Barefoot Innovation Podcast

My guest today is Sanjay Jain , Chief Innovation Officer at the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship ( CIIE ). Among many high-impact achievements, Sanjay helped lead creation of one of the most ambitious government infrastructure initiatives ever undertaken -- the so-called India Stack that is connecting everyone in India to the financial system and mainstream commerce, by provid...

I met today's guest, Sopnendu Mohanty , about 18 months ago. I moderated a panel on blockchain for last year's MIT Fintech Conference , and Sop, who is the Chief Fintech Officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore , was a panelist -- explaining how MAS was building a regional innovation hub that included blockchain strategies. Since then I've seen him three more times -- once at Harvard, which...

My favorite episodes of Barefoot Innovation are the ones that take a philosophical turn. That happened with John Ryan, the thoughtful president of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors , which is the organization that coordinates America's state-level financial regulators. As you would expect, John and I began by discussing the events that have CSBS in the news these days. One is the launch of...

Brett King and I see each other often, partly because we often speak at the same conferences and partly because we're both on the board of the Center for Financial Services Innovation . For some reason, though, we went for over a year trying unsuccessfully to find time to record a podcast. So we we ended up getting together in London. We both participated in the wonderful Innovate Finance Global S...

Today's program is a very special one -- a conversation about regulatory innovation, with the very innovative acting Chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission , Christopher Giancarlo. As regular listeners know, I've spent many years in and around Washington where there is a deeply entrenched belief that regulations, and regulators, simply can't change very much. Regulators are general...

"Sandboxes." "Greenhouses." "Pilot tests." "Labs." These are not words we normally associate with financial regulation. Yet suddenly, all over the world, regulatory agencies are giving these novel names to a new,  unconventional kind of initiative. The break from tradition is being driven by a realization:  they are going to need to find new ways to do their jobs well, in the face of fast-moving t...

Today's guest is Colleen Briggs, Executive Director for Community Innovation and Corporate Responsibility at JPMorgan Chase. Colleen leads a visionary effort that is part of JPM's commitment to building "more inclusive growth," globally, by finding innovative models that build financial access and economic expansion. Our timing is great because just last week, the Center for Financial Services Inn...

Here's a question: Would you like to file your taxes with just a keystroke, after your electronic devices automatically organized all your information and prepared the return? Here's another -- do you think you'll still be driving, five years from now? Today's episode is a far-ranging conversation with Al Ko , Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the Consumer Ecosystem at Intuit. Among o...

Bitcoin began in 2009 -- only eight years ago -- and set forces in motion that are only starting to show their potential power. One was a byproduct -- the creation of the blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, DLT, is now on its way to disrupting activities far beyond payments, from  value chains to contracts. The intentional innovation was establishing a new form of currency -- virtual or...

In the early days of Barefoot Innovation, one of my guests said something very provocative, that I knew would not sit well with some of our listeners. I considered whether to edit it out. Someone on my team pointed out that my website features a quote from Carl Sagan about the importance of truth-telling, and we decided that it's the essence of this show to have a wide range of guests and let them...

This episode is incredibly special, in two ways. First, Lyn Farrell is not only my former colleague, but one of my very best friends. We had such fun recording this at my apartment in Boston one weekend late last year. In many ways, it's just a slice of a long conversation we've been having more or less continuously for years, including over countless meals on the road together, in the consulting...

I'm excited to share today's conversation with Alfred Hannig , Executive Director of AFI. When you hear of an organization with a name like The Alliance for Financial Inclusion , you might picture a nonprofit advocating for credit opportunity or community reinvestment. AFI, though, is unique. Its members are governments -- central banks and financial regulators -- representing over 90 countries in...

Today's show features one of the most  interesting startups in London. I was there in in late 2015 and looked up someone I'd been wanting to meet -- Jean- Stephane Gourevitch, (see more on Jean-Stephane below -- he is behind many of the most interesting fintech developments in Europe and will be on the show one day soon).  We met for coffee on the south bank of the Thames, near the Shard hotel, an...

Today we're expanding beyond our usual Barefoot Innovation focus on consumer financial innovation, to explore the parallel issues arising for small businesses. We've touched on this before, but are so fortunate, today, to have a guest who deeply understands the whole range of these issues. She is Karen Mills , former head of the Small Business Administration and now senior fellow at the Harvard Bu...

Today's episode is about new ideas about a very old problem in consumer finance -- high-cost lending to high-risk borrowers. My guest is LendUp CEO Sasha Orloff, who is one of a new generation of fintech founders building alternatives to traditional payday lending. In public policy, there has been a long-standing assumption, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, that widespread access to cred...

Greetings for the holiday season, and apologies for my recent backlog in posting podcasts. The main reason for the latter is that I have been traveling almost constantly. In November and December I was in Singapore, Geneva, San Francisco, London (twice) and Washington multiple times, and of course, back in Boston in between. And not long before that, I was in Fiji, where I recorded this podcast, w...

Welcome to today's show. One night last summer I attended a small dinner in New York hosted by the editors of a global financial publication, on financial innovation. We had some of fintech's brightest stars seated around the table, but I remember offering the view that the person there who was most likely to actually revolutionize the financial system was Chris Larsen, the CEO of Ripple . Most fi...

I've been looking for a chance to do a podcast with today's guest for months. Colin Walsh is the founder and CEO of Varo , an online tool that aims to make it easy and affordable for consumers to manage their financial lives. Colin and I first met at last year's fintech conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and I've enjoyed, ever since, watching the rapid growth of his st...

Today's program is really special, because my guest is Brigitte Madrian . Brigitte is the Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management at the Harvard Kennedy School , and also co-director of the Household Finance working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research . She is a leading expert in behavioral economics and consumer decision-making regarding both health and finance, an...

Welcome to our first conversation with an innovator in small business lending – my guest is Sam Hodges, Co-founder and U.S. Managing Director of Funding Circle . Funding Circle was founded in 2012 and is the world's leading marketplace lender that's exclusively focused on small businesses. It has made more than $2.5 billion in loans to 20,000 businesses in the U.S., Germany, Spain, the Netherlands...

Today's show explores financial innovation through the eyes of one of America's most respected consumer advocates. My guest is Lauren Saunders, Associate Director of the National Consumer Law Center . The NCLC has been active in consumer financial protection for over 40 years. Lauren manages its Washington, DC office and directs its federal legislative and regulatory work on issues like prepaid ca...

Today we have our first-ever episode on Insure-tech. Happily, it also turned out to be one of the most fun, funny and thought-provoking shows we've ever done. I'm pretty sure it's the first one where we've talked about the internet of things, and CRISPR gene research, transportation as a service, and drones. My fascinating guest is Caribou Honig, founding partner of QED Investors . QED is a ventur...

My guests today are two of the most thoughtful people in the United States on the topic of regulatory compliance. They are the chief compliance officers of Citigroup  and Wells Fargo  – Kathryn Reimann and Yvette Hollingsworth Clark. Our listeners include a lot of people who are not fascinated by the topic of regulatory compliance, to put it mildly. The fact is, though, that compliance has shifted...

Welcome to today's episode with my very special guest. He is the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray . We got together in Washington to mark the fifth anniversary of the CFPB's opening its doors, on July 21, 2011.  I had the pleasure of serving on the Bureau's Consumer Advisory Board, or CAB, for its first three years. It's been fascinating to watch the launch of...

I enjoy all my guests on Barefoot Innovation, but if someone forced me to choose my favorite episodes, this one would be on the list. It's partly because my guests, the co-founders of Bee, were so fun to talk with, and so thoughtful. And it's also because they are addressing one of the objections people raise to fintech – the notion that it's only for millennials. Bee  was founded in June of 2015...