Structural Shifts | aperture podcast

We have a special podcast episode, which is all about Embedded Banking. We hosted four excellent guests:

1. What is embedded banking?

Today we speak with Hasan Nawaz, co-founder and CEO at HUBUC — a banking as a service (BaaS) platform that enables brands to open up new revenue lines by seamlessly embedding financial products into their customer journeys. HUBUC takes care of all the regulatory requirements and manages compliance risk. This allows their customers to get their services to market in less time with fewer resources. In this episode, you are going to learn what banking as a service or BaaS actually is, why it’s not the same as embedded finance. What’s happening right now in the BaaS landscape, the difference between BaaS 1.0 and 2.0, and more.

Before we get to the show, we want to flag that on May 1st we say happy birthday to aperture. We’re two years old! In case you are brand new to us, we design build, fund, and scale digital age companies. Now on with the episode.

Today we host Neri Tollardo, Tinkoff’s Vice President of Strategy. In this episode, we discuss about Tinkoff’s entrepreneurial spirit (which has no hierarchy or bureaucracy, and this is something that they plan on maintaining as they scale), about the difference between creating an ecosystem as opposed to a conglomerate of different goods and services, how Tinkoff has managed to create insane customer engagement compared to most banks by combining their content with their technology, and more. Before joining Tinkoff, Neri was a top ranked sell-side research analyst at Morgan Stanley. Enjoy the episode!

Climate change expert Chris Goodall says that fighting climate change isn’t as challenging or as expensive as we think it is and can actually benefit our economy. In today’s episode, we discuss how the climate change movement can advance social change, whether we can save our planet without some structural shifts to capitalism, nuclear energy, the politics behind tackling the climate crisis, and more. Chris has written several books, of which What We Need To Do Now For A Zero Carbon Future and How To Live A Low Carbon Life.

This week’s podcast is the recording of an actual live event — a 4x4 Virtual Salon — we hosted in anticipation of the launch of our Digital Age Wealth Management Report (which is now out! 🎉). Our guests were Sid Sahgal (Product Manager at Hydrogen), Nikolai Hack (Head of Strategy & Partnerships at Nucoro), Qiaojia Li (CEO at Rosecut) and Michael O’Sullivan (author “The Levelling”, ex-CIO Credit Suisse). We discuss: changing consumer trends; changing technology; new business models and new fitness landscape for wealth managers. We hope you enjoy and, if you listen carefully, you will get access to some unfair advantage! 🤷

Our guest is Stian Westlake, co-author of ‘Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy’ and we discuss the implications of an economy built increasingly on intangible assets, even more so in the post-pandemic world. In this podcast, we discuss the four S’s that explain how intangible assets behave differently than tangible ones, why we’re not seeing more economic growth or higher productivity right now, even though intangible assets are more scalable, what governments need to do to mitigate the increased income inequality that’s occurring in part due to the rise of intangible investments, and more. Stian serves as the Chief Executive of the Royal Statistical Society. Previously, he served as an advisor to three British ministers for science, innovation, research, and higher education. He also led the policy and research team at Nesta — UK’s National Foundation for Innovation.

We sit down with Marc Rubinstein, a former analyst and hedge fund manager who currently authors Net Interest — a weekly insight and analysis newsletter on the world of finance. Each note of his newsletter explores a theme currently trending in the sector, whether it’s FinTech or economics, or investment cycles — and today, you are going to hear about a little bit of everything. Marc and Ben Robinson discuss the history of equity research and where it’s at now, whether current regulation is tilted too far against banks, the twofold challenge facing challenger banks, the past and future of embedded banking, the four key differences between investing in private companies versus public and more.

Our guest is Manos Schizas — Lead in Regulation and RegTech at Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge. We discuss how regulatory change is accelerating so fast that people alone can’t deal with it and how does the technological solution addressing the problem looks like. Can technology solve this problem at scale? How much innovation are we seeing thanks to machine learning? And we also discuss about the Regulatory Genome Project, a recently launched long-term project that aims to sequence the world’s (financial) regulation, allowing developers and firms to build own applications on top of the platform. Before joining the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance, Manos also served as a regulator with the UK’s FCA.