Barefoot Innovation Podcast

What if regulations were machine-readable? What if, when regulatory changes come out, financial companies wouldn't have to download hundreds or thousands of pages of rules and read them all? What if they didn't have to rely on lawyers -- their own, and also the legions of legal experts and consultants who translate rules for the industry as a whole, to help them understand what to do? What if, ins...

It's always extra fun when we have a show where the guest talks about the days when Jack Dorsey hacked him and lived in his backyard. For today's conversation, I'm joined by my friend Greg Kidd, Co-founder and CEO of globaliD . I'm predicting right now that this one is going to be a Barefoot Innovation fan-favorite. Greg has an unusual background. He was involved from the early days of Ripple, Twi...

We have such a special guest on today's show. Gregory Meeks is the United States Congressman representing the Fifth District of New York. He is also a leading member of the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services . I was able to sit down with him, in his Capitol Hill office on one recent, hot summer day, to talk about how technology is changing consumer finance and, especially, ho...

Today's guest is Michael Butler, CEO of Radius Bank in Boston. As with our recent show with Bob Rivers of Eastern Bank (which is also based in Boston), Mike belongs to a small, but growing, group of CEOs who are truly transforming their community banks through technology. When conversation turns to the tech future for community institutions, these two banks' names always come up. We'll link in the...

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....

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 stateme...

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...

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...

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 --...

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 o...

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...

My guest today is pioneering a crucial innovation within the innovation landscape in finance -- by providing banking services to fintechs through a platform-based financial services model known as the sponsor bank, or partner bank. In today's episode, Gilles Gade tells the story of founding and building one of the leading sponsor banks, Cross River . Most fintech companies are licensed by their st...

Today's episode is like a crystal ball glimpse into the future of banking, narrated by my guest, Anne Boden, the thoughtful and charismatic Founder and CEO of Starling Bank in the UK. Anne has years of experience at large banks, including in IT roles. At one of them, she led an effort to develop an innovation transformation. It brought her to a critical conclusion:  that the only way to create a r...

I always love it when we find innovation in unexpected places, not just in the financial products and channels and regulatory issues we discuss, but also in people inventing new ways to get things done. Today's guests talk about taking a very old kind of entity -- the industry trade association -- and updating it for the 21st century financial world. As often happens with innovation, the thing tha...

Today's guest is a familiar name and face for everyone who follows U.S. politics. He is Tim Pawlenty, CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable . Tim was previously Governor of Minnesota and became well-known to most of us when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He's been a prominent voice on public policy for many years. He was also a speaker on a panel I moderated last fall a...

This is the most fun show we've done in ages, or maybe ever. My friend Jean-Stephane Gourevitch offered to gather some really interesting people in London to talk about the data economy. We finally sat down last fall, during London's Regtech Rising conference, and wow, did we talk. Jean-Stephane himself is French, based in London, and works with fintech startups throughout the world. His guests we...

What if regulation, as we know it, might disappear? Regulation will never stop, of course, but what if some of it will take on a new form, shaped by technology?  What if we're entering into a new era of what we could call "digitally-native" regulation, that's as agile and intuitive about regulation as digitally-native consumers are about consumer technology? Of all the shows we've ever done, I thi...

I could tell I was walking into an innovation lab even before I saw the space, because I could hear the ping pong game underway as I stepped off the elevator. It was great fun to be in San Francisco, on a sunny day in early fall, to talk with Braden More, Wells Fargo's head of partnerships and industry relations -- and to see their fascinating innovation facility, which includes what they call the...

I've been looking forward to today's show since my very first visit to the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, over two years ago. It was clear even then that they were doing something completely new for a regulatory agency. They were innovating. Not just creating new regulations, but actually rethinking how to create them. Reinventing the regulatory process itself. Specifically, they were respondin...

If you spend a lot of time in Washington, as I do, you see a lot of issues framed around statistics about people, especially medians, and averages. For instance, policies aimed at helping lower-income people typically stratify Americans into categories, in bands above and below median income, or median incomes in their census tracts. I've worked with programs like this for decades -- HUD housing a...

My guest today is Andres Wolberg Stok, Global Head of Policy at Citi Fin Tech . We got to know each other this year on a panel at FinXTech in New York, and something I immediately noticed is that he has a special way of talking about innovation -- a very fresh way with words. It might be because he's lived all over the world, or because he was once a journalist -- see his biography below for a sam...

This episode is a special treat because it's both fascinating and fun. My guest is Miles Reidy , partner at QED Investors in Alexandria, Virginia. Many people know that QED was founded by former leaders of Capital One, including Cap One co-founder Nigel Morris. They have a terrific track record of investing, focused mainly especially on fintech. Miles and I discussed two topics. One is the outlook...

I love having guests on the show who look at something that everyone takes for granted and said, why do we do it that way? That's what today's guest, Jason Gross , has done with credit cards. Jason is the CEO of Petal . He and his co-founders have designed a card that has a different business model and aims at a different market. Credit cards have always sparked mixed feelings among consumer advoc...

Gift from Gene Ludwig - Compliance isn't Mickey Mouse This is a very special show because we recorded it directly from the bustling floor of the American Bankers Association's 2017 Regulatory Compliance Conference. The RCC has long been the preeminent gathering of compliance professionals in the United States and, not surprisingly, it's growing -- with another attendance record this year at 1800 p...

From the main stage This is a very special show because we recorded it directly from the bustling floor of the American Bankers Association's 2017 Regulatory Compliance Conference. The RCC has long been the preeminent gathering of compliance professionals in the United States and, not surprisingly, it's growing -- with another attendance record this year at 1800 people. That makes it one of the la...