Barefoot Innovation Podcast

This morning, Brian Brooks is starting his new job as acting Comptroller of the Currency. I'm fortunate to know Brian well, and over the years he and I have spent many hours talking about all the themes that we explore here on Barefoot Innovation. As he takes on his new role, I'm delighted that we were able to sit down together (virtually) and share some of that conversation with you.

Today's show is both a fascinating story and a call to action. We're posting it as a bonus episode because my guest, Andrew McCormack of the Bank for International Settlements, is sharing an invitation to innovators throughout the world to apply to compete in the G20's global TechSprint -- and entries are due in just two weeks!

Welcome to the second in our series of special conversations about how the pandemic may change the shape of financial regulation. Last time we talked with former Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry. Today, my guest is another former Comptroller, and now the CEO and Founder of Promontory Financial Group, Eugene Ludwig. Gene Ludwig has been a household name in the financial regulatory realm for decades, and it was wonderful to be able to tap into his thinking about how this unprecedented crisis may change that world. He shares his insights about likely impacts for various sectors, for community banks, and for the government's efforts thus far to provide rescue assistance. Our listeners will be especially interested in Gene's thinking about how the crisis will reshape the technology of bank regulation. He foresees accelerating changes in how to conduct examinations, movement toward more shared utilities and third-party providers, and use of new

Today's show is the first in our COVID recovert series. My guest is Thomas J. Curry, who served as the US Comptroller of the Currency from 2012 to 2017. For listeners outside the United States, the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, is the US regulator of nationally-chartered banks.

Trailblazing is hard work. It is not easy to carve out a path no one has followed before, knowing where you want to go but not precisely how to get there. That is exactly what today's guest has done. Colin Walsh is the CEO of Varo, and Varo is the first fintech startup to become chartered as a national bank.

Our guest today is Ellison Anne Williams, the CEO of Enveil. And she is an expert in the privacy technology known as homomorphic encryption.

Today's guest is David Reiling, CEO and Chairman of Sunrise Banks and author of the book, Fintech4Good. David likes to emphasize the business advantages of being a mission-driven, double bottom line company. He says, for example, that it gives him a huge edge in recruiting top talent. He also believes it also saves on compliance costs. It's a fallacy, he says, to assume that banks operate in a "scarcity" marketplace in which profits and values have to be traded off against each other. He also offers insights on key steps regulators should consider, including on the need to push their innovation agendas quickly out to their field examiners.

In this episode, I talk with Jerry Buckley and Sasha Leonhart of the Buckley firm, who explain how they did the project and what they learned. Jerry, Sasha and I also conducted a briefing on Capitol Hill last month, which was very well-attended and has engendered a great deal of constructive feedback and discussion. I want to thank the Buckley firm for undertaking all this work on a pro bono basis. I also want to mention that the report will be published in the coming weeks by the Business and Finance Law Review at George Washington University School of Law.

Jeff Dyer is a professor of strategy at BYU and the Wharton School. He and two co-authors, Nathan Furr and Curtis Lefrandt, have written the book, Innovation Capital, which explores how to lead innovation work, whether for companies or for projects, in situations where the innovator lacks the formal "power" to cause the needed steps. What do you do, for instance, if your boss doesn't see the need for innovation? How do you get people to want to join your project? In our conversation, Jeff says part of the answer is what he calls the human capital skill of forward thinking -- which he likens to mental time travel, envisioning what people in your industry will want next, and what technology is coming that will enable new things to happen. He talks about spotting opportunities -- being a "scout" and learning to see patterns. He talks about getting other people to want to help, so that you can amass the needed resources. And he talks about building an innovation reputation that will continue to attract people to your efforts over time.

Greg Becker has been a champion of the innovation economy since he joined Silicon Valley Bank in 1993 as a banker to fast-growing technology companies. Today, he is the CEO of the world's only bank dedicated to the innovation sector around the world. Greg is optimistic about tech, including the power of fintech to drive down costs and therefore open financial access to nearly everyone -- he cites the book, How the Poor Can Save Capitalism by John Hope Bryant. He says adding AI to anything is like putting it on steroids, making everything much more interesting and powerful. At the same time, he shares his thinking on what we should worry about, including the ethics and impacts of AI and medical technology.