Will AI Fix Fintech?
Join host Tedd Huff, co-host Matt Vanhouten, and guest Theo Lau in a thought-provoking episode of UNCUT by Fintech Confidential, where we dive deep into the multifaceted world of Artificial Intelligence in Fintech. This episode covers a broad spectrum of topics, including the responsible use of AI, its impact on jobs, financial inclusion, and the ethical considerations surrounding technology.
Key Discussion Points:
- Defining AI and Its Overuse: Understand AI beyond the hype as a technology grounded in mathematics and algorithms. Tedd leads the conversation on how language and terminology influence our perception of AI.
- The Ethical Use of AI: Matt, Theo, and Tedd discuss the importance of accountability and addressing biases in AI development, emphasizing the need for responsible decision-making.
- AI's Role in Financial Inclusion and Services: Explore how AI revolutionizes financial services, from enhancing customer support to improving risk assessment and lending practices. The guests highlight innovative FinTech products leveraging AI for better access to financial resources.
- Government and AI Regulation: The trio delves into the necessity of government intervention in AI decision-making, aiming for a balance to avoid bias and ensure transparency.
- The Potential of Web3 and Digital Identity: Theo sheds light on how Web3 and self-sovereign identity can democratize access to technology and data, offering a more equitable digital future.
- Addressing the Digital Divide: Discussions extend to bridging the digital divide, ensuring affordable internet access, and the role of AI in education and learning.
- The Future of AI in FinTech: The conversation concludes with insights into the future trends of generative AI in FinTech, highlighting the enduring importance of human interaction and relationship-building in the digital age.
Takeaways:
- AI, a powerful tool based on math, holds the potential to transform industries, including financial services, by automating tasks and providing insights.
- The responsible use of AI necessitates carefully considering ethical implications, biases, and the impact on society.
- Bridging the digital divide and ensuring equitable access to technology are critical for harnessing the full potential of AI.
- The future of AI in FinTech will likely focus on enhancing customer experiences, streamlining operations, and supporting personalized financial planning.
This episode with Tedd, Matt, and Theo offers a comprehensive overview of AI's current state and future possibilities in FinTech. By addressing AI's challenges and opportunities, we can navigate toward a more inclusive, efficient, and ethically responsible future in financial technology.
Also, watch the entire episode on YouTube
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Time Stamps:
AI Fundamentals and Perception
[00:03:00] Theodora Lau emphasizes AI as a mathematical tool with a rich history.
[00:04:11] Matt Vanhouten discusses the impact of terminology on our understanding of AI.
Societal Implications of AI
[00:07:02] Discussion on AI's decentralizing effects and societal impacts.
[00:30:57] Lau addresses the complexities and transformative potential of AI and big tech.
AI's Role in Natural and Financial Worlds
[00:10:26] AI's application in understanding plant communication.
[00:37:05] Lau explains AI's role in enabling microloans, showcasing financial inclusion.
Ethical Use and Future Impact of AI
[00:13:21] Lau reflects on AI for good, focusing on ethical usage for solving real-world problems.
[00:32:02] Lau and Vanhouten debate the nuanced future impacts of AI on work and life.
Work Dynamics and Financial Services Innovations
[00:34:38] Discussion on how AI reshapes work dynamics and extends careers.
[01:37:27] Vanhouten talks about AI's potential to improve financial services like sanction screening.
Bias, Ethics, and Regulation in AI
[00:41:12] Necessity of addressing AI biases, especially in financial decisioning, and the role of regulation.
[01:10:05] Importance of prompt engineering to mitigate biases and achieve useful AI outputs.
AI in Creativity, Research, and Representation
[01:02:46] Huff shares how AI enhances research and breaks conventional thought patterns.
[01:09:01] Lau highlights biases in AI-generated images, stressing the need for diversity.
AI's Practical Applications and Skepticism
[01:17:00] Vanhouten expresses skepticism about generative AI in payments, advocating for machine learning.
[01:32:15] Ethical considerations in AI's future, with a vision of enhancing human creativity.
Changing Perceptions of Value and Financial Planning
[01:34:57] Huff on how AI might change our perception of value and mediums of exchange.
[01:42:10] Lau discusses the need for adaptive financial planning tools for changing life stages.
AI's Future in FinTech and Society
[01:47:09] Reflections on generative AI's future role in FinTech, emphasizing personalized services and human interaction.
[01:35:59] Lau shares her vision of the future of money, focusing on access to essential resources as forms of value.
This is a Production of Diamond D3, Media
ABOUT:
Tedd Huff: Tedd Huff is the Founder of Volayre, a FinTech-focused management consulting firm, providing expertise in Banking-as-a-Service, Payment Facilitation, and a range of services for banks, merchants, and tech companies in areas like partnership strategy, product management, and digital asset transfer. He is also the Founder of DD3 Media & executive producer and host of Fintech Confidential, a DD3 media production.
Over the past 24 years, he has contributed to FinTech startups as an Advisory Board Member, Co-Founder, and Chief Experience Officer, providing strategic and tactical direction for Global Payments OpenEdge, Heartland Payments, Nuvei, and TSYS, among others, focusing on growth while delivering innovation, process improvements and user experience-driven value to simplify the complexity of payments.
DD3, Media: A multimedia creation, management, production & marketing firm delivering engaging content primarily serving Fintech and technology companies globally.
Transcript
Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: of course is garbage and garbage
Speaker:out is garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker:I mean, as simple as that, right?
Speaker:If your data that you use
Speaker:is partially based on historical bias because of redlining, because
Speaker:of everything that we have done that we thought was okay, and
Speaker:now is manifesting itself in
Speaker:present day 2023, of course it needs to be fixed.
Speaker:And that was why CFPP came out couple of months ago and said.
Speaker:Hold your horses for all of you guys using AI in your automated credit decisioning.
Speaker:Make sure you can explain what you're doing if you are rejecting someone's
Speaker:Tedd Huff- Host, Fintech Confidential-1: Hey, Ted Huff here.
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Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential, Host: Welcome to Fintech Confidential, bringing
Speaker:you the people, tech, and companies that change how you pay and get paid.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Welcome to another episode of FinTech
Speaker:Confidentials Uncut, where we talk about subjects without any limitations,
Speaker:without any restrictions, and truly share where we're thinking, what we're
Speaker:thinking, and how we're thinking about these topics this week or this episode.
Speaker:Geez, I've been on so many episodes this week, but on this episode we're gonna be
Speaker:talking about artificial intelligence,
Speaker:how it plays in FinTech, how it maybe shouldn't play in FinTech, and a handful
Speaker:of the things that have been announced here recently, uh, around Nvidia.
Speaker:Jamie Diamond from JP Morgan has made a few comments in the recent news,
Speaker:and I'm gonna get the perspective from our guests now this week.
Speaker:I did it again on this episode.
Speaker:This is gonna be fun.
Speaker:Um, on this episode, I have Theodore Lau.
Speaker:She is an author.
Speaker:She has her own consulting company.
Speaker:She, she's been speaking all over the globe here recently.
Speaker:And I think one of the big pieces that I'm looking forward to her
Speaker:perspective is from her latest book around Web3 and the financial economy
Speaker:and how that impacts everything.
Speaker:She's gonna bring, bring a really unique perspective, and we brought
Speaker:Matt Van Houten back to the show.
Speaker:We've got him in here, and we'll love to see his perspective
Speaker:because he keeps track very closely to what's going on in FinTech.
Speaker:So the first question I want to ask everybody and, and we'll, we'll kick it
Speaker:off with Theo, you're, you're the new one here, so we'll kick off with you.
Speaker:Uh, the, the first question is how.
Speaker:How do you define ai and do you feel that it might be a slightly overused acronym?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: How about I do it the other way around?
Speaker:'cause I like to cause trouble.
Speaker:AI is not magic.
Speaker:Here you go.
Speaker:That's
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : What?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I I said
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Oh, come on.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: magic.
Speaker:Magic is illusion.
Speaker:Um, and, and ai, ai, does a lot of interesting things.
Speaker:I it's not, it's not magical.
Speaker:It's math.
Speaker:It, it's, it's math.
Speaker:It's literally numbers.
Speaker:Um, that's how I look at it.
Speaker:And it's been around, it's been around for a long time.
Speaker:It's been around even before the whole chat GPT hype that it brought about
Speaker:like, what, more than a year ago now?
Speaker:Uh, I think it was November last year.
Speaker:So it is, it is really interesting technology.
Speaker:Um, it can do a lot of really interesting things for how we live and how we work.
Speaker:Um, I, I'm pretty sure this is like a very non-controversial comment.
Speaker:Um, we haven't even touched the surface of what it can do.
Speaker:So it's gonna be fun.
Speaker:It's gonna be interesting.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Oh, Matt, what, where's, where's your perspec?
Speaker:Give us a little bit of your perspective on, on the, on the whole AI piece
Speaker:of it, and then I'll give mine.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:Um, well first of all, I totally agree with everything Theo just said, but
Speaker:I'm gonna, I'm gonna sort of come back around to, I think that the terminology
Speaker:and how it sort of influences the way, like people in the public perceive
Speaker:what is, is potentially actually there versus what's truly there.
Speaker:And um, and I think there's a, you know, language in my view, you know,
Speaker:creates our reality both in terms of how we understand the world and
Speaker:in terms of how we, we convey a description of something that then allows
Speaker:someone else to then Have their own.
Speaker:So we, we create mutual understanding through language in large part, right?
Speaker:That's not the only way, but it's one of the biggest, um, ways that we do that.
Speaker:So whenever we start with a, a, a framework and we say
Speaker:like, this is intelligence.
Speaker:It's, it's already really a brand versus a description of what's,
Speaker:what's underneath the hood.
Speaker:You know, it's not intelligence.
Speaker:Not yet.
Speaker:Maybe there's, there's, and there's a lot of debate around, you know, perhaps
Speaker:not ever, um, some really smart people think, yeah, we're gonna get to a, a
Speaker:a period where technologies that are sort of similar to the underlying
Speaker:structure of chat, GPT can be autonomous thinking entities.
Speaker:And there's a lot of other really smart people that say it.
Speaker:No, I mean, maybe it'll happen, but not with anything close to the
Speaker:frameworks that we're working with now.
Speaker:So I think, I think for one, it's just the, the key question I have is like, I.
Speaker:are are we talking about like technology that can do something?
Speaker:That's a tool, right?
Speaker:So like, let's just talk about what, what is a technology that can solve
Speaker:a problem and then what can it do?
Speaker:And then separately, the more philosophical question of like, you know,
Speaker:what is consciousness and, uh, you know, is this an independent being, you know,
Speaker:? It's like, I, I think we're so far away from needing to actually answer the second
Speaker:question given the, the, the, the truth of what the capabilities are right now.
Speaker:That it, it starts to create a, a, a, like a new narrative that I think
Speaker:coming back to Theodore's main point is being in large part fed by those
Speaker:who are driving the early innovation in this space to, in my view, scare people
Speaker:into, uh, creating oversight that they then write the rules around and can I.
Speaker:Control, right?
Speaker:So if you, if you tell everybody this thing is really scary, you need to
Speaker:only have it be in trusted hands.
Speaker:And my hands are the most trusted.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Oh yeah, that, that, that even
Speaker:goes into the whole decentralized fear of decentralization.
Speaker:Um, but we'll, we'll, we'll leave that one out for today's discussion.
Speaker:You know, from my perspective, I, I I look at it from a.
Speaker:We've had to simplify down the numerous things that have been going on from
Speaker:pattern recognition, some sort of, um, automated learning, some human
Speaker:directed or human decisions, movements and behaviors that go behind that.
Speaker:And it was just easier to create this nice big bucket called artificial
Speaker:intelligence because from my perspective, looking at it, the reason why people
Speaker:feel comfortable calling it artificial intelligence is because it's mimicking
Speaker:decisions that we have made in the past and regurgitating or presenting
Speaker:information that already exists.
Speaker:And for a lot of people that feels intelligent.
Speaker:And it's more about a feeling than the reality.
Speaker:So
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : like that, it's like that horse
Speaker:that could, you know, tap codes in, in like the 1910s or twenties or
Speaker:something and everyone's like, oh my God, this horse, it can communicate.
Speaker:It's, uh, I, I can't remember who is doing a pt.
Speaker:Barna maybe or so one of those side show type type of type of people.
Speaker:You know, and it was very convincing.
Speaker:A lot of people were fooled into thinking that this horse actually was
Speaker:a sentient thinking being that could tell you its thoughts and stories
Speaker:and, and then, you know, eventually it became clear what was really going on.
Speaker:It was, you know, taking direction from somewhere else, you know?
Speaker:And I think we, we want to believe in sentient, in, in
Speaker:hosts other than human minds.
Speaker:I mean, this is, this is, this is something that goes back, I
Speaker:don't know, maybe forever, right?
Speaker:Whether it's, you know, God, the, the idea of like a god, the idea of like
Speaker:mythical, like spirits or the forest having, you know, uh, a mind, like
Speaker:we want to know that there are other things in the universe that can think.
Speaker:And so it's very attractive and doesn't, so it, it doesn't
Speaker:take very much to then
Speaker:convince people to say, yeah, that's thinking, you know.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Yeah, but I, I would chime in here.
Speaker:I, I, I like what you just said, and it reminds me of something that Clara.
Speaker:Theier, she loves to say algorithms of parents, right?
Speaker:We, we often tend to forget that these things, they don't
Speaker:exist in a va in a vacuum.
Speaker:These things were created by humans.
Speaker:What they do was dictated by how we program it, by what we teach it.
Speaker:They don't just come into being.
Speaker:Um, so we need to stress that part a little bit more.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Well, and it's funny you bring that up,
Speaker:Matt, is um, I was at an event earlier this week where we were having a very
Speaker:similar discussion to what we're having today, more around AI and what's truly
Speaker:innovative and in different areas, and I.
Speaker:I'm gonna ask you guys for your perspective on the FinTech piece,
Speaker:but the part that I thought was interesting is that some of the scientists
Speaker:that were there, data scientists and biological scientists talked about,
Speaker:they're excited to use artificial intelligence to figure out how plants
Speaker:talk to each other, how cells within the body can understand what's going on.
Speaker:So they're, they're leveraging these models to really try and dive in
Speaker:a little bit deeper into the why.
Speaker:And I, the part that made it really interesting to me, especially based on
Speaker:your comment, is that they're trying to give it a human persona every single time.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : And how many movies do we
Speaker:have where animals are humans?
Speaker:right.
Speaker:Well, were there three launch this year that were really focused around
Speaker:that, at least that I know of.
Speaker:Heck, who knows how many more, but that's the other areas on how they're
Speaker:looking at it from the FinTech side.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Do, do you
Speaker:wait, so do you think that, do you think that's a problem in their,
Speaker:so take for example, I think there, there's pre pre ai there's been a lot
Speaker:of interesting research in, in the last several years that that does point to
Speaker:some kind of an interaction happening.
Speaker:Like between plants in between plants and humans.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : that, that, that we don't understand.
Speaker:And, and I'm not gonna say it, it's sentient that's at play there, but
Speaker:there's some kind of information exchange that's happening that goes
Speaker:beyond what we can see and you know, what we know about like cell biology.
Speaker:And so I, I wonder like, you know, I think exploring that further to me as a, as
Speaker:a, as a goal is, is, is, is a good one.
Speaker:The question I have is like do, because we've already
Speaker:anthropomorphized AI and we're very,
Speaker:uh, happy to continue to do that with whatever the object of our study is.
Speaker:You know, I guess are we.
Speaker:Are we bringing so much bias into just the framework for examining the question
Speaker:that we're automatically kind of like skewing the, like, the likely results
Speaker:to try to create an answer that says, well clearly this is speech, or this
Speaker:is thought, or this is understanding.
Speaker:Um, 'cause that's what you're looking for.
Speaker:You know, you're, you're, you, you are, you, you think that's what it is
Speaker:and you're gonna find it, you know.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Theodora, I saw your, your, the, the
Speaker:gears turning in your head as, as he was talking through that, you know, this
Speaker:is a kind of a topic that you brought up in your book really around how to.
Speaker:Use it for good, not evil.
Speaker:I'll use, I'm summarizing right.
Speaker:It is like how to use it, how to use the, the Web3 direction and all
Speaker:these new technologies for good.
Speaker:Do you think maybe we're taking it too far?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Now, I think you're probably
Speaker:referring, actually this is more in sync with my first book Beyond
Speaker:Good, which was written during Covid.
Speaker:Um, and in there that was when we were looking at technologies such as
Speaker:longevity tech, ai, um, and what have you.
Speaker:That has been around for a while and what companies are using them
Speaker:to improve financial inclusion, um, and help, for example, small hole
Speaker:farmers to get access to credit.
Speaker:So those things I think is really interesting.
Speaker:It has real world implications.
Speaker:I like Matt, what you just said about the interaction or.
Speaker:I relationship, I don't know, lack of better word, between plants
Speaker:and, and people, because it reminds me of something that actually
Speaker:I think my parents taught me.
Speaker:This was little, somehow it stuck to my mind that they told me that
Speaker:the plant respond to human presence.
Speaker:If you have bamboos and you have greens in the house and you're
Speaker:around, the plants will thrive.
Speaker:If you ignore it, it just let it sit there in the corner by themselves.
Speaker:You're never home.
Speaker:It doesn't work well.
Speaker:And and it's one of those, I used to call it ancient Chinese
Speaker:secret, like things that just get passed down from generations.
Speaker:But you're right.
Speaker:I mean, the universe is, is ma mysterious and it works in mysterious way.
Speaker:That sound like a lyric.
Speaker:Um, but there are
Speaker:a lot of things
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : probably is in some song somewhere.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Probably right.
Speaker:I'm not, absolutely not well versed in the entertainment
Speaker:area, but, but it probably is.
Speaker:So it goes back to we have this amazing set of technologies, amazing
Speaker:amount of resources, seemingly, um, endless at our disposal.
Speaker:Then the question becomes, what are you gonna do it for?
Speaker:What are you gonna use it for?
Speaker:And who, who will have a voice at the table to decide what you will use it for?
Speaker:And, and I think that's my worry.
Speaker:I'm not worried about the technology itself.
Speaker:I'm more worried about who will have to say so in saying this
Speaker:is the direction we're going.
Speaker:And it goes back a little bit to what Ted, you and Matt were talking about,
Speaker:um, in, in terms of the evolution of the technology and, and all the
Speaker:things that we are using it for.
Speaker:Who is.
Speaker:Who has the authority to set that and say, well, no, this is not a good direction.
Speaker:Or, yes, we need to double down on this,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : You know, it's funny as you, you
Speaker:mentioned that the plant and, and your parents teaching you that if you
Speaker:just leave it in the corner and you don't pay attention to it, it dies.
Speaker:I, I'm, I'm gonna hold a lot of truth in that.
Speaker:'cause I bought this beautiful, beautiful plant that was.
Speaker:A beautiful ficus.
Speaker:It was designed and cre turned into a bonsai and I got busy with a whole bunch
Speaker:of stuff and I mean, I still watered it, right, but like I watered it.
Speaker:But then I came back from a trip and it was as if it just gave up.
Speaker:It just as if it gave up.
Speaker:And now I look at, and it's still sitting in that corner because
Speaker:I feel bad that that happened.
Speaker:But, you know, those are the types of things that we have to kind of think
Speaker:through as, as we look at how are we gonna leverage this type of technology
Speaker:and, you know, exchange of value, money or otherwise is, is something
Speaker:everybody holds close because that's, that's how we live, that's how we.
Speaker:Get and or give things.
Speaker:That's, that's just how we we move forward in our daily lives.
Speaker:I'm gonna jump into the FinTech side of the house.
Speaker:We've talked about the philosophy piece of it, but let's dive into the FinTech.
Speaker:You know, there's a, a handful of companies that are really diving
Speaker:into the artificial intelligence side of the house, and that's
Speaker:what their business is based on.
Speaker:Uh, at one of the many layers in artificial intelligence, you know,
Speaker:you've, you've got everything from your, your machine learning, you've
Speaker:got your, your models and your your life piece of it, and then you
Speaker:just continue to grow out from it.
Speaker:Um.
Speaker:And then you also, uh, sorry, you have the behavioral, I skipped a life
Speaker:moment behavioral piece of it, and then we would get into the sentient
Speaker:part that, that Matt had brought about.
Speaker:But going back all the way down to the data analytics and the machine
Speaker:learning piece of it, Theo, as we were talking before we got hit
Speaker:the record button, it's not new.
Speaker:It's been around a really long time, Matt, you and I have talked about that.
Speaker:Um, but
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : My first experience working with Mach,
Speaker:it was, it's, it's a combination of machine learning and pattern recognition.
Speaker:To automate capturing information from financial documents
Speaker:was in like 2002, 2003.
Speaker:And it worked really well, like, um, and this was not simple, just like.
Speaker:You know, uh, standardized font, kind of like being able to read
Speaker:that, that that technology, that's like optical character recognition.
Speaker:And then that moved into intelligent character recognition.
Speaker:I think OCR is like from the sixties, maybe seventies, like long time magnetic
Speaker:ink kind of predates both of those.
Speaker:So the, uh, the
Speaker:ability to take a magnetic signature from, from text, like, so we've been using
Speaker:technology to take things that previously had to be like, looked at by a person.
Speaker:Then transferred by either hand or some other mechanism from
Speaker:one place to another place.
Speaker:Like if you go back to the magnetic ink example, that's definitely
Speaker:since at least sixties, right?
Speaker:And then, and then it's progressively gotten, uh, as the, both the
Speaker:imaging capabilities have improved.
Speaker:So you actually have a better signal coming in now you have a high resolution
Speaker:document, and then I can, I can examine all the bits on the, on the, on the map,
Speaker:and I can now put those through software.
Speaker:Um, the software then, you know, you, you can develop lots of different techniques
Speaker:to, to try to like figure out, like, based on what I see in that, in that
Speaker:map, how do I make sense out of this?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And, and, and yeah.
Speaker:So that, that technology has been, it's been working fairly well and actually
Speaker:doing a lot of, I would say good.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:I mean, I think this is something I'd really love to get into is like,
Speaker:you know, um, automating work that was being done by a person over time.
Speaker:I feel is a good thing.
Speaker:Um, however, sometimes it can be, it can be so fast in terms of the transition
Speaker:where, where we like automation can replace human, um, labor so quickly that
Speaker:there, that we, and we, and we don't do as, as is recognize the impact that
Speaker:that has on real human lives and invest in ways to support everyone, right?
Speaker:And so it's like we automate to save money for, like, this time I
Speaker:was working at JP Morgan, right?
Speaker:So JP Morgan's saving a bunch of money.
Speaker:JP Morgan's customers are saving a bunch of money, but then employees who used to
Speaker:do data capture don't have a job anymore.
Speaker:And we, and then we, we say, well that's, they should, uh, they should
Speaker:learn how to become software engineers.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : That's
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : not a very realistic, uh, transition.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : That Well, and that, that's one of
Speaker:the pieces, you know, that I, when I was doing the research and really
Speaker:diving into to kind of understand
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : why the bank, why some banks
Speaker:have dove in headfirst.
Speaker:Other banks are taking a wait and see approach.
Speaker:You know, good old Jamie Diamond from JP Morgan made a comment that
Speaker:he feels that it will eliminate jobs
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : and that it will reduce the workload of today
Speaker:down to three and a half hours a week.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Well, I, I think for one he can
Speaker:say with certainty, and I know this 'cause he's the CEO when I was there,
Speaker:it already has eliminated jobs.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And it will continue to eliminate jobs.
Speaker:I, to me this is like some of, some of the significance that we're placing on
Speaker:a statement that a person makes today is mostly just because the popular kind of
Speaker:like people just know about it, right?
Speaker:But,
Speaker:but the Theodore's point from early on, it, these.
Speaker:These impacts have been happening for a very, very long time.
Speaker:They're just accelerating.
Speaker:And I think the question is now like, and now people can under, like, I
Speaker:actually feel like this is one of those situations where, remember I was
Speaker:saying the language creates reality and it helps us to each like really
Speaker:kind of develop our own common understanding.
Speaker:I think like wonky software type nerd folks already knew all this
Speaker:stuff, but it was hard to convey to those who weren't in that world.
Speaker:But then
Speaker:once you can interact with this chatbot and then you suddenly see, oh my God, wow.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:A lot of this stuff was possible.
Speaker:Maybe not the generative side of things.
Speaker:I, I think we sort of over overvalue what generative AI really can do
Speaker:for, for, for real problem solving.
Speaker:Um, but it gives people the idea of like, whoa, I didn't know this was possible.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And now they start thinking about what if, what if, what if in a way that wasn't
Speaker:really happening quite as much before.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I almost, I almost wish.
Speaker:That we would've been a little bit more thoughtful in rolling that out.
Speaker:I, I think my biggest, one of my biggest gripe with how events
Speaker:have unfolded the last 13 months is that, Hey, we have this thing.
Speaker:Here you go.
Speaker:Oh, oops.
Speaker:It caused trouble.
Speaker:Oh, by the way, we forgot to tell you.
Speaker:Sterex, this is in beta.
Speaker:Take it with a grain of salt.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:You started a race and now everyone is dumping stuff out there and then
Speaker:going back and say, oops, sorry.
Speaker:I, I, I I love tech.
Speaker:Don't get me wrong, my entire journey has been around tech
Speaker:and I love toys.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : We're, we're, we're, we're all in.
Speaker:We all have the, uh, the, the, the, the tech bug, I think.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:We get
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: So, So, so, I, I love it.
Speaker:But, but there is, to a certain extent, needs to have a little
Speaker:bit of responsibility and accountability, and I don't see that.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Where do you think that
Speaker:should be coming from?
Speaker:Like who, whose job is it to hold whoever accountable for
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Oh, don't, don't get started on this one.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Oh boy.
Speaker:Oh boy.
Speaker:Oh boy.
Speaker:Oh boy.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : See, I, I,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I
Speaker:think, I think we need to, I need to poke on this one then.
Speaker:Ted
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I, that was a good poke.
Speaker:It was a good poke.
Speaker:I mean, realistically, I look at it as it should never be a government period.
Speaker:Um, it.
Speaker:it.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Who should it be, do you think?
Speaker:People that have an inherent interest in getting a big pie, we
Speaker:can trust them to come and say,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Yeah, I,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I'm gonna hold back.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I think it should be,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: a rhetorical question, by the way,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : oh, okay.
Speaker:, you stuck me with the rhetorical.
Speaker:No, I, I mean, and I'll even go a little bit further.
Speaker:Like I, I, the problem I have with governments making decisions on just
Speaker:about anything is because it's based on limited understanding of unlimited, uh,
Speaker:information, and they don't understand any potential side effects to restricting
Speaker:the flow of things and or people.
Speaker:So that's the piece that, that I say, I, I don't like the idea of our
Speaker:governmental piece of playing in it.
Speaker:I also don't.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : what, but what Ted, what if, what if
Speaker:all they did was said, um, you, you need to disclose anytime you are interacting
Speaker:with a customer through an artificially powered something persona, let's just say.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: So you don't end up with a Sports
Speaker:Illustrated issue of fake profiles and
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Like, if you're gonna use it, you need
Speaker:to, you need to, you need to disclose that it's this, it's ha it's here.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like, uh, you are inter, the thing you're interacting with right now is not a
Speaker:human being like, like num, like is that something that you think the government
Speaker:should enforce as a requirement?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : You make a good point.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: a spot.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I know and
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : what uncut iss all about.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Exact Exactly.
Speaker:You know, I, I mean.
Speaker:If it is a general direction of something like that, that you should, you
Speaker:should know, um, it should do no harm.
Speaker:It should not cause any problems
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : But wait, so you would, you would, you
Speaker:would not have a problem with that sort of
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : a gen, like the generality of that.
Speaker:But that isn't what our, what governments do, though.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : So they did sometimes is right.
Speaker:It's not, I, I agree that there's overstepping, but, but someone has
Speaker:to decide if someone's going to put a rule in like that, right?
Speaker:It won't be the platforms that are building these tools, right?
Speaker:It will need to come
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : it'll never be the platforms.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : this is why Sam Altman and company, yeah.
Speaker:they wanna go to DC and they wanna say it needs to be regulated and
Speaker:these are the specific things that it should be regulated around which,
Speaker:uh, surprise, surprise are likely to be favorable to open AI and Microsoft, right?
Speaker:Like that's the sausage making process in reality.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Well, and that, that brings me into the
Speaker:other question that I had is like, how.
Speaker:How comfortable should we be or how are you guys looking at the
Speaker:fact that you've got two major tech companies that are really driving
Speaker:and there's a kind of a third one you can kind of sneak in there 'cause
Speaker:they haven't been as public about it.
Speaker:But you've got open eye AI slash Microsoft, you've
Speaker:got Google that just
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I think, I think, I think
Speaker:this is the thing we need.
Speaker:We found out after everything played out last time around, it's Microsoft
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: They
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Open.
Speaker:AI is not open.
Speaker:AI is not an independent organization.
Speaker:They're Microsoft's subsidiary in all, but you know, legal, legal, legal paperwork.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: So, who else other than Microsoft are you
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Amazon is where I was going.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : So wait, Microsoft, Microsoft,
Speaker:Google Meta.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Amazon
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : You don't include meta.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Nah, they're, they are using
Speaker:it as a self-serving piece.
Speaker:They are not opening it up to be able to be used in multiple different areas,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : But none of them are.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:That's, That's.
Speaker:my point in saying that OpenAI and Microsoft is really Microsoft, you
Speaker:know, it's, it's, it's being fed.
Speaker:Microsoft's not putting 15 billion, 20 billion, whatever is ultimately gonna be
Speaker:delivered to, to build that tech because they think it's good for humanity, right?
Speaker:They may think it's good for humanity, but that's not why they write the check.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:They write the check because it's good for Microsoft
Speaker:and there's, and, and, and they want Sam Altman there because they think
Speaker:he's good for what Microsoft wants open AI to do, which is publish more stuff
Speaker:and go faster and like get this out.
Speaker:So I, I do think it's important to just recognize they all have self-interest.
Speaker:None of them are doing this from a position of the greater good.
Speaker:Even if
Speaker:they, even if as individuals, they may think that way as corporations.
Speaker:They're not allowed to because of being
Speaker:who they are.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:They're capital constrained, public market driven entities that have
Speaker:no choice but to keep growing.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:And I think one of the things I really wanted to, was thinking more about
Speaker:was I as a person can have a direct relationship with the language model
Speaker:or multimodal model depending on which platforms you choose to use.
Speaker:Whereas with meta, you get a user interface that's through their systems
Speaker:and, and it doesn't really allow the building on top of, but more
Speaker:the more interaction within meta.
Speaker:At least that's been my
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : the, however, the, the, um, if
Speaker:you look at what they did with chatbots in the, in the messenger.
Speaker:Platform.
Speaker:They opened their platform for brands to integrate with their APIs to
Speaker:deliver conversational experiences between bots and users on the platform.
Speaker:This is no different, right.
Speaker:I think what they're doing is they're, they're in addition to that,
Speaker:they're building their own persona that you can then, you know, have
Speaker:as your friend It's like part of your, maybe you don't have any real
Speaker:friends, you can at least have one.
Speaker:You can you get your, your,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : wasn't that a wasn't that a movie?
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : It's been a couple movies.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:usually.
Speaker:Usually.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Lars.
Speaker:Lars.
Speaker:Is that one?
Speaker:Lars and The Real Girl?
Speaker:Is that the one you're thinking of?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Yeah, those, yeah.
Speaker:And then there's, uh, another one too, and I, I, I can't
Speaker:remember what it was, but yeah,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker:I know, I know.
Speaker:The one.
Speaker:I
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : the guy where he falls in
Speaker:love with, with the aI bond
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : her.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Oh yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Oh, so Theodore, we, we, we did, we,
Speaker:we've been, we've been like going back and forth where, where do you
Speaker:lie in all of this craziness that we're, we're talking about here.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: In terms of what
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Um,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I have
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : perspective thoughts, you know, what
Speaker:have you seen around, like realistically, you know, you get to meet a lot of
Speaker:people as you go and travel and, and do your, your, your speaking engagements.
Speaker:Um, and, and I've actually been at a couple where, where you've,
Speaker:you've talked about the subject, um, just trying to understand, are
Speaker:these big conglomerates a concern?
Speaker:Are they not a concern?
Speaker:What are you, what are you, what are you hearing and feeling,
Speaker:especially around the FinTech world.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: it, because if you think about it,
Speaker:right, we, we look at artificial intelligence and a whole slew of
Speaker:technology as something that can be very transformative to how we work and how we
Speaker:earn a living and how we live, period.
Speaker:It's going to change our lives.
Speaker:If that's the case, and, and I'll go back to then who
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I'm sorry, just Theodore, could you,
Speaker:could I pause on that for a second?
Speaker:Do you believe that
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I do eventually.
Speaker:Not right now.
Speaker:I think eventually it will
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : you paint the picture for me
Speaker:around how better technology allows me to not work as much
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Oh, I, I, didn't say
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : working more, um, working more
Speaker:jobs and, uh, and, and delivering more value to the shareholders.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker:See, see, see, this is what we're talking about.
Speaker:You had a whole notion
Speaker:of assuming the direction was going.
Speaker:I didn't say we're gonna work less
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : you said it's gonna make our lives better.
Speaker:So if I'm working the same amount.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: it would change
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Okay.
Speaker:Maybe
Speaker:I, I, I, maybe I need to listen better.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Say, say, tell me again.
Speaker:'cause I, I think I misheard.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: it's, it's quite all right.
Speaker:That's what, that's what I tell my husband on a
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Uh,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: But it's, it's, it's, it would
Speaker:change how we work and it would change how we earn a living.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:Let's say, for example, going, going back to the example that you guys
Speaker:are talking about in banks, right?
Speaker:The technology has replaced, the automation, has replaced some of the
Speaker:things that we used to do manually.
Speaker:And also now, if you overlay that with human longevity since early 19
Speaker:hundreds and ta you probably heard this, we have earned and gained an
Speaker:extra 30 years of healthy living.
Speaker:Now, if you take a step back, look at me.
Speaker:I just turned 50 last month.
Speaker:My parents have been bugging me for the last year.
Speaker:Why aren't you retired yet?
Speaker:Context.
Speaker:My mom retired when she was 49.
Speaker:Um, like, yeah, no.
Speaker:What am I gonna do for the next 50 years?
Speaker:Sit at home, toddle with them.
Speaker:First of all, I cannot afford it.
Speaker:Second of all, no, that's boring.
Speaker:Um, so just by this really small example and I look all around me.
Speaker:We have changed how we work.
Speaker:We have changed how long we work.
Speaker:I was just reading a report earlier today that is talking about the fastest growing
Speaker:group of people who are still working.
Speaker:By the way, that's not a good news, are people that are older than 75, I would
Speaker:say part of us, because they cannot afford
Speaker:to stay living in a, you know, certain, um, standard, if you will.
Speaker:They just can't afford it if, if you live an extra 20 some years longer.
Speaker:So they have to stay working.
Speaker:But technology also allow us to change how we work, right?
Speaker:People are going to semi-retirement, not full retirement because now
Speaker:you have access to tech that you can work remotely, for example.
Speaker:So it has changed how we work.
Speaker:That doesn't mean we're working less.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Is it,
Speaker:I guess I'm curious if you think that, if you look at this future
Speaker:that you're envisioning and what does it, how does it make you feel?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: How many drinks do you want?
Speaker:Uh, I don't have
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : know, I did not prepare with
Speaker:with adult beverages though.
Speaker:Now I'm starting to feel like I should have.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I know.
Speaker:I get my mimosa going.
Speaker:It's still, it's still, uh, mid-morning in, uh, my time zone.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: it's two o'clock.
Speaker:I can start my whiskey bottle, but it, it's, it, it's more, I think, I think
Speaker:that is a really broad question that needs a little bit of unappealing.
Speaker:'cause I think how we deal with it and
Speaker:the impact of it on a lot of people in the United States, in the UK and Europe
Speaker:is going to be very different than the impact of it for people in global South.
Speaker:For people that are emerging economies.
Speaker:I think that's where we don't do a good job because we
Speaker:generalize things a lot.
Speaker:So going back, for example, to the example, I think earlier we're
Speaker:talking about AI and the ability, um, with Image sensing technology and
Speaker:recognition and all of that to allow small hold farmers to get access to
Speaker:microcredit that's been going on.
Speaker:So for example, my bank in um, Asia, they have used a 3 1 0 model for micro lending.
Speaker:Three minutes to assess your credit, one second to dispense
Speaker:the credit zero human interaction.
Speaker:And they do it because they have a huge database of data about you as a person
Speaker:and about you as a small business owner.
Speaker:So that's how they use to de-risk some of their lending decision.
Speaker:And boom, here you go, you're farmer.
Speaker:We have, um, the ability, you take a snapshot of the crops you're growing.
Speaker:We know who you are.
Speaker:We know what you're growing.
Speaker:We validate that this is a growing crop.
Speaker:This is how we assess the risk.
Speaker:Here you go, $10 microloan.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So that has changed how people.
Speaker:Earn a living, if you will, because now they have access to a little bit
Speaker:of money to get farm equipment, to get fertilizers and et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker:So that
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : who, who's who's, um, I guess who's
Speaker:driving that in terms of like the, is it a profit motive primarily?
Speaker:Is there.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: private
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : It's not, it's not always,
Speaker:micro loans aren't necessarily the best business model.
Speaker:So it's, uh, they
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: works for, for, it works for Ant.
Speaker:My bank is part of Ant
Speaker:and
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I see.
Speaker:But is it purely, is it purely about like monetizing the loans or is it
Speaker:because they've got this massive platform network play and then they just, they're
Speaker:getting people deeper and deeper into the, the super, the super app experience
Speaker:and now
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: App has been around for eight years.
Speaker:Come on, we're just catching up to it.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : been around it for eight years?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: super App, super App has been in alive
Speaker:and well in Asia since, I don't know,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Oh yeah.
Speaker:Sup Super app is not coming to the US though.
Speaker:So it's a very, it's a very, it's a very different sort of,
Speaker:I'm just curious if their approach to kind of microlending, is it
Speaker:actually about profit on lending or is it about, uh, ecosystem
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I think it can be both.
Speaker:It doesn't have to be either or does it?
Speaker:It can be both.
Speaker:It
Speaker:can be you are doing good while you're doing well.
Speaker:I mean, that's the whole thing about the
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : So why, so, so that would suggest back
Speaker:to Ted's point, um, it ride, right?
Speaker:Like don't get in the
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: and they have been, no one is getting
Speaker:in the middle of my bank, right?
Speaker:But that tech is used for a very particular purpose.
Speaker:Now, if you fast forward to where AI is and what people wanna use, this is
Speaker:when governments start getting into the middle, like, oh, whoa, wait a minute.
Speaker:What?
Speaker:What exactly are you doing in here?
Speaker:And we need to pay attention because the technology evolves and grow, right?
Speaker:It doesn't stay static.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : is that, is, I guess, are you, are you
Speaker:thinking that for an, in this example, should be supervised in the use of like
Speaker:how they apply, like the decisioning logic for who gets a loan and who doesn't?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I know not so much so that, but more
Speaker:so in what exactly are they doing?
Speaker:And do some of the pots and pieces need to be broken up?
Speaker:I think that's been very public.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Antitrust.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : What if there are biases in their
Speaker:dataset that are favoring one group
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: What if there's always bias and data?
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : But I thought that was a
Speaker:problem.
Speaker:Isn't that a problem that we need to have help solving?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: you are asking Todd, you are asking me
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I don't know.
Speaker:Ted.
Speaker:Ted, what do you, what do you, what do you know about Ant Financial and whether
Speaker:they need to be regulated because of their potential misuse of bias data?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I I don't think it's Ant
Speaker:Financial, only Ant Financial.
Speaker:I, I think it, it is across the board, whether you're a
Speaker:financial institution lender, a non-financial institution lender.
Speaker:Anybody that extends some sort of credit
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : has their own biases, but that
Speaker:also goes into what they believe to be their risk tolerance.
Speaker:That's why we have so many different options.
Speaker:That's why there are so many options around the world to be
Speaker:able to, to get lines of credit.
Speaker:I mean, heck, I could go to my neighbor and ask them if
Speaker:I can borrow a cup of sugar.
Speaker:Their bias around that cup of sugar and whether or not they think that I'm a good
Speaker:neighbor is gonna make that decision.
Speaker:So even when you get into the machine learning and any sort of generative
Speaker:ai, you're going to have those biases because the individual people that have
Speaker:made the decisions on what they feel comfortable with for their organization
Speaker:are gonna be baked right into it.
Speaker:And so
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I agree,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: are humans.
Speaker:That's
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : the us in the US at least, there are laws
Speaker:as well that deal with the fair, uh, uh, you know, use of how you apply credit.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:To, you know, there's a, there's a lot of information that that can be,
Speaker:that has historically been used to
Speaker:disqualify borrowers.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: is,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : That was, very much discriminatory.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: That still happens.
Speaker:That's, that's not history.
Speaker:It's still present day.
Speaker:There are still people that do not get access to the credit that they need
Speaker:because of the color of their skin.
Speaker:Because of historical bias and data that still very much happens.
Speaker:There are still people who aren't able to sell the houses the price they want
Speaker:because of pictures that they have in the house that has not changed.
Speaker:Come on,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I'm not saying, I'm not
Speaker:saying the problem is solved.
Speaker:I guess my, my, my question to the both of you is, should AI be subject to those same
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: of course is
Speaker:garbage and garbage out is garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker:I mean, as simple as that, right?
Speaker:If your data that you use
Speaker:is partially based on historical bias because of redlining, because
Speaker:of everything that we have done that we thought was okay, and
Speaker:now is manifesting itself in
Speaker:present day 2023, of course it needs to be fixed.
Speaker:And that was why CFPP came out couple of months ago and said.
Speaker:Hold your horses for all of you guys using AI in your automated credit decisioning.
Speaker:Make sure you can explain what you're doing if you are rejecting someone's loan
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Ted, you started off earlier by saying
Speaker:you don't want the government anywhere close to making any decisions about the
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I think he had fine prints there,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I, I, I still, I like, I really struggle
Speaker:with, with when they get super granular.
Speaker:That's, that's the biggest piece is that when you, when you get down to saying
Speaker:you must do this, and it is down to, I.
Speaker:A data level or a data field, or it is attached to something
Speaker:that has additional ramifications to it without identifying it.
Speaker:That's where I really, really struggle with that.
Speaker:And
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: struggle because of government saying
Speaker:yes, you can cannot do certain things?
Speaker:Or is that your struggle?
Speaker:Because the government may or may not have the right resources and the
Speaker:people who know what they're doing to be able to set up those guidelines,
Speaker:because that's two different things.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : yeah, I, I think mine is more around that
Speaker:we are humans and we come become very biased very quickly, especially when
Speaker:money and people and proximity effect starts to kick into effect as well.
Speaker:And that increases the gap between understanding and
Speaker:the knowledge that they have.
Speaker:And that's the piece that I really, really struggle with governments and,
Speaker:and I will go on record saying this.
Speaker:I don't agree with lobbying.
Speaker:That's a big piece that really, really bothers me.
Speaker:The lobbyists should not be able to go in and do that.
Speaker:And, and it's not just the us it's other places as well.
Speaker:It really should, should Exactly.
Speaker:But it should, it should come down to, they actually should have to talk
Speaker:to the people in their communities, not listen to people that represent
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Special interests.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : represent their people.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:It's like there's, there, it's gotten so far away and, and
Speaker:there are countries where, where bribery is still alive and well.
Speaker:And
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : still, it's, it's, it
Speaker:happens everywhere, right?
Speaker:It's just the extent to which it's endemic perhaps is, um, you know, could
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : that's, that's my
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : how widespread and how influential it's,
Speaker:I mean, someone is getting removed from the House of Representatives in part
Speaker:because of some of those accusations, um, that have kind of gotten, that
Speaker:gotten to an extent where, you know, for the first time in a very long time,
Speaker:there's, uh, action being taken, right?
Speaker:So it still happens here.
Speaker:And I agree with you on that front.
Speaker:The one thing I would say though is that like, and this is, this is sort
Speaker:of the thing, having worked for mega corporations and knowing the people who
Speaker:work there, and I know they're not evil.
Speaker:I know they're actually like really nice good people, human beings.
Speaker:But they represent a set of interests that, that are, that are not human beings.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So this is the thing around like corporations are people.
Speaker:That whole like Supreme Court decision that came out that like, has had huge imm
Speaker:implications in lots of different areas.
Speaker:But one of the things that I've noticed is like, it doesn't matter if you're
Speaker:a good person working, if you're working for a public corporation.
Speaker:The public corporation has a set of interests that, that
Speaker:don't care about inherently
Speaker:things that are maybe important to you as, as a person.
Speaker:But one of the things that they, they will, they would do, and I know
Speaker:this 'cause I also have friends that were on government relations, you
Speaker:know, that worked in those jobs.
Speaker:They really did see one of their key missions of, of informing lawmakers.
Speaker:And you come to the point around they don't know enough.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And it's true.
Speaker:How are they gonna learn?
Speaker:In part
Speaker:they've gotta learn from the industry.
Speaker:They don't need to do what the industry tells them to do, but they.
Speaker:You need to work with people who actually work in the industry to
Speaker:know what the industry is doing.
Speaker:You know?
Speaker:So it's a, it's a tricky one.
Speaker:It's very, very difficult to say, because we said there's no lobbyist, and that
Speaker:means anyone that's not a, uh, elected member cannot have a conversation.
Speaker:And you're not from my district.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:I can't have a conversation to help inform you about the, you
Speaker:know, understanding this technology and its implications better.
Speaker:I, I think, I think it is a tricky situation, but, but
Speaker:Not informing lawmakers, and you can call it lobbying.
Speaker:I think that's generally what it would be referred to as, you know, it's, it's
Speaker:it's like they do need to be educated.
Speaker:Sometimes the only people who can educate them are the ones
Speaker:who are working in the space.
Speaker:A think tank doesn't necessarily have access to what's
Speaker:really going on in business.
Speaker:They're smart people, but you've all worked with people who are
Speaker:not inside the companies, right?
Speaker:They're consulting on the outside.
Speaker:Perhaps.
Speaker:Maybe, you know, a lot around the, the overall picture, but don't
Speaker:really know about the, the nuts and bolts of what's happening inside.
Speaker:And so if you gotta trust over time that, that lawmakers are doing their jobs, I
Speaker:think there's not much faith in that.
Speaker:And that's probably why you, you probably have these concerns, Ted.
Speaker:I think we, I share them too.
Speaker:I.
Speaker:just don't know.
Speaker:who else can do it.
Speaker:I don't know what the alternative is.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : So, I mean, really the, the two places
Speaker:that I've seen it not work is, um, especially when you, when you look at
Speaker:all the regulatory that they try to put around credit cards and debit cards,
Speaker:those, those, never work because there's always another loophole.
Speaker:There's always something else.
Speaker:Please
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : never work In terms of what outcome,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : well, the, the outcome that
Speaker:they're hoping for is reduced costs
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : to
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : to the end consumer.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : That, that, that, that's a fool's errand because
Speaker:they're always going, the corporations and the companies and the businesses
Speaker:are always looking for additional ways to generate revenue and it, they will
Speaker:always leverage any sort of regulatory piece that provides something to go
Speaker:against in order to generate that revenue.
Speaker:Then you look, look at a number of other areas when it really starts to come
Speaker:into the investment side of the house.
Speaker:You know, I'm, I may not be listed as.
Speaker:As a person, I may not be listed as an accredited investor, but that doesn't
Speaker:mean I don't understand the market.
Speaker:That doesn't mean I don't understand the company in which I'm investing in.
Speaker:It doesn't under mean any of that stuff.
Speaker:But because I don't have a certain net worth, because I don't have a certain
Speaker:background, because I don't have a certain thing, I can't invest in the
Speaker:things that I want to invest in because they believe, because I don't have that
Speaker:money, I don't know how money works.
Speaker:And so like things like that
Speaker:are really
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : excluding access.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like it's like
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : exclusionary.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I, I think that's
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : then it's put, it's putting a layer
Speaker:in between that A small group of very wealthy folks can then kind of have a lot
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : wealth.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : control and yeah, they get to
Speaker:participate in these markets that are closed off to the public.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : So that that's,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: me ask you this,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : go ahead.
Speaker:The
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: So looking at what we have in here, here
Speaker:loud and clear what you do not like.
Speaker:What do you think about what the EU is doing with respect to data privacy and ai?
Speaker:Because their approach is very different than
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Yeah, I, I mean, I, I, yeah, data privacy.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: doing is whacking or at
Speaker:least it's helping Somewhat.
Speaker:Like, I'll give you a quick example,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : if it's helping.
Speaker:I think it makes people feel good.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: So was
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : isn't that what we're here for?
Speaker:To feel good?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Aw, gr hug.
Speaker:Um, but Apple, right?
Speaker:Apple.
Speaker:Yesterday they said they're gonna open up their tap to pay technology
Speaker:to competitors in pot because they are under immense pressure from
Speaker:the EU that we're gonna sue them.
Speaker:So wouldn't you think that might be one sliver of hope that perhaps
Speaker:regulation does do something?
Speaker:A trick question,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I don't, I don't think it's, I.
Speaker:I don't think it's the right approach.
Speaker:I think attacking individual companies is not the right approach, and
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : that, would that be an attack though?
Speaker:I
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : it is
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: they're just
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : you s when you single out an individual
Speaker:person or corporation about something you don't like that they're doing,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: but they're
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : an attack.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: customers.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : yeah.
Speaker:They're hoovering up all the volume and they're charging the fee that
Speaker:they get to decide what the price is.
Speaker:There's no, there's no, there's no constraint in the market that can, that
Speaker:can affect like what they choose to do.
Speaker:Like they
Speaker:' don't have a natural competitor, so it's either break them up, right.
Speaker:Antitrust kind of steps in and actually have to like, break up the company or,
Speaker:or they agree to these kinds of things,
Speaker:right?
Speaker:Like, I think it's like if you, if you, if you think a world that's
Speaker:full of monopolies is a good place for us all to inhabit, then I
Speaker:think that's the other extreme, right, is like, don't do anything.
Speaker:Apple Google and these handful of companies, eventually they run everything.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And, and we don't, I don't think we want that either.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : But this brings me back into the whole idea
Speaker:of, around my perspective and really how I look at the, the Web3 side of
Speaker:the house is like, I really believe that . Providing the ability to be
Speaker:self-sovereign and, and how I move my information myself and everything, and
Speaker:making it distributed versus centralized within these organizations is really the,
Speaker:the place that I think we can do the most good is, is to allow for that to happen
Speaker:and not to restrict that from happening.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: So let
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : But, oh, sorry.
Speaker:Go ahead.
Speaker:The.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: oh, sorry.
Speaker:I was gonna say, let me ask you a rhetorical question.
Speaker:Let's say that is the ideal path to go forward.
Speaker:What would you do with the big tech companies right now?
Speaker:Are you going to, as a government, tell them, Hey, you know what?
Speaker:What you're doing is not good?
Speaker:Stop it.
Speaker:Then.
Speaker:That will be part of stopping in.
Speaker:Now, to your point, if we're gonna let them go and do how
Speaker:the free market dictates.
Speaker:That's not gonna change either because they have all the resources.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Hmm.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I, I think you, you, you touched on a piece that reminds me that I'm not
Speaker:normal, I'm not like most people, um, uh, be, because I even remember back
Speaker:looking at, really when I was learning about blockchain down to the, the bits
Speaker:and bites level and figuring out how it works and the distribute distributed
Speaker:ledger technology that it represents, and thinking about all the really cool stuff
Speaker:you could do to trace and track things.
Speaker:And it got like super down into the weeds.
Speaker:And this is where I'm gonna bring it back to the artificial
Speaker:intelligence discussion, right?
Speaker:This is where I think that forms of AI can be really helpful because one of
Speaker:the thoughts that I had was, it would be really, really cool that if I could see
Speaker:where fractions of pennies go every time I pay my taxes, I wanna see everywhere
Speaker:that it goes, every last 100th of a penny.
Speaker:I wanna know where it goes and if I don't wanna fund it, I wanna
Speaker:be able to say stop funding.
Speaker:And to me, like giving that level of control and access
Speaker:would be awesome for me, but.
Speaker:Most people don't want to go that deep.
Speaker:Most people want to say, here's what I believe at a really,
Speaker:really high level, please tell me what I should or should not do.
Speaker:And I think that's the place where we get really,
Speaker:really dangerous areas.
Speaker:Um, and that's kind of where we're at today.
Speaker:At least that's how I feel with these big companies telling us
Speaker:how we should or should not feel.
Speaker:I have a similar feeling around religion, but we won't talk about that today.
Speaker:We've already hit on politics.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I guess I, I guess Ted, what you're
Speaker:describing is like, uh, it's a, it's a, it is definitely a very different
Speaker:approach to organizing society, right.
Speaker:Along those lines.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : me to be autonomous.
Speaker:Just allow me to be autonomous.
Speaker:It's all I ask.
Speaker:Let
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : and, and some,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : they may.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : somewhere between then and now we
Speaker:have, we have these giant companies that are becoming larger all the
Speaker:time, and I mean, we can come back to the, the open ai, Microsoft.
Speaker:Conversation for a second, right?
Speaker:Microsoft's been exposed to plenty of its own antitrust issues.
Speaker:Now, they, they, they own effectively, um, the leading developer of this
Speaker:particular generation of AI capabilities.
Speaker:And whether they wanna keep it open or not, keep it open or put it
Speaker:inside binging, and that's it, right?
Speaker:Like, uh, they're gonna be able to make that decision, you know, uh, absent
Speaker:some kind of external, uh, either market force, there's only two options, right?
Speaker:Market forces compel them, or the government compels them.
Speaker:And if market forces are shaped by them while this is in its embryonic stages, and
Speaker:then they influence government oversight.
Speaker:I just see there's a, there's a, there's a path here where before it even has
Speaker:a chance to really get out there and become like a competitive market.
Speaker:It's already like captive.
Speaker:And, and the four biggest tech companies have all the engineers, they have all
Speaker:the ip, they have all the, they've set all the rules and then it's gonna be
Speaker:like, okay, so their profits get bigger.
Speaker:And the rest of things I, this is where I come back to what you
Speaker:were saying, Theodore change Sure.
Speaker:Like on, on some levels, but fundamentally, you know, as like who
Speaker:we are as beings, as, as organisms, I do sometimes think we overstate how
Speaker:much this stuff actually really changes us versus maybe shapes our thinking
Speaker:of like what we see and experience, but doesn't really fundamentally
Speaker:change things as much as I think we,
Speaker:I.
Speaker:Sometimes are concerned that it will.
Speaker:So anyway, so I it's a long-winded statement.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:But I think it's like, I, I, I think we need to have some oversight.
Speaker:That'd be my position.
Speaker:Some oversight I think is necessary.
Speaker:And, and to pump the brakes kind of mentality I think is a good one.
Speaker:Um, slow things down
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: And I think at,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I'm like, pedal down, let's go.
Speaker:go.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: dive right in.
Speaker:I think at large we need to have a more coherent strategy on how we can
Speaker:level out the playing field, right?
Speaker:So, so a couple things.
Speaker:Um, first and foremost, the people that have access to technology
Speaker:that can take advantage of them as a sliver of the society.
Speaker:What's gonna happen to the rest of the people?
Speaker:What's gonna happen to the rest of the world that do not
Speaker:have access to the technology?
Speaker:And a lot, a lot of these tech is built based on Western languages,
Speaker:is built based on what we know how we do things.
Speaker:What about the global south?
Speaker:What about people who don't use English as their language?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So are we thereby creating a larger divide?
Speaker:If this is going to be our future, what are we going to do to change it?
Speaker:That's the part when I say is going to change how we live and how we work
Speaker:because it is increasing the divide of the haves and have nots.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : You know, it's funny that you not funny.
Speaker:I shouldn't say it's funny.
Speaker:It's not funny.
Speaker:It's actually not funny at all.
Speaker:But it's interesting that you've made that point.
Speaker:'cause I constantly am hearing from the fan, fan people, fan boys and girls and
Speaker:and non-binary folks that AI is going to.
Speaker:Make things like, oh, this kid in the, you know, in urban Detroit who can't get
Speaker:access to, you know, a calculus tutor.
Speaker:They can have one now, right?
Speaker:And, and the, the, the girl in Sudan, right, who just wishes that
Speaker:she could learn whatever, right?
Speaker:Like this is the, this is sort of the tech, the tech utopian fantasy
Speaker:that, that kind of, I feel it covers over, it smooths over a lot of the,
Speaker:maybe other, other implications.
Speaker:And my, my feeling has been similar to yours, um, Theodore, which is
Speaker:like, I, my, my expectation is that those who have access to the tech
Speaker:will use it to their advantage.
Speaker:And then, and then the gap will widen,
Speaker:right?
Speaker:I, I don't know, are we, are we in the extreme minority
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:. Yeah.
Speaker:We're, because every time when I say that, people look at me like, no
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I think it's democratizing
Speaker:information, right?
Speaker:They, they've bought into this, this, this sort of promise that
Speaker:we are going to give the best thinking in the world to everyone.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Right.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : why is that not the case?
Speaker:The English piece I think is really good.
Speaker:So it's
Speaker:just, I think it's even true within this English speaking world that
Speaker:it's, that it's likely to have a a in, it's gonna increase that
Speaker:disparity.
Speaker:I'm curious, like
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: it, it's, it,
Speaker:is.
Speaker:I I think the other part is digital inclusion.
Speaker:We are
Speaker:not thinking enough about digital inclusion.
Speaker:The entire world of the future that we have is built on having
Speaker:access to affordable internet.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: internet.
Speaker:A lot of people don't have internet access.
Speaker:A lot of people cannot afford internet access.
Speaker:And we're not just talking about rural, we're talking about urban, right.
Speaker:So it costs money.
Speaker:We tend to forget that I have a gig pipe in here, but I've
Speaker:sometimes it's easy to forget.
Speaker:It costs money to get
Speaker:that and, and so is this increasing the divide?
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:Hell yes.
Speaker:Unless we can get to the point where we say, you know what?
Speaker:This is the starting point.
Speaker:We need to level up the playing field for everyone.
Speaker:We will make sure that everyone on the planet have access to broadband internet,
Speaker:and then we can start from there.
Speaker:But of course, we'll not get there.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I, I, I, I agree on that front for lots
Speaker:of reasons, and I, and I think, so my, my added sort of perspective on this
Speaker:particular subtopic is, is also that I think community and local culture
Speaker:and the capability of, let's just say parents to be available because
Speaker:they're making enough money that they can then also, like Guide their, their
Speaker:children in terms of like learning.
Speaker:Like it's, for me, it'd be way we'd get a bigger bang for our proverbial
Speaker:buck if we invested in lifting up the conditions of working families.
Speaker:Um, so that they could be more available to support their children than to say,
Speaker:Hey, we're gonna give everybody, uh, fiber connection and free access to ai.
Speaker:And then the bots will teach the kids and the parents can keep working three jobs.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I think we need both.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : and everything's gonna get better.
Speaker:'cause the technology's giving them, uh, world class Stanford education
Speaker:at home, which they won't use.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Right.
Speaker:I, if you were in front of me, I would've given you a big hug.
Speaker:Um, I, I can't
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Thank you.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I can't agree with you more.
Speaker:Um, unfortunately, we do live in a society where if people are
Speaker:poor, we blame them on being poor.
Speaker:If people are poor health, we blame them on having poor health.
Speaker:So
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Well, but this issue is, I think, going
Speaker:to make that worse because now it'll be like, well, look, we gave you the ai,
Speaker:like we gave you a free subscription.
Speaker:Like what?
Speaker:You can't, you can't learn differential equations.
Speaker:Like
Speaker:what's, I don't know, what else you want us to do?
Speaker:Like what, what else can we do now?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: my middle school son, he tried
Speaker:to use, uh, Chad GBT to help him debug his Python code.
Speaker:He came back after a few days, he's like, this thing's not working.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I know.
Speaker:Well, you know, you know what I saw last week was really fascinating.
Speaker:Cheating is not up since the introduction of chat GPT, because
Speaker:it's shit, it doesn't work.
Speaker:It's garbage.
Speaker:Like, have you ever, I, I know Ted, you and I have different
Speaker:maybe opinions on this.
Speaker:Um, I have almost never.
Speaker:I've done, I've tried it hundreds of times.
Speaker:Just, just 'cause right?
Speaker:Like I've almost never found anything of value coming from that process that
Speaker:I've, that I've been able to take into my actual life or work and, and, and make
Speaker:it make what I would've done by myself without that system supporting me better.
Speaker:In some cases it was worse 'cause I spent like an hour trying to get it to
Speaker:do something and then it didn't get there and I didn't need to do it myself anyway.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So I, I, I also, that's the other piece of it.
Speaker:I don't even think it's all that good.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Yeah, I, I, I definitely have
Speaker:a difference opinion on that
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Oh,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : let's hear it.
Speaker:Ted
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: do
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : yeah, I mean, just for, for me, um,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Wait.
Speaker:Is this really you or is this like a
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : no, this is not an avatar.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Oh no, wait, I See,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Right.
Speaker:Are there legs?
Speaker:Are there legs there?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : So.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I see a Microsoft logo showed
Speaker:up in the upper corner of your
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Ah, crap.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : what's, what's going on?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I'm just kidding.
Speaker:Oh my gosh.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:I mean, realistically, when, when I look at it, and it's not just Chad GBT,
Speaker:there, there are a number of them that I leverage for, for different reasons.
Speaker:And, and a lot of times it, it's not meant for me to create something
Speaker:using it or to use what was created, let me word it that way.
Speaker:It wasn't meant to use what was created.
Speaker:What I've leveraged it for are to help me break the way that I'm looking at
Speaker:something, or it's like, this is kind of the thought process that I had.
Speaker:Does it make any sense?
Speaker:And if you put something that doesn't make any sense in there and you ask it
Speaker:to help you explain it, it's gonna tell you in one way or another, whether or
Speaker:not you're making any sort of sense.
Speaker:And so.
Speaker:Leveraging it to do that, or, um, even doing a lot of the research
Speaker:to, to talk to you all today to find and, and go through this.
Speaker:I was able to traverse tons and tons of articles across the web,
Speaker:pull them in, ask it to annotate and tell me which articles it came from.
Speaker:Then tell me what the similarities were across the board.
Speaker:Tell me what the differences were.
Speaker:And so that gave me that piece of going, okay, well here are the external opinions.
Speaker:I don't agree with that.
Speaker:I agree with that.
Speaker:That one doesn't make any sense at all.
Speaker:So I'm just gonna put that as an outlier.
Speaker:But like, and maybe that's just my personal bias too, right?
Speaker:So really doing that to be able to get the information in and,
Speaker:and not have to spend hours.
Speaker:Clicking on every single article or reading it and taking a note
Speaker:to what I, what I captured.
Speaker:Like I can literally have it do a word for word scan of all of these things and tell
Speaker:me how many of the same words were used.
Speaker:And you'd be amazed at like how many people have just taken the same thing
Speaker:and publish, republished it again.
Speaker:But that has been huge, especially when I'm doing research on
Speaker:projects and on information.
Speaker:Is
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : in this case, it's stuff
Speaker:you don't know very well.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And that's when it's been helpful.
Speaker:If you know it,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : no.
Speaker:Even, even, no, that's not true because I'm very familiar with this,
Speaker:but I don't know how other people feel about it or what other people
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Well, that's, that's
Speaker:the same thing, right?
Speaker:'cause that would be like, you know, the topic, but maybe you're not familiar with.
Speaker:Some aspect, right?
Speaker:And this aspect in this case is opinion, right?
Speaker:You wanna know like
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : External opinion.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So you wanna get a sense of like, what is, like, I know my view, I know
Speaker:a lot about the topic, but I don't know the broad like perspective.
Speaker:I so that, that's an interesting way to use a tool.
Speaker:Never thought about trying that.
Speaker:That's a,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : then also I know that I write
Speaker:in a very specific way that
Speaker:sometimes is extremely hard for other people to understand.
Speaker:Uh, even myself sometimes.
Speaker:So , I will ask it to dumb it down and then I'll get an understanding of like
Speaker:how to bring the verbiage I've used down to a lower level and then I tweak
Speaker:it in order to still feel like me.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Hmm.
Speaker:Wouldn't it be nice if you could just know how to do that though?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:But that takes time of learning.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: But that's the fun part of it.
Speaker:It's just like reading.
Speaker:I, I, I think I, I
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : But I have more fun figuring out
Speaker:the, the prompts to use to get it, to do what I want it to do
Speaker:than I do actually doing the thing
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Hmm.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: okay.
Speaker:I I get that.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:I find joy in, in, in digging.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I just love, I love our response to that.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I, I'm the weirdo who, who used
Speaker:to pick up a thing of Britannica encyclopedia and read through it.
Speaker:So this, this is me.
Speaker:I find joy in flipping through, in serendipity learning.
Speaker:Um, I.
Speaker:I had never used that for, for, um, what I write.
Speaker:'cause I always have a wonderful editor that's clean up my stuff.
Speaker:Um, but, but I had
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : a human, A human, editor.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: human.
Speaker:I like humans.
Speaker:I'm like this old school dinosaur that I love humans.
Speaker:Um, I had used that recently for, um, graphics and it has failed me ably.
Speaker:Um, I
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Well, it's not meant to create the
Speaker:gra so that's the other piece is that it's not meant to actually create
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I'll tell you
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : that, it's meant to give you inspiration because
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Oh God,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : a point where it cannot do that.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: it gave me inspiration
Speaker:from a newsletter tomorrow.
Speaker:That's what
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Uh,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: did.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : stay tuned.
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Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: oh yeah.
Speaker:I, I asked it to, um, to, to, to create an image for me that depict
Speaker:group of FinTech founders talking about predictions for the new year.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Mm-Hmm?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Do you wanna guess what they all look like?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : white men in
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : No, not just that.
Speaker:It's,
Speaker:it's,
Speaker:the hoodies in
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: oh, no, no hoodies.
Speaker:It's all rode up.
Speaker:Um, uh, shirts with beautiful jackets and beautiful hair.
Speaker:Beautiful hair.
Speaker:Every single one of them have beautiful hair,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : well, isn't that important,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: different tools,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Hey, them fighting words.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: same but it was, it was wild.
Speaker:I'm like, really, really?
Speaker:None of the founders I work with look like that, but Okay.
Speaker:Um, so, yeah,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : but I think so.
Speaker:So here's kind of where I go when we start talking about, I.
Speaker:Language models and this level of the AI that we're talking about
Speaker:right now is, is that piece of it?
Speaker:Is it that we don't know how to ask the right questions?
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Are you talking about prompt engineering?
Speaker:Is this, is this a, is this, is this like, are you blaming Theodore and
Speaker:I for not being good at prompts?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Yeah,
Speaker:we clearly don't know what the heck we're doing.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : No, but what, what I'm saying is like, is, is the,
Speaker:are we not asking questions or asking the right questions or asking 'em in the right
Speaker:way based upon the perspective of all the data that's out in the world today?
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : are, are you, but are you referring to
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: wouldn't get that.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I shouldn't have to force it to
Speaker:say, please make sure you have mixed gender in your graphic.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Isn't that interesting?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : But you would be describing
Speaker:what you wanted to have.
Speaker:That's the piece you have to look at.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : No,
Speaker:the default though, see the default would probably feel pretty okay
Speaker:to somebody that looks like us.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: No,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : actually No, it actually doesn't.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Only Ted.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Only maybe.
Speaker:Only Ted
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: the hair.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Oh my gosh.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:But what, where I was going?
Speaker:Is it,
Speaker:it,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : is why he likes AI so much.
Speaker:I see what's going on now.
Speaker:Every time he
Speaker:comes back, it's like there's a picture of this beautifully quaffed
Speaker:like, you know, tech savvy dude.
Speaker:And High five.
Speaker:High five.
Speaker:Ted, I loved your essay.
Speaker:I got, I got some tips for you,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Where I was going with that is, is like.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Sorry
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : it it does, it will show the biases
Speaker:that have been there for years.
Speaker:By all means, it will always show the biases, because that's
Speaker:what all of our content is.
Speaker:If you look back at one of the very first generative AI bots that Microsoft tried
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Oh yeah.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : it, it immediately became
Speaker:a white supremacist that that was full of hate speech like
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Well that one was self-learning
Speaker:too though, right?
Speaker:That
Speaker:one.
Speaker:That one I don't think started with a large language model.
Speaker:It was more the people were like, this'll be fun.
Speaker:We're gonna turn this thing into a monster.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : But but what, but the thing is,
Speaker:is that what they did was, was they, they gave it an information source
Speaker:that was supposed to be diverse and information, and diverse in opinions
Speaker:and diverse across the board, only to realize that . When it started looking
Speaker:at the information, it wasn't diverse.
Speaker:It wasn't that way.
Speaker:The way it was being used is, was a completely different than the Perce.
Speaker:The perception of how it was being used and what was there is
Speaker:completely different than reality.
Speaker:And this is where I go into talking about the prompt engineering
Speaker:and asking the right questions.
Speaker:Because where we are at today and the biases that play in and all of the
Speaker:inequity that there is, that means that we have to ask the questions, the right
Speaker:questions, and ask the questions the right way to be able to change the outcome.
Speaker:Because if we don't ask the right questions in the right way, then
Speaker:all we will get are more pictures of white dudes with great hair.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Um, wearing hoodies and, and pushed up sleeves.
Speaker:That's
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: me ask you, this is asking Amazon Alexa, is
Speaker:the last presidential election stolen?
Speaker:Is that a proper question to ask?
Speaker:Because
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : That would not be of, that is
Speaker:not a complete question though.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: according to Amazon Alexa, which
Speaker:for a while was pooling information from a particular website that might
Speaker:not be a mainstream website, that asserted that indeed the last election
Speaker:was stolen and it was full of fraud.
Speaker:How should
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : But if you had asked the question
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: reword.
Speaker:My prompt to get the proper information
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : you're getting the answer
Speaker:you probably want, right?
Speaker:If you're asking that question, you probably want
Speaker:that answer, I would suspect.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: or
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : the biases that it has, based
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : It reinforce.
Speaker:It would reinforce, yeah.
Speaker:The, the question, the questioner's bias.
Speaker:In that case,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: so it,
Speaker:right.
Speaker:And, and, and it can go on and go on and, and nevermind that Amazon Alexa is
Speaker:indeed a new site a lot of people rely on.
Speaker:You can always say that is not the source, but you know what?
Speaker:You pull it from a source.
Speaker:So then my next question
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:Nobody wants to sit there and listen to, to, um, uh, Alexa, go.
Speaker:This was pulled from website.
Speaker:It's just like, next, next.
Speaker:Stop.
Speaker:Stop.
Speaker:As soon as you, as soon as you're done, the answer on,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: So, so whose responsibility
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : but that goes back.
Speaker:Uh, so, so I'm gonna answer Matt first and then come back and say
Speaker:comment, and that Matt is exactly why disclosure does not work when you
Speaker:start to
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : certainly in an Audio
Speaker:format, a hundred percent.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Oh, come on.
Speaker:Even the T's and css, you need to click through.
Speaker:Who reads that?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Nobody reads the TSS and Cs, nobody does.
Speaker:Well, actually, I'm one of the weird people that does read the TSS
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: You do
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I do read t's and css.
Speaker:Like I, when I really wanna understand something and like
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: like,
Speaker:even on the app when you're clicking through, you read
Speaker:through the T's and C's before
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I won't do it on the app first.
Speaker:I'll go to the app store and read 'em there.
Speaker:Normally
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Interesting.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : a, I'm a, like I said, I'm not normal
Speaker:and I'm not like anybody else,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : he, he sends them to
Speaker:Chad, GPT to read for him.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I do a summary.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Oh,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I really like you.
Speaker:Next time when I'm in the Bay Area I'll come find you.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : oh my goodness.
Speaker:Well, you know, I'm changing my opinion very, very fast.
Speaker:No, no, seriously.
Speaker:But I mean, really looking at it, it's, it's like that's.
Speaker:I, I guess what I'm trying to get at is that if you're asking a general
Speaker:question or a general piece and you're not wanting the specifics or you're not
Speaker:really, it doesn't matter to you, then yeah, you're gonna get something that's
Speaker:based on general biases and everything that's out in the, in the marketplace.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:And most people I think would probably
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : this goes back to my tax
Speaker:thing, right?
Speaker:I would want to know where every 100th of a penny goes, and most people are
Speaker:like, uh, I'm okay with like every 10 bucks, or I'm okay with every
Speaker:thousand, or, uh, whatever it is, right?
Speaker:I wanna know down to the 10th decimal.
Speaker:And that's,
Speaker:that's, that's
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I, can
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : difference.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : can I, um, I wanna just come back
Speaker:to the FinTech AI topic for a sec.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: wait.
Speaker:That was how we
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I wanna make a, I wanna make a big statement
Speaker:and then you all can react to this.
Speaker:And tell me if, if, if you have a, a, what do you think?
Speaker:Um, at this
Speaker:moment,
Speaker:in time, I see virtually, no no specific use cases within payments.
Speaker:That's my landscape, right?
Speaker:So I'm just gonna talk about payments.
Speaker:Where generative AI is, is likely to be useful to, in any meaningful way.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I agree.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : On with only payments data.
Speaker:I will agree.
Speaker:But if you add on additional data,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Payments, like, let's just.
Speaker:Paint the bigger picture of payments if you want, right around.
Speaker:Um, like, like I say, I'm not talking about like the customer
Speaker:service interaction, like surrounding
Speaker:payments.
Speaker:I, I think, I think it could, and and has already kind of like
Speaker:benefited from, well, for certain, what I would've referred to in
Speaker:the past is a conversational ai, generative conversational ai, which
Speaker:is like the newest version of that same, um, mode of interaction.
Speaker:I, I think that can be fine.
Speaker:Um, but it's almost always limited to a very narrow, like language set.
Speaker:Like it's, it's, it's knowledge is very much constrained to serve the purpose
Speaker:of answering questions about a domain.
Speaker:I think in that area it can be very effective 'cause you can, you
Speaker:can train it to answer things very accurately and, and also know when it's
Speaker:appropriate to say, look, I can't help.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Mm-Hmm.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm
Speaker:gonna get a, I'm gonna get a human being in, into the flow that that's a
Speaker:space where I think things have already been done, that have shown value,
Speaker:will get better, are already getting better, and I, I, I think that area
Speaker:is like one that makes a lot of sense, um, for us to, to continue to explore
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I agree.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : consensus.
Speaker:Ted?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: He's thinking
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Well, I mean, I, I agree.
Speaker:I agree with the customer service.
Speaker:I mean, I still remember when IPsoft rolled out Amelia, um, which was a
Speaker:conversational chat bot that was put into many financial institutions to
Speaker:help people navigate their websites, to help them navigate a number of
Speaker:different questions that they would have, that had standard answers to.
Speaker:And I think that as we progress with these large language models
Speaker:and getting into it, you're going larger and larger language models.
Speaker:And then especially with Google getting into the multimodal version that isn't
Speaker:three modes put together the pile in, but them running together and,
Speaker:and crisscrossing at the same time.
Speaker:Our levels of customer service are going to skyrocket our abilities to
Speaker:understand the information from multiple areas and how they impact
Speaker:each other are gonna continue to grow.
Speaker:You know, a perfect example and, and someone, if you can take
Speaker:this and run with it, please do.
Speaker:But the idea that, that I had the other day was, what if I could take
Speaker:something like Whisper that OpenAI has and I can make a phone call to somebody
Speaker:after they've submitted something and just say, Hey, I want to VA verify
Speaker:and or validate some information.
Speaker:Then I ask them, can you tell me your street address?
Speaker:Can you tell me this?
Speaker:Can you tell me this?
Speaker:Cool.
Speaker:Now that you've done this, you'll receive notification or you'll get this or what
Speaker:have you of the next step of your process.
Speaker:And so.
Speaker:A lot of times people may not know how to write it the right way within the system.
Speaker:They may not understand the label that was used on a document and they used the
Speaker:wrong terminology or the wrong formatting.
Speaker:And just by having a quick conversation, that can get across a lot faster
Speaker:than trying to educate them on how to answer the question properly.
Speaker:As we were just talking about.
Speaker:And I see that happening a lot in anything having to do with, with risk.
Speaker:And underwriting is really getting into all these different multimodal areas.
Speaker:Um, heck even being able to pull in data from social media, publicly available
Speaker:social media to get, what are they saying?
Speaker:How did they say that?
Speaker:Does that pull into my model?
Speaker:How do I use that to assess risk and or credit?
Speaker:Like those types of things.
Speaker:I see that being coming into it.
Speaker:Again, I'm on lending and on on that side of the house, but you
Speaker:mentioned that payments, you don't see any benefit I think
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : For generative ai specifically in
Speaker:the, in the facilitation of payments.
Speaker:Setting aside, as I mentioned, the support surrounding any financial services.
Speaker:I think support around financial services is, is a really
Speaker:clear, like go, go into it.
Speaker:To your point, how do you make an interaction more personalized?
Speaker:How do you also give people insights that are valuable to them,
Speaker:that improve their knowledge and use of the service potentially.
Speaker:Then you're also talking now about like credit fraud.
Speaker:I think that's where you start to get.
Speaker:Back into our ethical sort of, um, like potential is there, but are the
Speaker:guardrails like clearly established?
Speaker:Like, you know, how far do you go from becoming the next Cambridge Analytica
Speaker:and you've got not just public social media, but a private pipe, right?
Speaker:And now I'm making, I'm making lending decisions based on stuff that I didn't
Speaker:think my bank saw, my Instagram, or, you know, maybe that's a bad example.
Speaker:My what, whatever, you know,
Speaker:you know, content.
Speaker:Um, so I, I think it can be done over there, um,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: that exists already.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:I wanted to say about what TAT was just talking about using
Speaker:social media information, I think.
Speaker:It was about two years ago, maybe a little bit longer.
Speaker:Um, there was a company at FinTech in India.
Speaker:I don't know if they're still around, but, um, a lot of their micro lending
Speaker:decisions, it is made particular company, um, is using WhatsApp as an information
Speaker:source as well as other social media.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : The end-to-end encrypted
Speaker:messaging app WhatsApp.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker:Somehow they were able to, if I remember, uh, India was one of the first
Speaker:countries that they were able to do that.
Speaker:Um, it wasn't this year, it was before.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : No.
Speaker:You know, is it private messages or public like interactions with
Speaker:like a com merchant kind of.
Speaker:Ah, I see, I
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Excuse.
Speaker:You can, because in WhatsApp you can put like your status
Speaker:and you can change pictures
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: You can do a lot of
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : public channels
Speaker:and
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: And so what they did was they
Speaker:use all of those interactions, interactions, to infer.
Speaker:The credit worthiness and the risk of lending to those particular people.
Speaker:The problem with that was that they then, if you do not go back and pay your loans
Speaker:on time, you get harassed because you got a phone number and everything in there.
Speaker:And then the next step was they shut off the access of your mobile
Speaker:phone until you pay your loan.
Speaker:I forgot the name of that company, but that did happen, and it was a big problem
Speaker:because things are our lives, right?
Speaker:You lose acc, especially in a lot of countries, you lose
Speaker:access to your mobile phone.
Speaker:You don't have a landline.
Speaker:This is your way to get out to the internet, to connect to
Speaker:people, to order right, and buy groceries and what have you.
Speaker:Um, so that became what you were just saying, Matt, a big ethical problem
Speaker:is what is
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : now that goes into your, your
Speaker:access question too, right?
Speaker:Is if, if you remove my access to have a, let's say I can't afford
Speaker:it, except for I've chosen not to do something, have you just restricted
Speaker:my access in order to repay that debt?
Speaker:May only making it worse.
Speaker:And the ethical questions that go into that, that's another place.
Speaker:Um, and I, I guess I'm looking at, you know, win-win.
Speaker:When we talk about the actual payment flow, if you're leveraging the ISO O2
Speaker:22 format, let's just say that we get really excited and somebody actually
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : You got my, my ears pricked
Speaker:up when I heard that.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : But if you were to use a format like that, then
Speaker:you're able to, to, understand a lot more.
Speaker:You're able to speed up or, or say, I'm not going to, it's not
Speaker:a, it's not a decline transaction, it's not an approved transaction.
Speaker:It's a transaction that's in review and then move that into
Speaker:another model to determine or to a human, um, to make the one
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I think machine machine learning is,
Speaker:is a better solution for structured transaction review and decisioning.
Speaker:Like I'm just saying, the gen, the generative AI for
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Ted always
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : 2 0 2 2 message is like, it's
Speaker:just, I don't see how it's helpful.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : well, but if you get the, the data
Speaker:around the, the frequency or the type of product or the type of service it
Speaker:is, if Ted, always, every time that he buys . His dog food in massive bulk.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : decides that for that particular
Speaker:one, what he's going to do is he's gonna split it into four payments
Speaker:over the next four months because he bought four months worth of dog food.
Speaker:Well,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : you don't need gen ed
Speaker:to do that is my point.
Speaker:Machine learning is a great solution to, to solve that problem.
Speaker:Deep learning can, can give you also some of those same like quantitative insights.
Speaker:Like fraud models are already using a lot of this technology,
Speaker:like very successfully.
Speaker:One of the guys I look to for my, because I'm not an expert in fraud, um,
Speaker:but if you follow like sardine, right?
Speaker:Sups is, uh, CEO of uh, um, sardine ai.
Speaker:It's funny, they say AI and then he's very public about saying
Speaker:mostly it's machine learning.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:In reality, when he talks about like the fraud
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : You have a machine learning.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I see where you're going.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : well, I'm just distinguishing kind of
Speaker:if we skip back to the front where we didn't really define what AI is, um,
Speaker:we could have said at that point in time is that it's an umbrella term that
Speaker:includes a lot of different technologies.
Speaker:This, this idea of like a machine learning, uh, and neural network that
Speaker:can take a set of fairly structured inputs and then watch for deviations
Speaker:from a trend make, make some predictions, indicate like something that's appearing
Speaker:to fall outside of a tolerance.
Speaker:It's not just a simple like plus or minus range that that adapts based on
Speaker:a whole lot of different variables.
Speaker:Like that.
Speaker:Technology is extremely valuable.
Speaker:It's just not new.
Speaker:That's not what open AI is building.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like, and so, um, that's the piece where I just feel that the, the
Speaker:hype, the hype is around the thing people can see and touch and talk to.
Speaker:The, the real value, in my opinion for payments is is in improving the
Speaker:technology that we've already been building on for like 10, 15, 20 years.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : And so maybe I'm looking at it from, and
Speaker:this is, I'm looking at it as I'm an analyst or I'm a person that wants to know
Speaker:specifically about this data, and I ask it a question, it's able to go pull that data
Speaker:and then give me a real English language version or a real language version
Speaker:versus a spreadsheet
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:I think analytics, analytics is, that's, but that, and that, that I
Speaker:think is a great example of where con, that's a conversational ai, right?
Speaker:And that would include a gen AI component, whether you're the co customer, a consumer
Speaker:wanting to inquire about your own.
Speaker:You know, data for your, you know, a fraud analyst that's looking
Speaker:for answers to specific questions.
Speaker:I, I do see your point.
Speaker:Like, I think that is, uh, that can be very useful instead of like
Speaker:a, I'm gonna write a SQL query and then I'm gonna go do a pivot
Speaker:table, and then I'm gonna, I'm gonna
Speaker:look for the thing and I'm gonna,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Oh, yeah.
Speaker:That,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : click, click, click, click, click.
Speaker:You know,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : And my, my
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : idea too,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : what's probably, here's what's
Speaker:happening is that you're thinking the actual transmission of the data within
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : for payments.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : And when I think payments, I think
Speaker:of everything that goes around that whole lifecycle of a payment.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Touching money.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Like I, I, think of the whole
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I think it's good.
Speaker:It's good.
Speaker:Good to distinguish, good to distinguish that analytics around purchases to
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : exchange of value, period.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I, I mean, I Sure.
Speaker:For me, payments is moving money, right?
Speaker:Like when you actually are transacting, you are facilitating the movement
Speaker:of, of value from point A to point B or C or D, whatever it might be.
Speaker:Um, that's a payment, you know, and, and then there's data that surrounds
Speaker:the payment metadata that surrounds the payment that you can then, you
Speaker:know, see in real time during the flow.
Speaker:You can also inquire about it after the fact.
Speaker:Um, that's, I would say is like data analytics and that can include
Speaker:lots of other stuff too, like
Speaker:lending and, and, and, and other credit, like tons of stuff.
Speaker:So I, I just, I try to put the world in boxes.
Speaker:Maybe it's not helpful.
Speaker:Um, it's just the way my brain works to say like, where's it, because I'm always
Speaker:looking for like right tool for the job.
Speaker:'cause it's usually, it's like we've got this hammer.
Speaker:Let's, like, where's the, where's the nails?
Speaker:Let's go find some nails.
Speaker:You know, instead of like, I start in payments as transaction processing
Speaker:primarily, and I ask myself like, what are the problems that I'm facing and
Speaker:what's the best tool to go solve them?
Speaker:You know, that's, so I start, I start with the problem first and then go,
Speaker:what's the best solution out there?
Speaker:Um, not to say it's the right way to do it, it's just that's how,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : That.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : how I see it.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : and I, and I know I am a non-linear thinker,
Speaker:which that completely boggles my mind on like how you could look at it in a
Speaker:singular, singular line, because nothing is singular, at least from my perspective.
Speaker:And so for me, I, I look at, okay, well I have this thing what.
Speaker:Can it do
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Well, this is probably why in our
Speaker:previous conversation you are so, um.
Speaker:You connected so much with that, uh, innovation lab example that we
Speaker:talked about, where at Wells Fargo, they developed these technologies
Speaker:that I thought had no purpose in real life, but you, you are very
Speaker:interested in like, what they could do.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And so I, I think both, both kinds of thinking are really helpful.
Speaker:You know, that there's people out there that are coming up with stuff and then
Speaker:being like, Hey, look, I made this thing.
Speaker:and and then go look for ways that it could solve, you know, be helpful.
Speaker:Um, and then there's people like me that are like, oh, wait, what'd you do?
Speaker:Let me, can I use it here?
Speaker:You know?
Speaker:And so it's, I I think it's like having the, the, the kind of like
Speaker:tools that are just kind of being made and published and now here's,
Speaker:here it is with no idea necessarily.
Speaker:Like, say an open AI example.
Speaker:They didn't start off with a commercial plan.
Speaker:They just said, started off with like Technology and now the commercial kind of
Speaker:concepts are like coming in and, and, and so when I look at that as a payments, kind
Speaker:of like transaction flow kind of person, I'm saying, okay, no matches in the flow.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: What
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Sure.
Speaker:Lots of times.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: what would you like for
Speaker:it to do ultimately, Ted?
Speaker:I'm curious because I'm looking at the two of you here, right?
Speaker:You are like the artist that has a bucket and you splash the paint on the
Speaker:wall and then try to imagine what it is.
Speaker:Matt, on the other hand, is like, I'm gonna set out, draw a cube
Speaker:and here are the tools I need and this is a cute eye draw.
Speaker:So you two are very different, but I'm very curious to hear from your dad.
Speaker:What, what would you like for the technology to ultimately do?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : so I think for me, what I look for
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : the bucket of artificial
Speaker:intelligence to do is to, I.
Speaker:Not replace and or do things for us, but help us progress and move forward and
Speaker:look at things differently so that we can understand it in a different light.
Speaker:That's really, as I see the whole bucket of artificial
Speaker:intelligence, it it really is.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Will it replace some things?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Are those things that, that are not innately human most likely?
Speaker:They're, they're, they're motions.
Speaker:They're things that just are a repetitive in nature.
Speaker:It just happens.
Speaker:It's another one of those, and I really think what it's going to do is really
Speaker:have a resurgence in, in the arts really, because, as Matt as you mentioned,
Speaker:everything that you've put in doesn't come out the way that you want it to come out.
Speaker:because it's not you, it's not, it's not creative, it's not your
Speaker:mind making that creative decision.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So, and I used it from a different perspective as the Theo mentioned,
Speaker:is that I said, I've got this idea, help me like explode it and I can
Speaker:take out the things that I don't like.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And, and I think you're gonna start to get that.
Speaker:And even Theo's comment about the creating the image.
Speaker:Like to me, I was like, okay, well that's not the image I was looking for.
Speaker:Why did it do that?
Speaker:How can I get it?
Speaker:How can I create the image that I'm looking for?
Speaker:And so that's, that's really what I'm seeing this being able to do, is to
Speaker:bring on a new generation of creative expression through numbers and through
Speaker:letters that we've never seen before.
Speaker:I think it's really going to have us all thinking differently and changing
Speaker:the way we perceive the world around us.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: How would that change
Speaker:the movement of money?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Say that one more time.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: How would that change how we move
Speaker:money and how we perceive money?
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I think it changes how we, what
Speaker:we value and how we value it.
Speaker:And by that, that's why I keep coming back and why I try my best to say
Speaker:an exchange of value because what we see as money today or something of
Speaker:value, it's all equated back to it.
Speaker:But it's not always been a fiat currency.
Speaker:It, it could be it.
Speaker:We had the gold standard for a long time before that.
Speaker:You know, if you look at the history of money, it's always been something that
Speaker:was limited in, in and availability.
Speaker:And so I think we're just going to see a transition into.
Speaker:What we find valuable and how we assess that value on it, and this will give us
Speaker:the ability to look at things differently versus a one-to-one ratio like we, we've
Speaker:been doing for a very, very long time.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: When I did, um, one of my SIBOS
Speaker:presentations a few years back, people asked me, what is the future of money?
Speaker:What, what would the future of money look like?
Speaker:And I said, it would be access to clean water and access to clean air.
Speaker:That was how I perceive the world and how we value things.
Speaker:Slightly different to your point, but is something that I believe is
Speaker:becoming more scarce and is going to be something that will be of value
Speaker:only to those who can afford it.
Speaker:And then the questions become how do we enable access
Speaker:through those scare resources?
Speaker:And what would be the roles of financial services in the middle?
Speaker:We are getting to be very philosophical at the hour.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Wow, this is, this is
Speaker:definitely very philosophical.
Speaker:So there are, there are a couple questions that I just wanted to make sure.
Speaker:I mean, we've been, we've been talking for some time, but I, I want, I
Speaker:want to dive into a couple things.
Speaker:Um, first in financial services and financial technologies,
Speaker:what are one or two.
Speaker:Products and or services that you've seen in the marketplace that you believe
Speaker:have promise or are solving a problem.
Speaker:And I'll start with you, Matt.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : Yeah, I think, I think the.
Speaker:The, there's a one area that I think is, is I'd really like to see a lot
Speaker:more work happen around that I, I know is beginning, um, but hasn't, I haven't
Speaker:seen it in my, in my own experience, like really like start to work because it's
Speaker:one of those areas that's like so risky that that I think there's a reluctance
Speaker:to outsource really, um, of any kind of function to either a different company
Speaker:or even especially, you know, technology that you don't fully understand.
Speaker:And that's like sanction screening and, um, suspicious activity reporting.
Speaker:There's a lot of like administrative excess that goes into screening,
Speaker:looking at potential matches, de determining if something is a, a, a,
Speaker:a real match, false positive, a lot of
Speaker:overhead that's not valuable, right?
Speaker:Like we doing things to try to like prevent.
Speaker:A real, you know, there's real, there's bad stuff.
Speaker:We're trying to protect people
Speaker:and, you know, the world from, so I think it's a good, um, process
Speaker:that we, that we need to do.
Speaker:We need to do it.
Speaker:But I do, I think that because of the administrative effort of, of
Speaker:trying to like, evaluate all this stuff with like, you know, some
Speaker:systems, but they're not that great.
Speaker:And then human oversight, which is, um, just stretched really thin.
Speaker:And then, and then when it comes time to really dig deep in understanding like
Speaker:something that looks like it could be a significant issue, you don't have a lot
Speaker:of time to really invest in going deep.
Speaker:It's kinda like a doctor who is seeing so many patients that
Speaker:they can only talk to their, you know, people for like 15 minutes.
Speaker:It can never go very deep into anything.
Speaker:So it's like, it's like, are there ways that we could use technology to
Speaker:dramatically improve our confidence that when somebody's looking at a case,
Speaker:it's very likely a real problem versus.
Speaker:80, 85, 90 out of a hundred times.
Speaker:I'm really excluding this from, um, consideration because it was flagged
Speaker:and it's actually not a big deal, but that's the majority of of things
Speaker:that get in front of a human being.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : So I think it's hilarious that you brought
Speaker:that up because, you know, before we got on, I let you know who the sponsors
Speaker:were gonna be for, for this episode.
Speaker:Um, and one of our sponsors happens to start to solve for that exact problem.
Speaker:That's been their focus from day one, is leveraging machine learning and
Speaker:other AI deep learning technologies to really make it so that when
Speaker:things really look out of place.
Speaker:Based upon tons and tons of training data, what they're able to do is distill it down
Speaker:to one or two that really need that human review to, to identify the piece of it.
Speaker:So I think that's, that's really interesting so that
Speaker:you brought that topic up.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : What, um, what I'd be curious to hear
Speaker:from you or them or whatever, it's kind of like, I think there's partly, there's this
Speaker:idea of like, you gotta prove that the tech actually does that effectively, you
Speaker:know, and then convince, you know, banks in most cases who there's serious, like
Speaker:penalties if you miss something, right?
Speaker:And so there's this sort of idea that like, I'm gonna over, I'm gonna
Speaker:over kind of like, index on examining things because the cost of missing a
Speaker:case that actually turns out to have been whatever it might be, right.
Speaker:Is so expensive that I, I, it doesn't, I, I just, I gotta, I
Speaker:gotta just invest in it, right?
Speaker:So I'd be curious to hear like, how do you, how do you show that the
Speaker:technology is good enough, right?
Speaker:To.
Speaker:Enable you to just ignore stuff that otherwise the previous generation of the
Speaker:system would've said, you, you should, you should look at this before you let it go.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Yeah.
Speaker:And, and I, there are a number of financial institutions and
Speaker:other groups that have, have felt that as they gone, th they'd gone
Speaker:through and, and looked at it that.
Speaker:This provides a much larger reward than the overarching risk, and
Speaker:they're starting to see that now exactly how they got into it.
Speaker:That is, that is a piece that, uh, I will be covering in an entire product review
Speaker:of the product, um, in the near future.
Speaker:Um, so we'll, we'll be diving into that piece of
Speaker:it, but Theo, Theo, what, what is one that, that you've seen in your travels
Speaker:and all the great people you've been able to talk to that that really
Speaker:perked you, perked your ears up?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I know there's something
Speaker:I would love to see.
Speaker:I'm borrow from Matt's, uh, response that we are not quite there yet, unfortunately.
Speaker:So one of the areas that's always been really intriguing, and I touched a
Speaker:little bit upon that is how we are living longer and we're living differently.
Speaker:The tools that have been at our disposal and the way we relate to
Speaker:money, unfortunately has not changed.
Speaker:A lot of the assumptions for basic financial planning still
Speaker:is you go to school, get a job,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Save
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: a family, keep spending credit card debt,
Speaker:retire and here you go, wealth transfer.
Speaker:It's been the same model forever and ever.
Speaker:What we have forgotten is that I.
Speaker:A lot of people don't subscribe to that anymore.
Speaker:We don't do that anymore.
Speaker:We could be going to school, work, go back to school later in life, start
Speaker:a family much later in life, start a family, um, start a business, right?
Speaker:Like, you know what I said?
Speaker:I, I always like to use myself as an example.
Speaker:'cause I turned 50 last month.
Speaker:I started my company in my mid forties.
Speaker:My parents are late seventies.
Speaker:children are young.
Speaker:They're still in elementary school and middle school now.
Speaker:If you look at
Speaker:trajectory of how we live and how long we live in 10 years time, I will be 60.
Speaker:My kids will be in college.
Speaker:We all know how expensive colleges is.
Speaker:The United States.
Speaker:My parents will be in the late eighties, meaning they will need help.
Speaker:And unfortunately, they had decided that they would live somewhere else abroad
Speaker:because they couldn't afford to grow old here and bear the healthcare cost
Speaker:anymore, which is becoming a problem.
Speaker:Now me, I like to plan ahead.
Speaker:What do I need to do in my next 10 years so that I know I can be
Speaker:a place that I can have a secure financial future for my next 30 years.
Speaker:At the same time, I'll be able to support my two children going to college
Speaker:at the same time, I could support my parents who will be almost 90.
Speaker:At the same time, I can keep doing what I like to do.
Speaker:Human can't do that.
Speaker:We sort of need help from technology.
Speaker:We sort of need help from Beyond what a current human advisor can do.
Speaker:We need something that is not static.
Speaker:We need something that can continue to change and evolve the planning.
Speaker:Much like how we step into a car for GPS navigation, it knows to reroute
Speaker:you if there is traffic, if there is an accident, it knows to reroute
Speaker:you if you change your destination.
Speaker:If you wanna add a stop in the middle, I don't have that for money.
Speaker:I don't.
Speaker:What do I do?
Speaker:I would love to see that before I go broke in 10 years.
Speaker:That's my hope as
Speaker:$500,000 per child for college in
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : but are you seeing anybody that's
Speaker:headed in the right direction?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I did, um, that was a startup that I met
Speaker:when I was in a RP quite a few years ago that they were going in that direction.
Speaker:But this is the problem.
Speaker:When, um, I started in the space, this is like quite a while ago, people
Speaker:are like, we don't do old people.
Speaker:I got told on stage, we do not do old people.
Speaker:The perception of planning for longevity is not a sexy concept for
Speaker:people who like to fund startups.
Speaker:Even though they all tell me they do have parents and they do relate to
Speaker:the situations because they themselves would have the same challenge.
Speaker:But no, we don't do old people.
Speaker:Here you go.
Speaker:Bye is not,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : We go back to the bias that we were
Speaker:talking about at the very beginning.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: trying to bring you back.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : I know.
Speaker:I know.
Speaker:I appreciate it.
Speaker:All right, so last but not least, I want you to pull out your, your
Speaker:crystal ball or put on your future glasses, whichever one you wanna do.
Speaker:We're not getting into the hot tub time machine, but
Speaker:when you look forward, where do you see very specifically the trends
Speaker:of generative AI inside a FinTech?
Speaker:Really making a difference and making a difference is based
Speaker:on your personal perspective.
Speaker:It doesn't have to be fiscal or, or altruistic of any sort.
Speaker:It just where do you feel it'll make the most difference?
Speaker:I'll let whichever one will start first.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: No timeframe.
Speaker:I thought you were gonna ask like 2024.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : 10 years.
Speaker:Let's go.
Speaker:10 years.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: 10 years.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : In the next 10 years,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Oh.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : what do you, what do you see generative ai, deep
Speaker:learning and FinTech 10 years from now?
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: Let's see what I, I can tell you
Speaker:something that I saw a few months ago that seems really interesting.
Speaker:It's not so much so generative ai, but more so using the data and
Speaker:understanding what people need and understanding the bankable moments.
Speaker:I'll go back to bankable moments.
Speaker:That's been one of my favorite this year, is if we look at, if we look at
Speaker:communities and you look at how we define communities, the old notion of community,
Speaker:you know, being at a geographical, um, state is different, right?
Speaker:So you define community as people.
Speaker:You define communities or things that bring them together.
Speaker:You define communities as employees, people that work for,
Speaker:let's say a particular company.
Speaker:What keep people up at night is, can I pay my bills?
Speaker:Can I afford to do the things I need to do?
Speaker:Do I need to work two jobs, three jobs to make ends meet?
Speaker:So what is the role of employers, knowing the people that are working
Speaker:for them and knowing who they are and what they need and what they want?
Speaker:How can they be in a position to help facilitate the particular services
Speaker:that their employees need to get them to a more secure financial future?
Speaker:I think that's where I see premise.
Speaker:I've seen, um, a company that is able to do that, looking at an overall quote
Speaker:unquote financial health score for each of the employee, and then matching them
Speaker:up to the services of the variety of community banks and credit unions that
Speaker:are in their network, thereby creating a specific suite of services that
Speaker:helps them in that particular position.
Speaker:To be able to personalize what they need for that person instead of saying, oh,
Speaker:you know what you're banking at, you know, bank, A, B, C, down the street,
Speaker:you're gonna take all of the suite of services, which doesn't always work.
Speaker:I want something from this one.
Speaker:I want something for this one because this is the life stage I'm in right now.
Speaker:And kind of like magic, but not magic.
Speaker:You bring them together.
Speaker:That's where
Speaker:I see more intentional use of technology and data to create
Speaker:better financial future for people.
Speaker:I do see that happening,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : Matt, how do you follow up that one man?
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I am not even gonna try.
Speaker:I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, just gonna say that, um, uh, uh, let me,
Speaker:let me, let me paint the, the most optimistic picture that I, that I think,
Speaker:um, like assuming things are used in a way that are on the whole kind of
Speaker:like going in a positive direction.
Speaker:Uh, I think there's risks, but I think I, there there's definitely ways that
Speaker:I see, I, I see things playing out that are, that are, that are sort of positive.
Speaker:Um, and that I think are important for us to kind of like already sort of anticipate
Speaker:impacts in order to prepare current.
Speaker:People who are working, and then the next generation of, of young people who are
Speaker:entering the workforce to start to, it's mostly that next generation, I think, is
Speaker:gonna bear the brunt of these changes.
Speaker:To be honest.
Speaker:Everyone keeps saying like, oh, you know, the, the, the older
Speaker:workforce isn't gonna be AI savvy.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And they're going to, and they're gonna, they're gonna struggle.
Speaker:You know?
Speaker:It's like they need to learn these new skills.
Speaker:I actually think the opposite problem, um, least based on what I see right
Speaker:now, is, is more likely, which is like
Speaker:one of the things that we use, um, the technology for today
Speaker:is summarizing call reports.
Speaker:And so, like historically, that was something that a.
Speaker:Inside salesperson would sit on calls, hear the, hear the account exec, talk to
Speaker:a client, um, take a bunch of notes, and then after the meeting they would write up
Speaker:the notes and they'd send it to everybody.
Speaker:So everyone has the notes on the meeting.
Speaker:Now that that person doesn't need to sit on the call, the AI agent
Speaker:sits on the call and listens to everything and then regurgitates
Speaker:it out into a, into a summary.
Speaker:And the summaries are like, good enough.
Speaker:Let's just say like in most cases, that that role was not simply like grunt work,
Speaker:even though it is grunt work, it was also, it gave you a seat at the table.
Speaker:So then like.
Speaker:Observe, how does the process of engaging in a strategic
Speaker:conversation, like how does it work?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And so now we're gonna have to figure out, I think it, so that is
Speaker:gonna become just standard, like every, every, it's already close.
Speaker:I think it's gonna become more and more and more standard.
Speaker:Um, and then look at things like prospecting, right?
Speaker:Like how do I find clients,
Speaker:um, or how do I contact, making initial contact with, with a client?
Speaker:Like those are gonna become very, very high quality, both in terms of finding
Speaker:the right targets, like exactly who
Speaker:with the right message that, that understands that person, what
Speaker:their role is, what their company does, what your company does.
Speaker:And then, and creates like communications that, that convey, uh, uh, something
Speaker:that's, I think going to be, it's gonna be pretty effective, right?
Speaker:So this whole process of taking your new, your new, your new service
Speaker:and then marketing it, I think will, will, will become a lot more.
Speaker:We'll require a lot less human direction, human steering and effort.
Speaker:And so I think that's not a bad thing.
Speaker:However, then I think we need to ask ourselves like, okay, the next,
Speaker:the next group that's coming in, like what, what, what is their job?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like, you know, like how, how do we, how do we help everyone kind of like
Speaker:learn the basics of human interaction?
Speaker:and,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : you're, you're playing right
Speaker:into to kind of what I see
Speaker:in the next 10 years is the importance of face-to-face interaction, the
Speaker:importance of building relationships, the importance of the transparency,
Speaker:the importance of the empathy, the, I mean, just all of the, the really human
Speaker:stuff about us is gonna be so much more important because all the things that can
Speaker:be non-human are just going to happen.
Speaker:And so we will have to do one of two things, either become really, really
Speaker:good at communicating with each other and building that relationship.
Speaker:Or the other side of the house is we don't, and unfortunately we
Speaker:become very, very lonely people.
Speaker:And so I think when you start to look at FinTech, what it
Speaker:does is it allow, it will allow.
Speaker:A lot of people to put, this sounds really bad, put it on autopilot and
Speaker:say, this is the outcome that I want.
Speaker:Let that happen.
Speaker:And then go spend the time with their friends and their family and all these
Speaker:other things to, to let them move forward.
Speaker:I really think that that's, that's the piece that it's
Speaker:really gonna allow us to do,
Speaker:is to build relationships, whether it be inside of business or outside of business,
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : I hope so.
Speaker:I,
Speaker:I think it could, it's, the question is like, we gotta choose that, right?
Speaker:That that isn't just gonna happen.
Speaker:Like it's a, it's gotta be an intent that, that we all sort
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : you can't regulate it.
Speaker:And on
Speaker:Matt Vanhouten - Fintech Confidential : cannot regulate it.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : and on that note,
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: I was gonna say, use that
Speaker:free time to learn Cobo.
Speaker:That's what I tell my son.
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : free time to Luke Cobalt.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Theodora Lau - Unconventional Ventures: needs to maintain it.
Speaker:I'm sorry,
Speaker:Tedd Huff - Fintech Confidential : And it'll be around forever.
Speaker:Uh, . You guys, thank you Theo, for joining.
Speaker:I know we went really, really long today,
Speaker:but it was so interesting to get down into the philosophical levels and bring
Speaker:it back up into the technology and, and really look at it from a world's
Speaker:view versus a very North American view.
Speaker:Matt, as always, um, thank you for putting me on the spot and forcing me
Speaker:to think and look at things differently.
Speaker:It's always greatly appreciated and I can't wait until the next episode
Speaker:of FinTech Confidentials Uncut.
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