIt Fintech conference series, Peter Renton , who is also the founder of Lend Academy .

My guest today is one of the world's foremost thinkers on how to modernize financial regulation through technology.  He is PJ Di Giammarino, CEO of JWG and founder of the global RegTech Council .

My guest today is the World Bank's Harish Natarajan , a leader of one of the most visionary and ambitious efforts underway in the financial world -- to achieve complete financial inclusion . Throughout history, the idea of reaching full inclusion -- enabling everyone to access the mainstream financial system -- seemed like fantasy. Financial services have always been expensive to produce and deliv...

One of the biggest challenges in fighting money laundering is satisfying the KYC, or Know Your Customer, rules. These regulatory requirements make sense in concept -- they require financial companies to verify customers' identities before letting them connect to the system, in order to screen out high-risk people and entities and as a foundation for meeting the legal mandate to monitor financial a...

I am especially thrilled about today's guest -- California DBO Commissioner Jan Owen -- because this episode has been years in the making. I've known Jan for a long time, and as anyone who knows her will attest, she's a breath of fresh air in the regulatory world. She's candid, she's outspoken, she's thought provoking, and she's fearless in tackling thorny issues. We've been looking for a good cha...