Keynote: A Fireside Chat with Jo Ann Barefoot, Alliance for Innovative Reg & Sultan Meghji, FDIC

[0:00] - Thank you. I know everyone always looks forward to the regulatory panel. - Yeah, I mean, we are going to be the most boring two people up here all morning. So. We're going to have to bring the regulators into this story. I'm here. Beyond you, all right? So that's what we're going to talk about. The regulators have to understand what the industry is doing with open source, and they're going to have to use it themselves. And you and I know that that conversation, if you were going to estimate the percentage of people in financial regulatory agencies that even could define open source, what percentage would you guess?

[0:44] As Gab said, a unicorn really in the government. You're the only head of innovation at any of our federal regulatory agencies and really almost any financial regulatory agency who's actually a tech guy. Do you want to take a moment to, I know you know a lot of people here already, do you want to just take a minute to talk a little bit about your background? Sure, because I love talking about myself. Yeah, so I've been in tech since the early 90s. I go back to the first web browser. I'm an artificial intelligence researcher by background. I was one of the first guys to put Linux on a Spark pizza box, if that dates me horribly, which I'm sure it does.

[1:25] Over the course of a few decades, I was at New York Stock Exchange. I've done a couple of startups in cloud, biotech, AI. And last year, I've had this interesting bounce in my career where I'll go into an industry and I'll go off and go do something nonprofit or do something fun. So I've done aid work in Africa. I'm a college professor and some other stuff. But what happened last year was really interesting. I was I just sold a company and I was just kind of sitting there thinking I could take 2021 and sit on it. basically and happened to be on a panel with the current chair of the FDIC, Yelena McWilliams. And within about 15 seconds of that conversation ending, her chief of staff started blowing up my phone and it's like, you know, Can you you know they took two years to find you? Yeah, and and and I actually tried to help them put other people in this job. In fact, I think it's possible one of the people that I was trying to get in that job is sitting here right now. I'm not going to call him out for anything, but it's it was.

[2:20] Basically, there are very few people who could get me to join the US government. Going from tech, going from startups into the US government is not a natural transition. I had hair just like Antoine like a year ago. model, which is how so many people, especially the thousands of lawyers I interact with, think about technology, that we have to talk about things in different ways. So earlier we heard people talk about moving from centralized to decentralized, right? That's a great piece of logic. Everybody here gets it.

[3:06] That can take three hours to explain to someone who got out of law school in 1965. I've had senior members of the US government ask me, why can't we get rid of the dark web with Section 230? Why can't we just legislate our way out of these discussions? And at the end of the day, legislation has a place, regulation has a place, but tech has to be part of those discussions. And so my role, in the US government right now at FDIC and across the other agencies, is really just to be a technical voice.

[3:40] that can explain the massive amount of evolution that's been going on. I mean, the banking system is catching up on decades of atrophy in some ways. into something that's going to be much more meaningful. But. it's 20 years of work in two or three years. Yeah. And so there's a lot of change that has to happen to make that work. For those who don't know, the chairman of the FDIC, Eleanor McWilliams, is a real visionary leader in this. She's really plowing whole new ground. So you and we at AIR and Finnoz together are talking about how to go about this strategy. If everything went as you would hope, and put the time horizon out five years, ten years, whatever you want to pick, how would the financial regulatory community and its mirror image in the risk management community in the industry What would it look like? What would be happening? Well, I'm going to preface this by saying this is my dream and my dream alone. And if you've ever talked to anyone. Well, well, I have to. I'm about to do the thing that everybody from the Federal Reserve does, where before they speak publicly or even in most meetings, they preface it by saying, I'm speaking for myself. I'm not a representative of the Federal Reserve. So I will say this is my dream.

[4:56] I would love it if when we pass legislation, there's open source code attached to it. I would love it if every. I to give you guys an example. Thank you. I'm very happy for the applause. But like I said this in a meeting with a very senior person that I deal with often and then it took me an hour to explain what that actually meant. And so I would love it if we got to a point where we say, OK, there's regulatory clarity. and that that's represented in code.

[5:27] And that then anybody, whether you're a fintech or a tech company or a community bank or one of the G-CIFI's, whatever, I always forget that acronym. has a clear and concrete understanding of what's there, then everybody can level out the playing field a little bit. You know, I've been in and out of open source. I mean, pre-new. I mean, that's how I've been doing this. And I got to say that when you bring in standards, when you bring in transparency, not only do you accelerate innovation, you make it more accessible. And that juices the economy. It juices the opportunity of getting more people in. We've talked about diversity already this morning, which makes me incredibly happy to hear that. But we get to do all those things. And we have tremendous risks in the system.

[6:14] of the things we have to do to get in front of that a few years off. You know, NIST is doing some great work. DHS has a great quantum strategy, but like there's some huge risk to the financial system if we don't get in front of this. Yeah. So this audience knows the benefits of open source, but putting the regulatory lens on it, Talk about, give us the list of the problems that we could solve with financial regulation if we brought, appropriately brought open source into it. I mean, yeah, I mean, that timer does not look like we've got a lot of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I really break out the financial system. You've got front office activities, which we really need to do more to get better CX in, more, you know, more dynamic versions of CX. So if somebody wants to go sit in an office with somebody and have a conversation, they can do that.

[7:02] that and everything in between. And then my back office, there's just such ridiculous inefficiencies. you know, millions and millions and millions of people days a year are spent copying and pasting fields from Excel spreadsheets into other Excel spreadsheets. And there's risk in that there's friction in that, you know, if we just got our hands on data models and standards around data and. APIs and API standards, we would do a tremendous amount. I tell the story of the creation of FIX at NYSE and the exchange systems because I was part of that as just what it did. We went from $45 a trade to now zero. We went from 15,000 transactions per second per node to just north of 400,000 in six months by going through that. So just imagine if you can create that kind of transparency and frictionless transactional activity and data standards.

[7:48] All of a sudden, the regulatory job becomes significantly easier. Regulatory burden goes down, both in terms of us trying to run a shop, but then also the people we have to interact with. And you lay the tracks for interoperability of these systems, you break out of the vendor capture situation, which is unbelievably powerful. If you ever want to look at a really terrible situation we have is look at some of the legacy banking technology providers and some of the contract structures they put in place on banks, especially community banks, it's ridiculous. Thank you. And another one is to get tech talent in to into the work, which is so hard for the government to do. It's just unbelievable. OK, we've only got a minute and a half left. So what's your call to action for this community? These are the people who can help solve this. And again, all the dreams. I'm a former bank regulator myself. I was deputy controller of the currency. All the dreams that the people here have.

[8:40] for transforming finance with these open source tools are going to butt into a wall with regulatory problems if we can't solve the regulator half of the equation. So now you got a minute left. Yeah, I don't, I would say if I were to ask everybody here to do three things, so I'm all about three things because it's usually you can remember them or you can forget the third one, right? So the first is, you know, be proactive on the regulatory front. If you're operating in space that's even adjacent, you know, make a point of reaching out or if you're dealing with any of the federal agencies, you can connect with me and I can find you the right person because we're not always the most straightforward about that. So one is engage. Engage early and often. I always, you know, previously I ran a company, I talked about being regulatory forward, you know, get in front of that discussion. A number of institutions have gotten very smart about doing that. So like we get over the next few years and we're like, okay, great. We can start to get our head around some of these things. And I gotta tell you, there's some amazing innovation in the pipeline. I'm just so excited about it. So the second thing is don't lose faith on this. This is gonna be a long haul. I don't know if it means, you know, when Gab's kids are, you know, giving him grandkids. I don't know if we're at that timeline necessarily, but we're, you know, it's somewhere between that and presidential administrations. We're somewhere in that band. I'm not really sure where. And then the third thing is,

[10:03] This is the best time ever. to be in this space. I think back on like when we were building some of the first credit card payments infrastructures in the 90s and we were having to hand code every single thing. We couldn't even get C compilers to play correctly together on different platforms. I was a fan of Alteryx, a friend of mine was a Sun OS guy, and it took more time to get our code to change going between the two platforms. Now I can probably, all of us can sit in a room for an hour and a half and build something 10 times better than what became the first payments gateways. So you are in an amazing to drive the market and you're in an amazing opportunity to really build it in a very different way that's more transparent less friction, more inclusive, and more representative of the people out there.

[10:49] And let me just say, we have a SIG. Led by David Eric of air who's here somewhere and Ian Hallibread of ING and we're trying to solve regulatory problems and have a GitHub. set up for this, so join in. We really need everyone. Yeah, it's possible you'll hear me trying to explain parts of the banking system in the GitHub. There we go. Everyone join me in thanking Sultan. Thank you. Thank you, John.