S2-Episode 11: Transformative effects of Gen-Z on financial services - Julia Carreon, GenZ expert and Daniel Hadgu, Georgia State alum

This episode features Julia Carreon, a former Wells Fargo executive and expert on Gen Z and the impacts of this demographic on financial services today and tomorrow. She is joined by Georgia State alum and fintech entrepreneur Daniel Hadgu.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Speaker 1 0:06

Welcome to the Georgia FinTech Academy podcast. The Georgia FinTech Academy is a collaboration between Georgia's FinTech industry and the university system of Georgia. This talent development initiative addresses a massive demand for FinTech professionals and give learners the specialized education experiences needed to

Speaker 2 0:26

Bobby Marshall , the executive director of the Georgia FinTech Academy. This is season two episode 11 of our Georgia FinTech Academy podcast. We've got a great discussion lined up for today. I have Julia carry on with me, an industry guru around digital wealth, gen Z, many other things I'm looking forward to introducing or having her introduce herself to us. And then Daniel had you recent graduate of Georgia state university. Welcome to you both. It's wonderful to have you delightful to be here. Julia, if you don't mind spending a little bit of time introducing yourself to our audience and , uh, help us understand how you , uh, your career in financial services, FinTech. Um, and I know many other things give us that background. Sure. So thanks for having me Tami , as you know, your audience is very near and dear to my heart because I believe , um, that the next generation is not just awesome, but it's going to change the world and already we're seeing a lot of that. Um, so let's talk about my journey. So I'm going to start at the beginning and then go backwards. Um, I spent almost 20 years at Wells Fargo doing all kinds of things that we can we'll talk about , um , probably later on in depth, more but wanted to say that the journey was kind of crazy and completely unexpected. At one point in my journey, I had 400 employees managing a Marietta functions most consistently leading the digital and desktop efforts for the PRI the private bank at Wells Fargo, but also , um , being responsible for that contact center and operations, including tax. Did you share a tax, which is kind of a crazy thing. Um, and then before then , um, standing up the first home equity lines and loans, Omni channel experience at any major bank , um , which we stood up 18 years ago to , um, compete with lending tree. And the reason I mentioned that is because a lot of people don't of the incumbent banks as being very, I don't think, bleeding edge , um, innovative these days like that , you know, but back in the day, we kind of did have budget to do that. And I think it's important for people to know , um, that, that we did have an omni-channel experience , um, 18 years ago before omni-channel was even a word.

Speaker 3 3:21

Um , and I think, well, CA check me on this. But I think Wells Fargo was the first major bank to have a digital bank offering that is correct of the major players. And , uh, I mean really led the way. And in some extent still does , uh, from a financial services innovation standpoint. I mean, I'm thinking about the [inaudible] , you know, major investments made Steve Ellis and the innovation team at Wells Fargo and just a lot of remarkable , um, leadership provided to the industry in that regard.

Speaker 2 3:57

Totally. And in fact, on the trust side, we were the first major bank to offer online viewing of your accounts that were held in a trust, which I know, you know, doesn't sound very sexy, but from a regulatory perspective was very difficult to get done. Um, so really some good and innovations I'm particularly proud of the fact that my team launched , uh, one of the first tablet apps in the industry. We'd beat the street with Merrell , we'd beat Morgan and Merrill to the street and , uh, giving our financial advisors a tablet app to use with their clients out on the road, which included some , uh , limited discovery. And , uh , we gamified our , um, like , uh, we gamified our planning app to some extent eight years ago, right before anybody was really talking about that. So, so that's, that was, you know, at Wells Fargo kind of doing, getting really big spans of control, having lots of employees , um, worrying about customer experience and team member experiences and , um, learned so much right. And going from having one employee. When I first started in the private bank to managing 400 people at scale, it's just a really , um, you know, really interesting and fun time. And then before that, I was a , um , consultant at Cambridge technology partners and worked with them to stand up one of the first social media websites focused on , uh, it executives exchanging information. And then, and then way back when in the day I started my career as a journalist and the reason that I think that's important and what I hope students listening will , um , get from that is what I learned as a journalist is how to tell stories and the importance of storytelling in communication. And I really recommend , um, to any extent that you're investing in soft skills that are not kind of the, you know, the things that you would learn in your everyday at school is definitely, if you get a chance to take a storytelling class and, and pay attention to people that you are listening to, and if they are a good storyteller, then seek them out to , to hear more about how it is that they do what they do. So , um, really didn't come up in financial services in a traditional way, you know, with , um, finance background or anything related to even technology kind of happened upon it , um, during the.com boom of the late 1990s. So

Speaker 3 6:48

I love it. And I know that's inspiring too , to several that are listening. We we've done some work to , uh, evaluate like the types of majors students are working on that are also taking our FinTech Academy courses. And we've discovered, I mean, there's the majors, you would expect finance computer science, computer information systems, but we also see journalism majors. We also see political science majors , um, and you know, several that folks might not necessarily expect that are engaging with these FinTech , um, CA classes that we offer.

Speaker 2 7:23

That's , that's wonderful. And , and I think that I become a real poster child for how somebody, without that traditional background in finance can , um , be successful. A lot of people ask me, but cause I talk about this a lot. I have severe case of dyscalculia. And I don't know to what extent that is being diagnosed, you know , at younger ages than when I was diagnosed in college, but dyscalculia is severe kind of math dyslexia. And you know, my family likes to joke that how did I end up in banking? Um, given the fact that I've really struggled with numbers and you know, what I would say is you work out other parts of your brain when you're doing FinTech. And it's not just all about computer science and math by any stretch of the imagination. The other thing, Tommy and Daniel, that's funny about that is I was not ever in marketing either. So a lot of people assume, Oh, you know, if you have dyscalculia and you were a journalism major, you must've spent your whole career in marcomm . And actually, you know, really I've spent my whole career as a product manager and customer experience person. So,

Speaker 3 8:40

And Julia, I remember you telling me about that challenge in the past, which, and, you know, and as we worked together, you'd bring this up and it was something that was never, I never noticed. I was like, man, she's way on top of more top of the numbers than I am, but the didn't you tell me your dad was like a math. I want to , I can't remember exactly the story, but like I, you know , very engaged from the math standard .

Speaker 2 9:04

My dad is , um, has two master's degrees in , um, logistics and computer science. And he taught compete. He taught math at a junior college at night. Right. And he developed the application that gets, he was the lead developer on the application that gets the troops out of hotspots. So a major logistics application that's used by the military. So yes, his daughter who couldn't , um , do basic algebra, believe me, that man wanted to beat his head against a wall, many nights of homework. I know.

Speaker 3 9:45

Thank you for that. Um, Daniel, remind us about yourself. Sure.

Speaker 4 9:52

So my name is Daniel had a view on a recent graduate of Georgia state universities , Robinson college of business. I will start working, full-time come this fall at Vanguard within their investment management development program. And I'm also called founder Istio period , which is a global payment payout platform that specializes in the payment needs of its Europeans, including payments for utility bills, as well as money transferring and investment .

Speaker 3 10:18

Uh, and then Dan, just say a little bit more about the investing capability that you're adding into Ethiopia . Um, if you, if you don't mind and I want you to do that, cause I think we're going to spend a little bit of time kind of talking about this whole investment wealth management piece as we get into our topic discussion.

Speaker 4 10:39

Sure, sure. So we haven't even made this announcement yet. Um, but we have partnered up with an organization called drywalls , which offers a SAS platform and APIs to provide the us DACA access to investors worldwide. And they aim to make it easy and affordable and efficient for people around the world to invest in us retail stocks, ETS and EDRs . And so that's something that we want to give to our customer base,

Speaker 3 11:05

Right? Yeah, no, that's exciting. So it's kind of beginning to expand the capability beyond the payments offering. Um, that that's been the beginning.

Speaker 4 11:18

Well, we want to essentially build out an ecosystem of sorts. So if individuals want to send money directly to the friends or family, they can, they want to pay the bills. They can, if they have leftover money, we want to also educate them how to kind of give up a survival mode and how to kind of better themself from a financial standpoint. And so that's what we bring into this investment component.

Speaker 3 11:41

Perfect. Um, all right. I want to turn us a bit to our, our primary topic discussion today. And I think as we get there, we're going to talk about this gen Z. Um, what, what they mean to us as a society, what they mean to the future of financial services. Um, and Julia, I guess, right before we go there, I want you to know that we have continued to have so many student projects being done with large FinTech companies with financial services companies where these FinTech companies and financial services companies are coming to me and saying, we need to really much better understand this gen Z population, what they need, what they want, what they want to see in terms of engaging when financial services, that's just the volume of those requests that are coming to us as the Georgia FinTech Academy is only , um , increased exponentially , uh, in the past year. Uh, and I'm sure that's not a surprise to you.

Speaker 2 12:47

It is not. So, so I want to start with just a little bit of an anecdote about how I got here in terms of, you know, spending my career at the really upper high net worth and upper high net worth segments of the market. People . A lot of people ask me, why is it that you care about, you know, young generations, gen Z and gen alpha, and the answer, I think, you know, Tommy and Daniel, it's kind of a funny story. In 2017, I was spending a lot of time out on the road at , at wealth conferences, really beating the drum that wealth management was running out of time to modernize our , um, the client experience and really saying there's too much paper, right? I mean, now if you want to open an account at many broker dealers, you still have to send them a fax and it, and you know, that it's a huge pet peeve of mine. So it was out on the road. And I was getting a lot of pushback about this, where executives were telling me that, you know, the next generation doesn't have money and who cares. And they hadn't taken FinTech, had not taken a huge amount of market share from big banks at that point and probably still have it . And so they , they, they were pretty sanguine about it. And so I got into a discussion, heated discussion with an executive in a room. And I finally just said, you know what? Let's just end this. I know that my kids are not going to do business with you the end. Like if you don't modernize, it's the end. So I, a gentleman walked up to me, introduced himself. He was a Harvard sociologist and he said to me, do you know why the next generation, why you said that about your kids? And I said, I just know that they'd play video games all the time. And they just aren't going to care. Like, whatever we're delivering right now was way too boring. And he said, that's because of haptics. And, and I didn't know anything about haptic memory at that point. He said, nobody's talking and writing about the fact that generation Z is the first generation to be born with a primary haptic memory of the smartphone. And that will make them the ultimate game changers. And you should really think about doing something with that. And , and so it was that little conversation with a stranger , um, that got me coming home and researching. What, what does it mean for generations I'm of age? Right. And you know, it is that that generation was playing angry birds on their mom's smartphone at three years old. And that makes them game changers right there.

Speaker 3 15:28

Talk the, I know when you, when, when you first brought this up with me a few years ago, I was captivated and intuitively understood this idea of haptic memory. And , um , and I've had a similar experience to you with my children. Like, you know, my, particularly my twins were born like right as the iPad was coming on market and we bought one and kind of handed it to them to see what would happen. And they immediately, you know, they're in there like zinging around on it, playing kidding different things. And they started to play in these kind of simpler apps. But , um, you know, can you say more about that? I guess I think of it kind of has the sensory connection between the sensory and there's something in that experience that these digital devices in particular provide, but can you unpack that a bit more like how, how that works?

Speaker 2 16:28

Yes. So, so haptic memory is formed. It is the form of touch sensory that is formed pretty much by the time you are a toddler and whatever your haptic memory is, like, whatever it is that you have become attached to from a sensory perspective, you have that deeply until you die. So let's use a non-tech related one , um, baby boomers and the silent generation are very attached to paper, right? So that is, they are , they're used to the way that it feels in their hands. And , and then they're , they're , um, accustomed to then reading and looking, right. It's all attached to your hearing and your eyesight and your, your hands. And so the story that I always tell is in 1997, I saw a futurist speak at Stanford who said the newspaper's going to go away in the next 10 to 15 years. Well, he's not wrong that the newspaper will eventually go away. But what he was missing was the fact that there's already generation in the marketplace, right? Baby boomers and silent generation who are too attached to paper to ever have paper go away until that generation literally physically dies. And so what people underestimated in my opinion is what it meant for generation Z to show up and have something like the iPad and have it touch every single one of their sensors. And, and then, and then be addicted to the fact that that was easy, right? Those people are not going to want to grow up and expect to fax 65 pages to open a brokerage account. They just are not. And so that, that , um, the feeling that they get from the smartphone, I just think was completely underestimated. And again, I have no knowledge. I know I would have never thought of it if this gentleman Derek had walked up to me and said it, but , but he's right. And , um, that's, that's what I think makes them game changers.

Speaker 3 18:37

So it was almost like this , um, like there's a , there was a haptic sensory experience I was having as a child coloring in a coloring book maybe that had, you know , that helped me form in my mind , um, how I , uh, in engage on all sorts of different activities. And it probably had something to do as a man, as I lifetime management consultant, I made a lot of PowerPoint slides, and I know that one of my favorite thing to do when I , the PowerPoint slides was to like sketch them out first. So, you know, maybe it was my haptic experiences childhood that like made me , uh, set a baseline for me to be a reasonable management consultant and, you know, somehow communicate through these visuals and whatnot. But now we've got this whole massive, new, amazing immersive digital experience that's been available , um, and is available to these, you know, young people from birth. Uh, and it's such a dramatic change that it's like completely reformulating, all interaction models that we can imagine. Uh, am I on the right track? Is that,

Speaker 2 19:50

And look at , I, I think you know this, cause you've been in this, in the room with me when I do this gen X has hybrid haptics. Okay. And then millennials primary haptic memory is of the laptop. Okay. Which is still not even as intuitive as the smartphone and then gen , gen Z obviously has the phone. So the best thing that I can do as a speaker, when I walk in the room is incorporate, I play. If I play Pac-Man music to an audience of gen X watching the smile on their face and the instant recall of where they were at playing that game and what they were in the 1980s at their high school prom, it's powerful. Right. Because OD bothers pizza. I mean, it's powerful. And, and I mean, I would love to ask Daniel, like, you know, how, I don't know if I'm allowed to ask how old you are, but like, you know, your , you have to have strong haptics at least of , um, of the laptop or desktop or something like that. Am I right?

Speaker 4 21:05

That is correct. Now I would definitely say at the hearing everything that you've been saying , um, and , and yes, I'm 23. So I think I do gravitate more towards laptop iPads, things as sorts versus, you know, paper, you know, drawn sketches like Tommy .

Speaker 2 21:26

Yeah. Right. And because you are a little bit, you are the older part of the gen Z cohort and, and the it's, it's like the 15 year olds too , that I think becomes even more dangerous too , in terms of becoming disruptors, because they're the ones like Tommy, our kids age, we're the ones that were actually physically born with a smartphone, but , but still like strong haptics, Daniel of tech. And , um, that, I just think many sectors are right . For potential disruption if they don't figure out how to modernize. So,

Speaker 3 22:05

And Jay , yeah. Cause Dale, you're the, you're the very beginning of gen Z. Like you're the, you're the tip of the spear. Um , um , Oh, so, and then Julia, you mentioned gen alpha, that's a new term for me. What's gen alpha

Speaker 2 22:27

And alpha is after gen Z. And there's a lot of, you know, still wiggling around of the age groups. I think that it , some people say gen alpha was born in 2015 and beyond others say 2011 is kind of the beginning of gen alpha, but they , they are who's next. So yeah.

Speaker 3 22:49

10 year olds current nine, 10 year olds . Correct. Got it. Okay. Um, so we know this is, this, this transformation of gen Z on financial services is, is happening in front of our eyes. Um, so I thought it would be interesting if we could think about some specific examples of, of what we mean by that. Like what, how we're seeing this change , um, occurring. Uh, I think one good example where we were bringing out this as we were prepping , um, is this kind of, in my view, just kind of laughable fiasco of this whole wall street bats, you know, kitty , whoever his name was and kitty kitty on the, I mean, I literally, we , in our family dinner table was this was happening. I was like, you know, I kept bringing it up and I had the kids looking at it and they're like, dad, I want my game stop. And I'm like, no, you're not buying games , you know ? And I'd be just laughing out loud. It just how ridiculous the whole thing was, but it was, you know, it was very real. So this was a , I guess for those of you that weren't, you know, aren't totally clear on what we're talking about in January of this year, there was a huge , um, group on the Reddit platform on a, on a, on a group called wall street bats that , um, were , were looking to , um, well, they got very angry because they'd been buying GameStop that they were buying gifts . So they were long on game GameStop . And then , um, some hedge fund guys , um, were of course short on GameStop . And so the wall street that's folks were like, we're going to take down these hedge fund guys that are trying to short this game stop coming that we love. So it was just drive the price as high as we can. So they kept talking about talking to them and people kept buying and buying and buying. And , um, and you know, if you, if you're not aware of GameStop, GameStop is selling video games on CD ROMs in malls . I mean, in the middle of the pandemic, I mean, of course this company is doomed. Talk about that . I just based on the whole, I mean, what generation goes to case I don't get it. So, I mean, but this whole, we had clearly , uh , a heavily Jinsey bias population driving this kind of amazing , uh, kind of shift in some ways in , uh , market-making , uh, in , uh , in our financial markets.

Speaker 2 25:37

So, so to me, what happened with, with GameStop is, was an opening salvo. So for the last, almost five years, I've been on my little Hill saying that disruption, that gen Z would cause for things to be disrupted in ways that people didn't expect. And my, the basis right. Of my, my theory was that because they're such calm , they're so comfortable with social media, they're evolving the way social media is being used, right? I mean, look at what's happening on Twitch and discord . They're changing the way those platforms are being used from their original inception and they're making money off of it. And they're creating communities and they're doing things because of their social media naitivity right. That, that, that would be disruptive. So of course I didn't predict the PR the exact scenario that happened there, but what, but what it says to me is that I was right. That weird stuff is going happen. That is going to be unexpected to people that have power, right. What they were doing on the Reddit boards was technically, I think, legal and they were completely , um, pulling the wool over the , the establishments, you know, they were gaming the system and w and it was legal and it kind of caused a big stir. So I think stuff like this is going to happen as, as you start to see gen Z rise in bigger numbers. And then as you know, the baby boomers, exit the scene , um, I just think all kinds of crazy stuff is going to happen like this. And to me, this was one great example.

Speaker 3 27:30

So Daniel, do you use Robin hood? I use Robin hood in acorn. Yes, I do. So Robin hood was a part of this story and in January, this whole wall street bets , Ron kitty story , um, and, you know, Robin hood, I guess Julia Rama has been very entertaining to me. I mean, just largely because of my passion around this intersection of what wealth management and digital that, you know, goes back, whatever, 15, 20 years. And, you know, we'd seen this, there's these things like, like Julie , you and I worked on, which was really just, okay, we're just going to take broker dealer stuff. And we're just going to put it online so that you can trade online. That was like, kind of stage one. Right. And then we got to like big stage two, which I would think about in like that 20, 2010 , um, 2010, 2011, 2013, where we were having these robo advisor , um, offering, starting to come forward wealth, front betterment , um, SIG fig , you know, that can be, and then, and then we started to see the Robin hoods popping up. Um, we had tour , you know, a hundred percent digital first on the mobile device to lead with, you know, leaning into some of these haptic aspects. You're thinking of with that maybe with the gen Z crowd. Um, and then, you know, we see them, you know, really gaining meaningful market share with gen Z. I mean, Daniel, you being an example and also really, really drove the trading cost for us as consumers to zero. I mean, there's anybody that's paying more than $0 for a trade today is, you know, needs to do something different. Like the, so say some about just, what's been your perception on that or what what's made almond hood. What have they taken advantage of from, from what you've understood on the , this, this gen Z kind of haptic , um, orientation.

Speaker 2 29:57

Yeah, so I , so I've been obviously also watching the very closely and I've met some of the executives at conferences and I look, I mean, they were the first to game-ify financial services in , in a meaningful way, at least on the wealth management side. And the thing that they didn't do, which I thought was brilliant is they didn't patronize their audience the way that so many financial services do to younger generations. And so that was appealing. I was saying years ago, right? Like when I started blogging and paying attention to what they were doing, that they were going to win with gen Z. Now I do, I am not a fan of the degree to which they gave a five actually trading. And I really have strong feelings that they would have way more credibility if they had gamified investment acumen and financial education, and then let less gave a five the trading aspect, because I think, you know, obviously we know real money was being exchanged there and there have been some damning consequences of that, but they really missed an opportunity to game-ify , um, education. And, but they did an excellent job of appealing to the next generation that frankly, Tommy , the executives, many of the executives, you and I come across every day, didn't want anything to do with those younger generations.

Speaker 4 31:29

Yeah. And I may add on that too. So I think Robin hood done a great job because I look at it versus like Z millennials. I just look at it more so like quote unquote smart money versus young money or young investors. And I think that Robin had done a great job of being like a gateway for young investors through the democratization and access to the financial market. Um, even given to the example that you referenced prior , uh, with the wall street bets , uh, I think a lot of these , uh, financial stakeholders are trying to do legitimize to a certain degree, the success that we tell them that she's had a whisk game stop and through the involvements they had on, on Reddit. Uh, but I think that, you know, honestly that is the way of the future. Uh, and to that certain degree, I think that retail investors are feeling different ways of how to think about investing and how to kind of , um, drive the stock market and things afterwards . So I think going back to the question that was asked, I think Robin hood has done a great job of just giving access to the financial markets that a lot of people really wouldn't have had originally.

Speaker 3 32:46

Yeah. I think that it's, there's an a , there's absolutely an important contribution in terms of getting more people engaging in investing positive. I agree with you, Julia, the gamification aspects on the trading are extremely concerning. Um, and there's a reason behind that. I mean, if you, if you, if you've studied investing theory in history, you know, that you need to be making, you know, smart investments either, you know , going long for a long period of time, you're not, you don't make money or build wealth by being an active daily trader, right . History says, and , um, you know, if you don't believe me, read Warren Buffett, you know , like me, you know, look at , um , you know, the great, very successful investment managers of our, of our lifetimes. Um, there , you know, it's very, it's a very thoughtful process. You need to think through questions of , um , asset allocation. Um, you need to be not trying, you need to avoid timing, market timing. Um, and you know, there's a variety of different, very valid reasons where investment wisdom says, you know, you want to be placing as , as individuals, us with households , maybe, you know, five, six trades a year. Um, and so what what's concerning is just you Robin hood taking this very powerful gamification capability, which has tremendous value , um, and pointing it towards , um, what I consider kind of a destructive , uh, easily destructive kind of behavior, which is getting too much trading happening , um, on any individual's account. So the question is like, I think I understand why they do that. It's very troublesome. I think the regulators quite honestly have a lot more, they need to be doing in terms of , um, you know , taking greater care to protect us all as investors on these types of platforms. Um, and there's really some ways gamification could likely be used on the Robin hood platform to, to support, you know, real bringing forth, real investing, investment management wisdom , uh , and like you're mentioning the financial literacy kind of Ackerman around financial literacy, investing literacy. Um, so it's curious the, you know, obviously, you know, Robin had , you know, they got brought before Congress, along with, you know, roaring kitty and others , you know, Maxine waters, you know, convened them all, which I , I couldn't, I couldn't stop watching. So I watched that whole session both days and I was like, Oh , this it's just amazing to me. Um, but they, you know, they, there was a big , uh, kind of investigation of the Robin hood business model as well. Cause they, you know , of course they're not trading. I mean, they're not charging anything per trade . They make their revenue by , um, kind of giving access to , uh , the order flow that they're generating. They're giving others access to that order flow. And then , um, the, those getting access are taking advantage of , uh, what's called the bid-ask spread , uh, on the trades. So, so us as individual investors on Robin hood were getting kind of a bad deal on the bid-ask , uh, spread and there's others taking advantage of the bad deal we're getting. And that's how Robin hood makes money. Um, and there's nothing there's really nothing raw that, I mean, every broker dealer does payment for order flow. Um, but there's , um, there, it hasn't been, there's never, I've never seen until Robin hood , a broker dealer that was like gap was the only way they made money. Right. So it was like a hundred percent of their revenue is payment for order flow. I remember like on other broker dealers I've been engaged with, you know, they get that, but it'd be like 5% of the revenue , uh, would be payment product from . So there's , um, there's some, you know, reasons for , I understand from our business model while they would try to use gamification to force more trading because they need more trading in order to make money or Robin hood has no business model. Um, and so now it's just like, how do you take these powerful things like gamification and steer them in ways that can , um, be better use useful or useful to us as investors?

Speaker 2 37:30

Well, and look, I mean, I, I think that the , you know, all of these companies are not not-for-profit right. They're not nonprofits . So they assume everybody in the business, as you guys know, we're asking, where are they going to , um , make their money if they're not, if they have zero , um, zero a dollar trading, right? And , and I think that that has created a whole bunch of different and new questions, but , but then look, I think that that is also where the business needs to evolve and change and ask itself these questions. The regulators need to be asking them to , you know, the regulators , um, have a responsibility, as you said, Tommy , to protect investors. And Robin hood was allowing automatic open of margin accounts when you opened your account where you, and I know that when we built that back in the day, you might have even been involved in it . We had to go in front of the regulators and show how to open a margin account. And it is the regulators forced us to make it difficult online because they didn't want, they wanted to protect investors. So how did they allow Robin hood to have that feature and, and with given the demographic of their clients and the [inaudible] and all of that. So look for the students that are listening. I hope what you get out of this discussion is your knowledge is needed, not just at fintechs and incumbents it's needed at regulators, right? Like they need to also be hearing what you guys have to say about the future and predicting the future. Um, in, in other ways, not just, you know , in the traditional ways that you guys might be thinking, I would be also thinking about how do you guys go get jobs at the sec to , um , to try to help keep them current?

Speaker 3 39:23

Yeah, no, that's a great advice. Um, the last thing I want to hit on before we hit go to the news is just, there's so many exciting thoughts about the future when it comes to I'd say what, what I see in the Minecraft Fortnite kind of discord, engaged gaming environment , um, and the delivery of financial services. And I'd say one area intersection point that I get most excited thinking about and imagining comes down to advice. Um, and I remember seeing some, some research Julia, where there were surveys done of Jim Z, probably like Daniel, you know, the upper, the older end of gen Z, but also I guess the younger end of millennials saying, Hey, a lot of surveying around like this advice capability, what does, you know, human interaction in your, in , in your financial life? And what surprised me from the studies that I've read was that a lot of the , um , older millennials and the gen Z crowd was saying, or the sorry, the younger millennials and the older disease were saying, I really value a person advising me. And that just, I remembered that. And then I think about how rich the gaming environments are from a, you know, you can be talking to people, you can have teams, there's a lot of visuals and engagement and house . It just seems like there's a lot of so many really interesting building blocks for building a like financial advice platform that, you know, we could have only dreamed about , um, five, 10 years ago.

Speaker 2 41:17

That's the company that I want to try to start, even though I have no idea how to go about it. But yes, I , I think all of the research that we have done with young millennials and gen Z has told us that they do want human interaction. They just don't necessarily want it face to face , meaning in-person face-to-face . And I think COVID has really helped accelerate some of that. But yes, one, one thing that is a fact, right, is that generate all these generations are still humans and they still want and need human interaction. But to your point, I think it's going to look and feel very differently. And I think whoever can figure out what that looks like in terms of the model will win. I mean, a lot of people are making good money on discord now by sharing their investment advice for a fee on discord. And they got, they have huge audiences. So that that's a whole brave new world that nobody had even thought about five years ago when I started talking about how all of this was going to be re-imagined .

Speaker 3 42:20

Mm . So before we move to news, I want you to have the last word on this Daniel , um, since , um, you're better positioned than Julia or myself to create this business. Uh, what D do you agree with us on this, like intersect advice thing? What are you, what are you,

Speaker 4 42:46

Yeah, I think so. I think, I mean, read it and the wall street bets, I mean, it was one of many online sites where we tell investors are learning, interacting, and kind of collaborating on investment ideas. So I think that they altered the beliefs that individuals such as yourself kind of had about investing and , and kind of gaining influence in the markets . I think it's not necessarily a movement of sorts, but it definitely kind of transformed the working of the financial markets and maybe not accompany , but perhaps , um , something to try to legitimize and , um, and these online interactions , uh, to kind of help you shape the power of dynamics, I guess, for retail investors, maybe it might be union of sorts.

Speaker 3 43:42

All right . Good. Thanks for that. Um, all right. Let's move quickly through news , uh, news of the past week, what caught your eye Julia?

Speaker 2 43:52

So PayPal announced that it will start allowing select customers if it's Venmo app to buy, sell, and whole cryptocurrencies something. I know that your audience is probably gets really frothy and excited over , um , and we'll eventually make that functionality available to all Venmo users. And the four types of crypto that they're looking at is , um , Bitcoin Ethereum, light point and Bitcoin cash. So big news from PayPal,

Speaker 3 44:21

No Dodge coin there for you, Daniel . Sorry , the , um , Daniel, how about you? Anything caught your eye? Yeah,

Speaker 4 44:32

I'll say , um , MasterCard announcing a multi-million dollar investment and , uh, the fearless fund, which is a venture capital firm founded by black woman was the mission of investing and minority female entrepreneurs. And I think , uh, one of the first investments , uh, was also was in Greenwood. So that's Atlanta base . Uh neobank uh, one of the people that kind of come eyes is I killed on Mike. Who's a local Atlanta native. That's going to be one of the co-founders as well as a media mogul, Ryan Glover, as well as , um, you know, Andrew Young, who was once a mayor and civil rights activist here in Atlanta.

Speaker 3 45:13

Yeah. I love seeing this. We continue to see so much great news about Greenwood , um, and as they're , they're starting to grow , um, the last thing I'd mentioned is , uh , Delotz sponsor of the George FinTech Academy. Uh, they announced last week that they're acquiring first American payment systems for close to a billion dollars in cash. Um, and it's a big , um, it's a big jolt for the payments business of deluxe , I think, is going to double the size of their payments business , uh , which is great, of course, very exciting for our community. Some of you will know that , um, deluxe has opened , um, there a major office here in , uh, in Atlanta, in Sandy Springs is going to be their innovation hub , um, in the us. Um, and they've been real active with us in the FinTech Academy. So that was, it was great to see and congrats to that team on that acquisition. Um, well, we're at the end of our time. Julia cannot thank you enough for being here. You are always welcome at the Georgia FinTech Academy. Please, please come back. Uh, Daniel always great to see you . Thanks for sharing your wisdom. Best of luck as Ethiopia continues to evolve. Um, we'll , uh, we're , you know, we're committed to helping, helping you make that company a success as well. Good . Well, thanks. Thanks.

Speaker 1 46:37

The Georgia FinTech Academy podcasts are available on iTunes and Spotify to obtain additional information about the Georgia FinTech Academy. Please visit our website@georgiafintechacademy.org .