Barefoot Innovation Podcast

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.

Think back to that time, 7 years ago. If you’re like me, you were not a podcast listener back then. I myself had never even heard a podcast and couldn’t even have named one. But Matt and I have long had a practice of having breakfast every few weeks to talk about how tech is changing finance and financial regulation. He has been the source of some of my best ideas, including that I should write the Regtech Manifesto a couple of years ago – and that I needed a podcast.

In the first few years of the show, a major goal was to bring voices from the fintech and regtech worlds to people in the traditional worlds of banking and regulation, who at that time were not yet hearing them. In those days, fintech was the new frontier of finance. I like to think we played a part in bringing the realms of traditional finance and technology together. Today, certainly, everyone in the financial world understands fintech. 

So for 2022, we plan to try to do the same thing with the issues that are now at the frontier, beyond fintech. We’re heading into territory that is not yet mapped, to see what we find there.

The nearest part of that frontier landscape is crypto. It of course is being explored very widely today and is the process of getting mapped. But, out beyond the crypto zone, are some wilder new lands that have been opened up by it and that are much less known. Some of these places don’t even have official names yet, but we talk about them with evolving labels like Defi, DAOs, NFTs, Web 3.0, and the metaverse.

We’re going to go out and look at them all through 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. 

We want to be sure to hear from you about that journey, so be sure to tell us, at our site, what you want to hear and who you want to hear from.

It’s going to be fun.

More for our Listeners

Welcome to March, Women’s History Month! 

We have many interesting shows coming up including Queen Maxima of the Netherlands; Anne Boden, CEO of Starling Bank in the UK; Sigal Mandelker, former Treasury official and now at Ribbit Capital; Nicole Elam and Robert James of the National Bankers Association, and returning guest Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, and Tomicah Tillemann. 

At AIR, we’re excited to be partnering with the Reserve Bank of India’s Innovation Hub on the Swanari TechSprint. It supports our mission of fair finance by helping Indian women achieve financial independence, raise the profile of female-led enterprises and women in technology, and expand the use of the TechSprint model to drive regulatory innovation. Please reach out to join Us! We are looking for: Indian nationals with a range of skills in technology, design, communications, policy, and financial services to participate on sprint teams, and we invite global observers to join the inspiration community. You can click on this link to learn more.