Breaking Banks

There’s a new wave coming. Unlike the prior banking industry waves of ATMs, online banking and mobile, this new wave is happening fast and faster than ever before. With rapid adoption of LLMs and AI, financial institutions need to be prepared

In this episode, Ryan Caldwell, MX’s Founder and CEO speaks with Breaking Banks’ host Jason Henrichs live from the stage of Money Experience Summit.

The new wave and banking channel is an AI agent. Once engaged with an agent, the stickiness is high. The AI agent works for the customer, not the bank, and it lives inside someone else’s app. Banks need to be having complex conversations to maintain relationships and trust built over decades, and even centuries, to help customers continue to fulfill dreams and achieve strong financial lives, the true nobility of banking.

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

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