496 Leaders and Leadership

Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

Today we bring you some of the best conversations from around the Provoke.fm network. First David Reiling, host of the Next Gen Banker podcast, talks with accidental banker and the host of Leaders in Lending, Jeff Keltner. Jeff is SVP of business development at Upstart, and they talk about using AI and predictive algorithms to improve access to affordable credit with less risk to banks and how this technology uses larger sets of data to help understand the real risks, as 80% of Americans have never defaulted on a loan, but less than half have a prime credit score.

Then Greg Palmer, host of the Finnovate podcast, talks with Jacqueline Baker, podcast host and leadership consultant about her recent book, The Unexpected Leader, Discovering the Leader Within You. Effective leadership isn’t confined to easily identifiable silos. It appears everywhere, and sometimes in the most unexpected of places.

Everyone can be a leader, and many of the best leaders are those who have leadership thrust upon them. You can find both of these podcasts, plus other great shows like The Futurist, Tech on Reg, Emerge Everywhere, Breaking Chains, Breaking Banks Europe, and Breaking Banks Asia Pacific, all on Provoke.fm and anywhere you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Next Gen Banker podcast, where we explore what’s next in banking and talk with the innovators responsible for creating positive change in the financial sector.

I am your host, David Reiling, and I’m very excited to welcome Jeff Keltner today. Jeff, thanks for being on the Next Gen Banker podcast. Thanks for having me.

I’m looking forward to it, Dave. Well, Jeff, right just before we get started, we always throw out a little reminder to our audience to listen to the musical feature at the end of each episode. It is somewhat of an interesting.

We got a little cult following with us on the music. So every episode, we shortcase one new artist from somewhere around the world and representing a wide range of genres. So check it out.

Sometimes it’s pretty cool. We got a pretty good following there. So Jeff, a little bit about your background.

You are the Senior Vice President of Business Development at Upstart, and before joining Upstart, you spent six years at Google, several years at IBM working in sales. You certainly are no stranger to the podcast world as you host Leaders in Lending, where you talk about the lending world and the future of the lending industry. Well, I’m always kind of curious with my guests how they get kind of where from their start to where they are today.

And if I have it, you started out with a degree in engineering. Then how did you end up in the finance industry in fintech? We call it the word I’ve heard of an accidental banker, accidental fintech. So yeah, I got a degree in computer systems engineering, which is some strange mix of electrical engineering and computer science that like 20 kids at my school do every year.

And somehow I got roped into doing that. I don’t really know how that happened. And when I came out, I kind of ended up deciding that I wanted to spend my career at the intersection of technology and what it can do in other industries, like where it makes an impact.

So I spent a couple of years at IBM selling, believe it or not, mainframe type computers, it was called AS400s, it was old school tech. And then I joined Google right in time for the launch of what is now Google Cloud. But Google was originally Gmail for domains, Gmail for businesses.

And I ran the education side of that for a number of years and then ran a lot of the global account strategy as we were trying to figure out how to displace Microsoft in those accounts. So really, again, if that kind of for the cloud revolution, how does a cloud get deployed in different industries? And then the individual who had been running the Google Enterprise division, Dave Gerrard, left and founded Upstart and I called him and said, this place feels pretty big and stodgy and slow now. What are you doing over there? It sounds interesting.

And so, you know, he was really looking at the problem of access to credit and how modern technology could expand access to reduce the price of credit in a variety of ways. And so I jumped on as like the fourth person in the door, I think, and it’s been a heck of a ride ever since. Yeah, that’s fantastic.

It sounds like it’s a heck of a ride. So let’s jump into where you are today. So Upstart is an artificial intelligence or AI marketplace, kind of straight off the website is to improve access to credit while reducing risk and cost for bank partners.

So maybe you could just kind of break that down a little bit for us. You know, what does that mean in kind of real people terms? Yeah. So the core technology that we’ve developed are really a couple.

One, kind of the onboarding experience initially just for personal unsecured loans. So think like 10 or 20 thousand dollar term loans, usually three or five year length loans unsecured, kind of a nontraditional bank product. The banks have had it, but it’s never been a very large portion of anybody’s asset base.

And kind of how do we do digital onboarding? How do we do sophisticated underwriting for that? That’s kind of the core technology we developed. The way we go to market is really a twofold strategy. One, we license that technology to banks and credit unions who can use it within their own customer base, who can market the loans, just use this as a kind of loan origination experience and an underwriting capability to help them approve more customers for this category of credit.

But the second part of that is also many of them did not know how to drive demand for this new product. And so the marketplace components where we actually have a consumer facing site and consumers come and they can submit their information and we’ll check it against our lending partners and match them with one of our lending partners that would have offers available for them. So they’ll end up originating a loan with one of our bank or credit union partners, even though they found the opportunity through the upstart site.

We found that that was really useful for our bank and credit union partners because many of them wanted more loans. This is a few years ago. Now they’re not all asking for more loans in the current macro environment, but they weren’t always effective at driving them.

So they say, can you help us? We love your loans. Can you help us get more of them than what we’re generating on our own? So we ended up kind of building both the ability to power their experiences as well as to drive consumer demand for at least the products we have. And we’ve now expanded into auto purchase, auto refinance, and we’re working on other kind of categories of loans to apply the same technology to.

That’s fantastic. And so just from the, I’ll say for the financial institution side, does a bank or a credit union just license the technology and you have the underwriting box there or is there any input with that institution? That’s a great question. The underwriting is always, I would describe it as being owned by the bank or credit union.

And we have a sophisticated risk model, but that risk model is making a prediction likelihood of repayment, likelihood of default, timing of default. How that prediction turns into an offer of credit and a price of credit is entirely at the discretion of our lending partners. Are they willing to lend to, they might have, in addition to our model, they all have, we don’t have go below a certain credit score.

We don’t go above a certain debt to income ratio. We might not go below a certain income threshold. We might not take people who are in bankruptcy or have had recent delinquencies or things like the very traditional credit metrics and go, this is our box.

You say, great, we will make sure that our system will respect that box and make offers of credit respective to your credit policy. And then the pricing strategy, if there’s a certain level of risk that Jeff will or won’t repay a loan, what kind of offer do you want to make him? And that’s totally at the discretion of each of the individual lending partners, the same consumer with the same upstart risk models underneath, the same way you have the same credit score through a lot of bureaus, but yet every bank has a slightly different way of looking at how they want to price that given risk. And so really, there’s a lot of control we put in the hands of our bank and credit union partners to kind of make sure the program matches their objectives, their goals.

Maybe they want higher yield, more prime customer. Maybe they want to reach into a more risky segment where they can make a higher yield. Maybe they want to like just bring customers on at a low price, like whatever their goal is, the system is configured to do that for them.

And the sophistication we have is just in helping them understand the risk that they might be taking on when making a given offer to a consumer. Gotcha. So that’s very intriguing.

And so but if I had to pull you then into maybe the magic of what is upstart, let’s talk about the AI. Now, I am kind of an AI nerd. I have no formal background other than at least once a day, if not more, I’m on chat, GPT or open AI.

And I’m just testing and trying and because it’s fascinating to me. And that’s in a lot of ways, people’s, I don’t know, view of artificial intelligence at the moment, but specifically in what upstart is doing in making impact in the finance industry. Gosh, I guess there’s there’s two camps here.

There’s those that are very skeptical about, you know, artificial intelligence. That’s a scary thing. And but you’re using it in a way that seems to be very beneficial.

So how are you using it kind of across the banking industry? Yeah, I’ll give you the two places we use it, but I do think it’s important for the audience’s segment. I think when we say AI, everybody has this kind of like in chat, GPT plays into this like a human like interface where it feels like I’m interacting, you know, how or the Terminator or whatever your favorite, the matrix. But it feels like I’m interacting with some sort of a human like intelligence.

That’s I think when people hear AI, that’s what they think. A lot of AI today is really very sophisticated prediction algorithms, but they’re just prediction algorithms that are far more complicated than a linear regression. They can look at far more variables.

They can look at how variables that are highly correlated might still be additive when you look at all of them together and understand how those correlations play in and what it means to have a high credit score and a high debt to income ratio. I got to weigh those off in the context of a given bar where those kind of questions AI is really good at answering. It doesn’t feel anything like talking to chat GPT, which which is a fascinating experience.

And so we’ve really looked more at this kind of back office side of AI. And I think if you look at the banking industry, you’ll find that AI is not it’s not if it’s here, it’s happening. It’s just a question of where is it being applied and how quickly is it being applied to other segments of what gets done? When will there be a virtual teller that’s GPT powered is a fair question.

But if you look at what we do, we really focus on kind of three areas, I’ll say right now, maybe four of where we can apply AI in a more back office kind of way that that just enhances capabilities. The first is understanding the level of risk. We can take over a thousand variables from multiple credit bureaus, write extra variables, information about an applicant being provided by the applicant, their level of education, their occupation, their field of work, that kind of thing.

And we can make a much more accurate prediction of risk. And the reality is that for most Americans, a credit score does not really represent their level of risk, certainly not across this. I mean, you’ve got the same credit score for a thousand dollar loan and a million dollar mortgage.

That doesn’t really make sense. And it turns out that more than 80 percent of Americans have never defaulted on a credit obligation and yet less than half have a prime credit score. And so we’re trying to say, how can we use larger sets of data, more sophisticated algorithms to identify that other large portion of Americans that are going to pay back a loan and help you understand that risk? So that’s kind of the first area we apply.

And that was kind of the founding belief. Many more Americans are credit worthy than we think. Can we find them with machine learning? Can we look at as opposed to 20 variables that are traditional credit bureau or sorry, bank or credit you might look at, can we look at a thousand or two thousand? And by putting those all together with an algorithm, understand the risk level of a borrower much, much better.

The answer that’s been a resounding yes. The second thing that we kind of came upon, I won’t say by accident, but through the journey was the importance of simplifying the onboarding experience and removing friction. So when we started the process with our bank partners, every borrower went through a phone call, some sort of knowledge based authentication, some sort of ID there, some sort of document upload.

Right. Give me your driver’s license. The way I might have done in the branch was going to upload the photo.

And then we kind of had this question that occurred one day and said, well, what if we could not ask for anything? Like what would happen? And so we took like two percent of borrowers with less than five thousand dollars. You know, like this is really small subset and said, don’t ask where we feel really good that it’s not fraud, where all the signals seem positive. What would happen? And what we found was that when you went from upload a document or talk to a person to a fully automated experience that could be done in one sitting, maybe it’s 20 or 30 minutes, but you’re not leaving the browser while you do it.

You start it, you finish it. The money’s on the way when you’re done. We could between double and triple conversions.

And then we thought, wow, if you can double or triple conversions, like how do we go from a small portion to a much larger portion of the applicants to whom we can provide that experience? And so we started applying AI to go, how can we figure out the smallest number of things we can ask a customer to do to get confident that all the things they told us are true, that they are who they say they are, that they do make the amount of money they said they make, that they did have the job that they said they have. And when can we reach the threshold of saying we’re now confident in issuing the loan to this person, given those factors, without maybe asking for a driver’s license upload? Now, sometimes you’ll have to. And sometimes we ask for, you know, a video selfie of a borrower with their driver’s license, telling us how much they want to borrow and what they’re doing with it, because fraudsters don’t want to do that.

And if we have a lot of concern about fraud, that might be helpful. But you don’t want to make everybody do that. And so we started applying AI.

Now, more than 75 percent of the originations through the platform have zero touch by a human through not just the underwriting, but the full verification process all the way through origination. And that really increases the throughput. So if you think about we started in how do we assess risk? This is kind of the same thing.

How do we assess risk of misrepresentation? The other areas we really apply AI now are how do we best target marketing outreach so that we get the highest propensity customer who’s going to convert at the lowest cost? Right. There’s a ton of efficiencies to be gained there. And then probably most nice scenario for us is that where do you see the most risk in your current portfolio? How can you best reach a customer who might be at risk of going delinquent, who maybe just went delinquent? How can you best identify the need for a hardship, maybe get even get ahead of somebody with a hardship offer when you know that they might be at risk? Those kinds of things that allow you to improve your servicing outcome.

So kind of across the life cycle, we see lots of ways to apply these sophisticated algorithms to improve your understanding of what’s happening for your customers and to improve your ability to serve them. And so that’s where we see a lot of that going on. None of that’s like a chatbot, right? None of that’s like replacing a teller.

It’s all kind of back office type stuff, but it’s amazingly powerful in how it can change the economics of the lending business. Yeah, definitely. Especially, I mean, that user experience going into it is that first impression in terms of the loan process and somebody who’s going to go into that loan process.

They’re looking for a yes where they may not get it. But the fact is, is that the experience is good enough. It doesn’t completely deter them from coming back in the future.

I’ll tell you the other the other interesting thing, you know, you talk about the deterrence and one of the questions we had when we saw this high uptick was like, well, when we stop asking people for verification, are we going to like decrease the quality of credit because people are going to take advantage of us? And our initial results were the exact opposite. We improved the quality of credit. We went, OK, why? And, you know, what we found is that the good borrowers are not only rate sensitive, the good borrowers are also more effort sensitive.

And they go, I’m a good customer. Why are you making me upload 15 docs? I’m going to go somewhere that’s going to treat me better, not just for a rate, but from a process point of view. And so these things really are important.

If you want to have a good relationship with that customer, you’ve got to give them a high quality experience, which means a simple, easy experience to the greatest extent that you can. You can’t do that for everybody. Now, there’s risk in the game.

And that means we have to be careful and put friction in the process where we see high degrees of risk. We don’t want people we don’t want fraudsters coming to the system and taking advantage and hurting people’s credit scores. But it is a really important thing, not just for the business, but for the customer, because that’s what they’re looking for.

Cool. So, Jeff, from the standpoint of I’m going to narrow you down a little bit in regards to. So Sunrise is very focused in regards to serving people and populations that are generally underserved.

And a lot of times they’re low and moderate income or they’re immigrants. And they’re generally those that are the least likely to enter the system in the traditional banking world, if you will. How do you see AI being used maybe in those circumstances or for good to get that person their first loan or build that credit history for the first time? I love this question because I feel like there’s so often this question about bias in AI and is AI going to discriminate and take systemic bias that exists and just exacerbate it.

And there’s always that risk. I don’t want to say it’s not possible, but I think it it understates the problem that faces these communities today. We’re worried about preventing that.

We’re also blocking off the ability to do exactly what you’re asking, which is like, can we actually make the world better with these technologies? And I don’t want to stand in the way of that too much because I think there’s a ton of opportunity. So let me give you, I think, the two areas where I think this really can make a difference. A, I kind of gave you that statistic that many more Americans are creditworthy than have prime credit scores that would get them traditional access to a bank or credit union type credit.

And they end up turning to all sorts of alternatives, buy here, pay here, car loans or payday loans or title, all sorts of stuff that’s certainly not as friendly to the consumer. And I think I can really help us find those customers who are credit where there certainly are fewer of them percentage wise in a lower income or traditionally disadvantaged community than there might be in a more prime community. But at the same time, there are many of them are there.

The majority of them are good customers. And if we can help you find those and sort the good from the risk, then that helps you serve a broader population. Because what does every bank and credit union do when they can’t identify the risk? Well, they just cut it off to go.

We’re just going to have a 700 minimum credit score. And then I’d much rather say, let’s go down to 600 or 580 or 550. We have some of our partners that have no minimum credit score and they rely on the risk algorithm.

Now, does that mean they serve as many people below 640 is above? Of course not. Right. There’s more risk there and they can’t approve as many, but they can approve some and they can approve a lot more than they could in a traditional world.

So I think there’s a ton of opportunity to expand the approvability without increasing risk for the institutions, just by understanding which members of the lower credit score communities are actually worthy of credit, are actually good risks to take. And there’s a lot of that mispricing, misrepresentation by credit scores in the markets. Tremendous opportunity.

The second area kind of related to that automation I talked about is a lot of products that these communities need are not the bread and butter of traditional banking. They’re not new car loans through through franchise dealers. Right.

They’re not mortgages. And often the cost of offering an alternative to a payday loan, a thousand dollar loan, a five hundred dollar loan. Why does the bank or credit union not offer a five hundred dollar loan? We go, well, Jeff, by the time they walk in the branch, talk to my guy for 10 minutes and the underwriter looks at it for 20 minutes, I’ve lost money.

Even if none of them ever default, I’ve already lost money. I can’t do it profitably. But that’s because we have a very person centric view of what that process is.

And if I can move to that automated underwriting, automated verification, I’m really reducing the cost to originate. And it opens up the ability to serve not just the personal unsecured loans, which, as we said, even a ten thousand dollar loan was something very few banks did before. But a thousand dollar loan, a five hundred dollar loan, that is really the kind of product that many communities need access to and don’t get it from the traditional financial system.

And if we can leverage that AI to lower the cost, the barrier to entry, I think we’ll see many more banks and credit unions that want to serve that customer. They want to provide that product. They want to help the community, but they just can’t do it without losing money.

And they’ve got to find a way to do that. And I think I can solve both. How can I find the right people to lend to and how can I reduce the cost to originate where I can put these kinds of products in market? Maybe not with a ton of profit, but not losing money.

And most of the banks I talk to would be happy to offer a payday alternative if they just didn’t lose money. They don’t need to make as much money as they do in a mortgage. If I can just deploy my assets to serve my community and break even, that would be good for me.

And I think we can make that happen with AI. And that’s to me a tremendous opportunity. Yeah, that’s fantastic.

And that’s where we are so on the same page. I preach this regularly that how can we really use this technology for good and open up access to markets? And ultimately that that access to capital, even if it’s small or micro, drives a community at its very base level. And it’s good for everyone, because at the end of the day, there’s going to be a merchant on the other end who’s going to sell something and you make a profit and it’s going to buy and going to grow and so forth.

So it really is kind of critical capital for those those underserved communities. And everything we’ve been saying applies equally from I focus on the consumer side is where we’ve been, but small business lending, which is the bread and brother of how you start businesses in a community. And by the way, one of the hardest kinds of lending to underwrite and operationalize at reasonable cost.

And that’s why so much commercial lending is large commercial real estate, because it’s a large transaction. I know how to write it. There’s a secured asset on the other side.

Like, I know how to do that. If you get down to the guy who needs fifty thousand dollars to open a restaurant, I mean, it’s hard just to verify that he’s got a lease on the place and is going to open the restaurant. And so just how you get to understanding the risk of that better so that you can approve more people and how you understand how to operationalize that without sending somebody out to the address to look.

No, that’s a traditional way. Is there really a business there? Is it operable? Send somebody out. Well, if you can get past that, then to your point, the lifeblood of the community of small businesses and the lifeblood of any business is access to credit.

And the more we can expand access to credit for consumers, for small businesses, the more we can really serve our communities. Fantastic. So, Jeff, I have one last question for you.

Now, you mentioned the the AI chatbot teller and so forth. But the basis of the question is a is one that we ask every guest. And that is, what do you think the next generation of banker looks like? GPT and a tie.

Is that supposed to be the answer? That could be it. That’s that’s what I’m headed, I think. I mean, I think that the nature I don’t know.

I’ve never been a banker, per se. I’m an accidental banker. So maybe I’ll just say I think I think the skills that are going to be critical for the banker in the future are going to be a high fluency with data.

Right. We are, you know, people sometimes describe data as the new oil. I think it’s a terrible analogy because the oil is valuable because it’s it’s rare.

It’s hard to find. And only a few people have it. Data is going to be the opposite.

Everybody’s going to have it. But it’s going to take a lot of understanding and effort to get out insights from it. So I compare it more like the new sand.

It’s everywhere. But turning the sand into the silicon is the magic, right? Everybody’s got the sand on the beach everywhere. But it’s that process of refining the sand into something more valuable, of turning it into a useful asset for the for the institution.

That’s really important. So I think every banker at every level is going to have to become with a high degree of data fluency and understanding of that kind of stuff. And then this sense of technology, technology is going to intermediate a lot of interactions and having an understanding of how those technologies work, how AI works, not that you have the right models and not everybody’s going to be a machine learning engineer, but that you can look at the business and go, where can we apply these capabilities to provide a great experience? And how do I best meld that experience with the in-person experience or the on the phone experience that customers still want? They still want that.

And so I think the banker that can understand where the technology can do its magic, how to integrate it into and also in human interaction experience and can make sense of the volume of data that will be available, those will be the bankers that are able to provide the most value to their institutions. And so those are the that’s what they look like. But that’s the skills I think that the successful bankers are going to have moving forward is understanding of that dual modality of the customer, understanding of the capabilities of technology and how to apply them best to their business and a real fluency with data to make those kinds of decisions, not based on just intuition, but based on the information you have and how you can make best use of it.

That is fantastic. So, Jeff, it has been a pleasure to talk to you today. And we appreciate your insights, particularly because I share that same passion of that intersection of I’ll say it’s commonly, you know, the high tech and the high touch type of aspect of where we see banking going in the particular what it whatever it means to be a banker in the future.

There’ll be some blend of that together. So thanks again. We appreciate your time.

Thanks for being with us. Thanks for listening to the Next Gen Banker podcast. And we’ll see you soon.

For this episode’s musical feature, we’re showcasing Adrian Wather. Most of Wather’s music consists of minimal piano and acoustic instrumentation. You’ll always find an emotional theme throughout his catalog.

Here is Baby Knows by Adrian Wather. That was Baby Knows by Adrian Wather. You can find more of Adrian Wather’s music on Spotify.

If you would like your music featured on the Next Gen Banker podcast, email David at NextGen-Banker.com with a link to your music and website. Thanks for listening to the Next Gen Banker podcast. We’ll see you soon.

This show is brought to you by Alloy Labs. As much as we love talking on the show, we believe that action is more valuable than talk. Alloy Labs is the industry leader in helping fearless bankers drive exponential growth through collaboration, exclusive partnerships and powerful network effects that give them an unfair advantage.

Learn more at AlloyLabs.com. Alloy Labs. Banking Unbound. Hi, and welcome to the Finnovate podcast.

Joining me today, we have Jacqueline Baker, author of The Unexpected Leader and founder of Scarlet Communications. Jacqueline, thank you so much for taking the time to connect with me today. Absolutely.

Thank you for having me, Greg. So we’re going to get into the book in a little bit, but can you start by just introducing yourself and kind of how you came to be in the role that you’re in? Absolutely. I’ve been in the entrepreneurship space for quite some time.

I definitely identify with being those titles that you listed off. I’m an author. I’m the founder, principal consultant of Scarlet Communications, which is a leadership consultancy.

But of course, I’m a podcast host as well. And, you know, I am also a self-professed magical hoster at home. I love to host people in my home.

Both me and my husband like to do that as well. And I had the opportunity to start my entrepreneur venture in the wedding and event production space in my early 20s. And what ultimately happened is that that.

Opportunity led me to falling in love with a unique part of many of our lives that we don’t really think about, but is very active in our lives each and every day. Well, I never really fell in love with event production. I did fall in love with protocol, etiquette and order.

Like I fell in love with this notion of trying to understand like why things happen a certain way, what was etiquette all about? And so what a lot of people don’t know, Greg, is that our company, Scarlet Communications, actually started out as a full fledged leadership consultancy. We were actually I’m sorry, a full fledged etiquette consultancy. We started out teaching etiquette to teen girls.

That’s literally how we started the business, because no one in Detroit was doing it in a way that we thought really mattered the most. A way that was really practical and functional. But after six months of doing that work, Greg, the Detroit Lions called randomly and asked if we would teach etiquette to their rookie players.

And I realized I know I realize, oh, my gosh, maybe more people than just teen girls or community organizations want etiquette training. And truly, we still teach etiquette training to teen girls. It’s really important.

But that really started the path of me realizing that most organizations weren’t asking me to teach etiquette. They were really asking us to help their leaders become better leaders. And so now, 10 years later, almost 11, we are a full fledged leadership consultancy that helps people see themselves as leaders and elevate to their next level of leadership.

But as the final part of this story that I’m sure we’ll discuss today, within that 10 year period, something else magical happened. It it was the result of me getting a message in my LinkedIn box. Someone said, hey, Jacqueline, are you interested in an event management consulting position? And I didn’t realize essentially what they’re asking me is would I be interested in doing some consulting work at one of the nation’s largest nonprofits in the event management space? I was truly uninterested in this because I had left the event space, but I took the call.

And ultimately, what ended up happening is that one call resulted in me having an eight year career at AARP, ending my career as the vice president of startup programming within AARP Innovation Labs or what is now H Tech Collaborative. And so I was able to dual track it, which I know you work with a lot of startups. They’re dual tracking it.

They have a full fledged job that they may even love and they’re growing their thing at the same time. And so for eight years, I was living in both worlds. And last year, actually eight years to the date, I gave myself permission to go fully full fledged and to scale Scarlet.

But that’s truly how I started in the entrepreneurship space. The stop that that I made along the way in corporate innovation. And now here I am again as a full time entrepreneur.

Now, that’s an amazing story. And we’re definitely going to talk about your experience at AARP in a little bit. But I want to jump in because the book, The Unexpected Leader, I think this is something which happens quite a bit in the fintech space.

You know, people found companies because they have great ideas. Maybe they see a hole in the ecosystem that they can go out and fill. But in many cases, you know, the people have those ideas are not necessarily natural leaders.

And the idea of kind of running a business can be really foreign. And so I’m curious what advice you can offer for people who kind of are thrust in that position where all of a sudden they find themselves responsible for a company and other people that they have to try and lead. Absolutely.

The one thing that I try to do, I try hard to remind founders how important it is to see yourself as a leader out the gate. I get the incredible opportunity. I know, Greg, you get this opportunity now as well to coach founders, sometimes founders that are pretty early in their journey.

And the earlier that I can get to them in their journey and helping them understand their role as a self-leader, but then their buy in that they are a leader in addition to being an innovator, in addition to making their product or their service as best as it could possibly be. They also are a leader for themselves and potentially and probably if you’re scaling a leader for others as well. And so if you can have that buy in immediately, that just helps you along your way.

But I get it. Not everyone crosses your path, Greg. Not everyone crosses my path.

And they don’t get that almost that reminder that they’re a leader. And what I will remind every single one of your founders or your founders to be your founders in the making that are listening today, what I would remind you of is, especially if you have scaling in mind, it’s not enough for your technology to be great. It’s not enough for your processes to be sound.

It’s not enough for you to have the top investment that you asked for. It’s not enough for you to have the best advisors know that there are people that are required to help your thing get greater, to scale your thing. And it’s not enough to just say, hey, here’s a job in doing that.

You also have a very key responsibility in leading people and being intentional in your leading journey. Lots of people have different motivation for some people. They know money is a high motivator for some people.

They want to feel inclusive. They want to feel like they’re connected. And there’s no greater way to feel included and to feel connected to a growing organization than by feeling like you are being intentionally led.

You have the opportunity when you embrace leadership, you know, at your level as a founder, as a self leader, as a people, as a leader of others, to really change the face of how someone sees themselves, to change how they see themselves as a leader overall, the decisions that they make. And so founders, you have a very unique opportunity. Investors, you have a unique opportunity.

Corporate innovation, you know, leaders all have a unique opportunity to both see yourself as a leader, but also understand your opportunity to impact others as well. Yeah, and I think one of the things that has also really resonated with me is the the theme from some of your work that, you know, anybody can be a leader and that you can kind of assume some leadership responsibility, regardless of whether you currently find yourself in the C-suite or not. You know, and I think one of the things that it really resonated with me is the idea that it takes leadership capabilities from people all throughout an organization in order for that organization to be successful.

This is particularly acute in a lot of areas in financial technology where sometimes if you are working at a bank and you’re trying to implement a new piece of technology, there’s going to be a headwind coming sometimes even from the C-suite of your own organization. People will be saying that we can’t do that. We’ve never done it that way before.

We need to try and stay in our lane a little bit here. What would you say to somebody who kind of find themselves in this role where they need to be a leader in order to advance their agenda and try and accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish, even if they don’t necessarily have that kind of institutional weight behind them? They don’t have the title yet, or maybe in some cases, actually getting a headwind from people who outrank them. I like this question because it allows me to sneak in one of our models that’s inside the book.

We are huge fans. Of course, we are huge fans on our side over here of the leadership levels. We talk about leadership in levels.

It’s four different levels. Leadership of self, leadership of others, leadership of communities, which could include your workplace, and leadership of movements are those community things that we care deeply about, those causes that change and shake up the world at the movement level. And the reality is you have influential opportunities at all four of those levels, right? If you are someone who’s leading an organization or leading at the community level, which can include an organization, you have a unique opportunity to tap into advocates there, knowledge that you have there.

But a lot of times the challenge comes in play, and you mentioned this just a short while ago, when we’re talking about people who don’t feel like they have that influence, they don’t feel like they have that power. And what I ask people to do is to think about yourself holistically, right? Because sometimes we assume that all of the things that we engage in, the skills that we have that we may feel good about or competent in or confident about outside the workplace, that once you walk inside the workplace, those things suddenly go away. And that’s the reason why we preach the importance of seeing yourself as a leader in all facets of your life, despite your role, position, status, or title.

There are many of you that are listening right now that are deeply responsible for something in your life. You might be responsible for planning the family reunion. You might be responsible for planning the boys’ annual golf trip, the girls’ annual vacation internationally.

And all these things have these underlying leadership qualities and skills embedded in them that you forget. Oh, you know what? I am a good delegator. I am a good negotiator.

I’m negotiating the hotel for my family reunion each and every year. I have difficult conversations with my friends. I don’t just block them.

And we just don’t count those things as skills. And so what I would encourage you to do is holistically think about you as a human overall. You don’t not become a leader because you step your foot inside your workplace.

You’re still a leader holistically. It’s just about you giving yourself permission to carry that skillset over the door threshold at your workplace. And so that’s the advice that I would give to people that are really trying to think, am I a leader? Am I influential? Can I get this done? Am I really gonna be able to move the needle? Think about yourself holistically.

Yeah, I mean, it’s huge. And I think when you start thinking about it in those terms, you start to recognize what you’re capable of. And honestly, we could spend a lot of time talking about the book and a lot of these themes here.

I do wanna make sure we spend some time also talking about your role with AARP Innovation Labs because that’s something that I think will kind of allow us to approach some of this from a different angle. But can you start by just talking about exactly what that final role was, you know, VP of Startup Programming at AARP? Absolutely. Before I get there though, Greg, I do wanna just take a trip over to how that came to be, before I talk about the rollover.

And the reason why I think taking a trip here is so important is because I get a chance to talk about how important it is for people to remain curious and flexible and nimble. When I started consulting work at AARP, which is how I started, quite frankly, I was not looking for a job at all. But one thing that I am very consistent in doing is having the conversation, right? And so there are some founders that are listening or some people, some professionals that are listening or just somebody who is a fan of your podcast listening that is laser focused on something.

And I do believe that you should be laser focused on the things that you care about, but not so much that you’re not able to look left or look right a little bit to be curious. I have remained curious throughout my career, my corporate career and also my entrepreneurial career. And honestly, that curiosity has been what’s opened up the most doors for me.

Instead of saying, nope, I’m gonna do it this way, this is exactly how I am and it’s only gonna be this way. It has opened up and unlocked these unknown doors, including being the Vice President of Startup Programming at AARP Innovation Labs. I started out there doing some consulting work, eventually transitioned in and serving essentially as someone’s chief of staff.

And when they left, the head of innovation at the time said, hey, I looked you up and I want you to come over here. Would you be interested in this? And me never, never playing a role in any innovation space whatsoever said, okay, let’s give it a try here, all while growing Scarlet at the same time. And I’m really proud of what we were able to build within AARP Innovation Labs.

You’ll see AARP Innovation Labs referred to a little bit more now as H-Tech Collaborative and they built out an amazing product and an amazing community for investors and startups and also places to launch your product and to do pilots, et cetera. But truly when we first started that work, we hadn’t really done a lot with startups. We didn’t have cohorts there.

We weren’t sending startups to pitch competitions and to conference engagements like they are now. Like literally AARP builds almost a little village inside of Consumer Electronics Show and some other health tech and FinTech conferences. They show up, but they show up in a way where their startups can shine bright.

And so the things that we were able to build there and work on and push the envelope there, I am still eternally proud of it. And quite frankly, Greg, what I did not expect, I did not expect to continue to do work in the startup space when I left. I was planning to really leave and continue to do my leadership consultancy work that I do for corporations and individuals all across the globe.

But lo and behold, lots of organizations have called me back to say, hey, can you coach our startups? Can you help them be better presenters? Can you help them see themselves as leaders? And so it’s so many lessons in that from number one, stay curious. Number two, be flexible. And number three, please minimize your burning of bridges along the way, right? Because I could have left, picked up a bunch of dust, right? And caused the whole hoopla walking out the door and no one from the industry would have called me back again.

But I’m really grateful to still serve in the startup space, to still have the honor. You know, Greg, sometimes I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You sit with startups and you’re just like, oh my gosh, like this is gonna change the world.

Like this is so impactful. And to be able to have that behind the door, a closed conversation with a startup that’s just getting started and you can guide their decisions and give them insight and best practices. I’m telling you, it for me is just a really humbling and honorable experience.

So that was my world there. And I’m proud of that stop. I’m grateful for that stop.

And I’m grateful and really excited about the work that they’re continuing to do. And man, so many lessons to pull out of that for the FinTech community. And I think there’s a couple that I just wanna highlight.

And I think the first one is, you know, around staying curious, recognizing that just because something’s been done that way all the time, doesn’t mean we need to keep doing it. And I think this is something that we see with the companies who are successful at the Finnovate stage, the companies who go on and do amazing things in the industry. This is something which you hear a lot about.

Somebody will have a good idea. They might get a lot of feedback. They might pivot and do something completely different based on the feedback they’ve got, or they might discover something and think, how is that process actually working? Can I make it better? So I think that’s massive, a massive lesson for the industry.

I think the other one, which sometimes gets overlooked, you know, in the FinTech space, we sometimes assume that everybody who’s in this space has always been in the FinTech space. And that’s just not the case. People come into this community from a wide variety of backgrounds.

And whenever you are talking to somebody, even whatever role they are filling right now, they might be coming at it from a place that’s completely different from where you are. And it just really puts this pressure on being able to connect with people from a wide variety of different backgrounds, and also being able to explain yourself to a wide variety of types of people who maybe don’t have the same expertise in the same areas that you have. And so there’s just a huge amount to unpack there.

I do want to just quickly, and I see we’re kind of coming up on the end of our time, but we can go a little bit over here. I do want to quickly just talk about what advice you might have for companies who are kind of looking to cut through the noise. In your role at AARP Innovation Labs, you must have seen a lot of different people who wanted to get involved in that program, and you would have to make some hard decisions about who you have room for and who you don’t.

What advice do you have for companies who find themselves in that kind of environment, where they have to make themselves a priority in that type of competitive environment? Yeah. And making themselves a priority can mean a couple of different things, right? It could totally mean taking care of yourself, right? Because a lot of startups like push themselves to the brink, crash and burn, right? In terms of their body and mind and all that good stuff. So there’s that taking care of yourself overall.

The other part of taking care of yourself or even prioritizing you, what you’re building, is just being honest or even being aware by way of us having this conversation about where corporate partnerships, corporate innovation arms, partnerships overall in general, where there might be a little bit of quicksand that you need to be aware of, right? And you spoke just a second ago and we had a nice little conversation before we kicked off just about how startups talk about themselves. A significant deciding factor for organizations and investors lies in your ability to be concise and talk about what you’re doing in a way that is relatable, in a way that’s charismatic, and in a way that’s succinct. And while yes, Greg, a lot of smart people listen to your podcast and a lot of smart people are in the fintech and health tech space and lots of other tech spaces, truly getting to the root of making sure that you’re sharing the with them when you’re talking about your thing, what’s in it for me and making sure the other person understands that is critically important in prioritizing your business and making sure that you’re showing up right.

The second thing is really being what I call coachable, which I’m sure you appreciate this, Greg. And when I say coachable, I mean, in understanding that everything isn’t going to always go your way because you might have some cutting edge technology that is going to change the world. There is red tape that exists within every organization that you just got to be aware of.

If it’s not policy, if it’s not accounts receivable, if it’s not the OGC legal team, there’s just some things, some rules that organizations can’t bend, can’t break. It doesn’t matter how awesome you are. And being coachable enough for you to understand that and figure out like how can we approach this in another way, it’s hugely important as well.

The last tip that I’ll give is in the branding space. I’m hoping that lots of startups and professionals overall that are listening today, drop your name into the Google box or the Bing box or whatever your search engine is, just drop it in there every now and then. Drop your company name in there because a lot of organizations will totally go the other way with collaborating with startups because the brand that you have online doesn’t have a good reflection of who you think you are or who you could be.

And brands, like big brands, big organizations spend a lot of money, right, on their brand presence, on their NPS score, et cetera. So they want to make sure if they’re collaborating with you that you are in alignment with the brand that they want to represent or the brand that they’ve worked so hard on. And so, yes, when you think about taking care of you, it is equally like not burning yourself out, not going too far, making sure that you’re getting a community around you to keep you together.

But it also is making sure that you prioritize those things to make you shine bright so you’re not working harder versus working smarter. So that’s how I would answer that, Greg. Man, thanks for that.

That’s, again, some really valuable insights there. So I want to end on potentially a slightly more lighthearted question, which is just coming back to the old cliche, you know, the best leaders don’t seek out leadership positions, but rather have leadership thrust upon them. Is that true? I think that is true.

And unfortunately, I think that, or fortunately, however you want to look at it, it could be another way. And it could be another way if we, as early as possible in our lives, saw ourselves as leaders. Because typically what happens, Greg, and I experienced this, maybe you experienced it too, at some point you were good at your job.

You were good at what you did. And then your job or your department got big. And all of a sudden it was, all right, Greg, now we’re going to bring some other people and lead these people.

And then you’re just like, wait a minute. Like I knew how to do my job well, but now you want me to like manage people and make sure they’re doing their job well too? Like, my goodness. And so I do think that a lot of times it turns into a, you were a rock star, you were doing great.

And so you’re almost being rewarded, right, for your team growing. But sometimes it ends up feeling like a punishment because you end up dealing with things that you were never taught how to deal with. And it’s not like all of a sudden you just give them more of your work and then that’s it, they go away.

You actually have to cultivate these people and grow these people, right? And so, yes, I do believe that most times it is thrust upon them and then they have to figure it out. But sometimes it ends up them crashing and burning because they have not been properly developed as a leader. Man, I completely agree.

And it’s like, I think you’ve got a crystal ball you can see into every organization that’s come across our stage for the last several years there. So again, I’ve been talking to Jacqueline Baker, author of The Unexpected Leader. Check out the book, check out Scarlet Communications.

And Jacqueline, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Really appreciate it. Absolutely.

Thank you, Greg. And thank you for the work that you’re continuing to do in the FinTech space. It’s an important sector.

It’s important work. And I know that the startups that you’re working with and the ecosystem that you’re growing will continue to change the world. So thank you for your work.

That’s it for another week of the world’s number one FinTech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by our U.S.-based production team, including producer Elizabeth Severance, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham, with social media support from Carlo Navarro and Sylvie Johnson. If you like this episode, don’t forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media.

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