Breaking Banks

For 20 years, U.S. Bank has had a formal innovation practice.

U.S. Bank was the bank that other banks pointed to when they talked about innovation. As the approach has matured, what’s striking is how U.S. Bank has turned this innovation practice into an actual discipline, not just a department, with its influence felt across the whole bank.  An intellectual property practice that has patents, 70,000 employees behind it as potential innovators, and dedicated Centers of Excellence for AI and Blockchain.

In this episode, Jason Henrichs sits down with Don Relyea, U.S. Bank’s Chief Innovation Officer, at the MX Money Experience Summit 2026

Listen as Don shares personal insights and the inner workings of the 20-year innovation journey at U.S. Bank, what will matter to customers years from now and what innovation really means when AI agents start making decisions about our money.

Barq means lightning in Arabic, and for once the brand name might be underselling it. One million users in three weeks, more than 15 million users across over 210 nationalities today, with around $118 billion processed since launch.

In this episode hosts Jason Henrichs and Brett King are joined by Mohamed Al Sabea, Chief of Staff and Chief Strategy Officer at barq, to discuss the rapid growth and strategic approach of barq, a digital payments company in Saudi Arabia.

For context, barq has achieved in two years what has taken many of today’s neobanks the better part of a decade to accomplish. And then last month, they did something even rarer: raising $329.5 million in a Series A funding round that values the business at $1.85 billion. It is the largest Series A round in MENA / GCC history. Barq is also the fastest growing neobank outside of China serving 70% of the Saudi banked population in just two years.

Listen as the trio explores how barq achieved its lightning-fast user acquisition, built trust through transparency, and planned for regional expansion and new product offerings.

Stay tuned for more!

In this episode, Brett King sits down with Carl Rivera, Chief Product Officer at Nubank—one of the world’s largest digital banking platforms—to discuss how Nubank is redefining modern banking.

With customer-centricity at its core, Nu continues to pave new paths in financial services. In this conversation, Brett and Carl discuss Nubank’s exponential growth, international expansion, U.S. market entry, design philosophy and product strategy. They also explore Nubank’s recent launch and leap forward with Nu Global, a multi-currency digital account for people with global lives.

From the beginning, Nu had a cultural value mission: to be the first bank that customers love fanatically. People go to banks for the most important decisions in their lives. By prioritizing customer experience and intuitive UI, Nu ensures users can easily navigate financial tasks—from KYC to global remittances—with the same ease as using a familiar social network or app. Building across borders.

Listen now and stay tuned for more!

As banking, wealth, and commerce converge, customers increasingly expect one view of their financial life — a view they often get from third-party apps rather than their bank. Are banks misdiagnosing what is holding them back?

In this episode Brett King connects with Rob Rooney, Co-Founder and CEO of Hyperlayer to discuss emerging infrastructure for next-generation AI-based financial technology. Some listeners will know Rob from his 30-plus years at Morgan Stanley. He ran Morgan Stanley International through Brexit, and later became Global Head of Technology, Operations and Firm Resilience.

Hyperlayer is addressing a challenge common to almost every bank: the desire to launch products as fast as the neobanks, but institutions are hesitant to touch the core. By placing a programmable layer on top of a bank’s existing core system, Hyperlayer enables institutions to build and launch new products in weeks, with governance built in from day one.

 Listen as Brett and Rob discuss:

What convergence costs banks

Why seamless banking is an infrastructure problem, not a design problem

Why core replacement is not the answer

and more

Enjoy the episode, and don’t forget to share!

As a Peace Corps volunteer with an engineering degree from MIT, Doug Ricket, Founder and CEO, PayJoy, a leading financial services provider for underserved consumers across emerging markets, learned first-hand what it means to build trust in underserved communities. The experience in West Africa sparked a long-held interest that eventually put Doug’s engineering and tech background to work to make a true financial impact and build a mission-driven business for underserved consumers, 20 million of them to date across 9 countries (Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Colombia, and the Philippines)

Listen as Doug shares his founder journey with Brett King and explains why he left a comfortable path in tech to help first-time borrowers build credit and access broader financial services and payments.

Smartphones have become essential economic infrastructure. A smartphone can be a customer’s first productive financial asset and first step into formal financial access, creating financial opportunity for consumers otherwise locked out of traditional credit and payments infrastructure.

40% of PayJoy’s customers are new to credit; 37% are first-time smartphone users. How does PayJoy build a credit profile for someone who’s never had access to credit before? What sets their approach apart from traditional lenders? Listen to find out.