Uncategorized Archives - Provoke.fm Media

Michelle Tinsley isn't so ready to kiss the bank branch goodbye.   As an expert in retail digital transformation, she thinks that the personal will become more valuable, not less, as technology continues to become an greater part of our environments.

One of the aims of Fintech is to lower the price of access to services that were once considered the province of the well-to-do.

In 2015, Brandon Krieg noticed that there was a large swath of the public that were underserved in investing. They either didn't know how to start, or didn't have the assets to make investing a priority. And they considered meeting an advisor too costly or beyond their means. He decided to found Stash, a mobile app that takes the pain out of entry into investing.

Today, Brett King, Ron Shevlin, Brian Roemmele, and Brandon Krieg talk about why or how that population is underserved, and what Stash is doing to create a comfortable frictionless point of entry for investing.

Also, we will be talking to Travis Dulaney, member of the Fed's Faster and Secure Payments taskforce about why 2018 is the year that adoption will exponentially increase across the US.

Africa is poised to be a 3 trillion dollar economy by 2030. Kenya, with the success of MPESA, has been the economic power house of east Africa. Due to this widely adopted digital payment system, there are big opportunities in building complete digital systems and truly use technology for the aims of financial inclusion.

The MasterCard Innovation Lab, established with a 19 million dollar grant from The Gates Foundation, has created a new product called Kionnect, which is a digital payments solution- from ear to tail- to include micro-small to medium enterprises in the wider financial system, and give them the access and advantages of credit, payment flexibility, and inventory management.

Thank you to MasterCard for hosting us in Nairobi. Thank you to Michael Eliot, Phillip Herrey, Bruno Witvoet, Temitope Seni-Alabede and Dennis Gikunda.

To learn more about the lab in Nairobi, go to their site: https://www.mastercard.us/content/mccom/en-us/about-mastercard/corp-responsibility/social-sustainability/the-mastercard-labs-for-financial-inclusion.html/

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Customers are switching to VoiceFirst devices at a rate that outpaces other adoption. And unlike many technologies, VoiceFirst adoption is high with all generations, particularly GenX and older. Many businesses- including financial institutions- are scrambling to find designers for voice first, figure out how to market with it, and understand how to design services around it. As they do, will this adoption determine which banks will continue to make money and will it assist them in their mission for financial inclusion?

Brett King is hosting. JP Nicols, host of Serial Intrapreneur is co-hosting.

The guests today are:

Jim Marous, Co-publisher of the Financial Brand

Theo Lau, LinkedIn Top 20 Voice

Penny Crosman, Editor at Large, American Banker

Whether you are a small community bank or a large national bank, you deal with issues of digitalization, helping your communities grow, creating and sustaining trust, and moving banking into the future. Today, we are bringing you samples of two of Provoke.fm shows:

First JP Nicols Serial Intrapreneur interviews CEO of Citizen Edmonds Bank, Jill Castilla about how she persisted until she dug the bank out of the red, and continues to innovate to keep the bank ahead of the curve.

And Simon Spencer's Breaking Banks Asia interviews Dilan Rajasingham, VP and bank futurist of Commonwealth Bank of Australia about the coming mesh economy and how banks can help.

Subscribe to BB ASIA- https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-banks-asia-provoke-media/id1297391008?mt=2

https://player.fm/series/breaking-banks-asia-provoke-media

Subscribe to Serial Intrapreneur- https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/serial-intrapreneur/id1291515840?mt=2

https://player.fm/series/serial-intrapreneur

The financial issues of the burgeoning marijuana industry highlight some very important problems for a lot of small businesses in the United States. First, it is cash heavy, which make it vulnerable. Second, the clash of laws and regulations make it difficult for banks to service them. And third, it is more costly for them to verify their source of product. One solution to many of these issues could be the blockchain, which offers a cheap solution to verifying source, and provides a payment system that can eliminate an over-reliance on cash.

This week, Brett hosts with Jason Henrichs, Co-host and Host of the Fintech5 podcast, Penny Crosman, Editor at Large for American Banker, and Jessica Versteeg, CEO of Paragon and ParagonCoin, a cannabis blockchain and cryptocurrency aimed at solving some of the issues as the cannabis industry grows.

Many in the fintech industry believe that blockchain is overhyped, but Jason Potts, who has made it his life’s work to study new technologies, actually believes it is under hyped and that it is a technology that changes the fundamental understanding of business and commercial interaction globally.

A month ago, he opened the Blockchain Innovation Hub, the first social science research institute on blockchain in the world. Starting with the study of how blockchain will affect markets, there are rapid plans for expansion to study the many different applications that are possible with blockchain protocols, and what that will mean for the nature of work and the nature of business.

Blockchain may be the technology that actually matches the natural nature of decentralized markets, ending the need for a central point of validation, and creating a much less inhibited flow of capital. Just as the internet changed the flow, nature, and control of information, the blockchain could do the same for money. But unlike the critical thinking and extra validation measures you need to put into information on the internet, the blockchain’s distributed ledger can act as a naturally incentivized, distributed, proof of validation.

It could change everything. And probably will.

Jason Potts is Professor of Economics in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University, and Director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub, the first social science research institute on Blockchain in the world.

In 2017, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia. Jason is one of Australia’s top economists, specialising in economic growth, innovation and institutions, as well as the theory of economic evolution and complexity. His work has been applied to the economics of creative industries, intellectual property, and cities, and to the study of common pool resources. He received the Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowship, and was the youngest ever winner of the InternationalJoseph A. Schumpeter Prize.

He has written five books and published over 80 articles on these themes, and is a regular media commentator. He is currently the Vice-President of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society, an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, editor of the Cambridge Elements series on Evolutionary Economics, and editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics.

Dominic (Dom) Pym and Anson Parker set out to reboot banking. Actually, to hear them tell it, they are not in banking- they are a tech company. They shun the name Neo-bank. But, as they were looking to build a new company, they were working with banks and realized that banks needed a reboot. And like most good entrepreneurs, they fixed the problem that was in front of them.

Hence, we have Alt – a reboot, and alternative, a do-over- to the customer experience in banking. If a bank has traditionally been a gym, Alt wants to redesign it for you to have the option of a personal trainer, to help you build wealth and make the most of your money.

Alt has a waiting list right now. You can sign up here.

Bios:

Dominic Pym has been involved in numerous start-ups and large scale Information Technology projects since the 90’s, in Australia and overseas.

Currently working on launching Alt (alt.com.au), a digital alternative to your current bank, built from the ground up to help you spend wisely and save effortlessly.

Dominic is also a co-founder of Ferocia, an extraordinary technology team re-imagining Internet banking (launched in 2014 with Bendigo Bank https://demo.bendigobank.com.au), Pin Payments (Australia’s first all-in-one online payments platform) and Clear Interactive (acquired in 2009 by NZX, operators of the New Zealand Stock Exchange and electricity markets).

Anson Parker has been working in the internet industry since 1996. Having battled on the front-lines in most areas of web production, he has found product management to be my true calling…

George Lawson’s role at Ant Financial is to grow Alipay’s ability to pay for goods and services in Australia. Alipay, for those that don’t know, is a lifestyle app with 520 million subscribers. That’s right- 520 million. In China, it is almost difficult to get around without the app. It is so ingrained as part of the lifestyle that it is used to pay for everything. When people go to the market, the first thing they do is open Alipay. While some would call it a payments app, that is only a fraction of what it does. It is used throughout every financial transaction, from cabs and bike rentals, to knowing where the best deal is, to paying for dinner.

11/11, also known as Singles Day, is the equivalent of Black Friday in the US, but much much bigger. Last year, Ali Pay processed $18 Billion USD on Singles Day. This year, Ali Pay processed $7 Billion USD in the first 30 minutes.

Originally conceived as an escrow service, Alipay has exploded until it is completely integrated into the modern China. It has built a network of trust among customers and merchants that enables commerce, frictionless payment, and frictionless information.

Alipay is a modern day behemoth, modeling the changes that are coming to consumer behavior, the payments industry, and global movement of money.

As head of emerging technologies at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Dilan Rajasingham is building a mesh economy. A mesh economy is about the convergence of new technologies; Artificial Intelligence will interact with the Internet of Things, and we will have an economy where the convergence of technologies will be machines talking to machines without human intervention.

Dilan sees the bank of the future as an enabler of that economy of convergence, but also we have to safeguard our humanity and talk now about the ethical implications of our technological choices. Unless we are conscientious, and we look at how these technologies layer, then we could create convergence that doesn’t lead to improvements as AI becomes more prevalent in our lives. When quantum computing is layered under IOT under AI under voice interface, then we will have a mesh economy because we will have a world built on a mesh of technologies.

But Dilan also sees that AI and IOT give us unprecedented opportunities to make life better. The help of voice assistants in running our homes is a more natural haptic than any other interface. Technology will be embedded into our work lives, homes, and bodies. Eventually, we may interact simply through our thoughts.