Book Review

Beyond Good and the Power of Purpose-Driven Fintech

Beyond Good and the Power of Purpose-Driven Fintech
By Charlie Burgess Posted on
Categories: Book Review, Diversity in Fintech, FinovateSpring 2021, Speaker series, Women in Fintech

When we think of global corporations and business in general, do we feel pride in how we do things? Beyond Good, a new book by Unconventional Ventures co-founders Theodora Lau and Bradley Leimer, is a call to arms for business leaders to recognize how they can do well by doing good.

Beyond Good showcases how fintech is changing business models and what every industry can learn from it. The leaders in financial services are fostering a thriving ecosystem of incumbents and startups, unlocking new possibilities to make broader financial inclusion a reality.

With a foreword from the Aspen Institute, exclusive interviews with leading B-Corps, policy makers, executives, and case studies from companies like Sunrise Banks, Ant Group, Village Capital, Microsoft, and PayPal, Beyond Good shows how everyone can contribute to a more common good. Finovate readers can also get 20% off their copy of the book, using code Inspire20.

Below are a few excerpts from our conversation with Theo and Brad on the new book and their upcoming appearance at FinovateSpring next month. For the full interview, check out the video above.

On the importance of financial inclusion

Theo Lau: “If we talk about the onset of the so-called fintech revolution, if you will, a lot of the new startups seemed to regurgitate old ideas that have already been around. They make it prettier, they create this bamboo credit card … But it that really changing our behavior, is it really changing how we work? In the West, are we really including more demographics and doing things better for them? I would argue a lot of the time we are not.”

Bradley Leimer: “Inclusivity goes much broader than just a credit card or just lending or just credit. And that’s a lot of what we discuss. There’s more to a financial relationship than one side of the balance sheet. There’s more to the financial services model than just profitability. There are longer term implications in everything we do every single day and every decision that we make.”

Why fintechs and financial services need to move “beyond good.”

Leimer: “We’ve seen a lot of stakeholder capitalism lately and examples of companies that have tried to mean more for their business model and their communities. That’s what we celebrate in the book, the shift that we can include more people in our communities in society. Especially in financial services and technology, companies we really need to focus how we can serve these larger groups. Everybody in society should be able to be a part of our business models. And that’s why we go “beyond good.”

Lau: “We want to reinforce that this is not a zero-sum game. Just because we are including more demographics and more considerations on how we conduct business doesn’t mean you’re losing. Case in point, one of the things lately we’ve been talking about is student loan debt, $1.7 trillion dollars of debt. Obviously the burden is shared across all demographics, but particularly in communities of color, among first generation college students, and among those in other less advantaged groups.

So our question is: how do we go about solving it? There are a lot of different moving parts. But for financial services, the role isn’t just to offer another loan on top of the pile of deb because that’s not solving the problem. We need to go back further to ask how we create a more equal society, more equal products, and create services to help people rethink their finances and get to a healthier financial situation.”

Join Theo Lau and Bradley Leimer at FinovateSpring May 10 through 13. For more information about our upcoming, all digital, spring fintech conference, visit our FinovateSpring hub today.

Photo by Steve Johnson from Pexels

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Brett King and the Disruptions of the Augmented Age

Brett King and the Disruptions of the Augmented Age
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Book Review

Augemented_BookCoverWhat does it take to thrive in a world of rapid technological change?

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane, the new book by Moven founder and CEO Brett King, marks the latest addition to a growing literature of futurism and prognostication on technology. And while King calls himself “ultimately an optimist,” Augmented threads the needle between the tech utopianism of a Ray Kurzweil, and the more anxious voices (at least where technologies like artificial intelligence are concerned) of visionaries ranging from Elon Musk to Neil Bostrom.

Augmented puts the current boom in the context of previous periods of rapid technological change. King dissents from the view that our current wave pales in comparison with other eras. Instead, he refers to the impact of the smartphone on personal finance (“Only 40% of the world had access to banking before mobile,” he points out) and talks about the transformative power of innovations like 3D printing in medicine and meta-materials in energy.

These innovations will force people to ask new ethical questions, such as “Should it be legal for a person to have an otherwise healthy limb amputated in favor of an enhanced prosthetic one?” But many of the thorniest questions in King’s view will revolve around what to do with all those workers displaced by increasingly productive “labor-saving” solutions. Augmented features a sobering table of jobs likely to survive the transition he believes is already underway, and those that are not. “Every business with a traditional business model that has resisted technological change has failed,” King says.

Augmented_BrettKingSo what are 21st century technological revolutions made of? King sees four key disruptors that will define the way we will live in the decades to come: artificial intelligence, smart infrastructure, healthcare technology, and what he calls embedded and distributed experiences. This last category includes the sort of virtual technologies that companies like Facebook have made major investments in, as well as the “Internet of Things” concept that King describes as a world in which “everything is able to give feedback.”

And while there will be some who will have none of this noisy, intrusive world, King is betting that most of us will find our place in it. Consider his take on privacy. For King, social media like Instagram and LinkedIn (to say nothing of  what we’ll have by mid-century) provide something equally as valuable in the augmented age: validation. “Lack of a digital identity may make you less trustworthy in the new world,” King suggested. In a world in which privacy and security remain important—if not even more so than today—the ability to quickly and accurately establish identity also becomes important, even if all that means is having an accurate and up-to-date Facebook page.

The inevitability of change is a key takeaway. And the irony may be that the technology will be the easy part. “There will have to be a mindset shift from the traditional values of baby boomers to the acceptance of change-mentality of millennials,” King says. And it is his own generation X, currently entering middle age, that will be key in making that transition happen.

Much of King’s message, however, is that as inevitable as the discomfort of disruption is, we’ve been through this before and tended to like what we found on the other side. “It is important to help people get ready for this,” he said, summing up his reason for writing Augmented. And to the extent his predictions prove prescient, forewarned is forearmed.

Meet Brett King in San Jose next month as his company, Moven, demonstrates its latest technology live on stage at FinovateSpring, May 10 and 11.

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