One Vision Podcast — Fintech, Banking & AI with Theodora Lau

In this week’s One Vision Podcast, Theodora Lau hosts Kathryn Outlaw, Co-Founder and COO of Spheros, a B2B SaaS platform that aims to unify client data into a single source of truth, enabling accurate, consented data sharing and supporting reliable AI agents. Kathryn talks about her entrepreneurial journey, the inspiration behind the startup, and the goal of making Spheros as essential as DocuSign for onboarding.💬Hot take:  ”Banks don't have a data scarcity problem. They have a data comprehension problem.” 🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.Keywords: Fintech, Financial Services, Data, Banking Industry Timestamp:00:00 Welcome And Guest Intro01:27 From Banking To Startup04:06 Why Spheros Exists07:58 Agents And Data Consent10:30 Open Banking Pathways15:31 Founder Lessons Learned17:01 Defining Success AheadMore about our guest 🌐Kathryn Outlaw on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathrynoutlaw/ More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision 

🎙️ "Delight is a deposit strategy."In this episode of One Vision Podcast, Angela Scott, Sales Enablement leader at Zions, joins host Theodora Lau, to discuss her idea that “delight is a deposit strategy,” arguing banks can win deposits by creating intuitive, responsive, and even enjoyable experiences that make money movement easy, especially when digital experiences are constrained by shared core and app vendors. They get into: Why delight isn’t fluffWhy the best deposit strategy makes money easy to move in and outThe chick-and-egg trap of building on the same handful of core and app providersFinancial literacy, and why communities shouldn’t bear the burdenWhy we need to make banking more legibleAngela stresses balancing efficiency and humanity through employee, digital, and brand experience to build trust. 💬 "If you want deposits, you have to bring the right environment to set them free."🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.Keywords: Fintech, FinancialServices, Banking Industry, Financial Inclusion, Financial Literacy 00:00 Welcome and Introductions01:05 Delight as Deposit Strategy04:43 Banking UX and Vendor Limits07:16 Neobank Story and Micro Delights11:46 Angela’s Origin Story17:22 Inclusion and Literacy Work25:29 Digital Efficiency vs Human Touch33:02 Brand Experience and Differentiation36:56 Takeaways and GoodbyeMore about our guest 🌐Angela Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-scott-a2348827/ More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision 

In this episode of One Vision Podcast, Theo chats with Huyen Tran from US Bank and founder/investor at Elys Ventures. Huyen shares her path from computer engineering and early real-estate investing to two decades in banking product leadership and P&L ownership. She discusses why banks can appear slow due to resilience, regulation, legacy systems, and trust requirements, and how AI will accelerate prototyping, testing, data analysis, and iterative product development while meeting customer expectations for personalization and security amid rising fraud. A must-listen episode on startup, innovation, relationship building, and ecosystem thinking. 🔥"What value are you creating for everyone involved? ...Just don't forget about the people."🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.Keywords: AI, Fintech, FinancialServices, VC, Startups, Banking Industry Timestamps:00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro00:53 Path to Banking05:17 Are Banks Really Slow?08:09 AI Changing Bank Product10:39 Customer Expectations and Trust13:27 Inside Elys Ventures14:18 Moats in the AI Era18:37 Founder Questions and Cycles20:27 Advice for New Founders23:41 Closing More about our guest 🌐Huyen Tran on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/huyen-tran-09a580aa/ More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision **

Anthony Sar, Co-founder and CEO of Finoverse and the driving force behind Hong Kong Fintech Week, joins Theo on One Vision to share the story behind one of Asia's most iconic innovation gatherings. From a bar conversation about hitting 5,000 attendees (when they had 300) to welcoming 45,000 people from 120+ economies at their 10th anniversary, Anthony reflects on what it takes to build something that genuinely keeps people in the room.At the center of the conversation is Samantha, built in-house by Finoverse. She acts as your personal AI networking agent. She interviews you, learns what you're looking for, and makes introductions at scale. After a successful pilot at last year’s FinTech Week as well as the recent Genesis Festival, Samantha will return to Hong Kong FinTech Week 2026 this November.  This year’s conference is aptly themed Fintech Nexus: Bridging the World, Building the Future. It is a rallying call to drive connectivity and collaboration across global and Chinese Mainland markets, at a time when the world feels more fragmented than ever.One World, One Planet. This episode invites us to come together to foster collaboration for a more inclusive financial services ecosystem for everyone. 🔥 Hot Take: "AI can't have coffee with you. It can't go for a hike. It can't watch a comedy with you." 🔥 Hot Take: “There's so much happening in mainland China and Asia that the rest of the world simply doesn't see." 🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.Keywords: AI, Fintech, FinancialServices, Startups, Hong KongTimestamps00:00 Welcome and Introductions02:59 A decade of Finoverse and Hong Kong Fintech Week 07:39 Introducing Samantha: The AI Host10:13 The Future of Events and Networking19:07 How AI Makes Human Connection More Valuable, Not Less27:55 Hong Kong Fintech Week 2026: Fintech Nexus: Bridging the World, Building the Future33:01 Closing Thoughts: One World, One PlanetMore about our guest 🌐Anthony Sar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonysar/ 🌐FinTech Week Hong Kong: https://www.fintechweek.hk/ More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision **

In this new episode of One Vision Podcast, Paolo Sironi joins Theodora Lau to unveil his new book, Quantum Sapiens, a philosophical literary thriller on artificial intelligence, quantum gravity, and the origins of human consciousness. A burning question: Why now?We talk about the "I love you" problem and what happens when we attribute meaning to words that machines give us. Paolo invites us to think about the journey ahead of us before we walk through Alice's mirror. What do we need to carry with us? What do we leave behind? An exhilarating conversation about the present and future of technology that you won't want to miss. No PhD required.📍The algorithm has no meaning. We need the entanglement and the magic of the human touch."🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.Keywords: AI, Fintech, Generative AI, Quantum, EmpathyTimestamps00:00 Welcome Back Paolo00:58 Unveiling Quantum Sapiens02:38 Why Fiction Not Whitepapers06:52 From Fintech to Consciousness18:48 Illusion of AI Meaning25:06 Poetry as AI AntidoteMore about our guest 🌐Paolo Sironi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thepsironi/ 📘Quantum Sapiens: https://mybook.to/Quantum-Sapiens More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision

Many people in this country don't have access to reliable financial guidance — so they're increasingly asking a free chatbot instead. The problem? A general-purpose model trained on Reddit threads inherits Reddit's appetite for risk, and now that skew shows up in the conversations people are having about their money. In this new episode of One Vision Podcast, Alisha Chowdhury, Founder of Kiro Money, joins Theodora Lau to argue that the same technology, pointed with different intentions, can do the opposite: close the advice gap instead of widening it.Alisha traces the origin of Kiro back to a socioeconomically diverse Bangladeshi community in New Orleans — the "aunties and uncles" who taught her immigrant parents how to navigate an unfamiliar financial system — and to the University of Pennsylvania, where she saw real wealth and learned how it's built for the first time. After years as an investor at Vanguard and in private equity, she left for an MBA in London and started building the earliest version of Kiro: a low-code, RAG-based coach fed only sources she trusted. "Not garbage in."Today Kiro is an embedded financial intelligence layer that lets a bank or investing platform drop a context-aware AI coach directly into its own app, so users get guidance where their data and their relationship already live. A conversation about financial inclusion, the advice gap, and what it takes to build AI for money that people can actually trust. Because when it comes to money, trust has to be earned — and tested.🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.Keywords: AI, Fintech, GenerativeAI, AI Agents, Chatbots📍”The vision of why I started this is to give back to people like my parents, is to give back to a younger version of myself, and making sure that access truly means access.”Timestamps00:00 Welcome and Introductions01:22 Alisha’s Founder Roots02:38 From New Orleans to Finance04:48 Career Path and MBA Pivot07:35 What Kiro Money Builds10:19 AI Agents and Product Vision12:27 Trust, Emotion, and Community17:36 Safety Guardrails and Testing22:12 Impact Metrics and ClosingMore about our guests 🌐Alisha Chowdhury on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisha-chowdhury-163808122/More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision 

We're halfway through 2026, and the fintech landscape is moving faster than anyone can track. In this new episode of One Vision Podcast, Theo brings back three fan favorites — Jennifer White (J.D. Power), Tiffani Montez (Insider Intelligence / EMARKETER), and Julie Muhn (Finovate) — for a midyear roundtable that covers it all.What did the recent Finovate Spring reveal about where AI is actually landing in financial services? Tiffani shares the latest from the AI Visibility Leadership Board — why banks are no longer competing for attention, they're competing for recommendations, and why the rules of discovery have completely changed. Jennifer brings the data that captures our attention: 53% of consumers used AI in the last 3 months to ask a personal finance question. While awareness of bank-provided PFM tools runs 70–90%, adoption sits at 17–22%. Soft churn is now the real primacy threat. And Julie calls out one of the hardest questions in fintech: what's real, and what's just marketing?This episode covers AI as infrastructure, the trust paradox, agentic payments, GEO vs. SEO, and why the money leaving your primary bank might be the most important signal nobody's watching closely enough.🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.Keywords: AI, Fintech, GenerativeAI, AI Agents, AI Visibility, LLM📍 “AI is no longer being just tacked on to existing platforms, like customer service chatbot. It's now being integrated into solutions.” ~ Julie Muhn📍 “For decades banks spend billions of dollars competing for attention, and they're now competing for recommendations.” ~ Tiffani Montez📍  ”You being the center of how the consumer manages where their money flows is a potential new definition for primacy.” ~ Jennifer White📍 “ Would we all have a little agent that's running around trying to look for the best product for us and move money for us?” ~ Theodora LauTimestamps02:35 AI Gets Practical05:25 Consumers Using AI07:04 AI Visibility Leaderboard14:26 Trust Paradox 19:53 Primacy and Soft Churn25:38 What to Watch NextMore about our guests 🌐Jennifer White on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-white-57257424/ 🌐Julie Muhn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieschicktanz/ 🌐Tiffany Montez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffani-montez/ More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision 

In this episode of One Vision Podcast, Danny Friday, CEO and Founder of Sail, joins Theodora Lau to unpack why the "boring" corners of fintech — HSA and FSA accounts — are exactly where the next wave of meaningful innovation is hiding. Danny shares the origin story behind Sail: a claim over a Spanish-language dental receipt that exposed a deeper challenge about regulated industries: most of their software isn't broken by accident, it's broken by indifference to user experience. They dig into why no one had built itemized, embedded HSA/FSA infrastructure before now, what changed technically to make it possible, and why Danny insists AI should never make the hard calls. The conversation closes on a bigger bet: that within three to five years, every digital banking app will help people reimburse tax-advantaged expenses, and what that means for the industry. 🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.Keywords: AI, Fintech, Healthcare, User Experience#AI #fintech #healthcare #UX #innovation #podcast Timestamps & Hot takes00:00 — Welcome, and the energy Danny brought to his pitch in Delaware01:30 — Why "boring" markets are where the money (literally) sits untouched03:00 — The stat: Americans forfeit billions in unused FSA dollars every year 05:30 — The origin story: a Mexico dental receipt, a Spanish-language invoice, and an endless loop with a benefits administrator07:00 — Regulated industries and the quiet acceptance that "software just sucks"08:30 — How Sail eliminates the HSA/FSA card entirely and why no one had built this before13:00 — The accountability question: "In most AI products, the cost of a wrong answer is embarrassment. In ours, it's an IRS audit."14:30 — Hot take: "AI should make it easy for the 95% to disappear so a human can spend all their judgment on the 5% that matters."16:00 — Trust as "new car smell" 19:00 — Inheriting trust through distribution: why showing up inside existing benefits relationships matters21:00 — AI and the founder journey: "It collapsed the barrier between an idea and a prototype."23:30 — Why understanding your industry still can't be prompted into existence25:00 — What's next: Sail's move from app to infrastructure, and a bet that every banking app will handle tax-advantaged reimbursement within 3–5 years26:30 — Closing: "We found money for you."More about our guest 🌐Danny Friday on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-friday-b86930112/ More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision

Since 2023, illicit financial activity has surged by $1.3 trillion, reaching an estimated $4.4 trillion globally. The reason isn't a mystery: bad actors have AI now too.In this episode of One Vision Podcast, Theodora Lau sits down with Tyler Allen, CEO of Unit21, to unpack what's happening on the front lines of AI-powered fraud. Tyler was Unit21's founding software engineer and he is now leading the company through a moment he calls "have your cake and eat it too": AI is finally cheaper than the human labor it could replace, and unlike humans, it doesn't get alert fatigue.The conversation goes deeper on:• The fundamental asymmetry between attackers and defenders — and why AI made it worse• Why majority of AI pilots fail (hint: it's almost never the technology) • Why AI makes sense for financial crime prevention and detection • What he asks potential buyers, from ownership and goals, to risk tolerance and more • What every FI should be demanding from their AI vendorsA conversation about the new physics of fraud — and the human consequences of getting it wrong. 🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.📍Hot take:   ”It's a have your cake and eat it too moment … it feels good to be in a space where you do have societal impact.”Keywords: AI, AI Agents, Fintech, Fraud, Risk ManagementTimestamps00:00 Welcome and Intro00:26 Robots to AI Fraud01:31 AI Fuels Crime Surge05:19 Alert Fatigue and Checks07:26 Who Adopts AI Fastest09:30 First Questions for Buyers16:18 Vendor Evaluation Checklist22:25 Pilot to Production Lessons27:26 Tyler’s Career Origin Story31:36 Books, Podcasts, and LearningMore about our guest 🌐Tyler Allen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylertallen/ More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision