Structural Shifts | aperture podcast

We have a special podcast episode, which is all about Embedded Banking. We hosted four excellent guests: Christine Schmid, Head of Strategy at additivEric Mouilleron, CEO & Founder at BankableScott Gordon, CEO at KardTue Mortensen, Global Head of Prime and Relationship Management at Saxo Bank. Main topics discussed: 1. What is embedded banking? 2. The mechanics of embedded finance 3. Making the business case for embedded finance 4. What creates differentiation in this space?

Today we speak with Hasan Nawaz, co-founder and CEO at HUBUC — a banking as a service (BaaS) platform that enables brands to open up new revenue lines by seamlessly embedding financial products into their customer journeys. HUBUC takes care of all the regulatory requirements and manages compliance risk. This allows their customers to get their services to market in less time with fewer resources. In this episode, you are going to learn what banking as a service or BaaS actually is, why it’s...

Today we host Neri Tollardo, Tinkoff’s Vice President of Strategy. In this episode, we discuss about Tinkoff’s entrepreneurial spirit (which has no hierarchy or bureaucracy, and this is something that they plan on maintaining as they scale), about the difference between creating an ecosystem as opposed to a conglomerate of different goods and services, how Tinkoff has managed to create insane customer engagement compared to most banks by combining their content with their technology, and...

Today, we have a special podcast episode, which is all about Bitcoin, discussing topics like: should every investor have some exposure to Bitcoin or is it still too volatile? What’s its intrinsic value anyway? And is Bitcoin a sustainable investment when it consumes more electricity than Argentina? We hosted four excellent guests: Izabella Kaminska, FT Alphaville editor at the Financial Times; Preston Byrne, partner at Anderson Kill; Nic Carter, partner at Castle Island Ventures; and Seamus...

What is the future of our cities? During the pandemic, places like London have seen an exodus of people who can work from anywhere. What is the future of office space? Is co-working going to continue? We dive into these questions with guest Zsolt Kohalmi, global head of real estate and co-CEO of Pictet Alternative Advisors. We also cover the future of retail and whether the pandemic plus Amazon has permanently closed a lot of our favorite shops and what’s going to become of these spaces. We...

Climate change expert Chris Goodall says that fighting climate change isn’t as challenging or as expensive as we think it is and can actually benefit our economy. In today’s episode, we discuss how the climate change movement can advance social change, whether we can save our planet without some structural shifts to capitalism, nuclear energy, the politics behind tackling the climate crisis, and more. Chris has written several books, of which What We Need To Do Now For A Zero Carbon Future...

This week’s podcast is the recording of an actual live event — a 4x4 Virtual Salon — we hosted in anticipation of the launch of our Digital Age Wealth Management Report (which is now out! 🎉). Our guests were Sid Sahgal (Product Manager at Hydrogen), Nikolai Hack (Head of Strategy & Partnerships at Nucoro), Qiaojia Li (CEO at Rosecut) and Michael O’Sullivan (author “The Levelling”, ex-CIO Credit Suisse). We discuss: changing consumer trends; changing technology; new business models and new...

Our guest is Stian Westlake, co-author of ‘Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy’ and we discuss the implications of an economy built increasingly on intangible assets, even more so in the post-pandemic world. In this podcast, we discuss the four S’s that explain how intangible assets behave differently than tangible ones, why we’re not seeing more economic growth or higher productivity right now, even though intangible assets are more scalable, what governments need...

We sit down with Marc Rubinstein, a former analyst and hedge fund manager who currently authors Net Interest — a weekly insight and analysis newsletter on the world of finance. Each note of his newsletter explores a theme currently trending in the sector, whether it’s FinTech or economics, or investment cycles — and today, you are going to hear about a little bit of everything. Marc and Ben Robinson discuss the history of equity research and where it’s at now, whether current regulation is...

Our guest is Manos Schizas — Lead in Regulation and RegTech at Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge. We discuss how regulatory change is accelerating so fast that people alone can’t deal with it and how does the technological solution addressing the problem looks like. Can technology solve this problem at scale? How much innovation are we seeing thanks to machine learning? And we also discuss about the Regulatory Genome Project, a recently launched...

Bitcoin is the best performing asset in 2020. There is growing institutional interest in crypto and broader digital assets. Tokenization is poised to be a huge market opportunity. In light of all this, we’re inviting you to a masterclass on all things crypto. We’re sitting down with Adrien Treccani, CEO and co-founder of METACO — a provider of security critical infrastructure for financial institutions that enables them to safely enter the digital asset ecosystem. Adrien is a leading...

Today’s guests are reinventing the way the world measures how sustainable companies really are. Yes, we do have ESG data and CSR reporting, but those measure practices rather than impact, and describe policies rather than outcomes. In this episode, the co-founders of Impaakt — Bertrand Gacon and Sylvain Massot — are sitting down with host, Ben Robinson, to talk about how they are creating the Wikipedia of impact investing. Leveraging the collective intelligence of a large community of...

We’re discussing with Leda Glyptis, a self-described recovering banker and lapsed academic, who’s worked in technology implementations for the last 20 years. Leda is one of the leading voices in banking and FinTech today, she has served as Chief Innovation Officer at QNB group, she was Director of EMEA Innovation at BNY Mellon, and most recently she was Chief of Staff at 11:FS. In this episode, Leda and Ben discuss what a Chief Innovation Officer actually does, whether innovation can come...

We discuss with Ian Hathaway — Senior Executive Director at Techstars, Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution, and a Co-founder and Board Member of the Center for American Entrepreneurship and book author (latest book co-authored is called ‘The Startup Community Way’ ). In this episode, Ben and Ian discuss entrepreneurial ecosystems, what governments are getting wrong when they try to foster entrepreneurship and how they can create better outcomes why entrepreneurship can lead to bigger...

Your host, Ben Robinson, is joined by Michael O’Sullivan, author of ‘The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization’ and former CIO of the International Wealth Management Division at Credit Suisse. Michael currently serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Economy. In this episode, Ben and Michael discuss what is the role central banks will play in the transition period to a post-globalization, multi-polar world; what international organizations should be...

There is a lot of anguish over what’s happening online these days from the rise of hate groups to media manipulation, the propaganda to interference with elections — are the positives of our digital world even worth it? Well, today, your host, Ben Robinson, digs into this question with Belén Romana García — Spain’s former head of Treasury, and an economist who has worked in both the public and private sectors. Belén is also a board member for several public companies and foundations. She...

When it comes to business, are you all about market research or do you go with your gut? For Michel Jordi it’s the latter — and following his intuition led him to start five groundbreaking watch companies. Michel is known for shaking things up in a traditional industry through innovative design and enviable marketing. Andy Warhol came to his New York launch party, People Magazine featured Michel on its cover and the event marketing strategies that Michel used for his launch publicity are...

We’re discussing with Youri Sawerschel, CEO of Creative Supply and Visiting Lecturer at EPFL EMBA and ESSEC Business School. Youri founded the Creative Supply agency in Zurich in 2015 to be the next generation of branding companies. We talk about the problems with the traditional branding agencies and how his switching things up through a distributed, networked workforce. In addition, we discuss why branding is the cause and the solution to so many of the world’s biggest crises, how brand...

Today, your host, Ben Robinson, is sitting down with Gary Pisano, professor at Harvard Business School and author of “Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation” — a book about how large companies can construct a strategy, system, and a culture of innovation that creates sustained growth. We discuss how organizations learn, innovate, and compete — and these are fundamental questions that Gary has been exploring throughout his career. Today, you will learn the four archetypes of...

Today, your host, Ben Robinson, is virtually sitting down with Julian Lehr, an ex-Googler, startup founder, and current startup partnerships lead at Stripe. Julian and Ben get into all sorts of interesting behavioral psychology related to buying and how digital companies can use physical elements to take advantage of signaling. You will also learn Julian's tactics for staying productive, why advertising budgets are shifting from celebrities to micro-influencers, why the Berlin startup scene...