Barefoot Innovation Podcast

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 digital currency -- that functions as alternative payments system that operates on the internet rather than through banks and the ACH. The financial system is still in the early stage of grappling with the potential benefits and risks arising from this mold-breaking model (I wrote about some of those issues three years ago in my blogpost on The Benefits of Bitcoin.) My guest for today's show brings yet another angle -- a unique one -- to rethinking money. He is Jonathan Dharmapalan, Founder and CEO at eCurrency Mint, Ltd. Jonathan spent 25 years in telecommunications field, including becoming Head of Enst & Young's Global Telecommunications Center in 2011. His insight, at eCurrency, is that the best way to capture the power of digital currency is to have governments, themselves, issue it. Jonathan and I met during the annual meeting of AFI, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, in Fiji, and he explained his vision for building a new system based on government-issued e-currency. He argues that this concept can capture the best of both worlds, combining the stability and confidence that comes with well-managed traditional currency, and adding the advantages of virtual money such as speed, ease of use, and infinite divisibility. I loved this conversation because it exemplifies how innovative thinking in finance, once it gets "released into the wild," can spark more and more creative thinking, far beyond what the originator innovators had in mind. Often, it leads to solving problems we don't even realize we have, because, well, we just assume the world is a certain way and we can't picture anything else. It reminds me of the quote attributed to Henry Ford -- apparently erroneously -- that if he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said, faster horses. More about eCurrency Jonathan's Background: Jonathan Dharmapalan is Founder and Chief Executive Officer at eCurrency Mint Limited. He became Head of the Global Telecommunications Center at Ernst & Young LLP in May 2011, responsible for leading a team of over 2,000 telecoms specialists across the world. He has had a 25 year career in telecommunications and the related sectors of technology, media and entertainment, and led Ernst & Young's Telecommunications Center in Beijing. He began his career in telecommunications at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Mr. Dharmapalan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University and a Masters of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from The California Institute of Technology. More for our listeners Many exciting things are happening. First, I'm happy to say that I recently became chair of the board of directors at CFSI -- the Center for Responsible Innovation. If you haven't signed up yet to come to our Emerge conference in June, be sure to do so! Also come, that same week, to the ABA's Regulatory Compliance Conference. The ABA is innovating in its format this year, including by having me record some very special podcasts straight from the conference floor. I'll also be holding a fireside chat on the main stage with Gene Ludwig of Promontory and Alastair Renee of IBM Watson, on how regtech will change compliance, including through their formation of IBM Financial to bring Watson's artificial intelligence to regulatory challenges. And it's not too early to put Money 2020 U.S. on your agenda for October. I'm going to MC the conference regulatory track, which has some fabulous speakers. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at jsbarefoot.com. Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support our Podcast - Send "A Buck a Show" See you soon! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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 speak as they want, without editing, and with the understanding that it's their opinions rather than mine. It's a good thing we have that policy, because otherwise, I would have quite the project figuring out what to do with my very lively conversation with Bill Harris, the former CEO of Paypal and Intuit, and Founder and Chairman of Personal Capital. Bill and I got together, in a little office I was using at Harvard, and had a very far-ranging conversation. By the time we finished, I told him I'll probably have to offer equal time to all the people he -- shall we say, critiqued -- during our talk. Seriously -- if anyone Bill mentions would like to come on the show to offer opposing views, please reach out. A lot of Bill's outspoken views these days focus on the controversy over customers' right to use and share their financial data. Much of today's most promising innovation works by having people give permission to a fintech to access their bank account, so that the fintech can help them save, invest, or manage their money. This is the model behind everything from Mint (podcast with them is coming soon), to Digit (see our past episode with Ethan Bloch). For the past year or so, banks have been raising concerns that these arrangements can be risky to customers because the fintech may have inadequate security, and/or because there may weak controls on how the fintech uses the data. The innovators are countering that many of them have better security than banks do -- basically because they have new technology rather than the aging, siloed IT at most banks. They also argue that the potential risks can be managed, including through best practice by data aggregators like Yodlee. Bill is part of a newly-formed fintech group on Consumer Financial Data Rights (which I have advised) and which is trying to build consensus on how to provide consumer protection while also assuring that consumers can access and use their data freely. The core argument is this information belongs to the consumer, rather than to the company that's holding it. There are huge stakes in this, because data is the life's blood of financial innovation. Regulators and the financial community must assure that it's protected and not abused, but also have to enable it to flow freely, with the consumer's permission. If it doesn't, most of the best innovation underway with wither and die. In our discussion, Bill talks about this challenge, including the fact that the Dodd-Frank law authorized the CFPB to set out guidance on it. (Here is the CFPB's request for information on the data rights issue.) Even more basically, he talks about the underlying problem, which is how to actually secure consumers' data and establish reliable identity verification. Bill has helped to found three major security companies and shares his deep thinking about a security world beyond passwords (which he calls "stupid"). He also warns against universal data security standards that are rigid or one-size-fits-all. And he offers a vision for how we will really solve identity authentication and security problems -- through the phone. We talked about his current company, Personal Capital, which provides personal financial management software to about 1.3 million users, for free. For customers that want more help, the company then provides fee-based investment advisory services tailored for people with complex financial situations. It arose from Bill and colleagues deciding that people's biggest financial challenge is the "chaos" that leaves people leading "unexamined financial lives." Personal Capital has designed a solution that is simultaneously high-tech and high-touch. Bill has wide-ranging views (including some praise) about new models emerging in investment management and robo-advising. (Here is the earlier podcast I mention in our talk, with Jon Stein of Betterment.) Our discussion also included a look into how Bill starts businesses and scales them up, and about the challenges of legacy bank IT systems (stuck together with "bubble gum and sealing wax"). I think you'll especially enjoy his stories about past adventures, including the early days at Intuit, and the hair-raising startup of PayPal with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, in a "small second floor thing over a bakery on University Street outside of Stanford." And listen closely as he recounts an intriguing dinner conversation with Steve Jobs, about financial services. More for our listeners: Watch for our upcoming shows, including Colleen Briggs of JPMorgan Chase; Wai Lum Kwok, who leads the regulatory sandbox in Abu Dhabi; Jonathan Dharmapalan, founder of eCurrency; Al Ko, who leads Mint; and the one and only Brett King, among others. Please review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes. Also sign up to get emails when the new podcasts come out and to get my newsletter and blog posts at jsbarefoot.com. And go there to send in your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Support our Podcast - Send "a buck a show" I hope you'll also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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 life we used to share Second, I love it when our podcast discussions are actual brainstorming sessions. This one hit the jackpot on that front. In our back and forth, Lyn came up with an insight that neither of us had when we started, and both of us have found it reshaping our thinking ever since. It comes late in the episode -- you'll know it when you hear it. I hope you find it as powerful as we did. Lyn Farrell is former Managing Director, and now Advisory Board Member, at Treliant Risk Advisors. She is arguably the foremost expert in the United States on regulatory compliance matters regarding consumer financial protection. As we note in our discussion, she literally "wrote the book" on compliance as the author, for more than twenty years, of the Reference Guide to Regulatory Compliance, published by the American Bankers Association as the foundation material that candidates must master in order to become Certified Regulatory Compliance Managers. Lyn is an attorney, in-demand public speaker, prolific writer, and consultant who has worked with every imaginable regulatory challenge, from the world's largest banks to small community institutions and fintech startups, and from positive, proactive clients to cleaning up grizzly enforcement problems. She has, simply, seen everything. Fortunately for us, she has opinions about it all and shares them with bracing candor in our talk. She describes what's failing in our current regulatory regime and explains what everybody is getting right and getting wrong, from Congress and regulators to bank CEO's to compliance and risk professionals to IT departments, to her fellow lawyers, to fintech innovators. She offers a cogent indictment, from the inside, of the weaknesses of what we've built -- the disclosures no one reads, the high costs of compliance, and the tragic mismatch between where we expend resources versus what consumers actually need. She's also expert in bank IT operations. It's an open secret that most banks have antiquated IT, often accumulated through decades of mergers and acquisitions in which older systems were never integrated but rather, as Lyn puts it, stuck together with "bailing wire." (We explored solving some of this through blockchain technology in my earlier Podcast with Blythe Masters of Digital Asset Holdings.) These old systems are a hotbed of compliance errors, for reasons she describes. It's another area where startups have a counterintuitive advantage over banks, thanks to having no creaky legacy IT. In our discussion, Lyn explores the regulatory present and past (it's been a long time since I've heard anyone mention Regulation Q!), but she's most thought-provoking about the future. She works extensively with innovators and has a vision for how we should be using new data and technology to do better. I always urge people interested in innovation to break out of their work silos and reach across disparate realms. Lyn does this better than anyone I know. If it weren't for her, I would never have attended a LEAN seminar, or done free-writing exercises to inspire creative thinking, or read Deep Work by Cal Newport, or watched the Amy Cuddy Ted Talk on "presence." Since we made our recording, Lyn has stepped back from her full time role at Treliant to serve on its advisory board, spend more time in the beautiful house she and her husband Brian are building in Colorado Springs, and lead the Treliant Institute for Strategic Compliance Leadership, her brainchild. Lyn asked me to speak at it, which inspired me to create a dinner talk I call "Heroic Compliance." It's about the need for compliance officers -- even though they often seem more like Clark Kent than Superman -- to save their banks, customers, and industry by leading them into the high-tech innovation age. No one embodies that leadership more than Lyn, and I'm titling this episode with the same name -- Heroic Compliance. The same day we recorded this episode, Lyn told me she's launching her own podcast show, aimed at compliance professionals. She said my dinner speech prompted her to give it the name, "Compliance Heroes." You'll find it on ITunes and the Android Market. Here are two more titles in Lyn's recommended reading: Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry Presence by Amy Cuddy And here is more on her background…. Kathlyn L. Farrell, CRCM, CAMS, AMLP Senior Advisory Board Member Lyn Farrell is an experienced Regulatory Compliance executive, with over 35 years of experience in banking law and compliance. She is a Senior Advisory Board Member at Treliant Risk Advisors, LLC. Lyn has led many diverse and complex compliance projects for large financial institutions, including: Developing a regulatory compliance strategic plan for a financial institution that primarily operates in the Fintech space; Assisting the CCO of a top 10 U.S. bank to make the regulatory compliance program more proactive, strategic and integrated with the businesses and other risk management disciplines within the organization; Designing and building a comprehensive Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices (UDAAP) audit program for the internal audit division of a top 10 U.S. financial institution, including developing the annual audit plan, scoping the individual audits, and writing the audit scripts; Assisting a top 20 bank implement all aspects of the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure Rule (TRID), including revamping business processes, enhancing risk controls, writing policies and procedures and creating job aids to assist first line staff to implement this complex regulation; Developing the "UDAAP University" training program for the compliance departments at three of the top 20 financial institutions and for the internal audit departments at 3 of the top 20 US banks; Overhauled the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) program for a top 20 US financial institution, including writing a new program document, reviewing its assessment areas and investments, and implementing a shift in the critical focus of its nationwide community development staff; Reviewing the potential acquisition by a top 20 U.S. bank of a large non-bank financial organization and provided advice on limiting the company's regulatory risk by integrating and expanding the current compliance function and making it more strategic in its execution. Lyn has a passion for leadership development and has designed the Treliant Institute for Strategic Compliance Leadership, a leadership program exclusively for compliance professionals in financial institutions She is a frequent speaker at banking events and regularly publishes articles on a variety of banking-related topics. Her recent publications include: "Strengthening the First Line of Defense" in ABA Bank Compliance magazine, September-October 2016"TRID: A Checklist for Successful Compliance" in Mortgage Banking magazine, March 2016 Reference Guide to Regulatory Compliance, published by the American Bankers Association, the official study guide to the CRCM examination "Is this UDAAP or Not?" in ABA Bank Compliance magazine, July-August 2015 "FCRA: A Sleeping Regulation Awakes" in Banking Exchange, August 2015 "Effectively Managing UDAAP Compliance in Mortgage Servicing" in Mortgage Banking magazine, April 2015 "Managing UDAAP Compliance Risks in Financial Institutions" in Journal of Taxation and Regulation of Financial Institutions, Nov/Dec, 2013 She received her undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University and her JD from the University of Houston. Lyn is a Certified Regulatory Compliance Manager (CRCM), and an attorney, licensed in the state of Texas. Lyn was the 2012 recipient of the ABA's Distinguished Service Award. More for our listeners: I'll hope to see you all this week at FinXTech Summit in New York and of course CFSI's Emerge in June. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at jsbarefoot.com. Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support our Podcast - Send "a buck a show" I'm just back from London -- more on that later -- but one highlight is I recorded an episode with the one and only Brett King. Coming soon! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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 the developing world. They all work at the cutting edge of financial transformation, because the mobile phone is suddenly bringing real financial inclusion. Think about that statement. Throughout history, a large percentage of people have been excluded from, or marginalized by, the financial system. That's mainly because it simply hasn't been very profitable to serve them. Finance evolved with a business model that serves people in buildings -- traditionally it was grand buildings with lots of marble -- and by giving them personalized attention. It was mainly for wealthy people, and then for the middle class as technology -- streamlined branches, ATM's, and telephone and online banking were added to the mix. Generally, though, finance, and especially banks, could not readily reach people with lower incomes, including the rural poor, or at least could not offer them affordable pricing. A lot of public policy has aimed at getting banks to serve those customers despite the challenging economics. The cell phone is changing that, and fast. The World Bank has a goal of enabling every adult in the world to have a bank account by 2020 -- three years from now. Whether or not that deadline is met, the fact is that access is spreading fast. Significantly, it's spreading fastest in the developing world. One reason is that cell phone adoption has been so rapid there, mainly because most people never had landlines. Another is that telcos began offering financial services through those phones, creating a fast and efficient delivery channel. A third is that these new systems often arise in settings that lack traditional regulatory systems, making it easy for innovators to move quickly, but of course raising many kinds of novel regulatory risks. AFI and its members are dealing with all of this -- both the opportunities and the risks. They're doing this from the perspective of financial regulators and also with the insight that financial inclusion is a key engine of economic growth, and of empowerment for women and other groups that have historically lacked access. I had the chance to join in this dialogue at AFI's Global Policy Forum in Fiji last year, a beautiful event highlighting traditional cultures of the Asia Pacific. More than 80 countries participated, working across diverse languages, cultures, demographics, and economic challenges to distill the keys to fostering inclusion and regulating change. While there, I recorded this episode with AFI's visionary leader, Alfred Hannig. I'll leave it to him to tell you his story. For more information, also check out our episode with Theo Cosmora, CEO of the One Dollar Smart Phone. And here's a (bad) photo of me with Vuli the Vanu, Fiji's mascot for financial literacy! More for our listeners: This month I'll be in Jakarta for a global discussion of regulation and financial inclusion. In April I'll speak at the FinXTech Summit in New York, and in London at both the Innovate Finance fintech conference and the International FinTech Investor Conference sponsored by the Financial Conduct Authority. And I hope everyone is registering to come to CFSI's Emerge in June. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at jsbarefoot.com. My latest post tells you about Hummingbird, the RegTech firm I cofounded late last year. We're aiming to use new technology to transform both halves of the regulatory equation -- both how to regulate and how to comply -- starting with anti-money laundering. We'll do a podcast on this, sometime soon. Also go to jsbarefoot.com to send in your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support the Podcast - Send a "Buck a show" And watch for upcoming podcasts, including with Wai Lum Kwok, Executive Director of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Abu Dhabi Global Market, Colleen Briggs of JPMorgan Chase, Bill Harris, former CEO of both PayPal and Intuit, and now CEO of Personal Capital, and Jonathan Dharmapalan, founder of eCurrency. Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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, and he brought along a young entrepreneur, Ollie Perdue of Loot. Ollie showed me a quick Loot demo on his phone, and ever since, I've been avidly watching their progress. A year later, I had a chance to do a podcast with Ollie. Sitting amidst their whiteboards marked up with problem-solving sketches and waiting list queues, he filled me in on their progress. Loot is an app paired with a prepaid debit card, offering tremendously useful tools for easy budgeting, payments, and simple ways to set financial goals and get coached about how best to meet them. They also analyze the customer's spending patterns and benchmark against peers -- helping the huge numbers of people who simply have no idea where they stand compared to where they should be, in financial health. In our conversation Ollie describes how it all works, including how he got going and how he's managed to launch something so impressive while still in his early twenties.The company has gotten a lot of attention, including raising an additional $3.13 in venture funds late last year. It's aimed at young people and is one of the best offerings I've seen in hitting that sweet spot. That includes having an in-app ability to do customer service by text with (what else?) GIF's. Skeptics often argue that fintech is too narrow because so much of it aims for millennials. To that, I'd say two things. First, startups, out of sheer financial necessity, have to target early adopters -- markets that are likely to pick up a new product quickly and share it virally. That means a high percentage are starting with millennials. However, I don't know any that plan to stop with them. Secondly, millennials are the largest generation in the history of the world, both in the U.S. and globally. They surpassed the baby boomers a couple of years ago. By sheer numbers alone, they're going to dominate commerce and culture, just as baby boomers did as they came of age. I made a speech last month to AFSA, who asked me to talk specifically about millennials as customers. Working on it made me think more deeply, myself, about how important it is that new financial technology is emerging concurrently with the rise of this huge generation -- whom we know, as both consumers and employees, want everything to be optimized by technology -- to be well-designed, fast, easy, friendly, engaging, and all the rest. If technology was changing, but customers weren't, we can imagine slow adoption of innovation. Instead, today, both halves are transforming together -- the product and the user. That will change the market, not only for young customers, but for everyone, and in some ways, faster than we might think. Millennials should not be underestimated -- especially thoughtful, energetic entrepreneurs like Ollie Purdue. More Links: IInterview with Ollie: http://www.businessinsider.com/loot-bank-ceo-ollie-purdue-interview-2015-8 Jean-Stephane's 2017 conference FintechConnectLive! More for our listeners: I'll hope to see you in March at LendIt in New York and SXSW in Austin. Also come to the FinXTech Summit in April and of course CFSI's Emerge in June. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at jsbarefoot.com. My new post says 2017 will be the year of RegTech. Go there too to send in your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. See you next time! Support the Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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 Business School, where she has just released a comprehensive paper on fintech and small business. We recorded today's show in her office on the business school campus, which is just across the Charles River from my fellowship's home base in the Harvard Kennedy School. She and I first met in Washington a few years back, when she issued a research paper on the state of small business lending. That was in conjunction with the group that issued the Small Business Borrowers' Bill of Rights (which we covered in our episode with Brian Graham of BancAlliance. In 2016, much to my delight, Karen and her co-author Brayden McCarthy put out an update on her paper, and this time it's mostly about fintech. Technology is changing small business lending in the same ways it's transforming consumer finance, but with different twists. On the positive side, innovators are using technology to do better for SME's -- small and medium-sized enterprises -- by adopting low-cost online platforms, becoming much smarter about getting and using data, speeding up service, and creating a vastly better user experience than was possible in the past. The data issue is crucial. Thanks to new technology (including Square), small businesses increasingly can give lenders solid, up to date information on their financial positions and cash flows. Innovative lenders can analyze this, determine with precision what the borrower can afford, and often can create a flexible repayment schedule that works with the rhythm of the business, including seasonal ones. These innovators are filling an enormous gap -- which Karen clearly demonstrates -- because banks just cannot profitably make the smaller loans that so many businesses need. There are downsides, though. One is that whereas local banks interact with their business customers face to face, these new relationships are online. For lenders, this creates higher risk of fraud. And for borrowers, there is rising danger that these entrepreneurs will be harmed by confusing terms and, sometimes, by downright predatory practices online. And here's a little-known fact: small business borrowers have almost no regulatory protections, at least at the federal level. There is no federal regulator for small business lending, as there is for consumers, and even if there were, there are very few regulations that apply. Generally speaking, there are no requirements for standard disclosures to small business borrowers, and no rules against unfair and deceptive practices, beyond those that cover commerce in general. This is significant, because today's small businesses are more similar to consumers than ever before. The "1099" or "gig" economy has led to more and more people starting small businesses as their main work, or to supplement tight household budgets, or to tide them over after losing a job. It's a mistake to assume that, simply because they're business people, they are therefore financially sophisticated. Listeners to Barefoot Innovation have probably figured out by now that I'm not a fan of the current regulatory apparatus for protecting financial consumers (even though I myself have been involved in developing some of it). Broadly speaking, disclosures are failing, and regulations are choking desirable innovation. The last thing I think we should do is to transplant our whole system of consumer protection laws into the fresh, green field of small business lending, and have it put down roots there -- like crabgrass. I think we should be deeply rethinking our consumer laws. In the process, though, we should also be thinking about whether and how to create protections and tools for small businesses to use, too. Karen does recommend extending some consumer-type protections to these firms, including APR's (we had a good exchange on the pros and cons of that). She also has tremendous insights into the structure and nature of the market, and on what to do about what she calls the "spaghetti soup" of regulatory agencies and rules, which now make it so hard to move toward a smarter system. She focuses, too, on the critical need for clearer, updated regulatory guidance for banks that want to work with fintechs on small business lending. A wide spectrum of new models are emerging, partly because these two industries need each other -- they complement each other. Both sides will suffer, and so will business borrowers, if banks can't navigate the third-party risk rules of their prudential regulators. (As I often say, the regulators have the hardest job in all this.) More information on Karen: Karen Gordon Mills served as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2009 until August 2013. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School and at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School focusing on U.S. competitiveness, entrepreneurship and innovation. As SBA Administrator and a Cabinet member, Mills served on the President's National Economic Council and was a key member of the White House economic team. At the SBA, she led a team of more than 3,000 employees and managed a loan guarantee portfolio of over $100 billion. Mills is credited with turning around the agency during the financial crisis and with streamlining loan programs, shortening turnaround times, and reducing paperwork. In addition, Mills helped small businesses create regional economic clusters, gain access to early stage capital, hire skilled workers, boost exports, and tap into government and commercial supply chains. Prior to the SBA, Mills held leadership positions in the private sector, including as a partner in several private equity firms, and served on the boards of Scotts Miracle-Gro and Arrow Electronics. Most recently, she was president of MMP Group, which invested in businesses in consumer products, food, textiles, and industrial components. In 2007, Maine Governor John Baldacci appointed Mills to chair Maine's Council on Competitiveness and the Economy, where she focused on regional development initiatives, including a regional economic cluster with Maine's boatbuilding industry. Mills earned an AB in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. Additionally, she is a past vice chair of the Harvard Overseers, and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Harvard Corporation. And listen, too, to our episode from last year with Sam Hodges of Funding Circle, a leading example of platform lending to small businesses. More for our listeners We have some amazing shows coming up, including one with Chase's Colleen Briggs, several focused on global trends, at least one with a CEO of a community bank, and one that I will call a barn-burner with the former CEO of PayPal and Inuit, Bill Harris. Don't miss them! Remember to write a review of Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up at www.,jsbarefoot.com to get email notices when new podcasts come out, as well as my newsletter and blog posts. Go there too to send in your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going. And remember to join my facebook fan page and follow me on twitter. Support the Podcast Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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 credit -- especially mortgages -- is a good thing. A host of government regulations, programs, and bank supervisory activities aim to promote more credit, because we've assumed that wider credit access is, broadly speaking, good. Is it, though? Most people would agree that up to a point, it's good, and beyond some point, it becomes bad. It definitely becomes bad at the point where the borrower can't realistically repay the loan. It can also become bad if the pricing is so high that the person ends up worse off for borrowing, instead of better, especially if the borrower doesn't understand the terms We could do many episodes on the tough issues embedded in this question. One is whether it's better to have high-cost loan options that are legal and subject to regulation, or to outlaw them, knowing that shutting down legal options will drive some desperate people to use illegal ones, which hurt them even more. Another is the philosophical question of how much the government should protect people from themselves. If the price of a high-cost loan is clear, and borrowers understand it, should the government respect their decision on whether to take it, or substitute its judgment for theirs and remove the option? Again, public policy has been debating these issues for decades -- maybe centuries -- and still is, including through many of the initiatives taken to date by the CFPB. In this podcast, we won't tackle those questions, but will instead ask a very different one: What if we didn't need to resolve them? What if, thanks to technology, we could solve the problems surrounding high-cost credit -- or a big chunk of them -- not through regulation, but in the marketplace. LendUp. Sasha Orloff founded LendUp to provide more affordable credit to the 50% of Americans with credit scores below 680. He had worked at a big bank, and at an NGO in the developing world, and had a brother in the technology world who kept telling him that better software could create better products. He finally founded LendUp, to build them. LendUp offers credit products online -- which means it has, automatically, a lower cost structure than the traditional bank model of branches. As Sasha explains in our discussion, it has also designed its products to offer borrowers a gateway to better credit scores, credit options, and financial health. LendUp is backed by major investors including Y-Combinator, Google Ventures, QED Investors, Startfund, Kleiner Perkins, A16Z seed fund, Thomvest Ventures, Kapor Capital, Bronze Investments, Founders Co-Op, Data Collective, Susa Ventures, and Radicle Impact. Sasha and the firm have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, NYTimes, Financial Times, CNN, NBC, TechCrunch, Venturebeat, Inc, Wired, Bloomberg, Fortune, Dow Jones, American Banker, Marketplace and many others. He has presented at TEDx, and LendUp, and they won Finovate Best In Show. FastCompany named the firm as one of the World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Personal Finance, and it won runner up in Webbys for best website design. They have presented at LendIt, Emerge, Money20/20, The HubSF, NBC News, and Huffington Post Live, and participate in The Clinton Global Initiative on Financial Inclusion. Sasha also serves on the Consumer Lending Advisory Board for TransUnion (one of the three major credit bureaus) A regulatory note. After Sasha and I recorded this episode, the CFPB announced an enforcement action against LendUp. The order is, among other things, a warning flag for startups about the importance, and the great challenges, of maintaining complete regulatory compliance in the midst of rapid growth. The company has responded with a massive expansion of compliance staff. Following the announcement of consent order last fall, it issued this statement: We started LendUp because the traditional banking system wasn't working for more than half of Americans. From day one, we've committed ourselves to offering better, safer and more transparent credit products and to aligning the success of our business with the success of our customers. We genuinely believed the product features that were identified by the CFPB and the California DBO– like optional expedited funding and a 30 cent per day discount for early repayment—were in the best interests of our customers. But we fell short in the execution and in meeting the expectations of our regulators. We have since taken action to resolve every issue they've raised, including beginning to refund customers prior to entry of the Consent Order and Settlement Agreement. We've also made significant investments to build out our legal and compliance operations. In this respect, we are a different company today, with a completely new legal and compliance team that is larger now than our entire company when we started these exams. Importantly, those teams are brought in at the beginning of the development lifecycle for every new product and feature. We are proud of the progress we've made to expand access to credit, lower borrowing costs and provide credit-building opportunities to our customers. LendUp has: Graduated more than 20,000 borrowers to the highest rungs of the LendUp Ladder in more than 11 states Saved Californians alone more than $18M in 2016 (and an estimated $40M to date nationwide) Delivered over 800,000 free credit education classes; and Helped LendUp customers improve their credit scores: according to TransUnion data, 66% of LendUp customers showed a credit score increase – more than those in the control group using similar types of products from other lenders. We are eager to keep building on this track record, and look forward to continuing our work to put our customers on paths to better financial health. I have found Sasha to be one of the most thoughtful people in fintech. I think you'll be fascinated by his overview of the shrinking of the American middle class, the impact of the smartphone revolution; innovation models fort startups versus banks; how making financial education interesting; and how to redesign regulation for the 21st century, The loans at Lendup cost less than traditional payday options, but more than loans to prime customers, because the borrowers are simply higher risk. If lenders can't charge enough to cover that risk, they won't serve these customers. If they can, though, and if they can leverage technology to gain efficiency and underwriting accuracy, and if they can enable high-risk borrowers to build and repair credit records, and if they can educate people about managing their finances, and can also make a great return on capital and then truly scale up…. then seemingly unsolvable problems can, maybe, begin to.get solved. More links: Study on LendUp impact on credit scores. LendUp education on credit scores. More for our listeners: I'll hope to see you at "LendIt in New York in February, SXSW in March, FinXTech Summit in April and of course CFSI's Emerge in June. Remember to review Barefoot Innovation on iTunes, and please sign up to get emails on new podcasts and my newsletter and blog posts at jsbarefoot.com. My latest post argues for some healthy regulatory disruption as a new administration takes office. Go there too to send in your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going. Please also join my Facebook fan page, and follow me on twitter. Support the Podcast And watch for the next podcast, because we're going to turn to innovation in small business lending. My guest will be Karen Mills, the former Administrator of the SBA and at Harvard Business School, where she has just issued an updated study on small business lending This one is focused mainly on fintech. We had a fascinating conversation. See you then! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. 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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, with Theo Cosmora, CEO of Social Eco and the OneDollarSmartPhone. Developing countries are the world's learning laboratory on financial inclusion. What I learned from these recent travels is that the world is alive with new ideas about both financial products and financial regulation. Fintech and regtech, are everywhere. And both are, surprisingly to some, more advanced in other parts of the world than in the U.S. The reason for that is simple: Other countries, and especially the developing world, have leaped straight to new technologies, and especially mobile financial services, because they never built the complex financial and regulatory infrastructure that predominates in the developed world, such as widespread telephone land lines and personal computers. Those financial systems have flaws, but broadly speaking, they work pretty well for middle and upper income people, getting financial tasks done through banks, bank branches, checks, plastic credit cards, plastic debit cards, cash machines, funds transfers and all the rest. That means that the impetus to change entrenched infrastructure, not to mention entrenched consumer habits, is weaker in highly developed markets. It also means that investing in such change takes more time to pay off there, and is extra expensive because providers have to maintain all their traditional systems while simultaneously building new ones. The developing world lacks that problem. For people who have never had access to financial services, for whom no one ever would have built a branch, there's nothing to replace except cash and barter. Planting new systems in new ground is, generally, easier than growing things amidst a mature forest. This fact has made developing countries into the world's learning laboratory on how to build really an innovative financial system -- especially for low-income people. People throughout the world have mobile phones -- as of 2013, more people had access to cellphones than to toilets. Everyone knows how to use them. Increasingly, these are smartphones that can access wifi, which is spreading fast too. While the United States is still focused on the Community Reinvestment Act obligation of banks to maintain branches in lower-income neighborhoods, other countries are bringing whole new affordable financial services to low income people, by the hundreds of millions, through converging new technologies. That's not just the cell phone, but all the other changes underway in digital identity, voice technology, block chains, big data, and much more. And regulators, especially in developing countries, are working hard to harness the same technology trends into new "regtech" strategies, to foster this progress and, simultaneously, to prevent new dangers that will grow along with it. We'll talk more about this revolution in other episodes -- I recorded several more in Fiji and my other travels -- but for now, let's focus on this incredible breakthrough -- the affordable phone. Theo Cosmora My guest for this episode is Theo Cosmora, co-founder and CEO of Social Eco and the man behind the OneDollarSmartPhone. Theo notes that four billion people can't afford smartphones; that this is potentially the world's most valuable market in the world, worth $5 trillion; and that people spend an average of three hours a day using phones if they have them. That means that connecting everyone to smart phones will connect them, both horizontally and vertically, into every dimension of the larger economy and culture. How to solve the phone affordability gap? Theo has devised a business model in which companies or governments will sponsor pre-set apps on a phone, to subsidize the price enough to reach people who can't afford the phone, but do have and spend money -- farmers, workers, migrants, others. This is somewhat like the model developed by the internet itself, or by players like Google -- or for that matter, broadcast television -- where a core service is free or nearly free, because it's creating access to markets for third parties. (As an aside, I've been thinking a lot about fintech business models, and the need for transparency and true consumer understanding around them. I'll be talking more about that in 2017.) I think you'll be fascinated by Theo's insights on this market and how serving it can unlock value throughout the global economy, as well as lifting people out of poverty and isolation. If you're a business, regulator, or central bank, anywhere, with interest in this market, Theo would like to talk with you about sponsoring phones. You'll also enjoy his insights about regulators, who he thinks are suddenly seeing the potential and becoming helpful. We recorded our conversation at the annual global forum of AFI, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which consists of the financial regulators and central banks of the developing world. The meeting dramatically bore out Theo's optimism on regulators embracing fintech and regtech, as we'll discuss in future episodes. For listeners in the United States, some of this may not seem directly relevant, but I want to encourage you to think about it. Initiatives like this are pointing the way to affordable, inclusive, profitable financial services -- for everyone. U.S. public policy has been striving toward that goal for decades, with results that are limited at best. Suddenly, technology is opening up a whole new way to go at them. Some say you can't make money serving people with no money -- at least not without cheating them. I'd love to know if our audience thinks that was ever true, and even if so, will it still be, as technology makes more markets profitable by making it inexpensive to reach and serve them. If you have thoughts, please share them at www.jsbarefoot.com. Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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 fintech innovators are building new things on the system's old footings. Ripple is trying to reshape the foundation itself. As you'll hear in our discussion, Chris and I first met about five years ago when the wider world had barely heard of Bitcoin, and blockchains and digital currency were still causing mostly head-scratching (at best). He had an impressive past that included co-founding eLoan and Prosper before Open Coin, which is now Ripple. The company's mission is to create interoperable global finance -- easy movement of money, and other forms of value, throughout the world. An analogy (which we also discussed in my earlier podcast with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire) is to do for money what the internet did for information, enabling it to move instantly, cheaply, and accurately to everyone, everywhere. I notice that people whose work is hard to explain use lovely, lively language and imagery. It's certainly true of Chris. He talks about paper mail and rails and siloes and blocked pipes and, my favorite -- shipping containers, which he says boosted global trade by 700%, with the simple step of standardizing containers so they can fit efficiently on any ship, truck or train, anywhere in the world. He discusses a book on how this changed the world -- The Box by Marc Levinson. That inspired me to include the picture below, of a fully-loaded container ship as it passed along beside my apartment, which overlooks Boston Harbor. In this episode, Chris says interoperability in finance is the last missing link that's needed for truly efficient global commerce. He discusses the possible "science fiction" of connecting 50 billion devices through the internet of things. He describes how micropayments can transform functions ranging from ocean monitoring to financial access. He talks about people in huge swaths of Africa who have phones and Google but no connected way to pay for things -- and imagines the global growth that would be sparked by adding two billion people into mainstream payments and commerce. He imagines these solutions even helping to solve the problems caused by globalization. Chris also talks about the crucial roles of banks, which are key partners for Ripple, and of regulators, including the risk that America's splintered regulatory system could undermine our leading global role in finance which he says will be "up for grabs" as many countries compete. And he explains, tellingly, how his views on "disruption" have evolved over time. We recorded this discussion last summer -- before the presidential election, which he mentions -- and also before Chris' announcement this month that he plans to step down as Ripple CEO at the end of 2016 in order to rebalance his life. He'll remain active with Ripple and will work closely with its incoming CEO, Brad Garlinghouse. More links: Chris's blog post on stepping down as CEO is HERE Ripple video My blog post: The Benefits of Bitcoin I loved this conversation with Chris Larsen, and I think you will too. Enjoy! Barefoot Innovation news…. We're posting this episode during a flurry of activity. Ten days ago I had the fun of doing a fireside chat at Money 2020 with CFPB Director Richard Cordray -- who used the venue to make some big new on big data and data aggregation. I raced back from that to speak last week at the FTC's fintech conference, and I'll be missing the SEC's first fintech event next week because I'm off to the Singapore fintech/RegTech festival that's being co-sponsored by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, MAS. Money 2020 drew 11,000 people this year -- the largest financial conference in the world -- and the Singapore conference expects over 10,000, including for the first-ever RegTech conference in Asia. Meanwhile, our direct subscribers to Barefoot Innovation more than doubled last month. Every week I'm encountering people who tell me they're fans of the show. Please do send in your "buck a show" to help us keep it going -- I'm having to bring in more helpers for it. And please remember to review us on Itunes. Also come to the new Facebook fan page. And please come to www.jsbarefoot.com to get onto our mailing list. Most of all, come back next time, when my very special guest will be Alfred Hannig, the executive director of AFI -- the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. We recorded this one on an idyllic day in beautiful Fiji! AFI is driving tremendous change in global financial inclusion and I know you'll find the episode fascinating. Support the Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

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 startup. Varo was still in development when we talked and is now in private beta, with plans to launch next year. I find them especially interesting in many ways, including that they raised $27 million this year; that the founders are very experienced banking executives; and that they are creating an ambitious product to meet multiple consumer needs at once. Maybe my favorite thing is that they are creating the Varo Bot, a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to actually take the initiative to help customers manage daily money tasks easily and well. The move toward fintech solutions that are proactive instead of reactive is a real breakthrough, because it attacks one of the biggest obstacles to consumer financial health -- people not really understanding how best to manage their money, or just not thinking about that question before, rather than after, they spend or borrow. Varo is solving for that. Colin has two and a half decades of leadership experience with global brands in Europe and the US, including as an EVP at American Express, Managing Director at Lloyds Banking Group, and an EVP at Wells Fargo. In this episode Colin explains his motivation in undertaking a fintech startup after years at big companies. He talks about why Varo's initial focus is simple, transparent mobile tools for millennials. He talks about the power of starting from a clean slate, with no legacy of what he calls "bad revenues," and no challenges caused by having data "trapped in silos," which is a major problem for banks. He also has thought-provoking advice for both banks and regulators. Here are some links: Varo is at www.varomoney.com He also refers to the book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir on consumer decision-making behavior. I know you'll enjoy hearing his insights. And more for our listeners: To help you keep up with innovators like Varo, I've been launching a series of social media channels that feature all my podcast guests as well as my blog posts and speeches. Sign up for my new monthly newsletter at jsbarefoot.com, head to my new facebook fan page, and please follow me on twitter. I have some big news coming up – I'm co-founding a RegTech venture, so don't miss hearing about it! Also, please send in your "buck a show" to support Barefoot Innovation. We now have thousands of listeners around the world, and we need support to keep the show coming and keep it timely, with my little band of part-time helpers. Support our Podcast Meanwhile, be sure to come back next time, when my guest will be the CEO of Ripple, Chris Larsen. Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!