Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Today's show is different. My guest, Sigal Mandelker, is the former U.S. Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and she talks to us with exceptional reflexion and, frankly, frustration, about why and how we need our government to work better. That's not a novel theme, of course – the world is noisy with critiques of government. Sigal's message is distinct, though, and desperately needs to be heard, because it's about technology. Now a General Partner at Ribbit Capital, she's on the cutting edge of understanding the technology gap in financial regulation, specifically in the fight against terrorism and financial crime but also more broadly, because both the public and private sectors are using technology that is several generations out of date.

Given New York's unique role in global finance, the state always has top notch regulators and is normally at the forefront in addressing market change. It's not surprising, then, that the state is focused today on the technology transformation underway in finance, including crypto. My two guests today are both leaders at the New York state Department of Financial Services – DFS. Kaitlin Asrow is Executive Deputy Superintendent of Research and Innovation. Peter Marton is Deputy Superintendent of Virtual Currency.

My guests today are Nicole Elam, CEO of the National Bankers Association, and Robert James II, who chairs the NBA's board of directors and is also president of Carver Financial Corporation in Savannah, Georgia. The NBA is the trade association for Minority Depository Institutions, or MDIs. It was founded nearly a century ago, in 1927, to build on the work being done by a group of Black-owned banks that were chartered shortly after the US Civil War, because white-owned banks were not serving the needs of Black communities.

How do you solve the biggest, hardest problems in the world? Usually, we just don't. They persist. Today, though, we live in an age that's putting powerful new technologies into our hands, opening up ways to make seemingly impossible solutions suddenly, theoretically, possible – if we can put them to use. These are the challenges that get taken up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In financial services, the foundation's goal is to achieve full financial inclusion by bringing all the excluded people in the world's emerging markets into the formal financial system… thereby unlocking massive gains in human wellbeing, everywhere. My guest today is a leader in that work. He is Kosta Peric, the foundation's Deputy Director of Financial Services for the Poor, and in this episode, he talks to us about the art of how to do this uniquely difficult type of problem solving.

My guest today is one of the world's leading innovators in this effort. Rashesh Bansal is the CEO of the Reserve Bank of India's Innovation Hub. In April, AIR worked with the RBIH and other partners on the Swanari TechSprint, named for the Hindi word meaning "self-reliant woman." I'm excited to have Rajesh on the show today to share a perspective that is fascinating on so many dimensions. It's a story of a bold new innovation strategy invented by a major central bank. It's a story about taking TechSprints to a whole new level as a method of regulatory innovation. It's a story about the incredible power of public/private collaboration and co-creation of solutions for intractable problems. And it's a story about new ideas for how to achieve full financial inclusion, in general and specifically for women.

My guest today is Michael Hsu, the Acting Comptroller of the Currency, and we are talking all things– and only things – crypto. Our conversation covers a lot of other ground: the lack of interoperability among today's stablecoins; whether and how stablecoin issuers should have bank charters; problems with blockchain technologies; the evolution of Central Bank Digital Currencies; the role of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency; whether US regulation could undermine America's international competitiveness; the unique challenges posed by regulating DAOs (since they are basically just a set of rules); potential lessons from the birth of the internet; and the blockchain "trilemma" cited by Vitalik Buterin forcing prioritized choices between decentralization, security and scalability. He also ponders the human factor, as people feel a sense of "community" in decentralized finance, while also embracing a world that promises to monetize, and transact around, nearly every aspect of their lives.

There are a lot of very rare things about my guest today, Anne Boden. She is one of a very small group of people who have founded what the U.K. calls challenger banks – banks that were chartered after the financial crisis as part of regulators' newly minted mandate to foster competition in the financial sector. She is one of the very small group of bank CEOs, worldwide, who are women – which makes her a great guest for an episode that we recorded at the end of March – which was Women's History Month. She is the CEO of a startup that turns a profit. Many don't. She is one of a very small group of bank CEOs whose roots are in technology, not banking. Her university degree was in chemistry and computer science. And she is the very rare bank CEO who has written a New York Times bestseller. Titled, Banking on it: How I Disrupted the Way We Manage Our Money Forever, her book recounts the amazing story of how Anne – then a senior executive at a global bank, in her mid-50's – decided to found, yes, a bank.

This is a special emergency episode of Barefoot Innovation with a call to action for helping to protect Ukrainian refugees from being preyed upon by human traffickers. Yesterday, I got a message from Stuart Watkins, the CEO of Zenoo, in Prague. I got to know Stu two years ago when AIR ran our first TechSprint on the US Paycheck Protection Program, which provided rescue funding for small businesses hit suddenly by the covid shutdowns. Zenoo, based in London and Prague, worked with the TechSprint teams from a Friday night to a Sunday night, developing tools for banks to use for fast, automated onboarding of PPP loan applicants. This week, Stu was reaching out for help with a different idea: a plan for protecting Ukrainian refugees by setting up a system to authenticate the identities of people offering them shelter and transportation.

My guest today is Ian Hollowbread, the Global Innovation Lead for Safe and Compliant at ING Bank. Ian and I have known each other since the early days of regtech, and even fintech, as I visited him in London to see the innovation lab he built at ING, figuring out how to do compliance better, using the best technology.

I started the Barefoot Innovation show in 2015. My guest today is the person who suggested I create a podcast. He is Matt Van Buskirk, Co-CEO of Hummingbird Regtech and also, among many things, a member of AIR's Advisory Council. We are starting a new special series of shows where we'll bring in guests and, instead of having them talk about what they're doing, we'll ask them to talk about what they are seeing, and learning, and thinking. In a way, we'll be going back to the original concept of the show, which was to make it possible for listeners to be like a fly on the wall in a fascinating conversation. I, for one, am having these kinds of conversations almost every day lately, with smart, visionary people who are trying to figure out the uncharted territory ahead, and how to navigate it.