American Banker Podcast

American Banker is pleased to bring you Breaking Banks, hosted by Brett King, and featuring the editors of American Banker. In this episode: Brett hosts a group of fintech influencers — including Chris Skinner, Jim Marous, Dave Birch, and Ghela Boskovich — to review a bit of 2016 and talk about the trends and predictions for 2017. What's next?

American Banker is pleased to bring you Breaking Banks, hosted by Brett King, and featuring the editors of American Banker. This week's show is a remix of Brett King's interview with Bruce Cahan, Stanford professor and creator of GoodBank and Manu Saadia, author of Trekonomics, a book about the economics of Star Trek. In the second half, Sam Maule, director and senior practice lead at NTT Data Americas, and Marc Hochstein, editor in chief of American Banker, speak with John Hope Bryant, American Banker Innovator of the Year and creator of the "Silver Rights Movement."

Dave Martin, founder of BankMechanics, shares his insights on sales culture, performance incentives, motivating employees to think about the long term, the future of branches, why in-store locations are harder to run than you think, and more.

Peter Wannemacher, senior analyst at Forrester, explains why Europe's PSD2 regulation matters to U.S. banks and why it will be a hot topic in 2017. He also shares his tech predictions for 2017 and a few contrarian warnings.

Loretta Mester, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, discusses how Trump's election will affect financial services, what she thinks of Neel Kashkari's plan to end "too big to fail," and her views on interest rates.

Ping-pong tables, latte machines and other neat frills don't attract millennials as much as companies like to think, according to Melissa Louis, managing consultant at The Gallup Organization, which has done massive surveys in this area. "The biggest thing millennials really care about is development," she says. "Are they going to be in an organization where they will be consistently coached, where they can see a path for themselves in the future, regardless of what role they're starting in?"

Wei Ke, a partner at consultants Simon-Kucher, discusses the psychology behind customers' choices, including the appeal of metal credit cards, the willingness to pay $450 a year for a card and the paralysis of too many options.

Banks are just as vulnerable to the kind of nation-state cyberattack Yahoo suffered, and can avoid some of the mistakes it made, says Samuel Visner of the consulting firm ICF and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

David Weiss, senior analyst at Aite Group, weighs in on the IBM/Promontory deal and how humans and artificial intelligence programs will interact in the field of bank regulatory compliance.

Julio Alejandro, CEO of Humanitarian Blockchain in London, thinks so. Some of his projects, such as providing bitcoin Visa debit cards to refugees and digital identities for ex-cons, are ideas financial services firms could implement here.