Barefoot Innovation Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Flourish Ventures investor Efayomi Carr and GDF executive Elise Soucie Watts join Jo Ann to unpack Africa's fintech boom, the rise of stablecoins, trust gaps, and what it takes to build inclusive, responsible regulation.

Read the full show notes and related resources here online.

Financial crime is a G7‑sized economy. Carole House, Ari Redbord and Matt Van Buskirk join Jo Ann to expose how AI has turbocharged scams and why the AML system is failing — and to chart a new path powered by trust tech and real‑time collaboration.

Read the full show notes at: https://regulationinnovation.org/podcast/we-can-beat-financial-crime-pt-1-carole-house-ari-redbord-and-matt-van-buskirk/

Oscilar CEO Neha Narkhede discusses AI for risk management, focusing on fraud & financial crime detection. Learn how AI breaks data silos & improves security.

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 was acquired by ZenBusiness earlier this year.

In our conversation, Ross and Lamine explain that their target market is service businesses with zero to ten employees. They explain that, in order to thrive, these little enterprises need to digitize every aspect of their activity, from marketing to legal to finance. Reflecting a pattern that I'm seeing everywhere, ZenBusiness is seeing the demand for this digitization soaring in the pandemic, which is driving activity of all kinds into digital and online channels. I've been saying that, in finance and financial regulation, we're seeing a decade of technology adoption and innovation squeezed into a few short months.

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 the journey to developing smart standards, ones that will do more good than harm.

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 attract customers, and then offers more services. It aims to move borrowers off of revolving credit and into loans that people can successfully pay off, incentivizing good consumer financial behavior and discipline. In our conversation, Renaud notes that despite all the innovation in the lending world, consumers still have massive credit balances outstanding in high-interest debt products -- a consumer burden that he thinks shouldn't exist anymore, now that better products are available.

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, as the infrastructure matures, use cases increase, and major institutional investors increasingly treat stable coins as a legitimate asset class.

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 partnership with the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS). The sprint will take on one of the most daunting challenges facing regulators today, namely, how to get more information, faster, about the companies they oversee, without escalating the burdens of regulatory reporting on the industry, in the midst of a crisis.

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 small business lending. Fundation had developed automated risk models that enable banks to say yes to business customers that, under traditional standards, would be rejected. Today, the company has a 50/50 split between direct lending and bank partnerships.

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 markets and away from startups that work on building financial health. Sarah explains MetLife's efforts on how to influence the fintech industry to diversify both founders and the customers served.