March 11th, 2012 in Feature, Sustainable Banking, Transparency Technologies | No Comments »
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.
Our TEDxNewWallStreet speakers were amazing, and let the audience at the Computer History Museum, and on YouTube understand how bankers and bank technologists in Silicon Valley are changing the paradigm, again:
- 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 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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December 11th, 2010 in Social Capital Eco-Sphere, Sustainable Banking | No Comments »
In Colonial America, states issued their local currency so as to achieve independence from the banking and bankers of the Old World in Great Britain and Europe. Today, the Bank of North Dakota formed in 1919 is all that remains of the state-owned bank tradition.
In response to 2008’s Credit Crisis, U.S. taxpayers pumped $608 billion into the banking system (of which $367 billion has been repaid as of August 2013). An immense DC-Wall Street-Main Street public debate followed, along with passage of The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act (echoing reform measures passed after every previous domestic banking crisis), and the lobbyists on Capitol Hill carving the reforms into shards and loopholes without sufficient enforcement budget or the will to prosecute offenders at “too big to fail” banks.
Two options for public investment remain relatively unexplored:
- Reviving State-owned banks who, by reason of being government-owned, would be subject to higher public purpose accountability, conflict of interest and transparency rules
- Investing in a national program of banking services innovation and redesign, through smaller new banks and non-bank organizations
Urban Logic has surveyed global state-owned banking history, and posted it online at StateOwnedBanks.com (as a Wikimedia research site and to reduce spam, please create an account to access our work there). For an illustrated timeline of multiple banking crises, recessions and other developments in the U.S., and legislative responses to them, download this PDF, and because it is 600 years wide, zoom in 12 times (12x).
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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December 11th, 2010 in Sustainable Banking, Transparency Technologies | No Comments »
Over the past few years, Urban Logic has looked at how banks reflect society’s priorities, and cause multiple impacts in doing so.
In order to understand “banking,” numerous books, professional journals and a deluge of popular works after the 2008 Credit Crisis have come forward to demystify the “black box of banking”, so that it can be simply understood.
Two of our favorite books that explain banking as it is currently practiced today are:
Other good reads on banking and money tell tales of bankers and banker hubris, and those are fun literature too!
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).
More Posts - Website
Follow Me: