Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Today’s guest has her finger on the pulse of global change in the world of payments, including how the COVID pandemic is changing the world. She is Ann Cairns, Executive Vice Chair of Mastercard. I first met Ann at the Paris Fintech Forum last January, just before the virus turned our world upside down. It’s fitting, then, that we started our discussion with the pandemic, and specifically with how it is affecting women. By the time we finished, we had traveled far into the future of payments.

November 24, 2020

In late January, just a few short weeks before COVID shut down the world, I was in Paris (which now seems like a lifetime ago). As I was helping myself to a coffee in the speaker lounge of the Paris Fintech Forum, I ran into Renaud Laplanche. Renaud was one of our earliest guests on Barefoot Innovation when he was CEO of Lending Club, and I’m so happy to have him back today in his new role as CEO and co-founder of Upgrade. I wanted to talk with him about Upgrade, and also to get his thoughts about how the fintech sector has evolved since those days.

November 13, 2020

When I started my senior fellowship at Harvard in 2015, I moved into the Boston “Innovation District,” an old neighborhood where rough brick streets slope down to Boston Harbor. A few blocks from my apartment was one of Boston’s most exciting young fintechs, Circle. Today’s guest, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, was a guest on my podcast show back then. Today, he’s back. And what a world of change has transpired in these five years.

October 30, 2020

Today’s show is a special one because it includes breaking news. My guest is Linda Lacewell, the New York State Superintendent of the Department of Financial Services, and she will not only share her program for innovating in the midst of a pandemic, but will also announce an exciting initiative: the DFS is working with us at AIR to host New York’s first-ever regulatory tech sprint, in partnership with the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS).

October 15, 2020

In this episode, Sam tells us about Fundation’s journey, starting with his own very usual mix of skills and then the company’s launch as a direct line-of-credit lender to small businesses. He describes their epiphany, a few years back, in realizing that the technology platform they built was exactly what banks need in order to automate their own small business lending. Fundation had developed automated risk models that enable banks to say yes to business customers that, under traditional standards, would be rejected. Today, the company has a 50/50 split between direct lending and bank partnerships.

October 14, 2020

I’m delighted to say that my guests today are Allie Burns, the CEO of Village Capital, and Sarah Willis, Head of Financial Health Work at JPMChase and former Director at the MetLife Foundation.

September 28, 2020

Our regular listeners know I have a long history of working with community banks, including in small towns and rural communities across the country. So it’s a special treat to have today’s guest on the show. She is Rebeca Romero Rainey, President and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

September 09, 2020

Way back at the start of Barefoot Innovation, our very second episode featured one of the guests we have with us today. He is Shamir Karkal, CEO of Sila, and he’s joined on today’s show by his cofounder and Sila’s General Counsel, Angela Angelovska-Wilson.

August 24, 2020