TEDxNewWallStreet – Re-imagining Banking built in and for the Information Age
2008 – 2012 had seen a stubborn recession, shattering personal wealth and global confidence in the largest banks. The Occupy Wall Street Protests in New York and London pressed for reforms to the banking system, by legislative, regulatory and judicial means.
By March 2012, Silicon Valley had been pursuing its agenda of revolutionizing the banking system through innovations for nearly a decade. Square did for in store local purchasing what PayPal did for online shopping, moving billions in credit card payments out of the hands of bankers and into the hands of “payments processors.” Kiva created a disruptive microfinance finance, uncontrolled by and side-steppng at scale the administrative overhead of large sprawling nonprofit organizations. Kickstarter anticipated the JOBS Act‘s embrace of crowdfunding small businesses, using elegant design storytelling to pre-sell products that have yet to be built.
Silicon Valley is well known for changing paradigms that concentrated power in entertainment, telecommunications and automotive industries.
Thus, on March 11, 2012, Urban Logic decided to convene TEDxNewWallStreet as a day-long exploration of what it might look like for Silicon Valley to be the New Wall Street, and ask how it might be fairer, safer, cheaper and see and show its impacts with greater transparency.
Moving opaque, dysfunctional, predatory banking into the digital age isn’t progress.
Fixing banking to become highly-transparent and impacts-aaware, that’s progress.
- Ami Kassar (New York Times’ Small Business Credit Opionator)
- Bill Harris (founder of Personal Wealth, and former CEO of PayPal and Intuit)
- Ellen Brown (author of Web of Debt, and founder of Public Banking Institute)
- Howard Gould (co-founder of Tundra Capital, the hedge fund for transforming dirty businesses to cleaner ones)
- Sean Gourley (algorithmic trading and big data analytics pioneer, co-founder of Quid)
- Rosco Hill (serial entrepreneur and a fellow at Palantir Technologies)
- Ken Kruszka (mobile remittances visionary, co-founder of m-Via)
- Joe Lonsdale (big data visionary, investor and philanthropist, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Addepar and other Silicon Valley paradigm shifters)
- Dr. Simon Roberts (associate director of the Foresight Innovation and Incubator at Arup Engineering)
- Dr. Douglas Merrill (founder/CEO of ZestCash, changing the FICO paradigm)
- Shvani Siroya (founder of InVenture, micro-investment platform)
- Jacob Soll (a Macarthur Fellow, now Professor of History and Accounting at University of Southern California)
- Robert Strong (the Comedy Magician)
- Peter Vander Auwera (SWIFT’s Innovation leader)
- Tom Van Dyck (visionary in the field of socially-responsible investing, now at RBC Capital’s Wealth Management Group)
- Camilla Webster (Forbes On-Air Business Journalist)
Bruce Cahan
Bruce Cahan is CEO and co-founder of Urban Logic, a nonprofit that harnesses finance and technology to change how systems think, act and feel. He is an Ashoka Fellow, aa Lecturer at Stanford University's Department of Management Science & Engineering, a Distinguished Scholar at Stanford mediaX and a former CodeX Fellow at Stanford's Center for Legal Informatics. Bruce was trained as an international finance lawyer at Weil Gotshal & Manges in NYC (10 years) and as merchant banker at Asian Oceanic in Hong Kong (2 years). Bruce graduated The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. Economics 1976) and Temple Law School (J.D. 1979). Bruce has been licensed to practice law in California (2006), New York (1980) and Pennsylvania (1980).
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