507 Innovation Disruption and Geopolitcal Risk

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.

Well, it’s almost time for Finnovate Fall again. So this week, we turn the mic over to Greg Palmer, master of ceremonies for Finnovate Fall and the host of the Finnovate podcast here on Provoke.fm. Greg’s going to give us a little taste of things to come as he shares two conversations with some keynote speakers from this Finnovate Fall. Luke Williams, professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and author of Disrupt, and Manas Chawla, founder of London Politica.

You’ll get no spoiler alerts here, so you’ll have to listen to the episode and come to Finnovate Fall in New York on September 11th through 13th to hear Luke talk about disruption and innovation, and Manas talk about geopolitical risk and gray rhinos. Hi, and welcome to the Finnovate podcast. We are joined today by Luke Williams, professor of innovation at NYU Stern School of Business, founder of IdeaSkills, and author of the book Disrupt.

Luke is going to be joining us on stage at Finnovate Fall this coming September. Luke, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Thanks, Greg.

Pleasure to be here. So obviously, we don’t want to give too much away. You want to learn more about what Luke is going to be talking about.

You should come and see us at Finnovate Fall. But for those of our audience who haven’t heard of you before, can you start by just giving us a quick background on yourself, and what brings you to the various crossroads that you find yourself now? Yeah, sure. Well, as your listeners can tell, I’m not from around here.

So I grew up in Australia, and my background is industrial design, so product design. And Australia’s a great career for marketing products that have been made elsewhere. But I really wanted to get a seat at the table where the decisions on these products were being made.

So basically, I cut off my left arm or would have cut off my left arm to get over to America to start working for some of these bigger brands. And I did that. I started working for a company called Frog Design, which got famous doing a lot of work for, first of all, Sony with Sony Walkman.

And then that attracted a young guy called Steve Jobs, and he wanted the same success for a company he was starting called Apple. And so he brought the company that was doing the work for Sony over to America, and that’s how Frog got started. So they were quite famous in the product design game.

And I had a tremendous career there as a creative director, and then got involved in education. When I moved to New York, NYU was looking to put more innovation in the MBA curriculum. And so I started a course there and joined the faculty full time.

I’ve been a professor in innovation and design for about the last 15 years at NYU. And along the way, I wrote a book called Disrupt, which is really putting all these ideas into practical form that other people can use. Yeah, a lot of interesting experiences there.

And certainly, it’s great to have your opinion so well grounded in so many different areas of the innovation ecosystem. I’m really intrigued by the idea that you can teach innovation, or at least teach strategies designed to produce disruptive, unexpected solutions. So obviously, this is something you cover in detail in your book Disrupt.

But can you give us an idea of how you can systemize the process of breaking systems? Yeah, you know, the question I get the most is, can you really teach innovation? Which is ridiculous when you think about it. I think innovation is where marketing was about 50 years ago. Everyone thought marketing couldn’t be taught about 50 years ago, but there were people sort of working to codify it and get into a form where it could be taught.

And I think we’re at that stage with innovation. I always use a cooking metaphor because I find it empowering for people that have never thought innovation is sort of their game. But if you look at all the cooking shows on American TV, I mean, it seems like we’re obsessed with cooking.

In fact, actually, we don’t like cooking. We like watching other people cook. But the next time you’re watching one of these shows, look at all the different personalities.

There’s range of ages, there’s mix of genders, every educational background imaginable. But none of us doubt that any of these people can cook because we know that cooking is nothing more. Well, then you take the ingredients and you arrange them into a meal.

And I want people to have the same attitude towards innovation. I define ideas as the recipes we use to rearrange things, our resources, to create new value and wealth. So I want people to think of innovation like cooking.

You’re taking the resources you have available, you’re seeking a new arrangement of those resources that makes them more valuable. That’s what innovation is all about. And that can be taught.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I’m going to go watch the movie Ratatouille again based on this. I think anyone can cook, right? That’s the idea.

Anyone can cook. Yeah. And so I think I love that analogy.

Now, obviously, we’re talking about this as being something universal that anybody can do. But are there traits that you look for among your students that make you feel confident that they’ll be able to implement your ideas? Are there certain characteristics that you think make people more likely to be successful as innovators? It’s an interesting subject. There’s always an article on the five traits that an entrepreneur must have or the successful traits of innovators.

Whenever I see an article with a title like that, I run the opposite way because I’m not asking anyone to change their personality. And I think we’ve been stuck in this cult of personality, model of leadership and innovation for a really long time. Celebrating the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs on the cover of glossy magazines.

And if you read the Steve Jobs biography or read these magazine articles, it’s very much about their behavioral antics, how they acted with different people. So as a result today, you get a lot of managers who know that innovation is important, want to know how to lead it. And they’re going around trying to mimic the personality traits of an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs.

And I just think this approach is just ridiculous. Innovation leadership does not have anything to do with your personality. Whether you’re an extrovert or an introvert, it doesn’t matter.

It’s about learning the process, learning the tactics, learning the techniques. And like any other skill, the more you practice, the better you get. I will say though, I teach in America and I’ve taught some courses in China.

What I found interesting about the Chinese students versus the American students, the Chinese students were so excited about innovation. I actually nicknamed them the vibrating students because every time I walked in the class, they literally were vibrating with excitement. They’ve been told that China can’t innovate and they’re fast followers and all the innovation comes from the West.

And they were so excited about this course because it was teaching them the tools and techniques and the process. And they were so open and eager to embrace that. Whereas some of the American students, we have to work a little bit harder to get them excited.

And at times there’s an arrogance that comes across thinking, well, just because I’m in this country and we have this culture of innovation, this makes me by right an innovator. And there’s more resistance to actually learning the process and actually embracing the process. So that’s been an interesting finding.

So what I would say to people is we’re typically pretty bad at innovation. So in order to get better at innovation, just be open to learning as many techniques and tools as you can. It’s not a natural ability.

In fact, it’s quite counterintuitive most of the skills you need for innovation. So embrace the frameworks, embrace the tools and actually give them a go. I love that answer.

And I think it’s something which I’ve certainly noticed as well, working with a lot of startup founders who come across our stage, the founders who come in who are going to do a live demo and understand that they need to learn something new in order to be successful at that, typically do a much better job on stage than the founders who are the very first time I talked to them, give me the, you know, I’ve totally got this. I speak all the time and you kind of hear the ego through the phone. And those are the companies that I worry about getting up there on stage and thinking, oh man, you need to learn something here.

And I’m worried that you’re not going to. And so those, I can absolutely see that side of it. Now I want to switch gears a little bit because I know your expertise goes well beyond the world of financial services.

You mentioned a little bit at the beginning, but can you kind of walk through again some of the industries in which you’ve worked? You know, when I started at Frog, it was very much focused on product design. So a lot of, you know, I started in Silicon Valley, there was a lot of tech products. But then an interesting thing happened in anyone involved in sort of innovation consulting and companies like Frog Design and IDO, those services started getting commodified.

So, you know, like, like many other services, people were shipping them sort of overseas and could find industrial designers at a cheaper rate over there. So what happened with companies like Frog Design is clients used to come to us and say, you know, this is the widget we make. We need to design a better widget.

But what started happening was that things were growing so complex and things were changing so fast in industry after industry. What we had is a lot of clients coming to Frog and saying, you know, we used to make this widget. We still make some of these widgets, but we’re not sure if we should continue to make this widget or we’re not sure what we should make in the future.

So the range of services became much more strategic and, you know, the whole process moved much further upstream, as we like to say. So much more strategy was involved trying to work out, you know, what these companies should do. So that actually took me out of, you know, working with a lot of tech companies into working with a lot of companies in every conceivable industry, you know, service providers, you know, people in finance companies that I’d never worked with before because they don’t do a lot of technology products.

So really I have worked in, you know, 30 plus industries and 120 different countries at the moment. And I typically work with 50 companies a year, everything from startups to Fortune 100 companies. And what that enables me to do is step back and connect the dots.

And I can start, I can start, because what I find is the executives in one industry are often unaware of the accelerating change in industries other than their own. Yeah, no, absolutely. Now I’m going to lob you just the biggest softball of all time here, but are there aspects of finance and fintech in particular that make you think they’re particularly right for disruption? And I mean, that’s just a tee off pitch right there.

Well, you know, when I, when I’m talking to every industry, I always look at the foundational concepts that the industry is working with and what you’ll, you’ll be surprised with when these foundational concepts were conceived. So most of the ideas that people are working with, and remember the ideas that we’re working with, the beliefs that we’re working with day in, day out, are behind every action that we take in the business. So there’s always an idea or belief or a foundational concept behind the actions that we’re taking.

Now, I know we’re all obsessed with getting stuff done, but getting stuff done normally means getting stuff done within the assumed boundary of that foundational concept or idea or belief. And many of these ideas were conceived by somebody else in a different age and a different context. So when we look at financial services and banking, you know, we’re still working with and within the boundaries of foundational concepts and ideas that were conceived of over at least 50 years ago, and sometimes 100 years.

Now, of course, a lot of things have changed in 100 years, a lot of things have changed in 50 years, a lot of things have changed in the last 10 years. The technology changes a lot faster than our foundational concepts. So often there is a lag there.

So the first thing that I look at, what are some of the things we’re taking for granted? What are some of the assumptions that have been made around these old ideas and these old concepts? How can we start to break those down before we can even start to consider or have a productive dialogue around new ideas? Yeah, I think that the mentality shift and looking past, you know, the way things have always been done is especially difficult in the financial services space. In talking with a lot of bankers myself over the years, I’ve learned that the word disrupt itself can actually be really polarizing. There’s a lot of bankers who sometimes hear that word and get this kind of visceral reaction, because on the one hand, you know, it means this is something new and exciting.

On the other hand, and I think this is how a lot of bankers see it, a disruption means costly downtime, legal ramifications, compliance problems, lost customer trust. There’s a lot of different things that can happen with this word disruption. And most of them aren’t pleasant, I think, from the standpoint of a banker.

And so you can sort of see how the industry itself is stuck in some of that old thinking. But, you know, how do you reconcile the idea of disrupting an industry that’s historically, and I think necessarily, averse to risk? Yeah, we have to start viewing disruption as a positive and not a negative. You know, there is a myth of disruption that it creates instability, but that’s a false narrative.

Basically, anyone working in a business is working in a system, and it’s a business within an industry. So it’s a system within a system. So system dynamics apply.

If you’ve only got a system with one feedback loop, which is a reinforcing feedback loop, which means you’re just getting better at doing exactly what you’re doing. You’re just getting better at doing it a little faster, a little cheaper, and a bit more efficiently. This is a single reinforcing feedback loop.

Now, in systems, that is an unstable system. Sooner or later, those same mechanisms that are fueling your success are going to flip into reverse and accelerate your decline. And this is why we see so many companies that seem to be in incredibly dominant positions like Nokia, Kodak, Blockbuster, Blackberry, you name it, all of a sudden become irrelevant overnight and sometimes go bankrupt overnight.

And it’s because these same reinforcing mechanisms flipped into reverse and accelerated their decline. So in order to grow your business and your industry, even your career in a sustainable way, you need to create stability, a stable system. Stable systems have balancing loops.

And in terms of innovation and thinking about the capabilities we’ll need for the future, that stabilizing loop is introducing deliberate discontinuity. So ideas that might be inconsistent or in direct conflict with what you’re currently doing, what’s making you successful right now. And that’s what disruption’s all about.

It’s about introducing disruptive ideas to actually strengthen your system, make you more adaptable, make you prepared for the capabilities that you will actually need for the future. I often sum that up by saying, a leader’s ability to challenge assumptions is more important than their ability to reinforce them. And that’s what it comes down to.

So you’ve got to get into that habit of challenging assumptions, not reinforcing them. No. And I think we’ve seen over the past couple of years, a couple of really high-profile instances where we’ve all been reminded in very painful ways, how fragile many aspects of the current system actually are and how ripe they are for innovation.

And I think we’ve got this moment right now where we’re starting to see a reckoning on the part of the industry as a whole saying, we need to change. There’s an appetite to embrace new technologies that wasn’t there, even five or 10 years ago. And so there’s a lot of optimism that you can point to from that, but certainly there are still a number of people who are mired in those past ways of thinking.

And so I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut it off here. But as I mentioned, Luke is going to be joining us at Finnovate Fall in September. He’ll be speaking on the 13th and there will be a networking opportunity after his session.

So do come check us out there, check out the book Disrupt. In the meantime, Luke, thanks again for taking the time to chat. Thanks, Greg.

Appreciate it. Looking forward to Finnovate in the Fall. Banking Unbound.

Joining me today, we have Manas Chawla, CEO of London Politica. Manas is going to be joining us on stage at Finnovate Fall this year in New York. We had a great session with him at Finnovate Spring.

Manas, thank you so much for joining me today. Greg, thank you so much for having me. I love working with the Finnovate family and I’m excited about New York.

Yeah, well, certainly we all learned a lot from your session last spring in San Francisco. But before we jump into some of those pieces, can you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and London Politica? Sure. So I founded and I now currently lead London Politica, which is the world’s largest geopolitical risk advisory for social impact.

And when we first entered the space about three and a half years ago, there were very few political risk companies doing things on social impact. And so the first few clients we worked with were anything to do with charities, non-profits, international organizations, really the kinds of organizations that work on the frontiers of geopolitically risky markets, but often don’t have the budgets to pay for the premium price tag which existed in that sort of industry. And that led to some cool projects.

We got to work with the United Nations World Food Program in Afghanistan, helping them figure out the geopolitics of local instability and helping them redesign more effective food programs after the United States pulled out. We got to work with the Red Cross and we were their exclusive partner in Ukraine, helping them figure out how the war was evolving, both sort of in a macro long term scale, but also on the ground, day to day, week to week. I got to spend a few weeks in Poland and Ukraine last summer, and that was very informative.

And then over time, we shifted to a much more sort of commercial focus and started providing that macro advice to all sorts of entities, from big banks, hedge funds, private equity. We do a lot of family offices. And of course, to fintech companies, which, you know, often because they’re so young and so fast moving, geopolitical risk isn’t high on their agenda.

But as I try to point out in San Francisco and will try to do in New York, I think it really should be because I think not only are there a lot of risks, but plenty of opportunities for fintechs to look out for. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, certainly the background that you have is really interesting and very different from most of the guests who come on this podcast.

I think it’s really beneficial, though, for fintechs and for financial institutions to turn their lens towards this bigger picture, because obviously a lot of geopolitical events will have massive impact on the banking and the fintech space. And I think we are, I think every industry is guilty of this to some extent. But I think the fintech industry in particular, we’ve got a bubble around ourselves.

And so sometimes there’s a temptation to ignore some of those larger pieces that are obviously going to have a major impact on the space. Now, I don’t want you to give away too much about what you’re going to be talking about in New York. But can you talk a little bit about some of the big geopolitical events that you’re seeing unfold or that might unfold that you think might have a big impact on the banking and fintech spaces? Sure.

I mean, I think these last five years in kind of the longer term, in the last year in particular, have proven that geopolitical risk is here and it’s here to stay. You know, there used to be a time when geopolitical risk wasn’t a mainstay at conferences like these, but now it’s really, really hard to ignore. The war in Ukraine has affected virtually every business and every industry in some way, shape or form or the other.

But you’re also seeing sort of more long term trends. If you’re seeing what’s happening with the macroeconomic environment and this sort of inflation that central banks all around the world are struggling to overcome. If you’re looking at how deeply interconnected our supply chains are to one or one to three particular choke points in Taiwan, where 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are made.

And if you think about the kind of potential of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which, you know, 10 years ago, people almost didn’t think about. Now, the best analysts I’ve seen rate it at somewhere between 50 to 75 percent in the next three years. When you think about all those things, it really makes you understand how fundamentally insecure, fragile and unstable the geopolitical environment we’re in.

And that obviously creates a lot of risk, but it also creates opportunities. One of the most interesting pieces of the puzzle, I think, for fintechs to keep track of is the evolving pattern of central bank backed digital currencies. Now, effectively, every major central bank in the world is thinking of issuing a digital currency, but by far the country most ahead in this race is China.

And they’ve already started trialing these currencies. They’ve rolled it out to about a quarter of their citizens, which is sort of in the neighborhood of three to five hundred million people. And this poses massive concerns, privacy concerns on one level, but also concerns about the ethics of an authoritarian government having access to how every individual spends their money on a day to day basis.

And particularly as we see U.S.-China relations intensify and heat up, we see this bifurcation between the tech systems we have. We’re developing two different systems simultaneously that don’t talk to each other. There’s different American tech companies and different Chinese tech companies.

And I think a real concern is that that spreads to the bifurcation of financial systems of fintech systems, which certainly poses, again, both risks and opportunities for fintech. So those are just some of the things I would watch out for. But there’s plenty more.

Yeah, and there’s certainly no shortage of pieces that you could potentially have listed off there. But the ones you have picked were, I think, really, really good to focus on. Now, one of the things that we were kind of talking about before we push record is the idea, obviously, big geopolitical events can impact the fintech industry.

But we’re now kind of seeing that go the other way as well, where the fintech industry is now playing a role in the outcome of some of these big geopolitical events. Can you talk a little bit about how the fintech industry is able to influence some of these pieces that you’ve been talking about? Not necessarily the exact examples that you just listed, but how it’s able to kind of become increasingly a factor on this international stage? Sure. I mean, we’ve seen this.

This isn’t a new story. We’ve seen this post-2007, 2008, when a lot of the surviving big financial institutions had immense government relations teams and had immense influence within the agenda-setting process of policymaking for the years to come. And I think that’s slowly evolved into the same reality, only more so for big tech companies.

And if you look across the landscape of American tech companies, whether that’s Google, Meta, Microsoft or Apple, all of these have dedicated government relations teams. But in certain cases, entire teams call digital diplomacy, speaking of Microsoft in particular, which has a permanent office and a permanent presence to the UN, both in New York and Geneva. And you might think that these tech companies are largely trying to influence the agenda on tech things, on AI, on regulation, on the future of work.

And while they are doing that, they’re also moving into completely traditional areas of geopolitics. Microsoft, for instance, is the largest private donor to the UN High Commission on Refugees in one year. And so there’s very clear agendas and priorities for tech companies.

That’s less so the case with fintechs, partly because we don’t have fintechs yet the size of these bigger tech companies, but also because most fintechs haven’t actually woken up to the reality of geopolitics being a sphere of influence that they can play an active role in. And so largely, while I think fintechs have made some important moves, and there’s some interesting examples, at least in Europe, of fintechs influencing regulation at the EU, with domestic authorities on very particular things, I think it’s a very decisive time for fintech thought leaders to play a role in thinking about the future of money, the future of debt, the future of lending, and really try to influence governments and civil society in accordance with that, whether that’s on central banking and central bank-backed digital currencies, or on other spheres. So there’s certainly immense opportunities, yeah.

Yeah, I think we’ve kind of seen that as well, the beginnings of it anyway. There have been these moments where the fintech community, I think, has sort of had to step up, or at least maybe seen an opportunity to step up in the wake of COVID, obviously, with the PPP loans. There were a huge number of fintechs who were jumping in to help facilitate that process and make the loan application process much more easy for the folks who are actually filling it out, tracking it.

And we saw different countries doing very different things. I had the minister of finance from Singapore on the show talking about how they were really quickly able to, through the fintech rails that they had built, distribute stimulus money into various sectors of the economy in an extremely targeted way, which obviously is not something that I think the fintech industry would have said, we’re going to do this. But when faced with that challenge, they had the means to go out and do it.

And so now I think the challenge is to say, okay, we built a system which is resilient enough to be able to handle problems as they come up, but can you think one step further? Can you start to anticipate the problems a little bit sooner? Can you start to think about how you might be able to influence the spheres beyond sort of crisis management mode? And that was something you actually talked a little bit about on stage at Spring as well. You mentioned the concept, not of a black swan, which I think many people are probably aware of, but of a gray rhino. Can you talk a little bit about what exactly a gray rhino is and how it kind of relates to a lot of the conversation we’ve been having so far? Yeah.

I mean, a black swan is a word that we used very, very regularly, especially post 2007, 2007 and eight, really to justify 2007 and eight as this kind of crisis that was entirely unforeseeable and that we could only rationalize with the benefit of hindsight. Effectively, black swans are very rare events that have massive impacts. But in contrast, gray rhinos actually develop right in front of our eyes.

You can see a gray rhino, there’s no way you could miss it. And it charges really slowly at you at first, but you only really start to act or realize it when it’s right in front of you. And similar to black swans, they can have massive societal impacts.

And I think a lot of the crises that’ll define the next decade of geopolitics and macroeconomics aren’t even necessarily ones we can’t predict. We probably can, it’s just that they’re developing so slowly. There’s a fundamental inertia and complacency in how we act about them.

And so as a couple of quick examples, the fact that all the world’s electronics and technology are so heavily dependent on what is effectively one or two supply chains of advanced semiconductors in Taiwan, everyone knows that. And everyone knows that a Chinese invasion is possible, but what really are companies doing to create contingency plans around what would happen when such a geopolitical event takes place? Or say it’s not geopolitical, where the raw materials come from for these semiconductors, which is largely based out of South Korea and Japan, and where they’re processed in Taiwan, both of those regions sit on key tectonic fault lines. So the risk of an earthquake is very high.

I mean, something like a kind of mid-level earthquake, a natural disaster, could entirely disrupt global supply chains in all parts of the world. And there’s very few companies, again, that have really started thinking about those sorts of risks. Yeah.

Well, I think it’s because it’s so difficult to think about, but that’s also why it’s so crucial to spend some time thinking about them. And as someone who, I have a story for another day, I was actually one time literally charged by a gray rhino while I was on safari. I can tell you, they do come up on you quick in the last 50 feet or so.

And so it’s something which I think there’s a lot to be aware of. I think the question then becomes, what can bankers and what can fintech professionals do? What do they need to be doing right now that they’re not already doing? Because when you lay it out in this way, it seems so obvious, right? That there needs to be some safeties built in, there needs to be some contingency plans built in. It’s not something which you can just ignore.

So what do you recommend in the part of actually kind of changing behavior from what you’re seeing now in the space? Yeah, I think there’s a couple of really big things, and these things might sound very basic, but I’d argue actually that very few institutions actually really implement them rigorously in the way they need to. But one of these things is treating geopolitical risk like a priority. I think in the kind of regulatory environment we’re coming into post-2007-8, and particularly in the fintech space where the regulatory environment is constantly changing, companies have huge compliance teams.

And often all the subparts of risk, including geopolitics, gets relegated to them. And it’s something often that C-suite leadership and the board can almost shrug off. And that shouldn’t be the case if you’re looking at geopolitical risk as a really real operational concern.

Because if that’s the case, which it is, then C-suite leadership and boards should spend time thinking about this as a crucial part of their agenda, and to think about how different geopolitical events could potentially be risked, but also opportunities and spaces to expand the business in. And then the second thing is that there’s no shortage of geopolitical risks in the short term. They’re very scary that the media bombards us with constantly and all the time, but often they pose the risk of us losing sight of the long-term geopolitical risks, which potentially, and I’d argue definitely, are even more pivotal in changing society and the kind of global structure and world order as a whole.

If you think about where emerging markets are going in the next five to ten years, if you think about the pace of digitization, if you think about democratic black sliding, you think about how important the influence of big tech companies has become as geopolitical actors of their own. These are huge things that banks can, again, are much like great rhinos that fintechs should focus on. But again, because they’re so far into the long term, often we lose sight of them.

And so second thing is to make sure that those are constantly on top of our agenda. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think one of the things that you can see now that the fintech industry is old enough that you can see companies who’ve done a good job of this historically do tend to be the ones who come and succeed later on. A lot of the companies that we think of as juggernauts right now in the fintech space have been just slightly ahead of the curve, both in understanding what’s likely to happen, what’s likely to drive consumer behavior, and also understanding how the geopolitical landscape might potentially shift. And I think we’re seeing that, obviously, regulators play a role in determining in a very literal sense what happens in the fintech and banking spheres.

But also consumers have evolved quite a bit. And I’m not going to say anybody anticipated exactly what happened in 2020 with the pandemic, but there were a lot of companies who, prior to that in 2018 and 2019, really started to understand we need to be able to meet customers wherever they are. All of a sudden, overnight, that became crucial.

And a huge number of companies benefited enormously in 2020 and 2021. And a lot of companies were on the exact other side, where things that they had put in place were not resilient enough to withstand that kind of stress test. And so I think that’s really the crucial piece.

There’s a lot more that we could talk about here. And I would encourage anybody who’s interested in hearing more from Manas to come to Finnovate Fall. Listen to him speak there.

Obviously, also check out the demoing companies that we’ll have on stage and see for yourself who among the group could potentially be one of these leaders in the next five or 10 years, could turn into one of those juggernauts. It absolutely can happen. It’s happened before.

And for my part, I’ll just say I always love chatting with you. And I’m really interested in hearing what you’re going to be talking about. Look forward to catching up with you in New York.

It’s been a real pleasure, Greg. I look forward to seeing you in New York. 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 US-based production team, including producer Lisbeth Severance, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham, with social media support from Carlo Navarra and Sylvie Johnson. If you liked this episode, don’t forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media. Or leave us a five-star review on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Facebook or wherever it is that you listen to our show.

Those actions help other people find our podcast. And in return, that helps us build an audience that can be supported by sponsorship so we can continue to provide you with our award-winning content every week. Thanks again for joining us.

We’ll see you on Breaking Banks next week.