March 10, 2026
Long-time listeners know that every now and then, we have a show that goes into my own personal pantheon of favorites. This one is among the very top. It is Part 2 of the terrific show we did last fall on financial crime, with Ari Redbord of TRM Labs, Carole House of Penumbra Strategies, and Matt Van Buskirk of Hummingbird. These are people who know how to find financial crime and have built tools that do it.
Today’s conversation is so great that it inspired me to kick off a new series format in Barefoot Innovation, that I’m calling Solvable. These will be episodes where we are going to talk about big problems that actually could already be solved by today’s technology, if only we humans will realize it, grasp the opening, and change how we do things to actually put new solutions in place.
Some of these challenges will be harder than others. Financial crime will be very tough, for sure. It is a huge, financial, human, legal and geopolitical problem. For a snapshot of how bad it is, listen to Part I of this two-part show, and also listen to the opening of this episode, where my guests share eye-opening stats and examples of the breathtaking scope of these crimes today – fraud, scams, money laundering, and cyber risk, which are all expanding at light speed now that their perpetrators are armed with AI that has become easy, affordable, and massively powerful.
Yes, the solutions are very difficult, but they are also fundamentally simple. These are financial crimes. That means they can be found in financial data, using the techniques that have become available in recent years. We have the financial data. All we have to do is pool it and analyze it to detect the patterns – the connections and typologies that signal possible crime. To pool it, of course, we have to be sure we can protect it, in terms of both privacy and security. That, in turn, means we don’t literally want to pool it – i.e., put it all in one place that becomes a “honey pot” attracting bad actors. Instead, we want to make it widely available and useful to the legitimate players who need it, such as law enforcement, national security, and the banks and other financial companies. Thanks to new technology, there are ways to do this. Technologically, it’s solvable.
So, let’s solve it! The discussion in this episode doesn’t get us all the way there. We can’t map all the solutions in 45 minutes. But my guests do identify most of the key elements needed. In our Solvable episodes, I want to do exactly that – clarify what needs to happen to solve a problem; identify the obstacles that are preventing them from happening; and then pinpoint what has to change to solve for the obstacles. And who needs to do it.
My mind is obsessing on solutions this year, because so many things are changing, so fast, and are being driven, so often, by new technology. Some problems are rapidly getting worse. Some new ones are arising. They all are moving faster than our current problem-solving toolbox is designed to address. If we try to solve these problems with our old methods, we’re going to fail. Bad things will happen. And good things won’t happen – things that are becoming possible but may be accidentally strangled by outdated legal and regulatory measures.
What are we going to do about that?
To answer that question, we need to develop the reflex of asking whether the technology, itself, can be part of the solution, because usually, it can. To counter AI risks, for example, we will need to use AI.
Beyond that, we are going to have to change the human systems operating around new technologies, to be able to deploy it safely and effectively and of course, to do the many things the technology can’t. We will need to change people issues like talents and training and cultures. We will need to change legal frameworks. We will need better ways to collaborate across silos.
I think we can find our way to doing the people work, if we believe that hard problems can actually be solvable.
So, let’s hear from our guests on how to solve financial crime!
Carole House
Carole is the CEO of Penumbra Strategies, Distinguished Senior Fellow at ACAMS, and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. She recently served as the White House National Security Council’s Special Advisor for Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Policy. She was the chair of the Technology Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has served on advisory councils to New York and Idaho state regulators, and is an Advisory Board Member for the U.S.-China Digital World Order Initiative of Third Way. Carole has a Masters degree from Georgetown University and is a former U.S. Army captain.
Ari Redbord
Ari is the Global Head of Policy at the blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs. He is also Vice-Chair of the CFTC Technology Advisory Committee (TAC).
Prior to joining TRM, Ari was the Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary and the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the United States Treasury. In that position, he worked with teams from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), and other Treasury units to use sanctions and other regulatory tools to safeguard the financial system from illicit use by terrorist financiers, weapons of mass destruction proliferators, drug kingpins, and other rogue actors, including Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. In addition, Ari worked closely with regulators, Capitol Hill and interagency activities on issues related to the Bank Secrecy Act, cryptocurrency, and anti-money laundering strategies.
Prior to Treasury, Ari was an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia for eleven years, where he investigated and prosecuted terrorism, espionage, threat finance, cryptocurrency, export control, child exploitation and human trafficking cases.
Matt Van Buskirk
Matt is cofounder and co-CEO, Regulatory, for Hummingbird, a regtech company combatting financial crime. Matt is a regulatory futurist and an advocate for the development of open-source and interoperable software solutions for the regulatory space. He is a frequent speaker on regulatory modernization in venues around the world.
Prior to launching Hummingbird, Matt was the director of compliance at Circle.com where he oversaw its regulatory compliance program from pre-launch to its international expansion. Circle is a blockchain technology company and issuers of the stablecoin USDC. It is focused on transforming the world economy with secure, simple, and less costly technology for storing and using money. In his role there, Matt developed a set of methodologies for building effective compliance and risk programs in cryptocurrency fintechs that has informed much of his later work.
Matt has also served as a bank regulator with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision and worked with the regulatory consulting firm Treliant Risk Advisors.
His speaking credentials include numerous government agency and financial industry events, including the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Fintech Festival, Money 2020 in the U.S. and Europe, Finovate Europe, the ABA Regulatory Compliance and Financial Crimes Conferences, and at government agencies such as the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Japanese, Irish and Dutch Central Banks, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Reserve. He has also appeared on the Nasdaq Tech Talks TV segment.
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