In this episode, Nakeita shared her experience and insights on overcoming self-doubt and navigating career pivots in the finance industry.

The conversation emphasized the importance of self-awareness, resilience, and a growth mindset, and discussed the challenges and opportunities of pivoting into finance and FinTech.

Nakeita envisioned herself three years in the future and described her ideal scenario to a coach, which helped her embody the success and overcome self-doubt. All professionals could benefit from this valuable advice.

Nakeita and Mohamed also shared insights on navigating professional journeys and leadership, with a focus on purpose and helping others. Throughout the discussion, they highlighted the value of networking, personal and professional development, and faith in achieving success.

Nathan Stevenson and Mohamed Desoky discussed the potential of reinforcement learning and AI in finance, particularly in asset management and personalized wealth management. Nathan also shared his inspirational and impactful journey to ForwardLane.

They emphasized the importance of human feedback in the reinforcement learning process to improve accuracy and highlighted the need for human interaction in financial decision-making. They also discussed the future of financial technology with AI, including the potential for AI to revolutionize the industry.

In this episode we were joined by Paul Davis, from Greensboro, NC and founder at Bank Slate, a banking and fintech consulting and advisory practice with a robust media platform. We discussed how fintechs can work better with banks.

Principle themes:

• Prioritizing compliance at fintechs, and taking proactive steps to demonstrate compliance;
• Building dedicated teams and leaders at banks to manage fintech partnerships;
• Monitoring and managing third party relationships through action plans;
• The importance of measuring potential risks with fintechs - eg. liquidity, credit, reputational, etc.
• Regulatory scopes, ie. the difference between the CFPB's scope and that of the OCC/FDIC/Fed;
• Becoming well-rounded in technology and compliance, and networking as keys to success in the field.

https://thebankslate.substack.com/ #FaaS

Thank you to James Barney, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Ally Bank in Charlotte, NC, for a stimulating conversation covering the tenets of the fintech infrastructure.

Principal topics:

+ Acceleration of existing systems through cloud migration.

+ Cloud integration of regulatory standards to help speed up the process of product development.

+ Pioneering the IT gateway between legacy vendor systems (ie, Fiserv) with new cloud infrastructure.

+ The democratization of financial data through the cloud migration of exchanges.

+ Application Programs Interface (API) advantages of constant maintenance and product agility.

+ Self-healing systems to prevent outages.

+ Hyper-scalers allowing entrepreneurs and product developers to focus on customer needs/experience.

+ Future fintech survival dependent on the protection the intellectual property.

+ Becoming a thought-leader by reading and becoming resourceful.

www.ally.com

#cloudmigration #API

Thank you to Pasha Maher of Stiegler EdTech in Charlotte, NC for an enlightening conversation covering the positive impact of Fintech entrepreneurship.

Principal themes:

1. examining the impact of public-private partnerships on Carolina Fintech Hub's vision for innovation in North Carolina
2. exploring the influence of early financial challenges on future innovations
3. leveraging the benefits of thriving fintech ecosystems and associated opportunities
4. navigating cash flow and interest rate challenges in the landscape of financial innovation and Fintech M&A activity
5. evaluating the strategic advantages for banks in acquiring scaled fintech firms
6. AI's role as a potential complement to cybersecurity technologies and its implications for the future of Web3
7. assessing alignment (or misalignment) with corporate culture as a catalyst or hindrance to startup success

Continue the conversation using #FaaS.

A logical and coherent conversation surrounding the imminent changes in the financial institutions and markets landscape.

Key themes:

• • Vetting new solution providers is more difficult than with established players.
  • More than 50% of Credit Union and Community bank boards don’t have a single board member that is well versed in technology.
  • Emerging technologies competitive advantage for banks.
  • Notions of technology convergence, and financial institutions either leveraging open-source or in-house development.
  • Education as central to regulation coming on board, and AI supporting policy advancements.
  • Liquidity, inclusivity and transparency gains in financial markets.
  • Different rates of global fintech adoption, and related consequences.
  • A career mindset that centers on ways to improve banking efficiency and observes signals at Central Banks.
  • Life balance while advancing your fintech knowledge.
  • Institutions of higher learning thinking about the future.

Discussion with Kostiantyn Dmitriiev of DevPro on the advancements of blockchain. Key topics:

+ Public vs. Private blockchain implications, as well as permissibility (and future public-permissioned chains)
+ The distinction between Confidentiality and Anonymity
+ The Layer 0 to Layer 4 (and beyond) blockchain stack for scalability and liquidity
+ The importance of future interoperability between different blockchains
+ DeFi as simply a digital projection of traditional finance 
+ Debunking the myth that traditional financial institutions are at risk given the rise of DeFi
+ NFT and FT use cases (to include the collatoralization of NFTs)
+ Focusing on the end-user first before yielding to the AI/Blockchain hype