The sixth annual LendIt USA conference will be happening in San Francisco on April 9-11, 2018. Called LendIt Fintech USA 2018 it will be the largest fintech conference ever held in the Bay Area. We are expecting over 5,000 attendees from more than 2,000 companies, over 500 speakers on nine different stages and our largest expo hall ever with over 250 sponsors.
As we do at this time every year this is the LendIt preview show here on the Lend Academy Podcast. This year we have the LendIt Content Team on the show discussing all the different aspects of the event and how attendees can get the most out of their time at LendIt Fintech USA 2018.
In this podcast you will learn:
- What was behind the name change from LendIt to LendIt Fintech.
- Some of the new trends we are seeing in fintech today.
- Why LendIt decided to launch a dedicated blockchain event within LendIt Fintech USA 2018.
- How the event will be structured at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco.
- Details of LendIt’s first ever BlockFin Summit.
- What people can expect at the second annual LendIt Fintech Awards Show.
- What is the Innovation Demo Hub.
- The annual startup competition, PitchIt @ LendIt.
- The networking opportunities for attendees and how to get the most out of the app.
- The idea behind the day three (April 11) workshops.
- How to get the most out of the media at LendIt Fintech.
- What to expect in the Expo hall this year.
- How the agenda is structured at LendIt Fintech USA 2018.
- A breakdown of some of the topics that will discussed.
- The keynote speakers the LendIt content team are most interested in.
This episode of the Lend Academy Podcast is sponsored by Nortridge Software: extremely flexible enterprise-grade loan servicing software.
Download a PDF of the transcription of Podcast 145 – LendIt Fintech USA 2018 Preview.
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION SESSION NO. 145 – LENDIT FINTECH USA 2018 PREVIEW
Welcome to the Lend Academy Podcast, Episode No. 145. This is your host, Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.
This episode on the Lend Academy podcast is sponsored by Nortridge Software, the platform behind some of the largest and most innovative lending companies in fintech. If you’ve gone to LendIt, chances are you’ve seen some of their customers. They chose Nortridge Software because it allowed them to push to market faster, provided the flexibility that other platforms don’t and enabled them to go from startup to IPO. Learn more at Nortridge.com.
Peter Renton: We’re doing something a little bit different on the show today, but it is something that we have done at this time every year, right before the big LendIt conference. LendIt Fintech USA 2018 is coming up in San Francisco, April 9 through 11 and is going to be the biggest conference we have ever done. So what I wanted to do was bring on the LendIt content team. We’re going to delve into the event in some depth, we’ll be able to show people what to expect, all the different components of the event and how to get the most out of it. Hope you enjoy the show!
Welcome to the podcast, guys.
Jason Jones: Hey, Peter.
Todd Anderson: Hey, Peter.
Ryan Lichtenwald: Hey, Peter.
Peter: Okay, so before we get started let’s just go around so everybody knows who is on the phone here, let’s just go around and introduce ourselves real quick.
Jason Jones: Alright, I guess I’ll start. Hi everybody, this is Jason Jones, I’m one of the Co-Founders of LendIt. Over the last year I’ve been working on launching our newest event, BlockFin: Blockchain for Financial Services.
Todd Anderson: Hi everyone, this is Todd Anderson, I’m the Director of Content at LendIt and responsible for helping to build the agenda.
Ryan Lichtenwald: This is Ryan Lichtenwald, I am a Content Manager and Journalist and I also help build the content for LendIt as well as writing quite a bit on Lend Academy as well.
Peter: Okay, thanks guys. So I want to get started and just before we even get into the preview of the show, what’s been going on in fintech, we should start with a change that we made. We made this a few months ago now where we changed our name from LendIt to LendIt Fintech. Maybe Jason, you can give us a little bit of background about that and why we decided to change the name of the event.
Jason: Sure, so first of all, it’s a very subtle change, LendIt to LendIt Fintech. We didn’t announce it, there was no fanfare made about it, no press release or anything like that, but it helps us slightly with our positioning. We love the name LendIt, it’s a great strong brand name and we’re well known in our industry, but the industry goes beyond just lending.
We love lending and it’s a huge component of our event, but we’ve expanded to all other areas of fintech, whether it’s wealth management or payments, or insurtech, real estate, all these different areas plus all the technologies underlying them; AI and blockchain, cyber security and biometrics, these are all important parts of the financial services industry.
We think of ourselves as positioned as innovation taking place in financial services, whether that is a big bank that’s thinking about innovation or whether that’s a mid-sized fintech company or a 2-person startup, we don’t care. We are looking for the most innovative ideas coming out of fintech and LendIt Fintech is positioned to capture those ideas, to focus the spotlight on them and to learn from those entrepreneurs that are making such innovation happen.
Peter: Okay, so then let’s start with those ideas and maybe before we really get into the guts of the event, let’s just talk about some of the trends that are happening in fintech today. Maybe I’ll start with you, Todd, and just talk about what are some of the things that you’re seeing in fintech today?
Todd: So I think what has been interesting, especially in the last 18 months, is that you’ve seen banks really go all in on digital, whether it’s through acquisition or partnering with fintech companies, you have seen banks really start to make that transition into a more digital service, you have brands like Chase spinning out a new mobile brand with Finn, you also have banks like PNC starting their own consumer lending platforms.
So I think what you’ve really seen is banks have noticed the success of fintech companies as well as the success they’ve had with consumer experience and banks have really gone all in with digital. I think that’s been a real big trend, especially in the last 18 months or the last year.
Peter: Yeah, we’re certainly seeing that when it comes to the registrations that are coming in. We’ve got more and more banks registering for LendIt than we’ve ever had before. So Ryan, what about you, what are you seeing in fintech lately?
Ryan: Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things the past two or three months is with Amazon…I think people have been talking about Amazon for quite some time when they’re really going to enter financial services and there’s just been a flurry of news as of late. They talked a little bit about their originations reaching $3 billion which was interesting.
They’re partnering with Bank of America for their loans. A division of Amazon I think it was the Alexa Fund, is investing in this debit card for kids. There’s been talk about these checking accounts, providing new credit cards for small businesses, they’re hiring in a mortgage division apparently so there’s been all this news on Amazon. It’s all kind of finally coming to light and I think it’s going to be really interesting to see the developments over the next year or so.
Peter: Yeah, indeed. I mean Amazon, they are making so many moves out of the big sort of tech companies, they seem to be one that’s most aggressively coming into finance. Okay, let’s go to you, Jason, what are you seeing?
Jason: Well I’ve been focused on the blockchain industry and I’d say last year felt like the focus was really on AI and the emergence of AI. This year feels like the momentum or the spotlight has shifted to the blockchain. We created BlockFin because from a programming perspective we saw so many blockchain companies that were being created, that were growing quickly, that were disrupting the industry so we decided it was time to create this event within the event, BlockFin.
Specifically, in the financial services space what we’re seeing is basically all the different pieces of the financial services industry are being rethought right now and rebuilt on crypto. The core technologies that are kind of the protocol layers that are being rethought right now that are kind of completing or continuing to build on top of the internet include a wallet, reputation, identity and voting are probably the core technologies that are being built.
Once those protocols are put into the foundation, we’re seeing all sorts of financial services companies that are thinking about how to build crypto-first, whether it’s a payments company or a custodian or companies that are thinking about the ability to do quarterly reporting, the kind of Bloomberg type reference dataset companies, obviously fund management, accounting and administration. All sorts of different companies are being created around the financial services industry that are thinking about how to be built on crypto.
Peter: Sure, and I think we also want to mention the online lending space. We’ve certainly seen…I would say quite a bit of a rebound from where we were a year ago where there’s been…these companies are growing again, they are becoming profitable. They are certainly not as pessimistic as they were a year or two ago and the people I speak with in the online lending space are certainly looking forward to this year to being the best year ever. We will all see a lot more optimism I think at LendIt in that space.
So let’s get stuck into the nitty gritty of the event. We’re going to be at the Moscone Center, Moscone West specifically, and I know you’ve been there a couple of times, Jason, and looked at the venue there. Can you maybe just give the listeners a little bit of a breakdown of the structure of the venue.
Jason: Sure thing, so the Moscone Center is the largest convention center in San Francisco, it’s a 3-floor building. The 1st floor will be a giant expo hall. For the last few years the buzz has been tremendous on the expo show floors, I feel like it’s really the place to be for networking and learning about all the different companies that are in attendance.
The 2nd floor with be LendIt programming; we’ll have a giant keynote stage as well as eight tracks of content and then the 3rd floor will be the BlockFin programming. We’ll have something called the Vision Stage which we are structuring similar to a TED Talk style stage where we have kind of industry visionaries get on stage and tell us about their vision of the future, what the blockchain’s role is in their vision of the future.
We’ll also have two breakout presentation rooms up there for BlockFin as well as a ton of private meeting rooms. We’ll have VIP concierge meetings, one on one meetings up there as well as a Token Summit which is a summit that matches token buyers with token sellers in a one to one fashion. I think that pretty much sums up the structure of the event.
Peter: Okay, if you could Jason, just go back and talk a little bit more about the BlockFin Summit. You obviously gave a very quick overview of it just then, but tell us a little bit about who are some of the speakers coming, how is it going to be for people because there’s going to be two kinds of attendees here at LendIt this year.
There’s going to be our regular attendees who have been attending for a while, obviously we’ll have plenty of new people but there will be people going to the BlockFin Summit who are not blockchain domain experts, but there will also be those people who are really signing up just for the BlockFin Summit. So tell us a little bit how it’s going to work.
Jason: Sure, so like I mentioned before, the amount of programming that we’re dedicating to blockchain has just increased every year and this year it felt like we had to just dedicate a new event basically, a new floor, new programming to it. We’ll have 190 speakers speaking on the blockchain; that will include people on the Vision Stage as well as the breakout rooms, panels in the breakout rooms.
The reason why we think it’s really interesting and different than most of the other blockchain conferences out there is because of the audience profile. Right now, pretty much anyone who hosts a blockchain event sells out, it’s just that’s the stage of the cycle that we’re in right now, but most of the people that go to those events are other crypto people.
In this case, we have a huge crypto audience that’s coming, but we also have the entire LendIt fintech audience of business decision makers, technologists, investors, business development people who are thinking about innovation in financial services across all of financial services and want to understand what’s happening in the blockchain space.
So as a result, right now I just checked the stats; 33% of our audience are fintech companies, many of those fintech companies are thinking about what is their blockchain strategy. Another 29% of our audience are banks and financial institutions, many of them will be thinking about what is their blockchain strategy and another, I think it’s 12 or 15%, something in that range, who are investors and they’re investing in many of these blockchain companies.
Peter: Right, okay I want to actually talk about what’s going to happen on Tuesday night. We have the awards show happening. Todd, do you want to tell us a little bit about the awards show for this year? It’s our second annual.
Todd: Sure, so the awards show is going to be taking place on the night of April 10th, it’s going to be at One Market and the festivities will begin around 6:30 pm. This is our 2nd annual awards show and seeing the response this year, it has certainly gotten a lot bigger and better than last year.
Overall, we’ve received more than 500 applications from fintech companies, banks and these applications have been from all over the world. We’ve seen European companies, Indian companies, China companies, companies in Africa. I think we’ve really captured the essence of fintech in financial services with the awards show.
In total, we have 21 awards that will be awarded the night of the awards show and we also have our Best in Show which is awarded to the best booth on the expo floor. We also have more than 30 judges that will represent fintech and these are judges that are both from the US and from around the globe so we’ve really seen a great response to the awards show, we’re looking forward to a fun, happy evening and we’re looking forward to seeing who wins. Right now they’re going through the judging process and we’re looking forward to having an exciting evening.
Peter: Indeed, indeed we are and just on that so everyone knows, LendIt actually does not choose the winners whatsoever. We have no idea right now who’s going to win. We choose the finalists and then we hand it over to our esteemed judging panelists who then will select the winners so that way we can’t show any favoritism and it’s going to be just as much as a surprise to us as it is for everybody else.
Okay, let’s move on, one of the other things we’ve done every year for some time now is our demo stage. Ryan, do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Ryan: Yeah, sure. So last year what we did was we put our company demo stage in the middle of the expo floor and we thought that worked really well so we decided to do it again this year for 2018. And the stage is called our Innovation Demo Hub.
In the middle of the expo hall and over the course of two days we’ll hear from many companies and basically, it’s a 10 minute demo or short presentation and it’s kind of one after another. You get a sense of kind of what the company is doing, some of the innovative things that they’re working on and then we move on to the next so really looking forward to having that stage again. It continues to draw a lot of interest kind of just because of where it’s located.
Peter: Okay, back again, we’re also having…I think this is the 4th year of PitchIt at LendIt. Todd, you want to give us a bit of a rundown on PitchIt?
Todd: Sure, this is our annual startup competition at the event and this year we’ve received more than 150 applications from fintech startups in all different categories; from AI, to blockchain, to data, digital identity and bank technology. We have judges from some of the best VC firms including 500 Startups, Greylock Partners, Citi Ventures and Core Innovation Capital. Additionally, this year we’re also having live fundraising. This was something that we initiated at LendIt Europe and now are bringing over to LendIt Fintech USA where companies immediately following PitchIt will be pitching to live fundraise at the conference.
It’s going to kick off on day one and the companies in live fundraising will pitch on the Innovation Demo Hub stage right after PitchIt concludes and so you’ll have a chance to not only see the PitchIt competition, but you can also see live fundraising. These companies come from all different stages, all different focuses from AI to blockchain, data, digital identity, bank technology so we’re looking forward to an exciting day of PitchIt and live fundraising on the Innovation Demo Hub stage.
Peter: Indeed, and then obviously a lot of people come to LendIt to network and we have the LendIt app and Brella that are both live right now. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Ryan?
Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. So over the years, we’ve continued to kind of leverage the mobile app as a way to better connect our attendees and we’ve continued to develop that last year, we introduced Brella and Peter, as you mentioned, the app is now live so if you are registered for the event, I highly recommend you go download the app.
There are already folks who are setting up meetings; I actually already received a meeting request for the event as well and so when you login you can kind of easily import, for instance, a LinkedIn profile and then within the app there’s Brella. That is our one on one kind of meeting tool. So at the event there will be tables set up and you can request meetings with folks through the app and then they can either accept or decline them.
For that scheduled time you’ll be assigned a table and you can have a quick chat. All of our attendees are within Brella and so that’s the best way to communicate with folks with such a large event so we’ve been really happy with that technology. And of course also, within the app you have the agenda, floor map so really everything that you need is within the app and that’s something that we’ve spent quite a lot of time on so definitely go out and download the app.
Peter: Yeah, I agree. If you don’t download the app and also connect with Brella, you’re not going to get the most out of the event so I think that’s a must for everybody. One thing just to add on Brella that I think is really cool; you can tell it what your interests are, the kinds of people you want to meet and it will actually make suggestions for you like here are some people that represent the interests…and these people will say, these are who I want to meet so it’s not just going in completely cold with a lot of these people.
Anyway, let’s move on, I want to talk about workshops because this is the first time ever we are having workshops on day three of the event. Todd, can you tell us a little bit about them?
Todd: Sure, so we actually tested the workshops within the framework of the agenda last year and it was such a good response that we wanted to put together workshops for day three for this year. These occur on April 11th, from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm and they really focus on topics that we want to dig a little bit deeper into.
So we have a Success Through Diversity Workshop that features a lot of diverse speakers, is focused on issues of women in the workplace, women in the fintech workplace. We have a Bank Technology workshop with 500 Fintech and Deloitte who have now partnered on Upside Partners. We have a blockchain focused workshop with ConsenSys Academy. We have a Regtech workshop that focuses on regulatory technology.
The reason behind putting these workshops together is really to dig a little bit deeper into topics so not just to have a panel or a couple of presentations; we want the audience interaction, we want questions, we want to hear from those who have just seen a presentation, or have just seen a case study. We want to go through, we want to get people interacted, we want to dig a little bit deeper and so that’s why we’ve gone to just testing the workshops last year to now doing a full morning of workshops.
So you’ll see the six workshops on the agenda and I forgot to include Financial AI in that workshop batch that I went through, but you’ll see them on the agenda and we are really looking forward to digging a little bit deeper into these specific topics. It’s something that we’ve had a little bit success with, but we’re really excited to bring it in in a more robust way here this year.
Peter: Yeah, that’s one of the great things about the workshops, they’re more interactive and they’re longer so the sessions…you can really get into a topic in more depth. I think it’s going to be a really valuable tool for everybody.
Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about media coverage; we have a ton of media coming. Jason, do you want to talk a little bit about the media?
Jason: Yeah, I think it’s probably one of the most under appreciated parts of our event. We get 150 to 200 members of the media that come to our event and we have 5,000 attendees and hundreds and hundreds of people who want to get their name out, for one thing or another.
So my advice to anyone coming to LendIt is think about what you want to say to the media, prepare a product launch, a new client, a new employee that’s come to your business, an acquisition. These are great things to talk about or announce either right before LendIt or at LendIt so that you can head in with the intent to network and meet with lots of members of the media and use the platform as a way to get your name out there into the news and have it amplified through our platform.
Peter: Indeed, indeed. And finally, before we get into the nitty gritty of the agenda, Ryan, let’s just talk about the expo hall, what people can expect there.
Ryan: Yeah, so as Jason kind of mentioned when he was going through the venue, we have our large expo hall with between 200 and 250 exhibitors. I actually checked with our team and this will be the largest showing in terms of number of exhibitors so the room should be quite a buzz. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, we have the demo stage in the middle of the expo hall as well.
Peter: Okay, so now let’s dive into the content. We’re covering a lot like we always do and, Todd, why don’t you give us a little bit of an overview of how the agenda is structured?
Todd: Sure, so as Jason mentioned earlier, the event is on three floors and so on those three floors we have content on each floor.
The 2nd floor, the main content hall, so to speak, is where the event will kick off. What we’ve done is we’ve structured the agenda so the different pieces of the content stagger when they start. So for example, the event will kick off on April 9th at 8:30 am with opening remarks and then we’ll move into the first keynote session; the keynotes will run from 8:30 to 10:30.
The BlockFin Summit, which Jason mentioned earlier, is on the 3rd floor, that begins with the Vision Stage at 10:00 am. The keynotes start at 8:30, the Vision Stage starts at 10:00 and then we have company demos on the 1st floor starting at 10:30 so it’s a staggered start to content with the keynotes being the first thing to kick off the event.
After the morning break at 10:50, we’ll move in to panel discussions on the 2nd and 3rd floors. We have the 2nd floor, our main content hall, we will kick off with six simultaneous panel rooms and on the 3rd floor, the BlockFin Summit panels will also kick off and so the content is staggered start and then we will move in with different stages of content throughout the day. After lunch, we come back for keynotes in the main keynote hall at 1:30 pm.
So we’ve structured the event slightly different than last year where we had a lot of the content start almost at the same time across the event and throughout the event. This year we’ve done a little bit of a staggered start and featured different pieces of content, starting at different times to feature in different ways. So we’re really excited about the agenda that we’ve built, we think it’s diverse, we think it captures a lot of what’s going on in fintech today and we’re really excited to bring you these different types of content pieces that I think everyone will give a great response to.
Peter: Okay, so let’s just dive in a little bit into…let’s do the BlockFin Summit first. What are some of the topics that are going to be covered there, Jason?
Jason: Sure, let’s see, we’re going to start with a talk about the future of money and the future of crypto with money. We’ll interview crypto fund managers, we’ll talk about market infrastructure, whether it’s bank-to-bank payments or custody administration, kind of all the back office market infrastructure services. We’ll look at state of regulation, both in the US and in Asia as well as abroad; we will talk about messaging and payments is another topic we’re going to cover; enterprise supply chain is a big topic. Those are the ones that come up at the top of my head right now.
Peter: Okay, and then Ryan, do you want to talk a little bit about what some of the other pieces of the agenda like real estate, asset-backed financing, that kind of thing?
Ryan: Yeah, sure. So on the real estate side, we have our Digital Real Estate track. This is where we’ll really cover digital mortgages. I think there was an incredible amount of interest from speakers wanting to talk about this and so we’ll be covering how to complete the end-to-end digital mortgage process.
We have some data companies coming so we’re going to talk about interesting ways to apply data into real estate. Also in the real estate we’ll have our Residential and Commercial Real Estate track so we’ll have some of the leaders there speaking about the institutionalization of online real estate. We have a couple of new names, some more offline lenders that are going to speak, we have this interesting panel about solving for the affordable homes crisis; some very interesting and innovative companies there.
On the asset-based financing track we will cover equipment finance, kind of what the opportunity is there; we will cover auto, we think that’s also a sector that’s really gotten a lot of traction over the last year with a lot of interesting service providers and partnerships. And then we’re covering solar which is kind of a new topic for this year, you know, there’s been a lot of traction in this space, there’s a lot of interest, there’s some interesting investment opportunities and so we’ll cover that as well.
Peter: Okay, and then, Todd I know you’ve been diving into financial AI and cyber security and what not, why don’t you tell us what’s in store there?
Todd: Sure, so I know that we’ve mentioned it a little bit throughout the call, but financial AI has really been a trendy topic for the last couple of years and we’ve seen it perform very well at our conference and so what we wanted to do this year was really kind of consolidate that into a track. In the past we’ve done it spliced throughout different tracks and different sessions; we really wanted to highlight it all together.
We’ve seen financial AI across fintech and banking really take off and so we wanted to put together a track that talks about how to democratize data using AI, how do you improve the consumer experience using AI and so we really want to highlight the different facets of AI that are currently being used so it’s a lot of talk about what’s currently being used today. I think we’ve put together a really good diverse track that can speak to fintechs and banks.
Cyber security is a new topic for us, it’s a new track for us. With the amount of attention that some of the big hacks have gotten, we wanted to put together a track that focuses on how do you protect your data, how do you account for some of the downstream effects after a hack happens. You know, kind of what happens to potential customers, potential clients and then also how can employees within a firm protect themselves better which in turn can then protect the firm and the company better. So I think those two are really interesting and diverse tracks.
We also feature our International Fintech track which focuses on a few different regions this year. We have India which talks about wealth management potentially being a really big new opportunity as well as lending in India which has really been sustained and been a big driver of fintech in India. We are also covering China which is obviously one of the biggest fintech markets in the world and Latin America as well. And then for the first time, we are going have Africa focused content on the international track.
So really if you look across financial AI, cyber security, international, I think you’ll really find that a lot of this is diverse, it’s keeping up with what’s currently going on and features lots of interesting and new names. I think right now we’re trending at about 55,56% new speakers overall so I think you’ll really get some fresh and interesting voices this year.
Peter: Indeed, indeed, and of course, we’ve got some fantastic content for the online lending community, we have a credit & underwriting track that has some great stuff in here like making real time credit decisions, we’ve got a piece on synthetic fraud, machine learning.
On the small business lending track one of the things I’m really looking forward to is this interesting piece about the convergence of payments and lending, we’ve got a really fascinating session about push payments that I’m looking forward to.
On the Consumer Lending track we have all the big names that you would expect are here. I’m actually going to be moderating a panel, a CEO roundtable with some of the leading platforms talking about how to sort of succeed in this more competitive market now, it is much more competitive than it has even been.
And of course, we also have financial inclusion, one of my pet projects where we’ll cover in depth a variety of different topics there and policy & regulation. We’ve got several people from the government coming out to San Francisco to speak and looking forward to hearing from them.
So anyway, we’re almost out of time unfortunately, I’d like to end with…just talking about the keynote speakers. Maybe we could just go around and talk about who you’re looking forward to hearing from on the keynote stage. Maybe Ryan, we can start with you.
Ryan: I’m most excited about hearing from Max Levchin of Affirm, he is a new speaker for us and I think the point of sale space is just fascinating so really interested to hear what he has to say.
Peter: Okay, Jason?
Jason: Okay, so one of the keynotes I confirmed was Scott Penberthy from Google. We tracked down their AI team and the first thing I learned was that Google doesn’t have a CTO, they actually have an office of CTOs which are eight different people, Scott being one of them. Scott was Head of Financial Services Sector in the CTO office and recently he has moved to become the Director of Applied AI for Financial Services.
So what was really interesting is that Google had spent $30 billion building the Google Compute Platform. GCP is very similar to Amazon AWS, IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure. Most people think of it as a cloud storage solution, but really what it is, is a giant, giant AI machine and they want to bring as many companies as possible onto this platform now that it’s built to utilize their AI technology.
One of the things Scott told me was that the cost that went into building this platform is unbelievably expensive. It’s something that most financial services companies can’t justify for themselves. He is talking to many of the top banks and financial institutions about moving their back office infrastructure over to the Google Compute Platform. I’m really excited to hear more about what Scott has to say.
Peter: Okay and Todd, who are you looking forward to?
Todd: I think it will be really interesting to see the Head of the PBSI Division at Wells Fargo, Avid Modjtabai and Avid, she basically heads up almost 40,000 employees and their PBSI Division is basically their innovation division. So I think it will be really fascinating to hear from her about some of the things that Wells Fargo is currently doing and yeah, I think it’s going to be an interesting discussion with her as well as some of the other keynotes that we’ve mentioned.
Peter: Okay, I’m looking forward to everybody (laughs). You know, Scott Sanborn, I am very much looking forward to him kicking off the event again with sort of a call to action for the industry.
Of course, we have Michael Lewis, the person who has written several best selling books that have been made into great movies like The Big Short and Moneyball and fascinated to hear what he has to say.
Of course, we have the return of Renaud Laplanche to the LendIt keynote stage and he has a big announcement to make which we are all very interested in hearing about.
Anyway, unfortunately we’re out of time. We had more topics to cover, but we are out of time today, guys. So thank you all for sharing with me today and for helping the LendIt audience get the most out of the show.
Jason: Thanks, Peter.
Todd: Thank you, Peter.
Ryan: Thanks, Peter.
Peter: Okay, see you guys. Bye.
If you’ve listened this far, you’re probably already coming to LendIt Fintech and I thank you for that. If you haven’t registered, you can do so still all the way up to the day of the event. You can go to LendIt.com and click register. Make sure you use the LendAcademyVIP Discount Code, it gives you 15% off the ticket price so go ahead and do that. If you’ve already registered, thank you very much, look forward to seeing you at the show. Please come up and say hi, always love to hear from Lend Academy podcast listeners.
On that note, I will sign off, I very much appreciate you listening and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.
This episode of the Lend Academy podcast was sponsored by Nortridge Software, the platform behind some of the largest and most innovative lending companies in fintech. If you’ve gone to LendIt, chances are you’ve seen some of their customers. They chose Nortridge Software because it allowed them to push to market faster, provided the flexibility that other platforms don’t and enabled them to go from startup to IPO. Learn more at Nortridge.com.[/expand]
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