BONUS: Reintroducing The Fintech OGs

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Julie VerHage-Greenberg is back for Season 4 of The Fintech OGs, now joined by co-host Lauren Crossett, to sit down with the pioneers who built and transformed fintech. From the early days of digital finance to the innovations redefining money today, these are the stories behind the people who changed the industry.

In episode one we sit down with Angela Hung and Dan Egan, two builders and researchers whose careers span policy research, Robinhood, Earnin, and Betterment. Together, they have helped shape how modern wealth and financial tools are designed and experienced.

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Transcript

Opening

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 0:04

Everyone, even in 2026, when FinTechs can spin up hards and minutes and move money across borders in real time, it's still hard to decipher transactions. That's why financial institutions turn to Spade. Spade is the data and AI platform that turns messy transaction strings into structured, verified records in real time. To learn more, head to spade.com. That's S P A D E.com. Hey guys, we're welcome back. This is now season four of the FinTech OG series, which is wild to think about. It was an idea I had, I think, back in like 21 or 22, where my now three-year-old was an infant and everything like that. So it's wild to think that. And you'll notice on the last couple series of things that I've done, whether it be the AI series, the payment series, the series we did with Large Venture as the architects, I had a co-host and I didn't want to feel lonely again. So I brought in a co-host for this season as well, my dear friend Lauren Crossett, who is also a fintech OG. So she could have been a guest on this series as well. But Lauren, I will let you give a quick intro since it is our very first episode of season four. And then I will have our lovely guests that are kicking off the season with us give an intro as well.

Lauren Crossett 1:17

Oh, great. Thanks, Julie. Yeah, I'm Lauren. I lead GoToMarket for Spade, the data and AI platform that works with messy transaction strings and turns them into structured verified records. I've been in FinTech, like you mentioned, for a long time, being at Povo, Plaid, Pinwheel, and having a GoToMarket consulting agency, GTM Guild. So I'm super excited to co-host with you this season. Thanks for having me.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 1:47

Yay, I'm excited. All right. Well, we'll go alphabetical order. And Angela, I would love to. And you're also the one I've never had a chance to meet you before. Dan and I go way back. I've been on the 23rd Street Flatiron Office to meet with Dan before. But Angela, I have never had the pleasure, but I'm so glad that Dan suggested we have you on this season.

Angela’s Path From Policy To Fintech

Angela Hung 2:06

Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I think I'm probably a bit different than your usual guests. Um and I don't know if I qualify as an OG, but anyhow, um, I am my my background is I'm a behavioral economist who studies household finance. So I study how people save, borrow, invest, um, how they manage money in real life. And I started my career in academia. So after grad school, I joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. From there, I moved to public policy when I joined the RAN Corporation. Um, and that is where I founded our Center for Financial and Economic Decision Making. And I studied things like how do people save and invest for retirement? How do they spend down their money in retirement? How do we increase financial capability? Um, I did a lot of work on investment advice, and I think that's where I first met Dan. I was thinking about this. I honestly don't remember when I met. Dan's just always been there. I don't remember where I met him exactly. But a lot of the work on investment advice and, you know, sort of learning about reboadvisors from Dan. Um and, you know, during the time that I was at Rand, because I started in 2006 and I left in 2020. So there was a real shift working in this financial services and product space where services and products were becoming increasingly digital, you know, investment platforms like robo advising, banking apps. Um, and I wanted to get more into studying how people interact with fintech in particular. Um, and I started to think that working in fintech was a way to gain firsthand knowledge of how these financial products are built. And I also felt on my side, I felt with my background, what I had to offer was expertise on how to build products that help users make financial decisions that are more aligned with their goals. And so I left Ring in early 2020 to take some time to think about how and what type of career change I wanted. But then, of course, the pandemic happened. I was gonna say quite tonight.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 4:12

I also switched what I was doing. I literally, I think I left Bloomberg like March 10th of 2020, like impeccable timing. I was like, great, now the world is shutting down and I have no idea what to do. Okay.

Angela Hung 4:22

Yeah, I left I left in 2020. I thought I'm gonna take some time, spend some, spend some time with my family and you know, think about what I want to do next. And then all of a sudden I was spending all my time with the family. Um and so during this time I I had sort of talked to like, you know, a few different firms, but then I saw this job posting at Robinhood um for a behavioral insights researcher. And I thought, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing I would love to do. And so yeah, so I was there for two years. And then from there I left to a join a smaller startup called Earnin um in 2022 that provides earned wage access, where I joined as head of research. Um, and that was also just a really rewarding experience. Um, I did eventually leave because I wanted to go back to policy research. So I'm not in fintech anymore, although I do still study it.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 5:17

Yeah, I don't think you give yourself enough credit. I feel like even though you're not at a fintech, you're still like, like you said, studying it, learning more about it. And obviously, personal financial management was one of like sort of the first things in fintech. We kind of think about like Mint, PayPal, et cetera, is some of those first companies in this space. So I I consider you an OG, even if maybe you don't consider yourself an OG.

Lauren Crossett 5:41

Well, thank you. Certainly Rolling Hood and Ernin.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 5:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Egan 5:46

It's also good to know that there are people who have worked on the, you know, both in like the large and the small side of things that then also can pivot over to policy and take the insights with them that they had from working there.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 5:55

Mm-hmm. Totally. And as she was giving her background, I'm like, no wonder her and Dan know each other. This is like exactly what Dan is into and everything too. So, Dan, for those that aren't aware of how much overlap there is there and what you guys focus on and think about from day to day, well, let's have you give your background as well.

Dan’s Behavioral Roots And Betterment

Dan Egan 6:12

I was about to say, I think Angela stole like 30% of my lines. First mover advantage there. Uh, so Dan Egan, um, very similar to Angela. I um successfully did a master's degree in decision science back in 2005, and then successfully failed to get accepted to a PhD program the following year. And was always interested in like, I want to see the real world applications of this behavioral stuff. I think it has a lot of resonance with people about like, how do I make decisions, how do I make mistakes, or how do I think about money? And very quickly, it was like, well, if you want to do interesting work in the real world that affects a lot of people, um, generally the fastest path is going to be working in a business where you can influence how they design things, how they think about customers. So I joined first a bank in the UK. I actually did my master's degree over in London and joined a UK bank, Barclays, and worked with them for about seven years. And over the course of that time, I a lot of what we did involved um accessing databases and looking at customer behavior and thinking about how we design things that interact with customers. And more and more we were building this. I was like, well, if we're doing this, uh, couldn't we like deploy this directly to the end consumer? Why do we have to go via a banker? You know, it's literally at one point we were um doing like a client survey about their financial circumstances and how they thought about things, and then producing two reports, one which went to the banker and the other, which was like the same thing with uh, you know, like a little bit more explanation that went directly to the client. And it wasn't hard to see. Well, what if we just did this and we just gave it directly to the end client themselves and you know gave them the advice directly? So that vision was a little bit which led me to looking for a fintech company to join. And I um was very lucky. I happened across Betterment about two years into uh its life, where in John Stein, uh the founder, I think at that point in time, I think there were like 12 people working there or something. It was actually an apartment down in Soho that they had rented and was an office. Um came in and I pitched them and I said, Listen, you know, like you have an opportunity here to do things differently, to build a product that, you know, gives a lot of the advice that we are giving in financial institutions to high net worth people. Let's give it to everybody. It's perfectly possible to let technology do that. Um and here are four behavioral ideas about how you can actually improve the way people make financial decisions using technology. Uh and he made a huge mistake and said yes and hired me. And that was like 13 years ago now. Um and I'll just throw out that like over that time, we've done a lot of very interesting behavioral design elements to Bettermint. We've done research, we've collaborated with academics and everything. Um, but that wasn't enough for me. And I've actually gone further into the tech side of it. I learned during the pandemic, uh, my you can't go out, what do you do with yourself? Was I taught myself how to do uh mobile app engineering. And so I now um additionally work on the mobile app at Bettermint as an engineer, which means I am extremely uh a threat to them because I can have ideas and implement them, which is probably really scary to apply.

Angela Hung 9:24

Probably terrifying, yeah. Dan, I want to know what the four things were that you suggested.

Dan Egan 9:30

Do you remember them? Um one was goals-based. I want to go and find this email. This email is kind of, you know, like canon at this point. One was definitely goals-based um accounts. So, you know, like one of the things that killed me was, you know, like you have retirement accounts, and there's like an IRA over here and a 401k over here. And they were just like, there wasn't a plan wrapped around them. So one of the things was I was like, you know, like I have a I want a retirement goal that consolidates all those accounts and knows about the fact that I have an employer match. Like, let's build what you're gonna use the money for, the goal as like a first um a first class experience for them. I think actually auto-escalation of savings over time, you know, like you set up an auto deposit this year, and in three years inflation's eaten away three or four percent of what it's worth. So it's like, well, those should auto-escalate over time. Um, and I need to go and find the email for the other ones.

Lauren Crossett 10:22

Dan, do you remember how you and Angela met?

Dan Egan 10:26

I am pretty sure it was there's a great conference in Boulder called the Boulder Consumer Uh Financial Decision Making Conference. And it's one of my favorites. There's it's a great mixing ground for practitioners such as uh myself and old Angela, um, who are at firms and who generally have access to like really interesting data because they're there. Sometimes they can like share it, sometimes they're just looking for ideas from academics who are more likely to like be able to review the theory, consolidate a lot of evidence. So the conference is practitioners, academics, and policy people. Um and for years it was great. We would get people from the Federal Reserve, from the CFPB, um, lots of academics both from all across the United States and Europe, and a lot of people from industry. You know, you'd go there and there would be people from Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity, all of the large firms there. There was the Mies and Angels of that world would come to uh try and figure out what we could do next.

Lauren Crossett 11:21

It sounds like that conference doesn't exist anymore.

Dan Egan 11:25

It does. It's uh it's attendance has been somewhat attrited by recent uh lack of uh support in various ways.

Fintech Surprises And Self-Driving Money

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 11:35

Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, hey, like you met at a conference, which is very common of people in fintech, because I feel like a lot of, oh, we met at Money20 in you know 2018 or something. I've had I've had that a lot. Um, okay, so both of you, let's say roughly like between you know, 12 and 17 years you guys have been in this space. Take take time to think about this answer if you want to. But one of the questions I love asking is both a surprise to the upside and the downside since you've gotten into fintech. So when you first got into this space, what's something you thought would have been possible by 2026 that is not possible, and something that is that you're like, wow, that like I would have thought it would have taken, you know, until 2030 or so to actually get to that point. And again, take a moment to think about this, but something that is kind of surprised to the upside and something that's surprised to the downside. And whoever thinks of one first is welcome to go.

Dan Egan 12:34

I definitely have one for the downside.

Angela Hung 12:37

Um I have I've I think I have one for the upside, which is um, which I think is is a for for me, I think I think I'm very pleasantly surprised at how much fintech has made um products and services that previously might not have been accessible to just a really wide population. I think that is what what one of the best things about fintech, and I think that it has lived up to that. I mean, even even from like, you know, even banking. I think I can't remember the exact numbers now, but like, you know, the FDIC puts out this annual report on like the unbanked. And it's really surprising the percentage of people who live in the US who are either unbanked or underbanked. And I think their methodology, I don't know if it includes neobanks of Chime, but but I do think that that they have you know reached a really wide population that hasn't been reached before. Um, there are also things like robo advising. Again, you're providing investment advice to a lot of people who either couldn't afford or weren't interested in seeking financial advice from a traditional advisor. Um, you know, Robinhood with with with investing, same thing. You know, just just the I feel like that that this is sort of like the best thing about fintech is that it's just really brought financial products and services to a much wider population than than what traditional products and services served.

Lauren Crossett 14:03

I love that. That's how I got into fintech too.

Dan Egan 14:06

Part of it isn't just about access, it's also about affordability. And I think, you know, if we go back to one of the kind of like core papers from Behavioral Finance are these um trading is hazardous to your wealth papers that are from the 1990s. And one of the things that's just fundamentally changed since then, you go back and they're like, well, you know, a round trip trade would cost you 7%. You know, like the fees were so much higher, the bid ask spreads were so much higher. Across the board, the cost of getting access to the services in general, but also like the quality of the services you get for such low fees, it really is dramatic.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 14:39

All right, wait, what's the downside one that you thought of, Dan?

Dan Egan 14:43

So I think this reflects a little bit more my uh hopes and aspirations. But um I think we hit a wall about the degree to which people were willing to let fintechs do things for them. There was a long period where we had this uh analogy of self-driving money, a little bit like self-driving cars. It's it's it's it's much slower than you think it's gonna be. But you know, there's the idea that you know you would be able to link up your like your checking account to your savings account, and you wouldn't have this thing where you just had cash sitting and checking, um, not earning any interest. And that like at the end of the month, when you had excess left over, it would automatically move into some sort of like a higher return vehicle. And that you know, like I could just link my direct deposit for my employer and it would go in and automatically go out to whichever account you know was like either going to get the best match or whatever it was. So we had a high hopes that you know, not only that people would feel comfortable delegating so much to us, but also that we could show them the value of that. Um, the other component of it, I think, is coming from the high networth bank, you're around a lot of very smart people who have ideas about like marginal ways to improve portfolio or tax management and all these things. And you can do them if you have that, I don't know how to put it, like the ability to communicate it really well. It's very hard to communicate to somebody who is looking at an app on their phone on the subway what asset location is or how tax loss harvesting affects your end-of-year tax bill. Um, and so the limit of kind of like there needs to either be a lot of trust or a lot of um, you know, segmentation into people who really care about those things. Um, we were not able to take all of the very smart things that like high net worth people get and give them to everybody because it's very hard to actually like deploy them and have people be like, oh yeah, I really appreciate that you're doing this very complicated thing that I don't understand the concepts of for me.

Lauren Crossett 16:34

I'm so glad you said driverless money asked me. Like, how could we ignore that uh phrase that I feel like everyone kind of forgot about, but now maybe is coming back? And along those lines, I wonder what you both want to see with the rapid change of kind of everything, tech focused, um, with the adoption of AI. Like, are there are there big problems or behavioral uh economic decisions that you think people should make differently? Or, you know, how do you think about this evolving landscape?

AI Adoption And Consumer Trust Limits

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 17:10

It'll add in what like what sort of time frame do you expect to happen there too? Because you guys, you perhaps better than anyone else I know really understand like the the psychology of people when it comes to these types of things. How quickly or slowly do you think consumers are gonna change where they are willing to let apps like Betterment, Robinhood, et cetera, use AI to kind of make those financial decisions for them?

Angela Hung 17:37

Yeah, I mean, I think it it sort of speaks a little bit to what Dan was saying, which I think he he has, he has a view that that that that I just don't um I don't have the ability to observe like like he does, but um, this idea that that there is a limit to how much people are are willing to let you know an app or a or a firm make these decisions for you. Um, I think that's really interesting. I hadn't really thought about that, and I hadn't really realized that it sounds like Dan, like you've you've sort of seen the those limits a bit. Um I do wonder how much of it is, you know, like a self-driving car, it's you know, we we we still want to be in the car and we still want to have our hands on the steering wheel or at least something that pings you and tells you to put your hands back at the steering wheel. And and maybe maybe it's sort of like a hybrid approach that that will work best is to um, you know, is is to automate a lot of these decisions, but but also have a lot of um have a lot of ways that that that that you can opt out or make your own decision. And you know, we we know from so much behavioral research that most likely people won't, but at least they have that option and that just that that gives them some reassurance when signing up for something that that is so automated. Um I wonder about that. I also wonder, um, you know, I I think a lot about how like AI has has this ability to really personalize and make and give tailored either feedback or or suggestions or even or even you know run someone's portfolio in a very tailored in a very personalized way. Um and I think that that holds a lot of promise. Um but again, I I see sort of Dan's point about how the the limit of that is also the how much people are actually willing to to follow that, right? Like you can you can ask chat GPT for for you know to give me a personalized financial plan, but like are people actually willing to let someone else run that? Or do you just want to see it and then you're like, okay, I can implement this myself.

Where AI Helps Without Being The UI

Dan Egan 21:36

So I I have two things. And I think one that you were implying or alluding to, and maybe this is just because we're OGs that you know we're we're on the tail end of this, but it feels like, and I'm pretty sure that the rate of change has gone up. And the result of that is that I think it's harder for people to think and plan about longer-term futures when they're like, what does it matter what I try to do to set up, you know, this year and next year, if the rate of change is so fast that it won't matter in five years? You know, I think there's something genuinely going on where if you are a person going to college or even just coming out of college, like where do you invest your human capital right now, knowing that the landscape that worked for the generation before you, it's not going to work the same way for you. So I do think there's a disorientation and a kind of like, oddly enough, like a fear of investment that comes. This is it's almost like um hyperinflation or something, but it's applying to human capital skills, where it's like, when the rate of change is fast enough, is it worth investing, or should you just kind of like enjoy right now? Um so that's that's the the psychological thing that I hit is a lot, I think is hitting a lot of people uh right now. On the other side of it, especially you gotta talk about AI. Um, I think it's very interesting in that the models and their the things you can do with them are getting better. And I do think um I've had this experience with a number of friends where I work at a FinCech. I'm the early adopter guy. Like I had clawed a personal subscription probably like six months ago. I have friends who are like that, we're nerding out on things constantly. I came to a friend's house and I explained to him how to use it, how to set it up and everything. And three weeks later, he was like, This has completely changed how I work. This is the way I do things now. I don't like Spotify's interface, so I built my own interface that I can use locally to do what I want, how I want my music done. So I think there's a really interesting potential, like, I don't want to call it an inversion, but a realignment of how things work. Where if you, you know, if you have a really good subscription to an AI client that keeps track of the fact that I've had conversations about my wife and my family and how old my kid is, and are we going to send her to this school or that school? And what are the financial implications? That knowledge builds up context significantly over time. And the question of like, how good are they at giving financial planning? Stuff, be that math programming or knowing tax legislation, et cetera, I think that's solvable. I think the more interesting thing is like this this thing over time will have a really good picture of who you are and you know what you need to talk to about it. And it's the first step that you it's better than search. You pull it out and you're like, hey, you know, the oven that I bought three months ago that I was asking you about? This light's on, what should I do about it? And it'll know the answer.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 24:17

What do you think betterment looks like in five years, given the rapid change in AI?

Dan Egan 24:22

See, again, I'm I'm you know, like five years is past the uh the event horizon of change that I think might be happening. I know, I know that um in the net interestingly, in the next few years, I think they're the consumer, the end consumer um component of it, there will be improvements, but I don't think they'll really, really be dramatic. Where we're seeing a lot more change and growth is actually in the advisor space and in the 401k space. That's where um, because it's a professional environment, it's your job, you're coming to you, you're more used to using these sorts of productivity tools anyway. There's a just much faster clip of adoption, um, renorming around the acceptable uses of it, that sort of thing.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 25:02

So wait, I I use Betterment for my 401k. It wasn't like one of the first things I did when I left Bloomberg is like, I don't want to use what I was they used one of the generic platforms that like everybody uses and stuff like that. I was like, I hate this interface, I'm moving it all over to Betterment. So what will I see change then over the next few years? Because you mean, to be fair, I don't really look at it that much because it's a 401k, it just kind of like sits there, you know.

Dan Egan 25:26

So what I'm actually thinking of is um if you're the HR person in a 400-person company, um the tools that will be deployed to help you help your participants are going to be more effective. So it'll be hey, these three people haven't actually logged in and accepted their packets yet, make sure you follow up with them. This person really should be adding just another $100 a month in order to max out their benefits. That's sort of like either prompted or on-demand insight. That again, because the HR professional is in a professional setting, they're going to be using, you know, productivity tools all day. It'll feel very natural for them to get more of that. Whereas for you as an end-consumer, um, you know, like it's a little bit more touchy-feely about exactly like where should we put this? How should we interact with it? One of the really important things that um we really stuck to is the AI can be used. We use AI for development and other things. It can be used, um, how do I put this? It can be used to like enrich things, but at the end of the day, it has to be right. It is, we are a fiduciary, we have to give you the correct uh advice at any given point of time. That needs to be deterministic. It can't be run by a bot. We can use a bot to explain it to you. You can be like, you know, like Roth because XYZ. And then this is actually something that um we're looking at right now is we have an account recommender, and the text that we put forth to you to explain why it's the right account to you. Well, if you're somebody who said, like, I have a ton of investing experience, I'm very familiar with this, we'll use jargon. We'll explain things a little bit more tersely. If you're somebody who's completely new to it, we're gonna write at a very different level and explain things more. So I think that's the sort of you know division of labor I see coming out of it.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 27:04

And when did that change happen?

Dan Egan 27:06

Which change?

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 27:08

The change in like how you explain things. Was is that something that like I said two weeks ago? Okay, I was gonna say that feels like it's probably something that's fairly recent because I feel like AI in particular, with customer support, et cetera, and like QA's, FAQs, whatever, chatbots, that's something where people think of first, but like it really didn't get that much better right away. And now I find that it actually does give pretty, pretty solid responses. Um, you know, 75% of the time if I ask something. And then Angela, you were gonna say something as definitely.

Angela Hung 27:43

I was gonna I was gonna ask something that the Dan sort of spoke to a little bit, which is I was, I was, I'm curious, and it sounds like it is a little bit that like, you know, for take Betterment, for example, is that the the user might not even really see how much AI has has changed the company, right? Because like what what you see look look looks exactly the same, but maybe, you know, like the underlying models that they use, or or even you know, like all the back end stuff, like maybe AI is touching all that, but the user actually doesn't see it. You you just still see like your same sort of account profile, the same kind of information. Maybe now it's written, you know, with with the help of AI rather than a designer or product manager writing it, or um, but in the end, like um, so I do wonder, you know, if if other than you know, it's sort of just asking like a chat bot or um or or you know, talking to customer service, maybe you get AI there. But I wonder if for most consumers, like the end user, you don't really see much of a difference. Um, you're getting much of the same uh experience that that you did before.

Dan Egan 28:50

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think we the degree to which our engineering organization was the early adopter of AI as a developer tool, and for like numerous other things, like even um data analysis of customer sort of like inbounds, you know, like what are the help desk tickets about? What are our Reddit posts saying? Can we consolidate that into some way? Um we've been adopting that very quickly to kind of like increase the speed with which we can move, move fast and not break things. Um, but I don't necessarily know, I think it's actually a good thing. I think there's a a sense of sometimes people just want to like rub AI on something uh as a consumer product and expect that it just like it makes a good product and it doesn't. Um just sort of like throwing in the AI chatbot, unless it's been super well trained and set up and has access to docs and it doesn't hallucinate things, it's worse. So um I definitely think, at least from our point of view, um the there are tremendous productivity gains to it, but it's not necessarily that you have to put it directly in front of the end consumer.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 29:51

And I also feel like you know, my co-host here, her company, they're doing so much to make the data so much better. And that's such a huge part of how good and how much you can do with AI as well. Because if you don't have the right data, especially in finance, like it's really hard to give a correct answer. And you're probably gonna make mistakes. And like Dan mentioned, it's really important that you do not give the wrong answer when it when it comes to people's money.

What Scares Us About AI

Lauren Crossett 30:16

Oh, totally. Like I did start my career as a financial advisor, and then I ran an RIA for a quant fund. Talk about trying to bring something typically not available to the masses to public consumption, largely, you know, uh motivated by seeing trends like betterment um come onto the scene. Um and then working at Quovo and Plaid, you see that like there's there's only so much you can do with just pure connectivity. And so what we're seeing now is that we we generally take a lot of first-party data where you're a party to the transaction, add the context, which is really merchant data. Um, and then that unlocks all the potential for a lot of AI features. And I think, Angela, you talked about personalization, which sometimes is like um polarizing word, um, because maybe on our side of the table, we think is that a euphemism for marketing. Um, and you know, I think kind of bringing this all full circle in my mind is that consumers won't see if the marketing is better, but they might have a higher take rate on either the driverless car saying, hey, put another $100 in your 401k, or, you know, maybe consider a different kind of investment vehicle. And so I think that's where maybe consumers can benefit without having to recognize that AI is really um taking so much control.

Angela Hung 31:43

That's a great point. Like if they don't realize that that the products and services that are offered to them are tailored, um, they think, you know, every everyone's opening the app and getting you know the suggestion. But you can really see how, you know, the it could be so it could be used for for marketing just to make more money, but it could also be used for good. Right. Right. There's a potential to recognize um financial struggles before they snowball, right? So like a banking app might be able to see signs of overspending or falling behind on payments. And you know, you can offer up solutions um changes to, you know, yeah, to help alleviate a lot of the these problems before they really snowball and get out of hand.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 32:25

Totally. I want to flip the the question a little bit though. We've talked a lot about how good AI can be. What scares you about AI right now? Whether it be both from like we hear about fraud quite a bit, or just like consumer behavior, is there anything that scares you from an AI perspective as well? Dan?

Dan Egan 32:44

I actually had that recently. I had a scam call where uh it was really interesting because they called and the voice started, it came from like I think like a New York phone number, and the four started speaking very clearly with an Indian accent, and there was a lag, and then it the same words came through in like a Midwest accent. So it was some sort of voice spoofer, but they just didn't get it quite right. Um, and it's here. And I think unfortunately for people who have had their voice put out there and their likeness put out there, we're very spoofable now. It's a little bit scary. Like, yeah, exactly.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 33:21

In the AI series, though, I for I think it was there was an episode that that covered fraud, and one of the companies they had a client where they um got like a Zoom call and it was like the executive team on the call asking them to like wire like 75K, 100K or something somewhere. And he actually did it because like it was literally a Zoom call where they had the pe the executive team on there. So like it's getting really good. Um but like is there anything consumer behavior related that scares you with AI? Or do you think that um, you know, like we've talked about, consumers are probably, you know, they are being a little hesitant and nervous to like really let AI drive a lot of things versus just give it advice and then they make the monetary moves.

Prediction Markets And Insider Incentives

Angela Hung 34:08

Yeah, I think well, yeah. So so obviously like fraud and scams is a huge area. I think outside of that, um, one is is sort of what LeDane talked about is that there are still hallucinations. You you still get, you know, just sort of um you get sort of outlandish um recommendations. Like a friend of mine asked, you know, one of these, um, I forget which which platform, you know, how much gold should I hold in my portfolio? And the answer was like, you can hold safely up to 50%. It was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no one should hold. Um but yeah, so so you definitely, you know, that there's definitely still things like that that are out there. I think um from someone who sort of has worked a lot on sort of personal like financial capability and financial literacy, I think one one thing I worry about is that this will be so outsourced that that people won't won't keep themselves really well informed. And I think, and you know, I I think it, you know, you you you still, I mean, like like I said, like you still kind of even if you outsource to to one of these like driverless cars, you still want to like have your hands on the steering wheel. You still want to know like, you know, what's going on a little bit. And I worry that that if this becomes so outsourced, people won't really pay attention. And that that makes it hard to sort of, you know, just make sure that that this is, you know, that that whatever what whatever driverless system you're you're working on is is still sort of working toward the goals that that you want.

Lauren Crossett 35:35

Wow, that's such a good point. You even think about like putting something on auto pay and and forgetting about it or recurring charges and how that changes your behavior, but then not taking that accountability to understand the decisions that you're making, even on the micro level in your financial life, is um that's a really interesting point I hadn't thought of.

Angela Hung 35:55

Absolutely. Like you definitely hear people talking about how like they put a bill on auto pay and they didn't realize that like all of a sudden, like, you know, the whatever service is now twice as expensive because they didn't pay attention to the bills and or you know, or they didn't realize that they're still subscribing to something that they don't want to be subscribed to.

Lauren Crossett 36:11

Yeah. Um, maybe a different topic, but Angela, since you were at Robinhood, um maybe it's apropos to ask, what are your what's your take on the prediction markets and how that's increasing in popularity?

Angela Hung 36:25

Yeah, I I actually don't know much about prediction markets. Um other than, I mean, I they they have been around like for for quite a time and and now they've just blown up in popularity. And I really don't don't know that much about it. I do think um, well, no, I'm not gonna say that, but but I do, I I I do think, I I do think um now I want to think about saying um yeah, I think, you know, I I think for for some of these things, I I think if it's like I my my my worry there is that people will will mistake it for something else, right? So so I I know that's not just pure entertainment, but but for for example, like if if if you participate for entertainment, I think that's fine. You know that's entertainment, you know that that that that's your goal. But if you participate because you think you're going to get some kind of information, you think it's going to be um, you know, you think it's going to be some kind of even like investment sort of opportunity. I that that that that that that that's where like I start to worry is that like, you know, when when people think that that's going to provide something that that it inherently does not.

Career Highs Lows And A Big Win

Dan Egan 37:40

There was um, are you familiar with the Good Judgment project or Super Forecasters by Philip Tetlock? So apropos of uh Angela's point, so this this there's this project that's been around forever um that was about uh abilities, people's ability to forecast large world events, political events, but other things too, you know, like could you have predicted um the fall of the Berlin Wall or who's gonna win this election and so on? And they ran surveys longitudinally with people for a long period of time, trying to figure out who was really good at like forecasting something out, but you had to be forecasting it out at least three months or six months or a year. It was meant to be somebody who was like able to see far into the future. Um and so to the point, like I think they those have been around for a very long time trying to find people who have foresight. What changed recently is number one, it went from being even just a US dollar-based thing to being crypto-based. So now there is a level of um anonymity and ability to profit off of things that didn't exist before. And because of that, what we're seeing is not people coming in and being really good at forecasting events, you know, three months out or something like that, but somebody coming in at the last minute who probably has inside information, making a very large trade in it and making a lot of money very quickly, using proprietary information of some kind. Um, so I actually think I'm a little bit sanguine about them because I think without some restructuring in some way, it's gonna be very clear that these are not markets that anybody who's not an insider should be participating in. Um, you know, if you're like, you know, uh what's Apple's earnings gonna be, you know, next quarter, and you're an Apple employee who knows what earnings are gonna be tomorrow, um, and you can use in crypto, go in and like make a ton of money, you can do that. And anybody else who's part of that market um is going to be like, why would I, why, why should I be your Patsy? So I actually think in a funny way, without them restructuring their own markets, these markets will self-fail quite quickly because the counterparties to the insiders are gonna go, we don't want to participate in this anymore.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 39:44

Interesting. Yeah. So like it's fine if, like Angela said, you're using it for entertainment, you're betting on the Super Bowl with some friends, or March Madness coming up or something like that. But on things where it's like economic data, earnings data and stuff, that's where you think, you know, it gets really sketchy really fast.

Dan Egan 40:02

I think even sporting events, wasn't there recently a parking match that like the the guy bet and he threw the match himself?

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 40:12

Probably. That's it sounds very believable. So I I I I would be shocked if you were wrong.

Lauren Crossett 40:19

We'll listen to the things next.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 40:22

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um I we're coming up closer to time. We've got about five or ten minutes left. Um, and one thing I wanted to make sure we get a chance to dive into is a career high and a low. I think a lot of times, you know, people that have been in fintech for a while, made a name for themselves, done really cool things. We think there's, you know, just been this nice upward trajectory, et cetera. But it always comes with some low moments and stuff too. So if you think back like something that you've done in fintech, where it's like that was amazing, like that was such a good day or moment, whatever. And then like a low and how you, you know, came back from that.

Dan Egan 41:01

So I can absolutely say a a good low. I don't know, maybe they were both the same thing. Um, I learned at one point I was actually like managing a team of people, um, probably eight people at its peak. And I was doing it and I was like, I don't like this, and they don't like me doing it either. Um, and so uh quite rightly, management was like, hey, we don't think this is working for anybody.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 41:27

Why don't we it was recently, and it was the mobile app team that's pissed that Dan now knows how to do the mobile app.

Dan Egan 41:34

Yeah. They so basically like I was, I was, how do I put it? I was like, I was taken out of that position. And at the time I was like, is this a failure? Did I fail to like, you know, because I think there's a very traditional um view of like, you know, progress where it's like you go up and there are more people under you and you own a big thing. Uh, and it felt like that being kind of like saying you failed at that. And then at the same time, you know, like a week or two later, I was like, oh, thank God, I'm not doing, you know, like 20 meetings a week about who said what to who and and all this sort of stuff. Um, so I think that was a both um uh like a bad thing. It felt like a failure at the time, but it was probably good in the long run.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 42:13

Okay, cool.

Angela Hung 42:14

Angela, um I think I think my my high might be Dan's low, which is it's it's a miracle we get along so well. Um but I would say, you know, I think one of my highs is is just building the research team at Ernan. Um, you know, it was it was a small team. There was just four of us, but you know, we were very interdisciplinary. So, you know, two of us came from academic backgrounds with PhDs in economics and sociology, one had a master's in epidemiology before she pivoted into user research. And we had someone who just had deep UX research experience. Um, you know, and so we had a mix of backgrounds, we had a blend of quantitative and qualitative research skills that um that we had, but it really just meant that, you know, we could we we could sort of look at the data from from from different ways. We we could both look at the user data, we could supplement it with insights directly from users. Um and yeah, I think I think the way that we worked is very collaborative, very curious, we're tight-knit, and also working really closely with product and design teams to to generate insights to help make the product decisions. I think that that that was sort of like the the best part of it was just sort of working together with them. They were super fun to work with.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 43:32

That's really cool. And then what's about what about a low too? And then Dan, I want to come back and get a different one for your high.

Angela Hung 43:40

Um, so low is well, I think um, you know, I had such a steep learning curve going into fintech. Um, I think coming from from my background, you know, I was I was new not just to fintech, but I was also new to tech. I was new to even the private sector. And um I think one of the things I I struggle with the most was sort of figuring out how research fits into, you know, a product environment into it into a fintech environment, right? So um, you know, product teams have to make decisions quickly. They need insights that are closely tied to those decisions. You know, they don't have time for for this sort of like research that we do in academia that has like depth and rigor, and you can always like, you know, can always do a little bit more. Um and so yeah, so for me, like, you know, it was a struggle. I did eventually do it, but you know, I had to learn how to adapt both how I do research, but also how I communicate research because you also need to be able to communicate your research to product and design teams. Um, you have to understand, you know, come and you also have to be able to listen to you have to understand what their questions are, what they need from you, um, to know how to translate your findings into something that is insightful for them.

Closing

Dan Egan 44:56

So got into this game to be able to influence how financial apps are designed to help people make better decisions. So uh one of again, the classic findings about people's investment behavior is uh something called the disposition effect. Or generally speaking, that people um don't take in transaction costs and taxes, especially when they're trading. And one of the places that this shows up is when you sell out of a gain because you're like, ah, I'm up, good decision, cash it out, feel good, go and have a nice dinner. And um, we saw this in Betterman's clients as well a little bit, where people like they like to trade. Um and again, we're like this wasn't like a stock brokerage thing. This was like, you know, it's a very simple stock bond interface. Um, but people would still trade too much. They would react to market movements too much. And so we put together a feature we call tax impact preview, and that's very important. Important the preview component of it. If you go in and you're like, oh, I'm feeling like I want to take some risk off the board, let me go from 90% stocks down to 10% stocks, it would go in and look at what you're selling and say, totally cool. Just so you know, this is gonna cause $120 worth of taxes next April. And that's not something that if you've been in any brokerage site, the brokerage knew about that, but the brokerages have no incentive to stop you from trading. That's how they make money. So putting this in front of people was actually like novel. They're like, oh yeah, this is gonna be a short-term capital gain. That's gonna be expensive for me. Oh, okay. I only have like 70 days until it's gonna be a long-term capital gain. Maybe I'll just be a little bit more patient. So we put this out in front of people and designed it. We ran it as a split test. It was actually like an experiment. It was like very well done. And the results came back. And it was like 90% of people who went in and saw a tax impact of more than a dollar or five dollars went back out. And either they made their allocation adjustments smaller or they just didn't go through with it. Um, and that was kind of like one of the biggest wins that I'd ever seen. You know, to be able to say, like, here's a problem people tend to have, here's an offsetting thing that they don't realize at that point in time. Like nobody's thinking about taxes when they're making that transaction. Put it in front of them and see them make better decisions become of it. Fantastic. Still happy about it to this day.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 47:14

I was gonna I remember you walking me through that when I was at Bloomberg still.

Dan Egan 47:19

It's my baby.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 47:21

Well, it's uh it was a very cool feature, and I think um, you know, I think all the other ones should have that too. Because it is important, like you said. Obviously, brokerages aren't incentivized to let you know that that's happening because they would love for you to trade and they can make more money. But um, you know, if you see that tax impact, especially like, hey, if you just hold on for this for another month, you won't have short-term capital gains, you'll have long-term capital gains, I think is important. And it's obvious it's even easier to do now today versus when you did it, because we have AI and everything too, where you know, someone that doesn't even know how to code can probably put it into a platform and stuff at this point. Very cool. Well, Lauren, what did you think? First time co-hosting. How was it?

Lauren Crossett 48:04

It was fun. I mean, Friday afternoon, I hope I made sense.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg 48:09

I hope we all made sense on a Friday afternoon, you know. But now, you know, it's 4 30 on the East Coast, it's 1 30 on the West Coast. Um, but I think all of us are well, no, Angela, you're on West Coast. You've still got a few hours left in your Friday, but the rest, the rest of us are about to peace out for the weekend. Uh well, thank you so much, you guys. This was a great way to kick off the next season of the FinTech OGs. And Lauren, I'm excited to have you as my co host this season.

Lauren Crossett 48:35

So excited to be here. Thank you guys so much. Thank you.