500 Celebrating 10 Years of Breaking Banks 

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.

Welcome to Breaking Banks. I’ve been saying that for 10 years now, and it hasn’t yet got old. Joining me for our 500th show and a truly epic milestone are my faithful co-hosts, J.P. Nichols and Jason Henricks.

Gentlemen, welcome. Hello. 500 episodes, 10 years.

Hard to believe. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you think about it, we’ve been doing this show every week for 10 years.

And yeah, we have some repeat shows here and there, but generally speaking, we’re at least producing 50 shows a year, at least, you know, so, and it is 10 years. So here we go, 500th episode. I don’t know if I’d ever, ever thought we’d get to this milestone when I first started the show.

In fact, you guys have heard me tell this story a few times, but do you know the reason I started the podcast? Tell us anyway. As soon as I say it, you’ll remember, but, you know, I, at the time, because it was 2013, May, 2013, at the time moving was starting to really take off. We’d just done our seed rounds.

It was flat out. I was running a weekly blog called banking for tomorrow. And the way I write, I do, you know, for a lot of the stuff I write, you know, sometimes I do straight opinion pieces, but a lot of the time I’m doing research pieces and it was taking me a few hours every week to do the blog and I was just running out of time.

And in my naivety, I thought, well, a podcast is only going to be an hour a week because it was live in those days. And I thought I’d be saving myself time. Little did I know that it would turn into this big beast.

So there you go. And I had been on a radio show out in California with Ken Rutowski and it had been, I’d been heard on that show from a producer for Voice America, Randall Libero, who you’re going to hear from later. And Randall rang me up and said, you should do your own show.

And a few weeks later, we were, we were live with the first episode of Breaking Banks. I think we might have a clip later from Giles Andrews, who was our first guest from Zopa. And on the second show, we had Ben Milne from Diwala.

I remember that. And we also had John Matonis, who at the time was the chair of the Bitcoin Foundation. That was our first and second episode.

Well, when you think about that 2013, I mean, Bitcoin wasn’t even invented until 2009, right? So we’re in the very early stages of this crazy thing called fintech. Many people hadn’t even heard about it. It was really pretty narrow group.

And as you mentioned, doing it live, then literally live, meaning opening on the air and Voice America built their business on what was originally called internet radio, right? It was about having a live broadcast over a URL. Absolutely. So all the shows were live back in those days.

We don’t do live shows very often now. Yeah, mainly because they stress me out, like massively stress me out because without fail, a guest doesn’t show up or we’re trying to navigate, you know, the various time zones because at the time we didn’t have Breaking Bank’s Europe or Breaking Bank’s Asia Pacific. So we were covering everything globally and it was always down to the minute that someone was unable to get in.

I’ve always had guests that would turn up and so forth. So that old O’Reilly, you know, mantra, we’ll do it live, we’ll do it live. Although it did lead to some hilarity, right? One of our best performing shows ever, pre-COVID, Matt Harris from Bane and I talking about, you know, unicorns versus workhorses and leave it to Matt.

I love him dearly. Taxi cab in New York, wasn’t he? Taxi cab on a corner on his way to LaGuardia. And so you hear all of New York City and its finest in the background for the show opener.

He’s like, I can do it. I can do it. I’m here.

I’m here. We’re live. Who was it that was standing on a street corner as a, you know, apparent six alarm fire was going on, right? Fire engines streaming down the street and it was a live show and there wasn’t really too much we could do about it other than mute their mic and try to, you know, pick something up.

Yeah. Was that DeWayne? I don’t know. That sounds familiar.

Yeah, I don’t think so. But doing it live, I was speaking at an event in, of all places, Astana, Kazakhstan, and had to host live at 11 or 12 p.m. whatever it was over there at the time. And it’s led to other funny moments, speaking of, you know, people being remote.

JP, you remember that recording with Dave Birch and it was live on the air and you just hear the zip, zip, zip. And you finally called him out on it like, Birch, what are you doing? And here he was looking for a pen, like unzipping every, you know, bag known to man. Yeah.

In fact, I think, I think we have that clip, right? Yeah. Somebody said to me the other day, I’m not going to say which, somebody said to me the other day, you know, in the bank we have this, essentially this weird kind of enterprise where people spend their nine to five, basically trying to figure out how to get away with stuff. You know, it’s, it’s the regulatory environment has, has grown up for reasons that we all understand.

But that doesn’t mean it should be sort of set into stone the way we do things. And I’ll give you a very simple example around that, which is to do with AML. So if we lived in Victorian times, then way back in the day, Are you packing? I keep hearing your zipper there.

I was actually, I was actually looking for my notebook. I’m searching through my rucksack. I can’t find my notebook.

I thought you were ready to skip out the back when you’re done. I’m sorry. I interrupted you.

Go ahead. No problem. No, no.

What I was going to say was, you know, we have a sort of structure, which is essentially kind of Victorian, right? The bank does some transactions and then they essentially fill out cards about those transactions. And then you send off those cards to somewhere and then somebody looks through them to see if there’s anything suspicious. And we’ve automated that, but we haven’t sort of changed.

Now we live in a world of always on, always connected, machine intelligence, machine learning, AI, perhaps we should be looking at a different way of doing things where instead of trying to create KYC barriers to keep the bad people out, whereby we have no idea what they’re doing. What we actually want to do is lower the barriers and let them in. Brett, mate, I literally, I can’t believe it.

500 episodes. That’s, I mean, it’s unbelievable. And thank you for involving me in some of them.

I’ve always, I’ve always had a good time on your show and I’ve always learned things, which is like a really important part. And I’ve always been, except the time I was scared when John McAfee was on, but you know, skate over that one. Anyway, my point is, here’s what I have to say about Breaking Banks.

I listen to the podcast even when I’m not on it. I mean, I cannot say any more in praise than that. Keep up the good work, mate.

So some of the funniest moments I recall on the show actually have Dave in them. I couldn’t find the clip before this show, but it was that time we were doing the news and Yahoo had got hacked and Dave came on and he’s like, you know, we announced that there’d been half a billion people had their details stolen. And Dave was like, I’m shocked.

I’m really shocked. And, you know, he absolutely drew us in and I had no idea Yahoo still had half a billion users, you know, which is just classic Birch dry humor in the moment. But he’s been one of our guest hosts, some of our other guest hosts over the years.

We’ve had Penny Crosman, Dave Birch, Chris Skinner, Ron Shelvin, Chloe James, Mark Hochstein, both Penny and Mark, of course, at the time were with Source Media, American Banker. In fact, for a number of years, we used their studios in New York. Liz Lumley was a guest host and there’s a few others.

If I’m forgetting them, I apologize. But I did catch up with Jim earlier in the week and Jim reminded me that his first show was a live show and in it he had to deal with the fact that a guest didn’t turn up or they dropped out. So here’s what Jim had to show about his early memories of co-hosting Breaking Banks.

Jim, thanks for joining us once again on Breaking Banks. Great to be here and I cannot believe you’re on your 500th show. That is insane.

It’s sort of epic, isn’t it? So can you can you remember those early appearances? Because we used to do a live show back in the day. Yeah, and actually that, you know, we go over these stories and it’s so funny because I was mentioning to you that I remember at least three shows that I did for my car in a parking lot, which I thought was kind of strange I had to do that. But when you realize we had to deal with so many time zones, so many different people involved, sometimes we weren’t in the best place to do it.

Heck, you’re a good example right now that you have to do what you have to do. I also remember my first time hosting your show, we ended up having one of the guests fall off and I was going on a script. Yeah, that’s the show you were hosting.

Exactly. I had to pivot between guests and figure out where I was in my conversation and really it gave me the thirst to do this because one thing that your show taught me and actually was the impetus to do a show myself was there are no better learning experiences than the podcast when you host. You learn something new every single time without fail and sometimes you’re stunned by what you know and what you find out and who tells it to you.

I’ve been doing some podcasts recently with very small financial institutions, they’re doing great things and I’ll tell you what, you can get innovation, get exciting stories from some of the most unusual places and that’s what makes it fun. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean that’s one of the reasons I started Breaking Banks and it’s definitely one of the reasons I’m doing the Futurists because I learn from so many of these guys, these folks.

Let’s explore that a little bit. You mentioned your podcast, Banking Transformed. How instrumental was Breaking Banks in you deciding to launch your own podcast? Well, in two different ways.

One was that, number one, you got so much information. Every time I hosted, every time I was a guest, it was so much fun and when COVID came on, all of a sudden I said, you know, I got to have some alternatives because content can become even more important and the other thing I learned was it wasn’t an impossible challenge. It was certainly a challenge but if you focus on it, if you keep consistency, I mean the biggest credit to you and your team and everybody that works on the show is that you’ve kept a cadence that I always know when I can find your shows.

That’s the hardest part of doing these shows is knowing that I’m coming out on X day every week. I’m going to promote it. I’m going to move on and that is so difficult.

It’s so hard for me at the financial brand writing articles. It’s so hard in creating content but once you get in the habit, it gets better and better and right now, the podcast is the most fun element of what I do today. Awesome.

Can I then ask you just to wrap up, you know, first of all, let me just say thanks for your contribution you’ve made to the show. We’re all very grateful and I’m sure the guests are grateful for that. You know, you’ve been a regular fixture and, you know, it’s also an important part of our friendship as well but, you know, what contribution do you think Breaking Banks has made to the industry overall? Well, you know, it’s interesting.

I go back to the history of my career. It used to be that you could read the American Banker every day. You had time to do it.

Things weren’t moving as fast. It’s impossible now and what’s interesting is podcasts like Breaking Banks gives you the opportunity to learn what’s going on today and the future is even more so that you get an up-to-date, up-to-the-minute update as far as what’s going on. There’s no other way to get that than with podcasts really and you need one source.

You can’t have 25 sources. You know, one of the things that you do and I try to do is we try to take everything that’s going on in the world, everything that’s being written, everything that’s being said, everybody that’s being highlighted in the industry and bring them on the show to say, bring us an up-to-date as to what’s going on in generative AI or in embedded finance, whatever it may be, in crypto or for your Futurist podcast, which is just exciting what you’re doing there. What’s going on outside of banking? Awesome.

Well, Jim, you know, on behalf of the team, thanks again and thanks for being a part of our 500th episode. All the best. You know, Brett, thank you for everything you got me going on.

You and Ron got me going on my writing career. You got me going on my presentation career. I owe you a lot of thanks for almost everything I’m doing right now.

Thanks. Virtual hug. Teamwork makes the dream work, bro.

Yeah, you can’t do it without a team. Absolutely. Well, we’ll see you again shortly.

That was Jim Maroos, the host of Banking Transform podcast and the author and owner of the Digital Banking Report. It’s been interesting, just the great number of people that it’s brought into its orbit and some of the fun that we get to have with it. Yeah, you know, I think the thing is, you know, a lot of Breaking Banks is history.

And if you go back and listen to the shows, it really does parallel what was happening in the space. And, you know, I was talking with Nigel Verdon earlier. You guys know Nigel from Rouser, previously Rouse Bank, exited there, CurrencyCloud.

You know, he’s done pretty well for himself. But he talked about the fact that in those early days, there was a lot of camaraderie. There’s a lot of collaboration between the different fintech founders and so forth.

And fintech was, you know, a lonely place in those early days. But it really was, you know, something very collaborative. And I think that’s why we had such extraordinary guests over the time, is we were able to get many of the founders and so forth, because, you know, we were all founders as well, and heavily involved in the industry.

But over the time, we’ve had some big names join us on the show. Who are the most memorable guests that you guys recall us having? Well, I think most memorable guest for me is when you had me on the show for the first time, Brett. And, you know, back to that camaraderie, right? So I had co-founded Perk Street back in 2008.

You wrote Banking 2.0 in 2010, which was required reading for everyone on our team. I randomly reached out to you thinking I would never hear from you, right? Like this famous Brett King guy with the raised eyebrow. You know, fast forward three years, just crash landed Perk Street into a ball of flames, moved to Chicago, and I get a call from you.

Best Brett King accent. Hey, mate, I’m going on a book tour. Do you want to look after the podcast for me? Somehow that Aussie accent turned into Brooklyn.

I’m not sure. Which is fair enough. But Brett moved to New York at the time.

I like it. I like it. Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve had many people try and do my accent on the show.

Jason’s tried it a couple of times, I think. It never works out. Pretty soon it’s going to be Crocodile Dundee.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, and that scene, of course, took place in New York, as did one of your early live shows at the Google NYPAY Unconference.

And that was my first time on the show as a guest. That was October of 2013. So just a few months into the show.

And at the time, I had founded what was then called the Bank Innovators Council, which ended up becoming a part of Next Money. And what I knew is that bankers who are trying to innovate need a club to belong to. They need a support group because they’re surrounded by what I always like to call the business prevention department.

I had met Jason. I had met you, Brett. And this whole idea of, let’s get these bankers together and do something.

What that something was, I didn’t know at the time. And ironic how, once Jason and I started working together, that idea in a much better version became what’s today the Alloy Labs Alliance. Yeah.

Yeah. And I don’t know, we must have got on because we ended up co-hosting together. So do you remember the first show that we did after we put Provoke Media together? I can’t, I’m trying to think when that would have been.

Well, I want to say that that was about the fall of 2015, around Finnovate Fall. Oh, the infamous meeting in New York. Yes.

Where we decided, hey, this one podcast is pretty good, but there are different angles, different ideas, different hosts. And let’s put them all under one roof. And that became Provoke.fm Media.

Well, it also, sorry, Jason, you’re on mute. But that’s one of our favorite lines from the show as well, over the years. Which one? You’re on mute.

Sorry, garbage truck. See, thank gosh, we’re not doing a live streaming show right now. But it was interesting.

I used to like the live shows, dude. You know, I mean, it gave us, I think it gave… Look, when I look back, the audio quality and so forth is not as good as the shows we do now. You know, they weren’t as polished in terms of production.

But they give you an edge, you know, you have to be on your best game. They definitely give you a shot of adrenaline, right, as a guest. I was amazed every single time that we actually pulled it off.

Yeah, kind of screech into that top of the next hour. We did have some challenges on the show. I remember being at a venue.

I can’t, it was at, might have been at a WeWork or something. And we had Stephen Wolfram as a guest. And we had terrible connectivity issues at our end.

His end was fine. So he would hear half a question. It was really tough.

But we had, yeah, that was a bad show. That was… Anyway. Some of the finest.

But hey, look where Provoked took us, right? We would have Matteo and Ajedon quite a bit. That gave, you know, life to Breaking Banks. Guadalajara as well.

Mattias, Mattias Korner, all those guys. And they came together and produced Breaking Banks Europe. We had, of course, Sam Maul, who spun off Fintech 5. And then Jason, you took the helm of that from Sam.

Which has now become the Hot Wings and Hot Takes. My 2700 bottles, custom branded hot sauce. Awesome.

And then we had Breaking Banks Asia Pacific. We had a shot at that for a little while with Simon Spencer. It’s back now with two journalists out of Australia.

Rachel Williamson and Karis Palmer running that show. And then, you know, you mentioned Finnovate Fall, JP. Well, we had a couple of live shows at Finnovate.

One of them you were involved in, in Finnovate New York. And then I did one in Finnovate. It must have been in San Diego around the same time.

2015 with Josh from Simple and Jim Maroos. We did a live show there. You, Jim, and I also worked on live shows over the years, right? Yeah, you, Jim, and I were live in London on stage two with a session there as well.

Over a million square feet of conference space in the exhibitor stands. Well, stands isn’t really the right word to describe them. These are high-tech exhibit spaces with huge video displays, like you’d expect to see at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Complete with meeting rooms to cut important business deals. And some even have their own bars built in. It takes a lot of coffee to keep everyone going all day.

And the team from InnoTribe, Swift’s innovation arm, brought in Jimmy Monkey Coffee, a longtime favorite at Next Money conferences, all the way from Singapore. Jimmy Monkey’s founder, Michael Ryan. Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting and exciting setup that we have here.

It’s quite exciting to be back again. Thank you. I mean, it’s 330 kilograms of coffee, 1500 liters of milk, a ton of equipment, all chucked in a plane and sent over to Switzerland here.

And 10 crew, all feverishly working away and putting out close to, I think we’ll get close to 10,000 cups this year. And that’s a lot of coffee. You know, we would do a special show with the Finnovate winners, which they then said, hey, we should have our own Finnovate podcast.

We said, come join the Provoke family. Absolutely. So I actually, we caught up with Greg Palmer, who is the emcee of Finnovate earlier in the week.

And he’s talked about that process of our collaboration over the years and what led then to the creation of the official Finnovate podcast in association with Provoke Media. Hey, Greg Palmer here from Finnovate and of course, the Finnovate podcast, just reaching out to say congratulations on your 500th episode. It’s a monumental achievement on behalf of myself and everybody on the Finnovate team.

We just want to say, well done. Certainly Breaking Banks has been a massive part of the Finnovate history. We’ve partnered with you for many years, ultimately, of course, culminating in our own podcast, which we do with you all.

But we are maybe some of the few people who knew you as a presenter first, having you up on stage at some of those early Finnovates with Move-In Bank. And of course, later on, as you continue to innovate, that was how we sort of built our relationship there. But I still think back to the first time that I was asked to appear on Breaking Banks.

What a big deal that was for me and how much effort I put into it. If you could have seen me in my house waiting for that call to start, I had two laptops open with a bunch of notes. I was making sure there was absolutely no noise around.

I wanted to do a really good job. Ultimately, it’s something that I’ve become a little bit more comfortable with as we continue to go over the years. But I still think back to that first time and it really speaks to what a big deal the show is and continues to be.

I have to say my favorite Breaking Banks memory, though, probably comes from the fact when we had you record the live episode at Finnovate Fall a couple of years ago. It was a great conversation. It was really fun to do it in front of the audience and kind of hear that live participation.

But the most satisfying moment had to be when I was able to ring the bell on Brett in front of the audience while we were recording it live. It was such a really good moment for me. And I thought something that probably a lot of people would have enjoyed to do as well.

So I was sort of really, really happy to do it. I think I was justified in doing it if you go back and listen to the tape. But again, a really enjoyable time.

And just on a personal note, I’ll say I really appreciate the support that the Breaking Banks team has given to me, has given to Finnovate. And again, what you’ve done for the industry has been absolutely massive. So congratulations.

Well done. And on behalf of everybody from Finnovate, here’s to another 500 episodes. And let’s say Dara Tarkovsky from Actuate Law, who is a frequent guest whenever we wanted to break down the latest happenings from the OCC or the CFPB.

We have a show coming up on that shortly. And she started the Tech on Reg podcast. And then I think last but not least, rounding that out, the folks from Sunrise Bank launching the Next Gen Banker podcast to really explore what is the future of banking and what is that human going to look like? And some of our guest hosts, I mean, some of our big names that we’ve had on the show over the previous years as well have a common theme to them.

So people like Peter Diamandis, Aubrey de Grey, Ramiz Naam, Stephen Wolfram, Kevin J. Anderson, David Brin, Thomas Frey, even Brian Romley and Robert Scoble, who’ve been regular guests on the show over the last few years, all were my friends out of the Futurists community. And so we ended up spinning off the Futurists podcast last year. And it’s now also hit that magic milestone of being the number one podcast in the category of Futurism, just like Breaking Banks has dominated the FinTech category for those years.

So now we’re producing, what is it? Nine or 10 shows now under the Provoke banner. They’ve been on a little bit of a hiatus, but don’t forget Emerge Everywhere from Jennifer Tescher and our friends at the Financial Health Network. Again, another frequent guest who always had some great perspectives on how do we make banking and finance more accessible and available to everybody.

And they’ve had some fantastic guests on their show as well, including Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal. And our newest one, Breaking Chains, crypto. Looking at the ins and out of the blockchain and crypto web3 market.

So a really nice stable of programs that we’ve created over the years. All right, let’s have a quick break, guys. And when we come back, let’s talk about some of the most memorable guests that we’ve had on the show, including Boris Johnson and John McAfee and a few others.

You knew I was going to call out McAfee. That show is unbelievable. Absolutely.

And also, you know, hear from a few more of our friends who’ve been on the show over the years. You’re listening to the 500th anniversary show of Breaking Banks, our 10th anniversary, 500th episode. We’ll be right back after these words from our sponsors.

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. In 500 episodes of Breaking Banks, Brett and the team have covered a lot of ground and challenged the status quo. In banking, the status quo deserves to be reexamined.

Being on Breaking Banks, especially during the years it was recorded live in the American Banker studio, has been a highlight of my career. In the early days, each time I was on the show, my blood pressure would go through the roof because inevitably Brett would ask me questions that had nothing to do with the topic I thought we would be discussing, forcing me to think on my feet. I met many interesting people on the show and had fun debating issues with Brett, Jim Maroose, Ron Shevlin, JP Nichols and other regulars on the show.

I wish the team well with the next 500 episodes. I remember when your show started on the Voice America business channel and when you visited the studio at about the two year mark, you had already reached half a million listeners. When you became the number one show on the business channel, I met you at Money 2020 and gave you an award.

I’ve developed and produced about 200 original shows, but Brett, you’ve been one of those hosts who had a clear vision of where you wanted to go right from the beginning. And like a good captain of a ship, you’ve sailed into extraordinary success with it. It’s been very exciting to see with the show as both a launching pad and a foundation, how you’ve built upon that, establishing Provoke Media, authoring more books that have gone even bigger and become international bestsellers.

And today, Breaking Banks Fintech is the number one talk show and podcast about the fintech industry in the whole world. There’s no question about that. So congratulations again on your 500th episode.

This is Randall Obero signing off. Couple of anecdotes I wanted to share. The first time I saw Brett, as I mentioned a few years later on stage in Singapore while I was interviewing him, was in 2016 in Las Vegas.

He walked past me. He was recognisable by that signature raised eyebrow and awesome trainers. And I was too nervous to introduce myself and say hi.

Anyway, after which we did connect and I realised that he was super down to earth with a steely eyed focus on creating great content in the fintech space. He and Breaking Banks were there on the cusp of its boom. I was lucky enough to become co-host along with some awesome peers and now friends that I’ve met by Brett.

Co-hosted with Jason Henricks, JP Nichols, Lita Glyptis, Dave Birch and Jim Maroos, who is a great friend of mine and my husband’s. They have a football baseball thing going on. Highlights are interviewing the likes of John Hope Bryant from Operation Hope, Sam Kilmer at Cornerstone Advisors, James Robert Ley, author of Banking on Digital Growth.

Such a forward thinking individual. Through Breaking Banks, I have met such interesting people and it’s been a real honour. Well, welcome back to Breaking Banks.

We’ve been talking about our 10 year history now on our 500th show of Breaking Banks and our sister podcast here at Provoke.fm media. And one of the things that has always been big to me is that we’ve been close and early on some of the big ideas. We talked a little bit about Bitcoin earlier.

I mean, what was the price of Bitcoin when you first started? I mean, it was less than $1,000, wasn’t it, Brad? Yeah, it was definitely less than $1,000. In fact, I was looking earlier, we did get a show in with Brock Pierce when it was at $1,200. And that was just when we were waiting for the announcement on the ETF from the Winklevoss twins.

It was about a week out, so we were debating whether that was going to affect it. But our first show, as I said, on the Bitcoin stuff was in June 4th, 2013. Then we had the Mt.

Gox crash, which we talked about on February 11th, 2014. Then, yeah, we had Chris Larson from Ripple Labs come on. Chris Skinner actually co-hosted that show.

Brock Pierce came on that one. And then Bitcoin crossed the $1,000 value Rubicon sometime around that time in 2015, something we did a show on that. Yeah, it was, yeah.

And then on March 3rd, 2017, we had Brock Pierce back on calling Bitcoin digital gold. And Bitcoin on that date of March 3rd, 2017 was at $1,273. I’m pretty sure Breaking Banks is the first place I heard the word blockchain.

And we’ve heard it a lot since then. We’ve also had, I think you’ve mentioned Vitalik Buterin has been on as well. That led us into really exploring some of the ideas with identity.

Dave Birch been a leader around that whole thing. Virtual reality, artificial reality, AI. Boy, AI has really hit the news hard in the past few months, but we’ve been talking about this for 10 years.

Yeah, one of my favorite shows on the AI front was actually with Ben Goertzel. And that was one of the early shows that he did with us. He’s been on a few times now.

So it was December 21, 2017 when we had Ben Goertzel on. It’s probably one of my favorite episodes, that episodes, which is entitled AI and Robots with Ben Goertzel. Well, I mean, it forced me, I was going to be hosting Brian.

And this was years ago. And I had to go read up on all things AI in order to have any semblance of a conversation with them. Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting how certain guests, when you get them together, work really well.

And I think we’re the only show that has Brian Romley and Robert Scoble on together like that. But they’ve always been really interesting guests. We had them both on individually and then together.

And it’s sort of magic when they come on together. Is there any other guests like that that have paired really well in your experience, guys? Alex Johnson and Kia Haslett are like gold together on the hot wings and hot pigs. I mean, we managed to talk about core deposits for an hour and we could have just kept going.

And it’s a well-performing show. Who listens to three people ramble on about deposit strategies and rates and what should be considered as a broker deposit for a full hour? Yeah, well, Kia has become a new favorite, relatively new to the show. But she always has hot takes, even if she’s not hitting hot wings.

And I had she and John Maxwell scheduled to record on what ended up being literally, as we were opening up the mics to record, they announced the shutdown of Silicon Valley Bank. And so hot on the heels of that. So it’s not always the big names, but sometimes the big stories.

Sometimes we know they’re big stories. Sometimes we don’t. I think about being so early in the conversation around M-Pesa and Flutterway and some of the things happening in emerging markets that we’ve talked on the show too, you know, frankly, we were not hearing anywhere else.

I think that’s very true. The M-Pesa show remained one of our most popular shows from 2016, which included man on the street interviews. I actually went down to Kenya.

It was sponsored by KCB Bank, one of the big banks there. We met with Bob Collymore who’s since passed away, but Bob was the CEO of M-Pesa, Safaricom in Kenya. We met with the governor of the central bank.

You know, that was a memorable show. And then, you know, we had our CBDC show, which was one of our, again, high production, you know, value shows where we had Henry Aslanian on and Richard Turin, the host, the author of Cashless, you know, a great book on what’s happening in China. And we managed to get some man on the street interviews from people in Shenzhen and Shanghai, asking them what, you know, how they would use the CBDC wallet and so forth.

And that was very insightful. So let’s just play a clip from those couple of shows, the M-Pesa and CBDC specials. Breaking Banks comes to you from one of the hottest proving grounds for fintech on the planet.

You’re worth the life, your perfect life. No, it’s not New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, or even Shanghai, but it is a country where fintech has created the largest shift in financial inclusion ever in the history of the financial system. Have you figured it out? This week, we’re on the African continent.

It might appear like an unlikely place for the leading fintech use cases in the world, but Kenya, the home of M-Pesa, which is the Swahili word for money or mobile money effectively, is where we’ve seen the evolution of the most prolific mobile bank account on the planet. That’s in terms of percentage of the population affected because we know what’s happening in China. Alibaba, Alipay, and WeChat, you know, they’ve got hundreds of millions.

But in terms of pure percentage of the population affected, Kenya is the place where it’s at. The ECNY wallet was a feature of the Beijing Olympics. Here’s how one Chinese citizen described their participation in the ECNY wallet trials in China that are happening today.

I’ve been on frequent business trips to Shanghai and Shenzhen recently. I used ECNY in Shanghai last December and I’ve always been interested in it. As soon as the ECNY was issued, I downloaded the app for tests.

So where is it being used? I have used it several times in shopping stores and malls. There are some business circles in Shanghai that support ECNY payment, such as Nanjing Road, Shindiandi, Beihai Beach, and Xuhuawei. I have often used it for online shopping several times.

Rich, can you tell us a little bit more about how widespread the trials are in China of the ECNY wallet? Sure, Brett. It’s really interesting. Right now, we’re up to 17 cities, plus one, and plus one is the Olympic venue.

Or this summer, it’s going to be a plus one of the Asian Games, which is also going to use digital currency or the ECNY, just like the Olympics did. So the thing to understand about it, though, is that while it’s in 18 cities, including my beloved Shanghai, where I live, it’s not well adopted. It’s hard to find in the store.

So I can’t use it at my local supermarket. I can use it at McDonald’s, which is not my favorite, but I can also use it at a Japanese clothing store, Big Chain, but my local coffee shop and many of the other small shops aren’t using it just yet. So it’s still in what’s called trial phase and it’s coming and it’s doing lots of interesting things, which being used for larger volume payments now or higher number payments, but it’s not everywhere.

You’re not going to see the ECNY symbol on display in every store that you look at. Being out there in the field and doing interviews, I’ll never forget Sky Izzard when we were in New York doing the startup bootcamp episode. Sky from Sandbox Banking, talking about the sacrifices he had to make moving from Boston to New York to get that startup off the ground.

For that, I was really an undergraduate student at Tufts, studied computer science and psychology. So you’re from Boston. You had to come down here to New York for 13 weeks.

How did that all work out? Where are you living? What’s that look like for you? I’m on my aunt’s third floor in Brooklyn. It’s actually a deal of a lifetime. She’s letting me stay there for free.

It’s very, very hot up there right now. You know, it’s tough. It is tough coming down here.

I mean, my girlfriend’s back in Boston. I miss her a lot. One of my favorite moments at the show happened in New York and it’s a brief clip.

The audio quality is not great, but of course, the guest went on to be rather infamous. And that is at the time he was the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, prior to him being prime minister. And we got the chance to catch up with him at an Innovate Finance event in New York City, where he talked about why it was that London was such a great destination for fintech.

What makes London a great destination for financial technology? Because we’ve got the banks. We’ve got the biggest financial sector anywhere in the world. But we’ve also got the expertise.

We’ve got more people involved in that sector than any other part of any other European capital, probably any capital in the world. And it’s growing the whole time. We have the brains.

We have the coders. We have the young graduates. And it’s a fantastic place to live.

I think that is why London is winning at the moment. It’s just because of the quality of life of the city. It’s the bars.

It’s the bars. It’s the vibe. All that kind of stuff that people like me can’t really screw up too much.

What we can do is make sure it’s safe, that it’s clean, that it’s green, and there are enough houses. And the transport is good. That’s what we do.

And it’s working well. And how do you think New York and London can collaborate on bringing technology to the banking sector? Just recognize that this is win-win. Obviously, New York and London will always be in competition to some extent.

But there’s a sense also in which the better New York does, the better London does, the better London does, the better New York does. They are two very similar economies. Breakthroughs in New York will instantly be replicated in London.

Breakthroughs in London will be instantly translated to New York. It all moves ahead of the same thing. Boris Johnson, thank you very much.

Great to meet you. Just to round things out, we had Keir Haslett, Alex Johnson, and Jason McCullough, who often participates in Hot Wings and Hot Takes, each record a Hot Take for us. Why don’t we listen to those? Hey, Breaking Banks.

It’s Keir Haslett from Bank Director. Congrats on your 500th episode. 500 is a lot.

I hope you and your listeners take a minute to think about what the banking startup and economic environment was like at the start of this podcast compared to where it is today. One thing I’ve been reflecting on are the beliefs that were more permanent in our minds than maybe we realized and the unexpected impact of the things when they change. More specifically, I’m thinking about interest rates, the movement of money, competition, and technology.

Everyone is rediscovering, or discovering if you’re my age, what it means to live in an inflationary, high interest rate environment. That’s on top of the technology investments and other changes banks and startups have made over the last decade. My take for you is that I think it’s too soon to say that the banking crisis is over.

I think it’s barely begun. I don’t think we’ve really seen the full breadth of the interest rate bets that banks have made and how their balance sheets will perform in a prolonged, high interest rate environment. I’m sure the next 500 episodes of Breaking Banks will explore how financial institutions can cope, respond to, and capitalize on the amount of changes that are about to happen in the industry.

Can’t wait to join you for those conversations. Hi, my name is Alex Johnson and I am the creator of FinTech Takes and in honor of Breaking Banks’ 500th episode, congratulations, I want to share this quick rant with you. Apple Wallet sucks.

Now, I say this as someone who’s a huge fan of Apple products generally. I’m recording this rant on an iPhone. I use a MacBook to type out my newsletter every week.

I may even buy the Vision Pro headset and I like a lot of the individual financial services products that Apple offers as well, right? The Apple credit card is great. It has a nice consumer-friendly design. The savings account offers a generous interest rate.

I even think the Buy Now, Pay Later product is fine. It’s a Buy Now, Pay Later product, but it’s no worse than any of the other ones out there. That’s not the problem.

They’ve assembled a lot of individual financial services products. They’re great that I really think are very competitive in the market and yet the ability to access all of those products is hinging on my ability to navigate this Apple Wallet that doesn’t make any sense. Why is it that I have to scroll past expired Disney World Resort passes in order to get to my account balance? Why is it that I have to apply for the new Apple savings account within the Apple credit card interface? That makes no sense.

Why is it so hard for me to just send money to someone even though Apple has the best infrastructure possible for P2P payments? Why is it that I have to click on every one of these individual cards in order to see my transactions rather than having the transactions aggregated together in one place? Why do I have to apply for the Buy Now, Pay Later service within the Apple Wallet before I can access that as a payment option at the point of sale using Apple Pay? Look, I have a physical wallet that is an absolute mess. It has cards in it. It has cash.

It has old receipts. It has identification cards. It has insurance cards.

It has identification cards that are expired. It has notes that I wrote to myself years ago that I haven’t gotten rid of for some reason. My wife makes fun of me for it.

And I understand that Apple, generally speaking, is a fan of skeuomorphic design. I get that. However, I really wish in this particular case they would have started with a blank slate and built a financial services app that makes sense rather than porting over my mess of a wallet into the digital world.

First of all, congratulations on your 500th episode. Because I can’t limit myself to just one topic, here are two quick ones for you. First, a product feature.

This will be no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with my work. Tipping. Tipping is not a business model.

Tipping is something you do when you receive exceptionally good service at a restaurant, at a coffee shop, etc. It is not something you do when you take a loan or execute a trade. Particularly in lending business models, it tends to just be an end run around state usury law.

Yeah. Hate it. Not an innovation.

Terrible. Need to get rid of it. In relation to that, the phrase democratizing X needs to go.

I was hoping we would get rid of this in 2023. I still see it floating around. Any time I see a company refer to how they are democratizing something, I’m immediately and inherently suspicious of what it is that they’re doing and how they’re monetizing their users.

Whether it’s Robinhood in the trading space, anything in crypto, if they’re calling it democratizing X, chances are it really is just taking advantage of users who probably should not be using the product. With that, again, happy 500th episode and congratulations on all the hard work. Well, Jason, you get credit for hot wings and hot takes.

That’s been one of our best features. And the other one you brought to the show is FinTech Fight Club. And we both have hosted those at various events and never fails to entertain.

Well, it’s funny, the backstory on that one, Ron in Chevrolet and Jim Marose were going to be doing a debate for MX, for Money Experience. And I was gonna be out there and this was Ron and I doing some late night Twitter DMs. And I said, the problem here, Ron, is you are always beating poor Jim up.

And Jim’s too nice to hit you back. You need like a moderator or something so you fight fair. And I wake up to an email the next morning from the head of content from MX going, hey, Ron Chevlin says you’re willing to moderate a debate between the two of them.

And it’s gonna be right after your session that you’re speaking at anyway with Jane Barrett. So that’s cool. I’m like, wait a second, I didn’t sign up to that.

And I said, well, I’ll do it on one condition. I get full editorial control of the production. And so the folks from MX didn’t know what was about to happen.

And I’ve got a source now in Vietnam that makes all of the Fight Club robes when they come out. But it was Ron the Shiv Chevlin and Jim the Moose Marose unbeknownst to me that that was his nickname once upon a time. But coming out at the full, ladies and gentlemen, now prepare yourself for the main event.

And it always brings a lot of energy back to the stage. So we’ve done it five times now. I wanna say five of the Finnovates.

I think it’ll be at Finnovate fall again this year. The reigning champions are Lindsey Davis and Wade Arnold from Move, right? We changed it up a little bit and did a tag team format for a while. But they’re pushing the edge of content is a ton of fun.

Welcome to today’s main event. The Fintech Fight Club. No more debate.

The gloves are coming off. Our first contender, the Oracle of Ohio. The bad boy behind the financial brand and the reigning champion at Orange Theory, Jim the Moose Marose.

The reigning champion weighing in at 180 pounds of snark. The bruiser from just north of Boston. Forbes contributor.

And oh yeah, the director of research at Cornerstone. Ron the Shiv Chevlon. Hi, Ron Chevlon here.

Just wanted to congratulate you and the whole Breaking Banks team on your 500th episode. It’s a huge accomplishment to have been the top rated banking podcast for so many years in a row. Thanks for having me on the show from time to time and especially for allowing me to guest host.

I remember the first time I guest hosted. I can’t tell you how nervous I was. There were two guests that day.

Spiros Margeris, founder of Margeris Ventures and one of the top Fintech influencers on Twitter was on that day. And the second guest was someone involved in RegTech, which is not an area I follow closely. I remember studying up on the space for a few hours before the show in hope of gaining enough knowledge to maintain a good conversation and ask some good questions.

It really made me appreciate how easy you make hosting Breaking Banks look. So congrats on show number 500, Brett. And I’m already looking forward to show 1000.

I’ve been involved with Breaking Banks as a podcast since its first episode. And now we’re on number 500. And now there are many podcasts.

But this was probably one of the first ones that was out there. Um, to be honest, maybe it’s my age. I cannot remember the first one.

I think I was on it. But it really goes to the heart of communication. And from my perspective, I’m a writer like Brett.

And so my personal view is that I like to share my thoughts through my words in the written form. And having said that, I’ve taken part in many different podcasts and videos and vodcast services. And I think the thing about Breaking Banks is it’s a record of the history of the last decade of the rise of fintech and the challenge that creates for banks, which is why it’s called Breaking Banks.

Although many of us would say, how can you have Breaking Banks when banks are already broken? The reverse of that is that where we are today is that fintech’s now on a decline. It’s not on a irreversible decline, but it is going through a downhill run because of the drying up of funding and the nature of the markets in 2023 and where we are with venture capital. And rather than Breaking Banks, it’s more like the way of the world is trying to integrate banks with technology through fintech.

A lot of banks are acquiring fintech companies and a lot of banks are trying to work with fintech companies. So we’ve seen a massive change in the last decade from challenges and new structures, open banking, APIs, cloud, mobile, smartphone, computing, etc. Now artificial intelligence in particular is a big focus, to banks becoming far more technology savvy and integrated with technology and accepting that they cannot work without technologists, which to me is the greatest thing I’ve seen in my lifetime.

And Breaking Banks has been tracking that for 500 episodes. So happy birthday. And I really thank you for everything you’ve done.

I’m Spiros Megheres of Megheres Ventures. I would like to say a few words about Breaking Banks and Bret King. It’s a fantastic show, probably the leader in its space globally for almost 10 years.

I listen to it a lot whenever I can. I get a lot of insights from the fantastic guests on this show that share generously their knowledge. It made me a better investor in the fintech space and in general to listen to those guests and to listen what Bret had to say.

I want to thank Bret King and his team for having provided us with so much knowledge on banking, financial services, on AI, on fintech, primarily on fintech, but all plays into one. Thanks again for having me. Thanks again for having us all.

And thanks for sharing this platform to all of us to listen and become more knowledgeable in the process. Spiros Megheres. One of the other interesting things about this show is not only do we hit topics early, sometimes we take on some hot ones, things around cannabis, very popular there for a while, and a little bit of controversy.

And I can’t believe we’ve got that show right every time, man. One of our highest guests, John McAfee, Bret, and that interview you did with him. Yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with this, whether it was in Belize at the time or whatever.

But I do remember we had Dave Birch and Katie co-hosting with me, and it got sort of crazy, which is John McAfee, right? But he thought he was supposed to be on for a half hour, and we’re trying to get him for a full hour show and end up staying for the time. But we skipped all around a whole lot of stuff. But just trying, it was like riding a dolphin.

You know, I don’t know if that’s a good analogy, it’s just a bronco or something. It was pretty hard to keep him in check. All right, guys, listen, I hate to be so grating, but I promise you, Janice will tell you, I have immersed 18 hours a day, numbers, and you cannot possibly tell me a country or ask me a question.

I cannot give you the numbers for, and I can even tell you what the probability of those numbers being correct are based on any number of factors. So people, I invented antivirus. Nobody knows the mathematics of epidemiology more than me.

And I’m telling you people, this is a scary compelling. Katie King, aka Ms. Metaverse here. Here we are, 500 episodes of the number one FinTech podcast and radio show.

I remember it was around 2016 when Brett first invited me on the show for an episode called FinTech Thoughts, Brands, and Entrepreneurship. That seems like ages ago, and we have all come such a long way since. It was later that year when I officially joined the Breaking Banks team, helping out with social posts and the production side of things.

It’s been an amazing experiencing how much the show and the Provoked team have evolved even just over the past few years. One of my favorite episodes was in May, 2020, and it was with the late and great John McAfee. It was Brett, Dave Birch, and I, and the show aired just a year before he passed.

COVID was just kicking off at the time, and there was a lot of uncertainty, but McAfee was one of a kind. If you haven’t heard the episode, definitely check it out. I’d also like to thank his wife, Janice, for having connected us and making the show possible.

Thanks to Breaking Banks, I’ve gotten to meet many amazing people in the FinTech community, including the show’s hosts, co-hosts, guests, production team, and everyone we’ve interviewed and connected with at conferences and events around the world. Congratulations to everyone at Breaking Banks and the team at Provoked Media. We’ll see you in the future.

We also had a little more mainstream look on cannabis as Stuart Cook from Valley Bank talked about their bold move into cannabis live at Money 2020. We would have to rethink how we went to market and the type of industry segments that we might serve. So for the board, there’s buy-in on that strategy, but people can’t help being nervous about the situation, like we’re going to take drug money.

But of course, it’s legal. It’s legal in 18 plus states. We have the sort of complication around the federal sort of rules around this, but it’s highly regulated at state level.

And we’re able to demonstrate to the board that you can do this. You can provide safe and compliant banking to businesses like this that are hugely ambitious. And that was the journey that we went on.

Personally, for me, the show has been quite transformative for my life. Not just the fact that traveling around the world, I get to meet people who have heard Breaking Banks. I remember doing an SAP conference in Sydney.

And I remember sitting in the audience and this guy came in into the audience. We were doing prep for the show and rehearsals and stuff. And I remember getting up on stage to do my rehearsal and said a few lines.

And this guy in the audience, he had his back turned and he did this double take and he spun around. And he actually said from the audience, you’re breaking from Breaking Banks. Because he’d heard my voice and that was enough to trigger it for him.

So that was sort of a funny experience. Someone came up to me in New York City and I was wearing my Breaking Banks T-shirt. And they said, are you from Breaking Banks, the radio show? I thought that was pretty cool, getting sort of recognized on the streets of New York.

But probably the most interesting thing for me was in 2015, I invited a female futurist on the show. And because as you know, I like futurists on the show and there’s not many female futurists that do media and stuff. And invited Katie Schultz, also known as Miss Metaverse on the show.

And invited her a second time in 2016. And she ended up doing some work for me personally on the social media side. And lo and behold, now we’re married together.

So as I say, Breaking Banks has been quite transformative in my life. It’s a different kind of co-host. Yeah.

So earlier in the show, you heard from Randall Libero from Voice America talking about the name of the show, Breaking Banks, how it was inspired by Breaking Bad back in 2013, which was the number one show. But in those early days, in the first few years of the show, to your point, JP, about bankers listening to the show, bankers would get very nervous about coming on the show because of the show title, Breaking Banks. And we were seen as sort of the bad boy of banking back in those early days.

I think that’s a fair enough characterization. But I think everyone just got used to it, maybe. And it didn’t become such an issue because we’ve had some great bankers on the show over the years.

Well, on the show and listening. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I have been surprised at a laid-back, buttoned-down banker at a conference telling me they never miss a show because this is where they’re hearing things they’re not hearing anywhere else. It’s been a blast looking backwards over the last 10 years and 500 episodes.

But what I’m more excited about is where we’re headed in the future, not just with The Futurist, but, Brett, as our chief futurist of Provoke.fm, what are you looking forward to in the next 10 years? That’s a good point. I mean, obviously, things are changing ever more rapidly. The introduction of AI into banking and how that’s going to produce the next layer of disruption is easily going to give us another 10 years worth of traction for the show, I’m sure.

But I think there are some sort of macro-level changes occurring in terms of what it means to be a bank. And over the next 10 years, we’re going to start to see that come together. So you were talking about deposits and so forth.

You know, the flavor of deposit-taking organizations has rapidly changed. The way we organize banks, you know, if you look at the structures of digital banks, they’re all charts versus those of traditional banks. You look at the technology stack versus the core systems in the old days and so forth.

There are some pretty profound changes that have occurred over the last 10 years, but that’s nothing really compared to the impact that AI and digital currencies and automation is going to have on the space. So I think that the Futurist Show and breaking banks are going to continue to intersect because of those changes. And I think we can easily go in front of the 10 years, inshallah, as they say.

I’m excited that the fintech bubble has finally burst, that it feels like the amount of money that was pouring into the space was actually creating too much incentive for growth at all costs as opposed to real fundamental innovation. So I’m actually, for one, looking forward to not just a return to the way it was, which I don’t think is what we’re going to see happen, but actual, let me go think about something in an entirely different way versus the neobank for this, that, and the next thing. Or we use blockchain and now we use AI.

But really where those applications can go as opposed to saying, we’re an AI company now. I think over the next 10 years, we’re going to see the benefits of this digital Darwinism, right? So the weaker players, both on the fintech side and the traditional financial services or financial institution side are being winnowed out, merged away, in some cases failed. And we are really what’s left are the stronger, more innovative organizations.

And it all makes me think of a famous quote from Bill Gates. We tend to overestimate how much will happen in the next two years and underestimate how much will happen in the next 10. Well, I think that brings us to the wrap of the 500th show.

And one of my favorite parts of hosting, especially when it was live, was getting to the end, being able to go. And this has been Breaking Becks. Absolutely.

Yeah, well, and also, you know, the big thing that sort of impacted us over these last few years have been your support as a crowd. The fact that you do listen to the show regularly, you know, you let other people know about it. So please continue to do that.

And, you know, thank you as an audience for being a part of this journey with us over the last 10 years. It’s been a big part of our lives and we hope that we’ve played a small but significant part in your lives. And with your continued support and that of our sponsors and friends and co-hosts and some of those people you heard from today that reached out, I hope we’ll be able to continue to go for another 10 years.

Dare I say it, PSM, budgeting, savings, embeddable or not, I do dare to say it. And I’m calling it right now. Savings is in for it.

And I absolutely mean it in a good way. You can see it with Apple launching a savings account with Goldman Sachs, although we all know that’s like, seems to be a fragile relationship right now. We see it with PayPal savings.

We see it with Save Now, Pay Later as an option to pay with, for example, a cruise savings. And that is, savings accounts are being used almost as like a wishlist for items. And, you know, I think one thing the industry hasn’t really zoomed in on, but is like a really, really, you know, strong opportunity for rethinking savings is that Regulation D was put on pause during the pandemic in terms of banks had the option to not fee their customers if they like withdrew too many times in their savings online or other convenient ways.

And that’s still on pause. So there are banks now that aren’t charging, you know, customers for withdrawing too much from their savings account. But now that you can see like tech players getting to this game, it’s logical to think, you know, savings accounts will be used to pay for things and perhaps without penalty.

So, you know, my eyes are on this, but my eyes are also on this because for the banks in credit unions still charging consumers fees for withdrawing too much for their savings account. I mean, sure, it’s meant for savings, but it’s not like a CD. And I think, you know, it’s something the CFPB could look at in time because one might ask, why are people paying these fees for something that banks don’t have to charge? So that’s what my mind’s on.

Hi, this is Rachel Morrissey, and I’m one of the creators of the original producer of Breaking Banks. And it’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since we launched in May of 2013. I remember getting ready to launch the first show and it’s almost impossible to believe that it’s been that long and how much has happened since then.

There will always be shows. There will always be particular episodes that were very close to my heart. Among those are always going to be the ones where we got to get out of our regular setting and we were able to take it on the road and we were able to do things like go to Kenya or when we did the demo day from Startup Bootcamp and we got to actually sit inside the meetings with the demoers and really get a sense of their experience and be able to convey that to the audience in a new way.

Those will always be my favorites, especially because I got to bring new people in at that time, like J.P. Nichols and Sam Mall and a couple of the others that we brought in and just really enjoyed working with. Always have really fun memories of those times and I’m really proud of the work that we did on Breaking Banks. All the best, guys.

Thanks for joining us again this week, the 500th episode of Breaking Banks. I’m your host, Brett King, and with me, Jason Hendricks and J.P. Nichols, and we’ll be back next week with more Breaking Banks. 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 Lisbeth 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 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.