Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Today's program is really special, because my guest is Brigitte Madrian. Brigitte is the Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management at the Harvard Kennedy School, and also co-director of the Household Finance working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a leading expert in behavioral economics and consumer decision-making regarding both health and finance, and in finance,especially savings and retirement. Importantly to me, she is also my faculty advisor for the book I'm writing. Regular listeners know I'm spending two years as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Business and Government in the Kennedy School. As I started into my fellowship last year, I had the great fortune of linking with Brigitte as my faculty advisor for the book. She is part of the movement in economics that's rethinking the classical theory that assumes that everyone behaves rationally. That work goes to the very heart of the condundrum in consumer finance, where both policymakers and industry have to grapple with the fact that consumers don't always make the choices that are best for them. Understanding the many reasons why that happens, and how to elicit better decisions, is one of the keys to improving consumer financial health. For this podcast, I met with Brigitte in her office on a lovely summer day. The Kennedy school is a complex of brick buildings clustered on the bank of the Charles River – it's located about halfway between the Harvard Business School, on the other side of the river, and the old Harvard Yard, which is the traditional heart of the college (Harvard was founded in 1636). The Kennedy School has been undergoing construction ever since I got here – I get a fascinating display of cranes and I-beams and such from my little office space in the Belfer building – but Brigitte and I had a quiet talk during summer semester, with most of the students away. She came to Harvard about 10 years ago, and in our talk, she quoted someone once saying that professional schools tend to be run very much like the professions they represent. It's certainly true of the Kennedy School, which is all about gathering together a multiplicity of voices to grapple with public policy challenges. And it's especially true for my center, which is the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. All of our fellows are working on finding practical solutions at the nexus of public policy and the private sector. That's what Brigitte has done in her research. She started out by looking at data on retirement plans (her first paper was about automatic enrollment), and she found the results so compelling that she didn't even need to do statistical analysis to see that automatic enrollment led to dramatic increase in savings plan participation, especially among the groups least likely to participate -- employees who were younger, lower-paid employees, newly-hired, black and latino. The automatic enrollment caused an amazing 50-60% increase in plan participation. That paper got a lot of attention and led her to a 20 year research agenda trying to understand financial decisions. I think you'll be very interested in her views about the track record for policies like financial literacy education and financial incentives to save. She pinpoints complexity as a critical problem, and she's not a fan of disclosure as the solution. Our talk was especially timely because we met shortly after release of an important study she helped produce, by the Retirement Security and Personal Savings Commission of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. The report is titled Securing Our Financial Future, and makes recommendations for policymakers on how to increase income security for older individuals. She'll describe some of the highlights. I'm excited about behavioral economics because when these insights are combined with new technology, it becomes possible to create vastly better financial products. You may remember my discussion with Ethan Bloch of Digit, which incorporates these same principles of letting people save automatically instead of through daily effort, and in trying to bring financial decision-making time to zero. Easy and sound financial management is suddenly becoming possible. Brigitte's biography: Brigitte Madrian is the Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before coming to Harvard in 2006, she was on the Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School (2003-2006), the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (1995-2003) and the Harvard University Economics Department (1993-1995). She is also a research associate and co-director of the Household Finance working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Madrian's current research focuses on behavioral economics and household finance, with a particular focus on household saving and investment behavior. Her work in this area has impacted the design of employer-sponsored savings plans in the U.S. and has influenced pension reform legislation both in the U.S. and abroad. She is also engaged in research on health, using the lens of behavioral economics to understand health behaviors and improve health outcomes; in the past she has also examined the impact of health insurance on the job choice and retirement decisions of employees and the hiring decisions of firms. Dr. Madrian received her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied economics as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. She is the recipient of the National Academy of Social Insurance Dissertation Prize (first place, 1994) and a two-time recipient of the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Scholarly Research on Lifelong Financial Security (2002 and 2011). Also…. Please sign up for our mailing list, which includes our newly-launched newsletter highlighting events of the month and my thoughts about them. I have some big news coming up – I'm co-founding a Reg-Tech venture, so don't miss hearing about it! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you! Also, please send in your "buck a show" to support Barefoot Innovation. Have you ever noticed that we often have long lapses of time between when we record a podcast and when we post it? That's because the show is free, but takes huge amounts of time to produce. And we produce it on a shoestring – I work with my little cadre of young part-timers. If we can develop more revenue, we want to get onto a more frequent and regular schedule. You won't belive the amazing episodes I have already recorded, but haven't yet been able to share. So if you love the show – and I hear constantly that people do, and we have thousands of people listening around the world – it would be great for you to send in a little bit of support. Support our Podcast Remember, follow me on twitter at @joannbarefoot, and please review us on iTunes. And come to my new Facebook fan page HERE Last but not least, come back next time for an exciting conversation with Colin Walsh, right around the time he is launching his new fintech venture….Varo. See you then!

Welcome to our first conversation with an innovator in small business lending – my guest is Sam Hodges, Co-founder and U.S. Managing Director of Funding Circle. Funding Circle was founded in 2012 and is the world's leading marketplace lender that's exclusively focused on small businesses. It has made more than $2.5 billion in loans to 20,000 businesses in the U.S., Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK (where it is based). It customers borrow directly from a wide range of investors, including more than 50,000 people, the UK Government, and divers entities like local councils, a university and various financial organizations. Funding Circle was created because the founders were small business owners themselves and learned how hard it is to access finance, even for a successful business. Even when a loan was approved, they found the process difficult, or the terms unattractive. Sometimes they even felt misled. After opening their 96th loan rejection letter, they decided this was a systemic failure – that the traditional bank loan system was broken – and they set out to build a new solution. The financial crisis created fertile ground for them, as so many business suddenly had trouble accessing capital (the number of small businesses has dropped every year for the past 8-10 years). And their timing fit with the emergence of marketplace lending as a new model. As Funding Circle's Co–Founder and U.S. Managing Director, Sam oversees the company's overall strategic direction and its day–to–day operation in the U.S. He was previously Vice President of Business Development at SecondMarket, the leading marketplace for alternative investments, where he was responsible for corporate and business development and the company's geographic expansion efforts. Sam was also part of the investment team at Pequot Capital, an $8 billion global fund manager, covering investments in financial technology and information services. He started his career as a strategy consultant at Katzenbach Partners, advising financial services and technology companies. He currently serves on the boards of two private companies. He received his MBA and MS from Stanford University and graduated magna cum laude from Brown University. Sam points to three key Funding Circle innovations: One is delivering a superior borrower experience. They can on-board and evaluate customers sometimes in minutes, or a few days, for situations where a bank might need 30 man-hours to reach a decision. Second, they've re-architected how they do credit evaluation. Sam says it's not a silver bullet, but they've have created their own rigorous data-driven approach to understanding risk, and they're using new data, in new ways, to serve more borrowers. And third, he argues that the marketplace model can be more scalable and profitable than the traditional bank approach, enabling them to grow a global business. In our conversation, Sam expresses his continued confidence in the marketplace model. He discusses Funding Circle's risk analytics (he says they hire world class risk officers from world-class institutions). He explains the role of alternative data in driving more sound and inclusive lending. I was especially interested in how Sam contrasts the U.S. regulatory model with the U.K.'s efforts, especially on P2P lending. He thinks the fragmented American structure makes innovation here difficult. He also has suggestions for regulatory innovation, including sandboxes and a graduated scale of coverage that would allow small innovators to get up and running more easily. He emphasizes the need for interagency coordination and consistency. He says transparency needs to undergird the whole industry, and that requires smart, sound regulation that everyone understands. (To listen to our previous episode about the "Regulatory Sandbox" with Nitish Pandey of BMO, click here.) Sam welcomes smart customer protection regulation – he discusses his involvement in creating the Small Business Borrower's Bill of Rights we discussed in an earlier episode with Brian Graham of BancAlliance. See also this Harvard research paper by former Small Business Administration head Karen Mills on small business lending. I hear increasing discussion about more regulation of small business lending. It's partly because the online lenders are transforming the market, and partly because the "1099 economy" is producing more little businesses that arguably are functionally-equivalent to consumer borrowers. The sector is covered by some of the federal laws on consumer protection, but not by most of them. My own view is that regulation will probably need to come, but that we should NOT transplant the existing consumer protection rules into it without first updating them for the digital age. Speaking as someone who helped develop some of these rules, I will say they have a mixed record, at best, of protecting consumers. And complying with them costs a fortune. If we're going to bring new regulation into the small business sector, let's use the chance to take a fresh look, and apply some RegTech thinking. Other notes: Newsletter: I also want to share an announcement -- this month we're launching a newsletter. It will be pithy and punchy and useful, highlighting the most interesting things that have happened, the most exciting things coming up. It will be a way to share some of the fascinating things I've been getting involved with. One example is that, this summer, I joined the Netherlands' Queen Maxima (who leads the UN's work on global financial inclusion) on her trip to Silicon Valley. Another is that I just returned from a week in Fiji at the global policy forum of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which represents the financial regulators of more than 90 countries in the developing world. I'm also working on ideas for promoting regulatory sandboxes in the United States. And in November, I'll be speaking in Singapore at Asia's first RegTech conference. And I'm doing a lot of work on RegTech. In fact, in Fiji I heard a new term – "SuperTech." It's a branch of RegTech that means technology-driven solutions for bank supervision. The newsletter will share some of the intriguing things that are going on, outside our poccasts. Don't forget: Remember to send in your "buck a show" to keep the podcasts coming Support the Podcast Remember to rate us on ITunes. Coming guests: And look for some amazing guests coming up. We have none other than the leaders of Varo, Ripple, LendUp, and Loot (from London)! We have two amazing, mold-breaking innovators from the developing world – eCurrency and OneDollarCellPhone, as well as the head of AFI, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. And back in the US, we'll have the community bank perspective on innovation. But first, next up, we have Harvard professor and behavioral economics expert, Brigitte Madrian. So, enjoy my conversation with Funding Circle's Sam Hodges … and come back soon! 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 explores financial innovation through the eyes of one of America's most respected consumer advocates. My guest is Lauren Saunders, Associate Director of the National Consumer Law Center. The NCLC has been active in consumer financial protection for over 40 years. Lauren manages its Washington, DC office and directs its federal legislative and regulatory work on issues like prepaid cards, electronic payments, small dollar loans, credit cards, bank accounts, and consumer protection regulation overall. She also contributes to NCLC legal treatises, including Consumer Banking and Payments Law, Consumer Credit Regulation, and Fair Credit Reporting. Previously she directed the Federal Rights Project of the National Senior Citizens Law Center; was Deputy Director of Litigation at Bet Tzedek Legal Services; and was an associate at Hall & Phillips. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and was an Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She holds a Masters' in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, from Stanford University. In our conversation, Lauren talks thoughtfully about what worries her about consumer finance today and how she thinks we should address emerging problems. We had a wide-ranging discussion, including about what would happen if traditional payday lending was no longer an option (she'd like a "Goldilocks" approach on loan length). She also discusses her concerns about both easy credit and fast credit; partnering between banks and marketplace lenders; using alternative data in underwriting; and the future of overdraft products as we move toward increasingly fast - and even real-time - payments. For a look into the innovators who were mentioned in the show (and who have been featured as previous guests), check out their websites: Digit, Even, and Simple. Also note Lauren's mention of the American Express-backed movie, Spent. Also .... Time is running out to vote for my SXSW panel! Remember to vote for my panel for SXSW 2017. It's Regulation Innovation - how to modernize regulation to optimize financial innovation. My fantastic panelists are CFSI's CEO Jennifer Tescher, the White House's Adrienne Harris, and Simple CEO Josh Reich. To vote, just go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/67829 (there's a quick signup to be sure the votes are real). And please plan to come to SXSW! Remember to like us! Also remember to like Barefoot Innovation on ITunes; follow me on Twitter @JoAnnBarefoot; and contribute your "buck a show" to keep our podcasts coming. Going global: I recorded the introduction to this episode from the airport en route to London (I figure if Tim Ferriss can do this - and he inspired me to try pod-casting - I can give it a try). I'm heading to the UK for meetings on progress so far with the regulatory sandbox that was launched this year by the Financial Conduct Authority, to distill some lessons for the United States with our much more fragmented regulatory structure. Two days after I return from London, I'm heading to Fiji for the annual global conference of AFI - the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which is made up of the financial regulators of the Global South. In November, I'll be speaking at the FinTech forum of the Singapore Monetary Authority - in the portion that will be Asia's first-ever RegTech conference in Asia. And I recently had to turn down invitations to speak in Tokyo and in Shanghai, and to participate in a UN gathering in Tanzania. All of which is to say, financial innovation is global, and so are the global challenges of how to regulate it, and so is Barefoot Innovation. We have listeners throughout the world, and I'll be recording fascinating podcasts on these travels. Watch for widened horizons this fall. Upcoming: Meanwhile, come back next time for my special guest, Sam Hodges of Funding Circle. Support Barefoot Innovation! Don't forget to send in your buck-a-show to support Barefoot Innovation 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 have our first-ever episode on Insure-tech. Happily, it also turned out to be one of the most fun, funny and thought-provoking shows we've ever done. I'm pretty sure it's the first one where we've talked about the internet of things, and CRISPR gene research, transportation as a service, and drones. My fascinating guest is Caribou Honig, founding partner of QED Investors. QED is a venture fund cofounded by Caribou, Frank Rotman, and Nigel Morris, who first came together in the early days of Capital One. They have helped launch some great fintech companies - for instance LendUp and DriveFactor. Caribou's investments span an array of marketing, payments, and insurance technology companies, particularly where B2C customer acquisition drives the business success. He developed a passion for data-driven marketing when he led key marketing initiatives at Capital One, including responsibility for a $50 mm marketing budget, managing a 200-person underwriting operation, and cracking the code on digital credit card originations. Recent investments led by Caribou include, Remitly, TheMuse, and KNIP. He also serves on the Advisory Council for the CFSI Financial Solutions Lab. As you'll hear in our conversation, moreover, he's a Renaissance man. He holds a bachelor's degree in Physics and Philosophy from Harvard University, an MBA from the Darden School of Business, and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He and his wife have two children and, what he describes as two occasionally annoying dogs. Over the years He's taken time off to be Mr. Mom and to listen to the universe, as he puts it. And of course, he has an interesting name, which he'll explain in our discussion. I reached out to Caribou because I knew he was working in Insure-Tech, which has been on a slower track than other kinds of fintech but is starting to gain real traction. Caribou is Chairman of the InsureTech Connect, a new conference that's scheduled for October 5-6 in Las Vegas. I found our conversation incredibly interesting, especially in how insurance is being transformed by types of technology that have nothing to do with finance -- because its product is usually about managing risks in the physical world ranging from health to roofing materials to self-driving cars. As it turned out, about half of our talk is on insurance, and half is on his broader thoughts oninnovation, and also on regulation. He really sparked my own thinking on some of the tough regulatory issues, like how to resolve the conflicts between alternative data and fair lending disparate impact, and the pros and cons of state-based regulation, and his advice to regulators. Plus I'm stilling thinking about "parametric insurance" - skipping the adjudication process and agreeing in advance to let outside parameters - big data - determine the appropriate claim. New ideas, everywhere! Finally, for all you innovators in the audience, note that Caribou shares an open invitation to bring him interesting ideas. I know you'll enjoy hearing him. Vote for my SXSW Panel! Also, remember to vote to help get my Regulation Innovation panel selected for SXSW 2017 - it's at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/67829. My panelists will be Simple's Josh Reich, Adrienne Harris of the White House, and CFSI's CEO, Jennifer Tescher. We need your vote - voting is only open to September 2. And please plan to come to SX in Austin. Support Barefoot Innovation! Don't forget to send in your buck-a-show to support Barefoot Innovation -- and leave a review on ITunes. Support the Podcast Upcoming Shows Finally, come back next time. We have fantastic guests coming up, including Lauren Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center, Sam Hodges of Funding Circle, Colin Walsh of Varo, and Harvard professor Brigitte Madrian. 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!

My guests today are two of the most thoughtful people in the United States on the topic of regulatory compliance. They are the chief compliance officers of Citigroup and Wells Fargo – Kathryn Reimann and Yvette Hollingsworth Clark. Our listeners include a lot of people who are not fascinated by the topic of regulatory compliance, to put it mildly. The fact is, though, that compliance has shifted, rather suddenly, from being boring to most people, to being fascinating. And whether it fascinates you or not, it has become absolutely critical to whether financial companies can thrive. Becoming great at compliance – both effective and efficient -- has become mission-critical competencies for every financial company, large and small. Let's step back and think about what's happening. Technology is disrupting finance, which means that it's also disrupting financial regulation, which therefore means that it's also disrupting compliance, inevitably. It will completely change how financial companies implement the massive set of regulatory requirements that pervade every aspect of what they do. This is going to be – already is – a wrenching process. For better or worse, consumer financial protection regulation has always been hypertechnical. built mainly around highly prescriptive rules. Congress passes laws, the regulatory agencies issue regulations to implement them, and the industry implements the regulations. I've spent much of my career in this field and have watched it mature into a major function – major cost center – in every bank, into a profession of experts, and into an industry of technology vendors and consultants and lawyers who help financial companies follow these rules. With a few exceptions, the system is about getting the details right. That's still true, of course. We still have voluminous, detailed rules aimed at consumer protection. But the financial crisis shifted the ground under this whole system, by supplementing the traditional "rules-based" system with a new "principles-based" overlay that aggressively requires that financial products be not only "compliant," but also "fair" – able to meet heightened prohibitions on practices that are unfair, deception or abusive (which we in the compliance world, with our habit of using acornyms, call, "UDAAP." And then, as if that weren't a big enough change, the financial world has now also been hit with a second huge wave of change, in technology innovation. And it's even more challenging than the shift from rules to principles, because it's coming faster, and it's even more unknowable than regulatory change. All this means we've entered into a state of permanent uncertainty. The products and market and technology are changing too fast for the legislative and regulatory process to keep pace. The regulatory process can't, and won't, provide clarity on exactly what the industry has to do. Instead, it will review what has been done and will, after the fact, penalize actions that are judged to have been illegal because they're subjectively determined to have been unfair, deceptive, abusive, or discriminatory in effect. The result is that financial companies are going to have to build a whole new kind of compliance model. They won't have the luxury of waiting for clear-cut rules. They'll have to figure out for themselves how regulators may react to rapid change, and make their own decisions, in the absence of clear guidance, about what is risky. This requires a full overhaul of the traditional compliance model. For one thing, it means deeply, actively engaging the CEO, the board, and the business-side leadership of every company in proactively managing regulatory risk. They can't delegate it and assume that their experts and technology will take care of it. They have to make their own decisions, and they have to do it not reactively, but proactively. Again, they'll have to think for themselves. And they'll also have to adopt a new generation of regtech solutions, which are starting to emerge to improve outcomes and cut costs. There's a lot to say about what's ahead on all this, but for today, we're going to pick the brains of two of the most impressive leaders anywhere in the compliance world. Yvette Hollingsworth Clark is the chief compliance officer of Wells Fargo, and Kathryn Reimann leads this work for Citigroup. I've known them both for years, and I was lucky enough to catch them together while we were all at the same event, and carve out some time to talk. Listen to their views on how compliance is changing, the impact of technology, and the need to bring a "fairness" lens to absolutely every regulatory question. They talk about how to do that, including how to integrate teams that can bake it into daily decision-making. They talk about the challenges arising because of the accelerating the speed of change. And they discuss the challenges of working with old legacy IT systems that were created long before today's regulations and technology. They talk about the need for a level regulatory playing field for banks and nonbanks, how to work with regulators, and advice for regulators. They also talk about their own journeys – Kathryn notes that when she started working as a lawyer, the compliance profession didn't even exist. We've come a long way. These are people who are pioneering new ways of tackling compliance. They're doing it in some of the world's biggest, most complex, and most highly-regulated companies, but their insights apply to every financial company – large and small, and old or brand new. Also…. Vote for my panel on the SXSW PanelPicker! I need your help getting my panel selected for inclusion in South By Southwest – SXSW – the huge technology conference that runs in Austin TX each year in conjunction with the famous music and film festival. I attended SXSW ("South by," as people call it) for the first time last year, and it was absolutely fascinating. It's unique among the conferences I attend, in that it's broader than finance. It's about technology overall. I believe fintech is more tech than fin, in the sense that it's being driven by enormous and converging technology trends. We in the financial realm tend to underestimate how big these are and how fast they're moving, because we think of them in terms of the financial products they're reshaping – but they're much bigger than those. SX is a great place to go to learn and think about these wider trends, while also seeing the most interesting new things emerging in fintech, as well. So I have proposed a panel discussion there on RegTech – the shift toward using new generation technology to get to win/wins on regulation, by reducing regulatory costs and burdens while improving outcomes for customers at the same time. I'm calling the panel REGULATION INNOVATION and my amazing guests will be Josh Reich, the CEO of Simple; Jennifer Tescher, CEO of CFSI; and Adrienne Harris of the White House. Last year, SX received 4,600 proposals, so, I need you to vote for the session on the SX Panel Picker. Voting opens up on Monday, August 8 and closes September 2. Please Google the SXSW PanelPicker during that time period, and vote for session called Regulation Innovation. And then plan to come to SX, which is 3/6-10 in Austin. I've been thinking maybe we should take a group of financial folks. What do you think? You can vote for it HERE Support the podcast Please support the show! Last but not least, thanks so very much to those who have sent in your "buck a show," as we call it, to support Barefoot Innovation. Donations are essential to keep the show going, since it's taken on a life of its own and requires a massive effort to produce. And also, please be sure to like the show on whatever ITunes or wherever you listen to it. We'll see you soon with some incredibly interesting new guests – startups, banks, and even someone from Harvard. Til next time! As Kathryn rightly states, such an overhaul of the system requires updating perspectives of themselves and of their hires. It also requires a great degree of inter-departmental collaboration and communication. This is something that I have seen to be true all across the map of regulation - open dialogue is essential. In a previous podcast, Thomas Curry, the Comptroller of Currency and head of the taskforce on responsible innovation agrees. Kathryn and Yvette explain that compliance officers have a very tough job ahead, and I couldn't agree more. They have to balance a fine line between assessing and preventing massive risk from such huge amounts of data sharing while not becoming an obstacle to innovation. As Yvette states, we want to use innovation to regulate innovation. Important links: Citi Wells Fargo 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 episode with my very special guest. He is the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray. We got together in Washington to mark the fifth anniversary of the CFPB's opening its doors, on July 21, 2011. I had the pleasure of serving on the Bureau's Consumer Advisory Board, or CAB, for its first three years. It's been fascinating to watch the launch of this agency, which is the first in many years to be built from scratch, as opposed to something like, say, Homeland Security, that amalgamated existing agencies. As Director Cordray says in our discussion, the CFPB has actually faced many of the same challenges as private sector startup. There are obvious differences, of course, but they still began with a small team, like founders, and went through the stresses of very rapid growth amid having to deliver against a lot of tough deadlines - and under a bright floodlight of scrutiny. A unique thing about the CFPB is that it looks at consumer financial services as a holistic marketplace. Most of our financial regulatory system is bank-centric, with numerous agencies closely overseeing bank activities, while nonbank financial companies - while generally subject to the same rules -- don't normally face the constant, close scrutiny that banks do. This has led to a highly uneven marketplace in terms of both de facto regulatory standards and compliance burdens. That unevenness, in turn, produces some unintended consequences. One is uneven protection of consumers based on what financial company they deal with. Another is some distortion of what products banks and nonbanks are willing to offer, based on their assessments of the related regulatory risks. Moving toward a more uniform framework lays groundwork for a system that can potentially be more fair and workable for both consumers and providers. The CFPB has also been a leader in pioneering regulatory exploration of innovation. Its Project Catalyst was the first initiative in the world, to my knowledge, to create a learning laboratory for looking at regulatory issues in innovative fintech. In our conversation, Director Cordray mentions that they have special powers to allow trial waivers of disclosure rules for companies that have better ideas. They're open for proposals on this -- it would be great to see some new thinking come out of those tests, to move toward updating our old, low-tech disclosure models. I think you'll enjoy hearing Director Cordray's thoughts about Project Catalyst; about how the Bureau thinks about innovation and fintech; and about CFPB itself being a startup and how hard it is to do that inside government. You'll also be interested in what we discussed about the agency's priorities as it enters year six, and about what he has learned from the first five years. Here's more information: CFPB Video: Making Consumers Count Download the full video 5 year anniversary factsheet CFPB's enforcement actions have resulted in $11.7 billion in relief for more than 27 million consumers. They've taken nearly one million consumer complaints. They provided millions of consumers with materials to Know Before You Owe. They issued new rules on mortgage lending Blog and infographic Four factsheets by topic: CFPB's work By the Numbers How CFPB supervises financial markets and enforces consumer financial law CFPB's work in developing consumer protections Financial education, engagement, and empowerment The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at age 5! Enjoy my conversation with Director Richard Cordray. And a note about our next show.... My guests next time will be the chief compliance officers of two of America's largest banks -Yvette Hollingsworth Clark of Wells Fargo and Kathryn Reimann of Citi, who are leaders in - if you can imagine this phrase - innovating in regulatory compliance. Subscribe to our Mailing List Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

I enjoy all my guests on Barefoot Innovation, but if someone forced me to choose my favorite episodes, this one would be on the list. It's partly because my guests, the co-founders of Bee, were so fun to talk with, and so thoughtful. And it's also because they are addressing one of the objections people raise to fintech – the notion that it's only for millennials. Bee was founded in June of 2015 by Vinay Patel and brothers Max and Alex Grasner as an outgrowth of One Financial Holdings, a 'venture-backed laboratory for innovation in retail financial services'. In pioneering an innovative capital-light model using pop-up kiosks and street teams to sign up customers in-person, Bee is able to offer top quality financial services at a significantly lower cost than traditional brick-and-mortar bank branches. Bee is specifically targeting the lack of quality services for low-and moderate-income underserved people (although my guests point out that 'underserved' and 'underbanked' are not words people use to describe themselves). The product is intended to function as an alternative to checking accounts, structured as a prepaid card paired with a mobile app. Bee partners with Community Federal Savings Bank to offer alternatives to checking and savings accounts to its customers in New York and California. Part of what makes this interesting is Bee's specific hybrid model of personal touch and high tech. They're trying to put the human beings where customers need them the most – in explaining and opening the account. And then they're trying to drive down costs overall by not providing branches and tellers for routine functions. Bee's team goes in person into underserved neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and they set up eye-catching mobile kiosks, which they compare to food trucks. They get people interested and then help them through a thorough process of thinking through their needs; opening an account; setting up and learning to use the app; and then, often, letting the new customer stay on to take advantage of the Bee wifi hotspot. The in-person signup process also helps guard against money laundering, since people are seen face-to-face. I think you'll be fascinated by Max and Vinay's insights into these consumers, including their huge financial savvy -- how thoroughly they know their money situations, and how they optimize their spending on their phones (and the challenges of working with such a wide array of phones that may be old or broken). Vinay and Max talk about their customers' worries about both pricing uncertainties and payment delays (issues that are being tackled by other innovators as well). One repeated theme is the company's commitment to treating these customers with respect by providing a product that is obviously high-quality, right down to the thickness of the card, and providing a truly fantastic user experience on the app. They say customers often take selfies with the Bee team, at the end of setting up an account. Bee's CEO, Vinay Patel, has a joint law degree and MBA from NYU. He spent 5 years teaching at NYU Business school and at Columbia Public Policy Business School. He then moved on to McKinsey and Co. as a consultant to banks and government. Max Gasner has a background as an investment stock broker on Wall street from 2007 – part of what motivated this work. He has also worked in the Bay area at an AI company - Prior Knowledge, and then moved on to a tech company which eventually morphed into Salesforce. We recorded this episode several months ago. Since then the company has grown. It also won national recognition in New Orleans in June at the Emerge Conference, as one of the winners of the Financial Solutions Lab competition run by the Center for Financial Services Innovation and funded by JPMorgan Chase. Max and Vinay are eloquent on the need for regulators to allow space for robust innovation – just one startup might create the 10X breakthrough that can change people's lives. They're also thoughtful on their commitment to earning compelling returns for their investors, including Blumberg Capital, Fenway Summer Ventures and AXA Strategy Ventures. They aim to do this with their unique formula of delivering personal attention and high value to a huge, largely untapped market, at very low cost. Enjoy my conversation with Bee. More Links and Information One Financial Holdings Blog Bee card website and access to kiosk locator CFSI CFSI research on consumer financial health and the financial situations of underserved families Blumberg Capital Fenway Summer Ventures AXA Strategy Ventures My blog post on CFSI's research on underserved consumers, "Underserved and Underestimated" More about Vinay Prior to Bee, Vinay spent five years at McKinsey & Company, where he advised leaders of US banks and public sector organizations on executing large-scale IT modernization programs. Vinay is a faculty member at both NYU Stern School of Business and Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, where he has taught courses on Enterprise Strategy, Game Theory, and Data Visualization. Vinay holds a J.D. and an M.B.A from NYU, and a B.A. with honors in Economics from the University of Chicago. He is happily married and lives in Brooklyn. LinkedIn Twitter: @patelpost More about Max Prior to Bee, Max built and sold a machine learning company to Salesforce.com and traded equities in NY and London. Max holds a B.A. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, where he graduated after spending two years at Deep Springs College. He lives in West Oakland. LinkedIn Twitter: @gasnerpants More about Bee Bee is a financial technology startup built on the principle that all Americans deserve convenient, high quality retail financial services. Bee has pioneered an innovative capital-light model using pop-up street teams and kiosks to sign up customers in-person for financial services at significantly lower cost than with traditional brick-and-mortar bank branches. Bee partners with Community Federal Savings Bank to offer alternatives to checking and savings accounts to its customers in New York and California. Bee has ambitious plans to expand its product offering and geographic footprint over the coming years. Its major investors are Blumberg Capital, AXA Strategic Ventures, T5 Capital, Fenway Summer Ventures, and Western Technology Investment Websites: www.onefinancialholdings.com and www.beecard.us Support the podcasts - A buck a show! I've decided to distill a lesson from the popular podcast series Hardcore History, by emulating their habit of asking everyone to send them "a buck a show." Some years ago, the show's host Dan Carlin realized the podcast was taking over his life - much as Barefoot Innovation has been doing with mine! He hit on the idea of asking listeners for "a buck a show," and eventually reached the point where he can devote himself to producing the series. Barefoot Innovation is produced part-time by me and two young, very talented helpers. One of them has a day job and the other is a full-time graduate student. If all our listeners will chip in a buck a show, we'll be able to expand our interviews, accelerate our pace (believe it or not, we currently run at a four- to five-month backlog from recording date to posting!), and be able to do some fun new things we have in mind for you. We'll appreciate any and all help to keep the show going, and growing! And remember to post a review on iTunes. Support the Podcast Subscribe to our Mailing List Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Barefoot Innovation usually explores technology that touches financial consumers - new products and new ways of managing money. Today's episode pivots 180 degrees and looks internally, inside financial companies, at the equally transformative change underway in how financial products are made and delivered. My conversation is with Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, and our topic is the blockchain -- distributed ledger technology, or DLT. Most of our listeners know that the blockchain, created by the inventors of Bitcoin, is expanding far beyond digital currency and has revolutionary potential for changing how society operates. Any complex system that keeps records or involves chains of transactions - payments, contracts, titles, tickets, warranties, exchanges of all kinds, government records, medical information, purchasing systems - anything -- can potentially be managed through distributed ledgers that can eliminate most of the current costs as well as errors, uncertainty, and fraud. DLT can also enable trustable transactions among parties who don't know each other, without need for a trusted intermediary. That's because safeguards are built into the technology itself, by making all the records and transactions transparent to all parties and preventing duplication or fabrication of information. Blythe Masters says she began as a skeptic because, like many people, she equated the blockchain with Bitcoin and, given Bitcoin's colorful developments, dismissed both. However, after leaving her long career as a senior executive at JPMorgan Chase, she took a closer look and became a convert. Today she's leading one of the most exciting and best-financed firms in the field, Digital Asset Holdings in New York. We had a chance to sit down together at the 2016 Fintech Forum of Women in Housing and Finance in Washington, where she shared her vision for the power of DLT to transform the internal operations of banks. Note that DLT systems can be either open-access and "permissionless," moving information on the open internet as with digital currency, or can be closed and "permissioned" within a single organization or a gatekeeping group that shares a common need. (For more on open systems and digital currency, see our episode with Jeremy Allaire of Circle.) Large banks are actively exploring use of closed DLT systems to streamline their internal operations to cut out expense, mistakes, and the slowness caused by the need for reconciliation of records. These efforts will bring enormous cost savings, for three reasons. First, the DLT system is simply cheaper to operate. Second, it eliminates many kinds of errors - and preventing, detecting and correcting errors is a massive source of expense in every financial company. And third, reducing delay will also reduce the need to hold capital against the risks that attend pending transactions. I would add that DLT will, over time, open up the opportunity to modernize and streamline regulation itself, through use of "reg-tech" relies on automated data in many areas that are now subject to expensive traditional examination. Blythe thinks DLT is coming to banking much faster than people think - that these solutions will be in commercial deployment in just two years! One reason is that banks can modularize them, dropping DLT into functions that need it and then connecting them up with the other, older systems. She makes another interesting argument, which is that those notoriously outdated old systems are going to have to be replaced soon anyway. Many are about thirty years old use computer languages no longer taught in college. The industry will have to invest in new technology, and DLT solutions will fortunately be ready at just the right time to permit a real leap forward in efficiency and effectiveness. Blythe also says regulators are thinking right about these challenges and have the right tools to manage them. Her company is focused on banks' non-consumer activities, but think about the impact of these changes for everyone. Smart phones are demolishing the cost structure of delivering financial services, worldwide. Simultaneously, DLT is demolishing the cost of manufacturing and servicing them. The combination will bring vastly more efficient, affordable and accessible services. Blythe Masters is a fascinating person. She was previously a senior executive at J.P. Morgan, where she started as an intern and spent 27 years. In 2007 she was named head of Global Commodities, and left the firm in 2014 upon the unit's successful sale. She had also been responsible for the Corporate & Investment Bank's Regulatory Affairs, and was a member of the J.P. Morgan Corporate & Investment Bank Operating Committee and previously the firm's Executive Committee. From 2004 to 2007, she was Chief Financial Officer of the Investment Bank. Previously she headed the Global Credit Portfolio and Credit Policy and Strategy. Earlier positions included head of North American Structured Credit Products, co-head of Asset Backed Securitization and head of Global Credit Derivatives Marketing. From 2012 to 2014, Blythe was chair of the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA). From 2008-2010 she was chair of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). She currently chairs the board of Santander Consumer USA Holdings and serves on the boards the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the Global Fund for Women. She is an avid amateur equestrian. Her efforts have long generated interest and buzz, including this feature story in Bloomberg, others in Fortune and CNBC, and a Financial Times story on her company's blockchain test with Chase. In our discussion I quoted from an invaluable report on DLT by the Bank of England. Here is the quote I cited in our conversation - the report's opening lines: "The progress of mankind is marked by the rise of new technologies and the human ingenuity they unlock. In distributed ledger technology, we may be witnessing one of those potential explosions of creative potential that catalyse exceptional levels of innovation....that could prove to have the capacity to deliver a new kind of trust to a wide range of services." Please enjoy this thought-provoking conversation with Blythe Masters. Support the podcasts - A buck a show! I've decided to distill a lesson from the popular podcast series Hardcore History, by emulating their habit of asking everyone to send them "a buck a show." Some years ago, the show's host Dan Carlin realized the podcast was taking over his life - much as Barefoot Innovation has been doing with mine! He hit on the idea of asking listeners for "a buck a show," and eventually reached the point where he can devote himself to producing the series. Barefoot Innovation is produced part-time by me and two young, very talented helpers. One of them has a day job and the other is a full-time graduate student. If all our listeners will chip in a buck a show, we'll be able to expand our interviews, accelerate our pace (believe it or not, we currently run at a four- to five-month backlog from recording date to posting!), and be able to do some fun new things we have in mind for you. We'll appreciate any and all help to keep the show going, and growing! And remember to post a review on iTunes. Support the Podcast Subscribe to Our Mailing List Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

Barefoot Innovation has been in hiatus in recent weeks because my father passed away. I was in San Francisco and got a call saying he was suddenly ill and might not live through the day. I rushed for a redeye and flew all night home to Boston, where my son Matt met me and we drove to Harford in the wee hours. My brother and sister had rushed to our Dad too, and he had held on. In fact he began to do better, regaling us with stories in the ICU, bringing his sharp engineering mind to analyzing his medical situation, and enjoying us singing to him (we're a singing family). We had hopes he would recover, but a few days later, he worsened and ultimately did not pull through. He was 95 years old. His name was Glidden Sweet Doman. And he was a remarkable innovator. He's being widely remembered as the last of the great helicopter pioneers, and he was also an important inventor in wind energy. Those two industries share the same technology – the wickedly complex science of rotor dynamics. This very special episode of Barefoot Innovation is a conversation I recorded with him last Thanksgiving but had not yet posted. I got the idea of doing this podcast after watching a video of a talk he'd recently given at the New England Air Museum, which has two of his Doman Helicopters on permanent display. Listening to his lecture, I kept noticing parallels with the themes we discuss on Barefoot Innovation. It occurred to me that it would be fun to do a show inviting insights from someone who, nearly a century ago, began innovating in a field that's very different from finance, but that was being similarly transformed by new, fast-changing technology. Glid Doman was born in the village of Elbridge, New York, in 1921. His father, Albert Doman, brought electricity to that part of the state in 1890 (you can still see historic sites related to it), and was an inventor of the electric starter and electric windshield wiper. My Dad's uncle, Lewis Doman, invented the player piano. His half-brother Carl Doman pioneered both aircraft and automobile engines and became a senior executive at Ford. His half-sister Ruth Chamberlain was the first woman architect in the region. My family is loaded with the genes for invention and entrepreneurship. For my Dad as a boy, the most exciting field of invention was aviation. Airplanes were barnstorming farm fields. Airlines did not yet exist. And my Dad, who avidly read Popular Mechanics, built an airplane in his back yard (you'll hear in the podcast whether he ever made it fly). Aviation was the new technology then, the way digitization and mobile phones and blockchains are the tech frontiers today -- or genetics or robotics or 3D printing. Aviation was full of novel engineering challenges that were not yet understood. Flight was also inspiring bold predictions about how our lives were going to change, some of which were hilariously wrong – a good lesson for people like me who like to try to forecast tech impacts. For instance, in clearing out our parents' attic in recent days, my siblings and I found a magazine cover story advising on women's fashion for the coming trend of traveling by helicopter. This little podcast touches only a tiny fragment of what made my Dad fascinating, and has nothing on his great life partner, our late mother, Joan Hamilton Doman. They met because she was the only woman in the 50-person University of Michigan flying club in World War II – and she was its top pilot. They had an amazing six decades or so, built around family and his work. He knew all the aviation greats from Igor Sikorsky to Charles Lindberg. He was featured on aviation magazine covers and traveled throughout the world. He was enlisted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to help design a "space sail" to rendezvous with Haley's Comet (ultimately not deployed). He's been honored by his alma mater, the University of Michigan aeronautical engineering school. And when his helicopter company didn't reach scale, he pivoted to wind energy and invented a superior rotor design for wind turbines, using the same insights he'd developed working with helicopters. He led the design of two colossal experimental turbines funded by the Departments of Energy and Interior and installed in Wyoming. When he "retired" at age 65, he and my mother moved to Rome where he led international engineering teams in designing huge turbines in Europe. And then, in his 80's, he started a new wind energy venture of his own. Right up to his death, he continued to be engaged with an affiliated firm, Seawind Technology, which is actively working to deploy his "Gamma" rotor designs on offshore wind turbines in Europe and other parts of the world. Decades before computers could model the movements of rotor blades, my Dad used a combination of intuition, math, physics and relentless measurement to understand, correctly, the movement of spinning blades. For both helicopters and wind turbines, my Dad created massively simplified rotor designs and drastically reduced the stress on the blades as they rotate. This captures huge efficiency gains and virtually eliminates blade failure, the bane of most rotor systems. As he explains in our talk, one key to this was to realize that the commonly-used three-bladed rotor design is inherently unstable. Wind turbines, he argued, should have two blades and helicopters – because they have to fly forward – need four. Our conversation elicited a lot of my Dad's thoughts about how to work with young, little-understood technology, as both an engineer and entrepreneur. While we didn't cover all the ground I'd hoped to, you'll hear him imparting Lean Startup-type wisdom. As a young engineer, for instance, he used a jackknife to cut open the balsa wood of a Sikorsky rotor blade to install measurement gauges on it and figure out what it was doing. He bought a postwar helicopter body for a dollar. He got hold of a Chevrolet clutch to use in his helicopter engine. His team invented do-it-yourself wind tunnels. It's an MVP approach – a minimum viable product – in which they methodically identified, isolated, and intensively tested issues and reaped what today we call "rapid learning" and "fail-fast" lessons. As they figured out answers, they quickly pivoted, trying to succeed in an industry where, unlike today's fintech, entrepreneurs needed huge amounts of capital. (In our recording, he talks about how easily his enterprise raised money, but that pattern did not hold over the decades.) Our conversation only touches on a few of these lessons (and nothing about the wind business), but shining through it is his defining trait, the one that made him most successful, which was unbounded and insatiable curiosity. Mainly, this episode shares his secret to being an innovator – and to having a wonderful career. His advice: find organizations that have a lot of interesting problems, and go there and figure out how to solve them. For those intrigued with the technology history of the twentieth century, I'm attaching early chapters of a biography that my brother, Steve Doman – also an aeronautical engineer -- is writing about our father's journey. Here, also, is an overview and short video on Doman Helicopters created by my sister, Terry Gibbon (she too is an entrepreneur, with her own video company). And here is a short video of one of the wind turbines. To prepare this episode, I re-listened to the recording just a few weeks after his passing. One thing I notice is that, as we had this conversation after our Thanksgiving dinner last fall, my Dad's comments kept making me laugh. Whenever he said goodbye to people, he always added the advice, "keep smiling." Words to live by. Let me share two updates about me and the show. First, I've become involved in a very significant project aimed at helping prepare our U.S. financial regulatory framework for the challenges raised by innovation. I'm going to stay in my Harvard fellowship for a second year, still writing my book on innovation and regulation, but will also be devoting much of my time to this initiative, which I'll tell you more about as it develops. One result of the new project is that I've decided to suspend the Regulation Innovation video series we launched earlier this year. I expect to reactivate it when I have time to create the videos. Meanwhile, they are still available, still for free, at www.RegulationInnovation.com. Please do check them out. As I said when we started the series, I think the articles that accompany these videos might be the most important writing I've ever done. Second, we will soon be back from the Barefoot Innovation hiatus, and what a line up we have! We'll have CFPB Director Richard Cordray; Digital Asset Holdings' Blythe Masters; National Consumer Law Center's Lauren Saunders; the prize-winning founders of Bee, Vinay Patel and Max Gasner; Harvard professor and behavioral economics scholar Brigitte Madrian; Funding Circle's U.S. CEO Sam Hodges; QED Investors co-founder and venture capital wise man Caribou Honig, and the chief compliance officers of both Citi and Wells Fargo, Kathryn Reimann and Yvette Hollingsworth Clark, together. And those are the ones we've already recorded! We have many more exciting people in the scheduling queue. This is why we ask you to send in "a buck a show" – the show has turned into a major enterprise, just because we have so many fascinating people to talk with. We'll try to speed up production as best we can, I'll look forward to your continued feedback. Meanwhile, keep smiling. Jo Ann Click below to donate your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going and growing. Support the Podcast Subscribe to Our Mailing LIst Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

In addition to our podcast, please take a look at Raul's keynote at the EMERGE Forum. I am constantly amazed by the fascinating and unpredictable course of our conversations on Barefoot Innovation - and what a fun one I had with Raul Vazquez, CEO of Oportun. I always like to ask my guests to tell us how they, themselves, keep up with technology. With Raul, I asked this just as I thought we were wrapping up, and the question launched us on a whole new conversation. He's definitely my first guest to bring up potential uses of virtual reality in financial services, not to mention the first to describe virtually interacting with bison. He thinks we're heading to a "transformative" ability for "anyone, regardless of their incomes" to be able to immerse themselves in a virtual world to try out products and experiences. As sometimes happens as I get to know great innovators, this is a second podcast with the same company -- click here to listen to our prior discussion with Luz Urrutia, Global Head of Retail. Oportun is based in Silicon Valley and was formerly called Progresso Financiero. It leverages advanced data analytics and technology to provide affordable, credit-building loans to U.S. Hispanics and others with limited or no credit history. The company's proprietary platform risk-scores loan applicants, calculates each one's ability to repay, approves the loans it believes can be paid back, and sets loan amounts and terms to fit individual budgets. Customer accounts are also reported to credit bureaus to help establish credit history. The goal is to combine a highly personal experience with back-office efficiency. Between 2006 and 2015, Oportun helped more than 689,000 customers, disbursing more than $2.2 billion through more than 1.3 million small dollar loans. Raul joined Oportun in 2012 after nine years in senior leadership roles at Walmart, including as EVP and President of Walmart West, President and CEO of Walmart.com, and EVP of Global eCommerce for developed markets. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Staples, Inc. and is a member of the Federal Reserve Board's Community Advisory Council. He's a graduate of Stanford University with BS and MS degrees in industrial engineering, and also earned an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania. This is one of those fun episodes where we could have kept talking for hours if we hadn't run out of time. So...enjoy my conversation with Raul Vazquez! To learn more about Oportun Financial, click here. Click here to Opor-tune in to Raul's presentation at last year's EMERGE conference about Oportun's four key learnings so far. To register for this year's indispensable Emerge in June in New Orleans, click here. And here's my favorite Wired article on voice technology: "We're on the Brink of a Revolution in Crazy-Smart Digital Assistants" A note on the podcasts - A buck a show! I've decided to distill a lesson from the popular podcast series Hardcore History, by emulating their habit of asking everyone to send them "a buck a show." Some years ago, the show's host Dan Carlin realized the podcast was taking over his life - much as Barefoot Innovatoin has been doing with mine! He hit on the idea of asking listeners for "a buck a show," and eventually reached the point where he can devote himself to producing the series. Barefoot Innovation is produced part-time by me and two young, very talented helpers. One of them has a day job and the other is a full-time graduate student. If all our listeners will chip in a buck a show, we'll be able to expand our interviews, accelerate our pace (believe it or not, we currently run at a four- to five-month backlog from recording date to posting!), and be able to do some fun new things we have in mind for you. We'll appreciate any and all help to keep the show going, and growing! And remember to post a review on ITunes. Support the Podcast A note on my Regulation Innovation videos and the most important writing I've ever done Also click here to watch the new Regulation Innovation videos we've posted and read the new articles. These are currently a free sample but will soon become limited to subscribers. Every month, I'm creating a short video briefing and then backing it up with a deep article that shares what I've been learning about financial innovation, and also shares my hard-earned secrets about how I've been learning it. The articles are rich with links to resources -- everything from news reports and white papers to statistical trends to my very favorite Ted Talks. My goal is to use this pairing of videos and deep articles to repackage my consulting advice, so it can reach a wide audience affordably. In essence, I'm searching the fintech world and curating the best insights for you. As a series, it's a journey through this changing landscape, finding the keys to thriving on disruption with me as your guide. I've done a huge amount of writing over the years - I've published hundreds of articles. These are the most important, valuable writings I've ever done. Again, these are currently free - I hope everyone will try them out. Upcoming shows We have terrific shows come up - the amazing Blythe Masters, the very innovative founders of Bee, and much more. Join me then! Subscribe To Our Mailing LIst Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!