Barefoot Innovation Podcast

Today I have something different for you. Last spring, I recorded a conversation for the virtual South by Southwest conference with Cleve Mesidor. Cleve founded the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain, among other roles. SX had us to talk about the lack of diversity in the tech sector, and what to do about it. We had a great conversation, and we got permission to share it with you as a podcast.

October 11, 2021

My guest today is one of the most high-ranking women in the world of banking. Stephanie Cohen is Global Co-Head of Consumer and Wealth Management, Goldman Sachs. In that role, she co-leads Goldman’s digital bank, Marcus. We have talked on the show before -- and we do so again today -- about the uniqueness of Marcus. It’s a rare hybrid: a wholly new financial company, created by an old one -- in this case, by one that is 152 years old.

September 21, 2021

The single most critical factor in meeting this challenge is to equip regulators with really sound, empirical, trustable information about how these technologies will affect the public. And that’s why I’m excited to welcome today’s guest. Melissa Koide is CEO of FinRegLab, and she joins me to talk about how she and her colleagues are meeting this need.

August 26, 2021

Last spring, AIR launched an initiative called the Crypto Climate Accord, a voluntary effort to make the crypto sector carbon neutral by 2030. Our partners in this project are two other nonprofit organizations -- the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Energy Web Foundation. My guest today is Jesse Morris, Energy Web’s CEO and one of the most visionary innovators in the climate space.  In this conversation, we talk about the Accord -- what we’re doing and who is joining in. The group includes crypto miners, crypto exchanges, renewable energy providers, and financial services firms offering crypto options. Please note that all kinds of entities that work with crypto are invited to participate. 

August 05, 2021

Kenya is the birthplace of mobile money. In 2007, long before most of the world had even imagined mobile electronic payments, Safaricom introduced M-Pesa, enabling Kenyans to load money into their phones and use the phone to pay for things. The rest is history. Spreading quickly throughout Kenya and far beyond, this innovation sparked a worldwide shift toward instant, mobile, affordable movement of money. And it helped inspire a whole generation of fintech innovators, who saw that cell phones were reaching nearly everyone in the world and could become, in effect, banking infrastructure. The phones were already in people’s hands. People already knew how to use them. The phone could carry additional services at incredibly low marginal costs. People who had little money, people for whom traditional banks were never going to build and staff a traditional branch, suddenly didn’t need one anymore. The world had changed.

July 07, 2021

I get the opportunity to work with regulators all over the world who are building a new, better regulatory model for the digital age. It makes me a good judge -- I know when something is exciting. And something exciting is happening now at the FDIC. (For listeners outside the United State, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is, among other things, our primary US regulator for small banks.) We’ve had the FDIC chairman, Jelena McWilliams, on the show twice. She is a remarkable leader who is driving an agenda of transformational change to modernize both bank technology and regulatory technology, at the same time. In 2019 she announced the creation of an innovation unit, FDiTech, and embarked on a search for a Chief Innovation Officer. This spring -- more than two years later, after an extremely diligent search -- she found him. Sultan Meghji has set out to change how bank regulation is done.

June 22, 2021

In 2014, two countries, on opposite sides of the world, embarked on a path to make themselves global centers of fintech. One was Singapore, where the Monetary Authority of Singapore, MAS, began building a uniquely creative and powerful innovation ecosystem. The other was the UK, where the Financial Conduct Authority kicked off an innovation program, often in collaboration with the Bank of England. In short order, both countries recognized that the same technologies that drive fintech also have to drive financial regulation. The whole system must transition to the digital age.

June 20, 2021

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