Barefoot Innovation Podcast

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' R&D arm, in ways that make the relationship worthwhile for both sides.

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 variety of problems that API connections can solve, for both consumers and providers. Susan leads the design and development of Open Platform's groundbreaking suite of white-label, banking-as-a-service APIs in the US. She is an expert in payment, digital commerce and financial services, focused on understanding what fintech companies navigating this landscape want from an API platform.

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. They know whether it's good, or whether it 's old. If it's old, and it's clunky and frustrating, they don't persist. They walk away immediately to find something better -- since better options are all around. The main solution for this, Nathaniel thinks -- as do I -- will be banks and fintech firms working together.

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 Currency, or CBDC.

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 good idea into a great company? What values should drive the effort? Scott shares his thinking on all this, he does it mainly by telling us stories drawn from his own experience.

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 counterintuitive. He talks about the urgent challenges facing borrowers in different circumstances, creating the need for lenders to take a surgical approach to consumer and small business lending amidst the crisis, with accurate data being the key.

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.