Adam Torres and Nicole Valentine, Esq. discuss fintech and the metaverse.
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Show Notes:
In this episode, Adam Torres and Nicole Valentine, Esq., FinTech Director at Milken Institute, explore the future of fintech and a metaverse project Milken Institute is launching.
Watch Full Interview:
About Nicole Valentine, Esq.
Nicole Valentine is the director, FinTech at the Milken Institute with over a decade of financial services, international mergers and acquisitions, technology, and innovation experience. As the FinTech director, Valentine explores market innovation and developments, analyzes alternative regulatory approaches, and offers policy recommendations to facilitate FinTech’s responsible development. Her work engages and educates policymakers and stakeholders to improve access to capital, financial inclusion, transparency, and compliance. Valentine’s thought leadership on digital assets, Web3, FinTech, the metaverse, and the future of finance is also frequently featured in news publications, including CNBC, Forbes, USA Today, Worth, Fox Business, CQ Roll Call, E-Crypto News, Miami Herald, and Protocol Braintrust (Politico). She weighs in on topics that include digital assets legislation and regulation, financial inclusion and fluency, and crypto’s cultural relevance in society.
An attorney by background, Valentine practiced mergers and acquisitions and securities at Wall Street law firm Debevoise & Plimpton and then served as assistant general counsel and vice president at global financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Valentine founded Synergy Business Development, where she served as business strategist, advisor, and consultant to CEOs and innovation leads at Fortune 500 companies, innovative start-ups, nonprofits, and government agencies. Valentine earned her JD from the University of Virginia School of Law and her BA from American University in political science. She is a member of the New York Bar.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres and I’m proud to announce we are at the Milken Global Conference 2024 in Beverly Hills, California. This is the final day. I think the president Bill Clinton’s on stage right now. We’re, we’re doing an interview.
Having a lot of fun, and first off, I’d like to say Nicole Valentine’s on the show, expert in FinTech, and I hear all these little rumors that there’s a metaverse going on. We’re going to get this out of Nicole, but first off, just welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam. Such a pleasure to be on your show. All right.
All right. So. I get excited. This is like my, and people laugh like, okay, I obviously am kind of one dimensional. So this is my Superbowl coming to Milken every year. I love it. It’s just fun. I don’t, I’m not a sports person. Like this is my sport. I know for those of you watching, you know, this long term listener is fine.
That being said, what gets you excited? Like what, what was exciting this year about Milken? Give me, give me some moments. Cause I’ve been in here doing interviews. So this is a Superbowl. Super Bowl Super Bowl. So we’re part of, you know, the team planning the Super Bowl. So, you know, we’re excited because this is our vision that has come to life.
We always purpose to have great ideas and great content and great programs and speakers to talk about the most greatest solutions for the most pressing issues. And so we made it. And so, you know, I focus on fintech and I was so excited to see so much fintech programming. We talked about the future of money.
We’re talking about digital innovation. We’re talking about AI. And so that content is amplified and what’s happening. We want to make sure that gets out there. And I’m also just excited about the energy. Of the people and relationships that are happening just in the hallways, the people that you run into heads of business, heads of state innovators.
We’re all connecting and we’re connecting to be purposed and our work of strengthening capital markets or, you know, impacting health care or impacting philanthropy or education. And I’m just excited that in this time and when, when in the world there’s a lot of stress, there’s a lot of tension. There’s a lot of questions about what the future of the world is going to be, that we have a lot of thought leaders and people that are ready to activate their ideas.
So that gets me so excited. Yeah. It is exciting and I want to jump around a little bit here. Talk to me about this metaverse, like what, what’s going on over here. So my listeners need to know. So, okay. I’m going to tease this out to you because it teases it out because it’s something that we’re building is still in development, but the FinTech program, you know, we’re focused on financial inclusion, access to capital, and looking at innovative technologies and how it could scale finance.
One of our we have a FinTech advisory council where I have great members on there. I have moon pay. I have circle, I have coin base. I interface, I interface with a lot of FinTechs on the council of Intuit, we have chime, we have AWS. I can go on and on. But we have a vintage advisory council member that opened a metaverse and so I said well, let’s experiment.
Why don’t we? Build a metaverse for the fintech program. Let’s experience it. And I think the thing about technology, which is great, and you know, we always talk about technology as having issues, it’s always going to have issues. It’s always going to be iterative. It’s always going to be something that you have to develop.
And I think we need to kind of jump in as like, we’re not technologists. We’re not engineers, but we have to experiment with it. So, so we’re experimenting with the metaverse and we really want to use our metaverse to bring more people into our financial education into understanding. More about what’s happening in the FinTech world.
So I think that one day, hopefully this, this 5, 000, you know, people that are here at the Milken Institute, we’ll have a metaverse where more people can come in and participate. That’d be fun. That’s, that’s going to be amazing. And I see it like, we’ll be back here one day. We’re going to be looking at this interview and X amount of years back.
Like, I remember when you were talking about that, Nicole, that’s amazing. The digital world. I mean, there’s new worlds that are being developed and we’re a part of it. And our imaginations. Are just have, have no boundary. So let’s try it and see where it goes, but I’m excited about just being in a pilot phase with it and, and building it and experiencing what design looks like.
So, so speaking of FinTech, I, I, I interviewed one of your colleagues Emily Musil Church earlier in the week, and she told me that one of the pillars that they’re going to be focusing on for next year’s Milken Matsepe Prize is going to be FinTech. So I’m like, oh my gosh, this is all you. So I mean, talk to me a little bit about that from your perspective.
Well, Emily is a powerhouse and I’m so excited about the work that her and her team are doing. I got a chance to interface with her team obviously to talk about kind of the design of the prize. You know, I personally have spent some time in Lagos, Nigeria. I live there for more than nine months consistently, and I got a chance to spend time just being in the local region and understanding what locals were experiencing around money transfer of money around banking and access to banking.
And, you know, I saw that In the Sub Saharan Africa and across the continent, there hasn’t always been a banking services financial services that that have been deployed to the masses. The banking and financial services that can be deployed are being deployed through fintech fintech. They has been, you know, they talk about leapfrogging, they’ve leapfrogged into using technology as their, as their first source.
And so it just, you know, the, the unicorns that exist in Africa. The majority of them are fintechs. And so that means that there’s obviously a need for the, the technology and the services. And, and there’s also just so many more ways that they can, you know, ideas around deploying and applications of it.
And so let them build, right, let them build from, from their set. And I think about when you talk about building and solutions. It’s always best to have the person or the team that is closest to the problem to be a part of the solution. And so if the problem is access to capital and being involved in financial ecosystems or making sure that there’s more access to capital or loans or access to insurance through InsurTech or through Fintech, I think it’s great that, you know, we take that and we give, you know, The, the groups that are there on the ground know the issues that put them in the driver’s seat and give them the capital so they can go out and build.
What does that do? I think sometimes, and the reason I’m asking this question is I feel like sometimes, especially our audience, I mean, 99 percent are US based probably for our audience. So I think sometimes we take it for granted. Maybe some of this infrastructure that we already have or access to capital or just things that are in place like, but when you think about like a mobile first economy or Some of the other things that have kind of developed, like what is access to capital provide for these growing economies access to capital provides everything.
I mean, the capital that’s in place, the capitalists lended. I mean, it can enable more opportunity, higher transaction value. Hiring, hiring teams, bringing on workforce. I mean, you, you have economies that do so much with so little, what happens when you give them more so that they can do more. And so I think to me, it’s just a no brainer.
It’s just simple math, just fuel, fuel the economies that, you know, have these great ideas, this great talent and this great need and the scale is there. So I, I think that that’s something that, you know, I focus on. Amazing. Well, Nicole, I just want to say, you know, this has been great having you on the show, snagging you for some time.
Final question going into, you know, after this conference, you’re the Superbowl team. You’re my team on the back end. I love it. What happens after this? I’ve never asked this question to any of the other experts. Like, what do you do after this? Like, is there like a break for a second? Probably not.
There’s probably not. It just goes right into the next thing, huh? What’s next? So, you know, we’re global, as you know, we, we, This is our Superbowl, but there’s, there’s many, many bowls that happen around the world. So I wish I could say I’m going to take a break, but we are, we are doing a lot in FinTech and we’re focused on making sure that we, we work on this metaverse.
I mean, so that’s, that’s in design and that’s happening. We’re also just making sure that we bring this AI conversation. To more people. So we’re going to be developing some more research on A. I. And finance in particular. How does A. I. And finance? How is it going to evolve? A. I. Has always been a part of finance, but this gen A.
I. Piece and kind of new applications. We want to make sure that we’re putting that out there. So we have a newsletter. Yeah, called fintech and focus where we just talk about and share all of these current events as well as relevant issues that we’d like to discuss. And so we’d like to make sure that, you know, that’s deployed and all the information’s out there so that we all can be a part of shaping this future.
And we all have the same amount of information to get there. Mm. Wonderful. I said the last question was the final question, but I guess I got one more. How do people get the newsletter? So it can go on the website and if you go into the, you press Fintech, you can see there’s a, there’s a subscribe button for our Fintech newsletter.
Fintech and Focus. Yeah. So come see us. We, we’d love to be engaged with, with everyone. I’m always. Looking for real world use cases of fintech new applications, innovative ideas, innovative founders that have ideas or they have, they see problems in the financial services sector that’s not being addressed.
We want to know what’s out there. We want to know how you’re handling it and we’d love to amplify those solutions. So reach out to us. Our program is always interested in knowing, knowing those types of innovators. Perfect. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put the links to the newsletter in the show notes, so you can just click on the links and head right on over.
And Nicole, again, thank you so much for making some time for us over at Mission Matters. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. This was so great. So fun. Let’s go
