Episodes
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Crypto banks are safer than insured banks: Bitgo's CEO
The crypto companies getting trust charters hold 100% reserves and thus are lower risk than traditional banks that hold fractional reserves, Mike Belshe argues.
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Why big banks bet on Besu
Citi, DTCC and others are quietly using Hyperledger Besu as neutral, enterprise-grade rails for tokenized deposits and collateral. Daniela Barbosa, general manager of decentralized technologies at the Linux Foundation, explains why.
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What's life like after crypto firms get trust bank charters?
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has conditionally approved several national trust bank charters for crypto companies. Fabian Dori, head of asset management at Sygnum Bank, a digital asset bank based in Zurich that has operated as a crypto bank for more than six years, shared what...
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'Credit access is absolutely a problem': Upstart's Paul Gu
The company's new CEO, and long-time chief technology officer, shares his views on why some banks are stuck in old ways of determining creditworthiness, how Upstart has been modifying its underwriting models and the objections people sometimes have to AI-based lending.
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Is AI the way to get credit to the underbanked?
Rodney Hood, former acting Comptroller of the Currency and former chair of the National Credit Union Administration, says the credit scoring system is broken and AI can fix it.
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What a 'moral architecture' for AI in banking would look like
Surjit Chana, a board member of Beneficial State Bank, a Harvard Fellow and a tech committee member of the Global Alliance for Banking Values, explains why there's a need for what he calls a moral architecture for AI
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Solana 101: What it is and why some banks use it
JPMorganChase, Citi, Bank of America and Anchorage Digital are among the banks that are using or planning to work with the Solana distributed ledger and network. Solana Policy Institute CEO Miller Whitehouse-Levine explains how it works.
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Grasshopper's taking AI beyond the 'confident intern' stage
Peter Chapman, chief technology officer at Grasshopper Bank, initially saw AI as "the best intern that you could ever have." Today the technology is taking on more advanced work at the bank.
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How Clearview FCU's CIO gets employees to use and trust AI
"AI may not take your job, but somebody who knows AI will," says Raymond George, CIO of Clearview Federal Credit Union.
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What is Ethereum and why should you care? Paul Brody at EY
JPMorganChase, Citi, Vantage Bank and Custodia Bank have all chosen Ethereum as the underpinning for blockchain projects such as tokenized deposits. The chairman of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance explains its appeal.
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Thread Bank's Chris Black sees opening in bank charter boom
Some traditional bankers are unsettled by the wave of crypto and fintech banks getting bank charters. This Nashville bank CEO sees opportunity.
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How banks can reap revenue from AI: Accenture's Mike Abbott
The company's recently released 2026 trends report is about "moving and changing the narrative from being Eeyores to being Tiggers," Abbott said in the latest American Banker podcast.
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'Optimism is a moral duty': Paul Achleitner
The former Deutsche Bank chair and Goldman Sachs partner shares some of the leadership principles in his new book.
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From day-trading bar mitzvah cash to founding Hiro: Ethan Bloch
The founder of Digit explains how he got into fintech and why he built an AI-meets-personal-finance app that launched in November.
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'Policy leaders are being shown a rosier picture': Ludwig
Former controller of the currency Eugene Ludwig has written a book called The Mismeasurement of America that lays out the shortcomings of the standard economic data that U.S. government and businesses use to make decisions, and how this data obscures the truth about how low-income Americans are...
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'The household balance sheet is fragile': Sarah Biller
The co-founder of Fintech Sandbox says fintech entrepreneurs will figure out how to help Americans struggling with economic stressors.
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Anchorage COO is a fan of the Fed's 'skinny' master accounts
Rachel Anderika, chief operating officer at Anchorage Digital Bank, sees the Federal Reserve's proposal to give crypto companies limited access to its payment rails as "a really great signal to the market."
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'Crypto will always be a target for scammers': Amanda Fischer
Amanda Fischer, is policy director and chief operating officer at Better Markets and former chief of staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission has some concerns about stablecoins.
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How banks can mitigate AI workslop and errors
The former banker Bradley Leimer now advises financial institutions on AI projects, and shared some of his tips for achieving accurate results and a return on AI investments.
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'That's a lawless way of proceeding': Cordray on CFPB cuts
Richard Cordray, the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, says the Trump administration seems intent on shutting the agency down, even though it has a legal mandate to exist.
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Advice on coping with stablecoins: Anchorage CEO McCauley
Crypto-as-a-service, stablecoins and tokenized deposits all present opportunities for banks, according to Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital.
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JPMorganchase's Waldron, Starion's Rogstad on new projects
The banks have invested in gen AI and embedded finance, respectively.
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Tariff unease 'puts everybody on their back foot': Flushing Bank CEO
John Buran shares how his New York bank and its small business customers are faring with tariff uncertainty — and how some have quickly changed suppliers and modified business plans — in the latest American Banker podcast.
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The digital asset opportunities opening up for banks
Staking activities and stablecoins are two of the possible ways banks could have a role in decentralized finance, said Margaret Butler, head of the financial services practice at the law firm Baker Hostetler and Kristiane Koontz, director of Treasury Services and Payments at Zions Bank, in...
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'Failures across the board': Dara Tarkowski on Synapse case
Tarkowski, managing partner at Actuate Law, shares a legal perspective on the lawsuit that Yotta, a savings app provider, filed against Evolve Bank & Trust, in September and recently amended.
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Can banks beat the 80/20 rule for generative AI?
Sid Khosla, EY Americas banking and capital markets Leader, predicts that over the next two years, 20% of generative AI cases will drive 80% of the value across financial institutions. In this podcast, he explains what those use cases are and how banks can make the most of them.
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What will AI-driven banking look like in the future?
Theo Lau, co-founder of Unconventional Ventures and author of the new book Banking on Artificial Intelligence, shares a vision of how banks could help consumers navigate financial uncertainties.
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'You can't make it a side gig': Brett Pharr on banking as a service
It takes $50 million to $100 million dollars, three to five years of losses and a complete commitment from the board to make it as a banking-as-a-service bank, the CEO of Pathward bank says in the latest American Banker podcast.
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How J.P. Morgan is helping to build connected cars
Rob Abrams, CEO of Mobility Payment Solutions at J.P. Morgan Payments, is overseeing the development of in-car wallet systems that turn cars into rolling credit cards. He explains his vision of what connected cars could look like and do in the future.
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Banks struggle to keep up with threat of AI deepfakes
Valerie Abend, Accenture's financial services cybersecurity lead, explains what banks get wrong about fending off AI-based threats and what they should do instead.
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'It can eliminate things we don't like doing': Vlad Lukic on AI
Generative AI will remove toil from our day to day jobs, argues Lukic, who is managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group.
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Could industry standards prevent the next Synapse-style mess?
"We want to put banks in the risk management driver's seat," says Sima Gandhi, co-founder of the Council for Fintech Ecosystem Standards, which has worked with a group of fintechs to create risk and compliance standards banks can use to evaluate their fintech partners.
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'It's a tremendous priority': Huntington CFO Wasserman on AI
Software code generation and knowledge management are two of the places the bank has begun using generative AI to improve efficiency.
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How one New York bank is getting younger people to save
Thomas Rudzewick, CEO of Maspeth Savings Bank worries about the growing crisis of low savings among millennials and Gen Z. He believes banks like his can help reverse this trend with financial literacy and innovative savings tools.
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East West Bank's CEO on how the bank coped with LA wildfires
The bank, which is headquartered in Pasadena, had to quickly switch to remote work for many employees and come up with relief programs for customers whose homes and businesses were destroyed by fire.
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Where Citi Ventures is placing its fintech bets in 2025
Arvind Purushotham, head of Citi Ventures, shares where he and his team see opportunities and how they vet tech startups.
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Why banks keep failing at money laundering
A lack of resources is one common cause of AML penalties, says consultant Aaron Ansari.
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The banks that implement AI well, from titans to mavericks
Some banks are "punching above their weight," according to Dan Latimore, chief research officer at The Financial Revolutionist. Here's how they do it.
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The case for a human crime officer in every bank
Ian Mitchell, founder of The Noble, an organization that works with law enforcement and with banks to fight human crime trafficking, explains some of his group's recent work and why banks need someone dedicated to human crime.
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AARP's Jilenne Gunther has advice for banks on elder fraud
Elder financial exploitation has been a problem for banks for years, and it's getting worse. Gunther offers practical suggestions for what banks should do when they suspect an older customer is a victim.
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Southern Bancorp's answer to the home affordability crisis
The Arkansas community development financial institution has an ambitious goal of making $500 million worth of mortgages in rural, minority and low-income neighborhoods.
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'Job satisfaction will go up': How generative AI is changing work
The technology will take on routine, dull work, says Alenka Grealish, principal analyst at Celent.
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How banks' use of generative AI has evolved over the past year
Financial institutions have dramatically increased their investment and trust in large language models since 2023. Kartik Ramakrishnan, Capgemini's deputy CEO of Financial Services and head of banking and capital markets, shares the results of a recent report that analyzed these changes.
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Upstart's CEO Dave Girouard explains brighter outlook for rest of 2024
Advances in the company's AI-based lending models have made them better at predicting risk, which has led to growth, he says.
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'These models will always hallucinate': Seth Dobrin on LLMsDek
Dobrin, founder of advisory firm Qantm AI and former global chief AI officer at IBM, warns that popular generative AI models were trained on the whole of the internet and hallucinate at an unacceptable rate.
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'Fraud is pervasive throughout the entire industry': Crypto insider
Jake Donoghue, author of the book Crypto Confidential, shares some of the worst practices he saw as a founder of a cryptocurrency company.
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Some banks are making a Faustian bargain with fintechs: Karen Petrou
Karen Petrou, the managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics and a long-time observer of banking and regulation, says banks need to do far more due diligence on potential fintech partners and exert more control over these relationships.
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What military members need from their banks
Two veterans and executives at Armed Forces Bank – Tom McLean and Jodi Vickery – share the challenges they see their customers face and new products the bank has rolled out this year to better serve them.
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Regulators are wise to be more careful' after Chevron ruling
Gene Scalia, the banking lobby's lawyer on retainer for a potential challenge to Washington's capital reform effort, discusses the state of administrative law after the overturning of a key legal precedent.
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Climate First Bank's plans to expand nationwide
The Florida bank has emerged from de novo status and can now offer its solar loans in a larger geographic footprint.