Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Today's show is a bonus episode, and an extra-special one, because I sat down with my friend, the futurist and financial technology guru Brett King.This is our second show with Brett -- we also had one we recorded over a delightful breakfast in London a while back. We wanted to talk again because he's put out his new book, Bank 4.0, for which I co-wrote the chapter on financial regulation. We made that chapter 2 of the book, right after the opening, because regulation has become absolutely central to the question of whether technology is going to make banking better, or worse, than what we have today.

I have a real treat for you today. Brian Brooks is the Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase and is also one of the smartest and most thoughtful people anywhere in the financial world. His past roles include being General Counsel at Fannie Mae and Vice Chairman of OneWest Bank, where he worked with both now-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and now-Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting. If his name seems familiar, it may be because was in headlines a while back as a short-list candidate to be Deputy Treasury Secretary, or Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or White House Counsel.

Today is International Women's Day, and we're honoring it with a very special bonus episode of Barefoot Innovation, on Women in Fintech...and with Women in Fintech. My four guests are Laura Spiekerman, the CRO of Alloy, Melissa van Kluyve, Associate at Clocktower Technology Ventures, Zoe Chaves, the Product Manager of Splitwise, and Lyn Farrell, the Regulatory Strategy Advisor of Hummingbird Regtech.

I love how technology is bringing new kinds of people into finance. Today's guest, Lamont Young, is a great example. He started his career in the fashion industry. Today, he is at Citizens Bank, as the Head of Digital and Multi-Channel Marketing.

I had a fascinating conversation in Boston this winter with Steve Cohen, who is Cofounder, EVP, and COO of Basis Technology. Basis is a world-leading innovator in text analytics and the branch of artificial intelligence known as natural language processing. Over the last two decades. they have built a suite of tools that can analyze information produced by people in text form, in virtually any language, and distill patterns that reveal meaning and connections.

Amidst all the collective angst about our political discourse, I found myself, one afternoon last fall, in a meeting with the leadership team of the government affairs group at the law firm, Arent Fox. One partner, Jon Bouker, is a Democrat. Another, Dan Renberg, is a Republican. And as we talked, they kept making me laugh. Watching them interact, watching them brainstorm together, watching them riff on each other's points, I realized we could all use a little more of whatever makes them effective. So I asked them to come on the show, along with fintech expert Kate Flocken from the firm's emerging technologies group, to share with you, our listeners, the secrets of how to get things done in a polarized and partisan environment.

Today's show is a bonus episode that we added to the schedule because it has a deadline connected with it. My guest is Paul Watkins, Assistant Director of the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Director of its new Office of Innovation. And the deadline is February 11, which is the last day that the CFPB will be accepting public comment letters on its proposals for organizing a Product Sandbox and for issuing No-Action Letters on innovative products and practices. The Bureau is very interested in hearing from as many people as possible, and I really encourage all our listeners to submit input.

Today's guest is Walter Cruttenden, cofounder of Acorns and founder of the gaming company, Blast.

Today's show is a special treat because my guest is brilliant and funny and original, and he's also a friend. Dave Birch is a London-based author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services and Global Ambassador for Consult Hyperion. We often run into each other in different parts of the world, and in December we found time to sit down and catch up in London's old City.

Our first 2019 show brings us a global perspective on fintech. My guest is Anju Patwardhan, Managing Director of the CreditEase FinTech VC Fund. Anju has an incredible background. I first met her when she was starting at Stanford as a Fulbright Fellow and visiting scholar, at a time when I was a senior fellow at Harvard. We made an instant connection and since then, we've often run into each other in interesting places around the world. Late last summer, we finally found time to sit down and talk at her office in San Francisco.