Barefoot Innovation Podcast

What stands in the way of full financial inclusion and financial health? No CEO of a major financial company has thought as deeply about this challenge as today’s guest, PayPal’s Dan Schulman. More than anyone I can think of, Dan has been speaking on these themes for years and calling on us all to find innovations that can help. Today, he seems optimistic -- or at least determined. As nearly all our guests are doing, he points to the year of COVID as a turning point, both in breaking through to rapid new technology adoption and in galvanizing a real will to do better following the killing of George Floyd. Dan sees progress ahead.

June 04, 2021

My guest today, John Ryan, is the man of the hour. He is CEO of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, and CSBS is at the vortex of most of the currents of change swirling around the US financial system. What’s the future of banking charters? What’s the future for fintechs that want to operate nationwide? What’s the future for community banks? How will regulators keep up with the technology that’s transforming the markets they oversee? What’s the future of bank regulation itself? CSBS plays a key role in all of it. 

May 27, 2021

Every now and then I do a podcast where I feel like I hit a vein of gold. This is one of them. It’s one of our shows where I think you’ll want to listen several times and take notes, or print out the transcript and mark it up. My guest is Douglas Arner, who is the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law at Hong Kong University, and the Director and Cofounder of the Asian Institute of International Financial Law.

May 02, 2021

America has about 5,000 banks -- more than any other country. My guest today leads their national trade group. He is Rob Nichols, CEO of the American Bankers Association. He joined me for a conversation about how technology is changing banking, and especially community banks. While total banking volume is disproportionately done by large institutions, small community banks play a critical role in both our financial system, and in the life of the nation.

April 23, 2021

The Swahili word for “one” is mojaloop, and it inspired the name of the organization that is led by today’s guests. They are Paula Hunter and Lesley-Ann Vaughan of the Mojaloop Foundation. The open-source Mojaloop software was first developed in 2017 to support the financial inclusion work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, premised on the realization that reaching financially underserved people with digital financial services will require the financial system to use open and interoperable solutions. Just four years later, more than 400 developers are collaborating to create Mojaloop software that is helping service providers open markets and accelerate progress in emerging markets.

April 08, 2021

My guests today are leaders in the drive to bring the world’s poor into the formal financial system. They are Sharmista Appaya, Financial Sector Specialist at the World Bank Group, and Ivo Jenik, Financial Sector Specialist at CGAP. CGAP stands for the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor and sits within the World Bank as essentially a financial inclusion think tank. I first met Sharmista years ago in London when she headed the Bank of England’s Fintech Accelerator, and I’ve been running into Ivo in interesting places around the world for years, but they are now both based where I am, in Washington DC.

April 03, 2021

We are introducing some thematic series into Barefoot Innovation this year. One series will stretch our collective thinking out into the future and try to envision how technology will change financial services, not for the next few years, but over the next decade or two. My working title for this theme is, the Thinkers. And so we’re starting with Pindar Wong.

March 14, 2021

My guests today are Mike de Vere, CEO of Zest AI, and Teddy Flo, the company's general counsel. Zest is seeking to revolutionize credit underwriting by leveraging more information and analyzing it through machine learning. They started out as a lender, but have pivoted to selling tools to banks and other lenders, to equip them to make better lending decisions.

February 26, 2021