The Irish Tech News Podcast

The National Final of the Student Enterprise Programme took place recently with 88 students competing for the title of Student Enterprise of the Year. The programme itself is Ireland’s largest student entrepreneurship initiative, with over 500,000 students having started businesses since 2003. To find out more I spoke to one of the finalists Seán FitzGerald, a fourth-year student who has created software Fleet Monitor, designed to predict the movements of ships attempting to avoid maritime sanctions across every ocean globally.
I spoke Sean about his background, the  Student Enterprise Programme, what Fleet Monitor does, and more.
More about Fleet Monitor:
A standout in this year’s programme, Fleet Monitor uses Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to track the position, heading, speed and size of vessels. The platform then cross checks this data in real time against official EU and Nato sanction lists to identify known or suspected shadow-fleet ships.

We're halfway through 2026, and the fintech landscape is moving faster than anyone can track. In this new episode of One Vision Podcast, Theo brings back three fan favorites — Jennifer White (J.D. Power), Tiffani Montez (Insider Intelligence / EMARKETER), and Julie Muhn (Finovate) — for a midyear roundtable that covers it all.
What did the recent Finovate Spring reveal about where AI is actually landing in financial services? Tiffani shares the latest from the AI Visibility Leadership Board — why banks are no longer competing for attention, they're competing for recommendations, and why the rules of discovery have completely changed. Jennifer brings the data that captures our attention: 53% of consumers used AI in the last 3 months to ask a personal finance question. While awareness of bank-provided PFM tools runs 70–90%, adoption sits at 17–22%. Soft churn is now the real primacy threat. And Julie calls out one of the hardest questions in fintech: what's real, and what's just marketing?
This episode covers AI as infrastructure, the trust paradox, agentic payments, GEO vs. SEO, and why the money leaving your primary bank might be the most important signal nobody's watching closely enough.

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Keywords: AI, Fintech, GenerativeAI, AI Agents, AI Visibility, LLM

📍 “AI is no longer being just tacked on to existing platforms, like customer service chatbot. It's now being integrated into solutions.” ~ Julie Muhn

📍 “For decades banks spend billions of dollars competing for attention, and they're now competing for recommendations.” ~ Tiffani Montez

📍  ”You being the center of how the consumer manages where their money flows is a potential new definition for primacy.” ~ Jennifer White

📍 “ Would we all have a little agent that's running around trying to look for the best product for us and move money for us?” ~ Theodora Lau

Timestamps
02:35 AI Gets Practical
05:25 Consumers Using AI
07:04 AI Visibility Leaderboard
14:26 Trust Paradox 
19:53 Primacy and Soft Churn
25:38 What to Watch Next

More about our guests 
🌐Jennifer White on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-white-57257424/ 
🌐Julie Muhn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieschicktanz/ 
🌐Tiffany Montez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffani-montez/ 

More about our host and One Vision Podcast 
🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 
🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 
🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 
🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision

At the recent Future Health Summit which was held in Dublin, Nordic Europe delivered a special presentation on why Ireland has reached a pivotal moment in patient safety, with medication related harm responsible for around 50% of preventable harm globally.
To find out more about this I spoke to Nordic Europe’s Vice President of Strategy and Transformation Bill Meredith, and their Vice President of Strategy & Country Manager for Ireland Claire Staple.
Bill and Claire spoke to me about their background, what Nordic does, digital transformation reshaping medication safety across Ireland and more.
More about Nordic Europe:
From technology to teams, Nordic provides the end-to-end expertise that healthcare systems throughout Europe need to advance clinical and operational excellence through technology. 
They combine deep healthcare insight with technical and strategic expertise to help providers integrate new systems, improve workflows, and elevate patient care with confidence.

In this episode of One Vision Podcast, Danny Friday, CEO and Founder of Sail, joins Theodora Lau to unpack why the "boring" corners of fintech — HSA and FSA accounts — are exactly where the next wave of meaningful innovation is hiding. 
Danny shares the origin story behind Sail: a claim over a Spanish-language dental receipt that exposed a deeper challenge about regulated industries: most of their software isn't broken by accident, it's broken by indifference to user experience. They dig into why no one had built itemized, embedded HSA/FSA infrastructure before now, what changed technically to make it possible, and why Danny insists AI should never make the hard calls. The conversation closes on a bigger bet: that within three to five years, every digital banking app will help people reimburse tax-advantaged expenses, and what that means for the industry. 

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Keywords: AI, Fintech, Healthcare, User Experience
#AI #fintech #healthcare #UX #innovation #podcast 

Timestamps & Hot takes
00:00 — Welcome, and the energy Danny brought to his pitch in Delaware
01:30 — Why "boring" markets are where the money (literally) sits untouched
03:00 — The stat: Americans forfeit billions in unused FSA dollars every year 
05:30 — The origin story: a Mexico dental receipt, a Spanish-language invoice, and an endless loop with a benefits administrator
07:00 — Regulated industries and the quiet acceptance that "software just sucks"
08:30 — How Sail eliminates the HSA/FSA card entirely and why no one had built this before
13:00 — The accountability question: "In most AI products, the cost of a wrong answer is embarrassment. In ours, it's an IRS audit."
14:30 — Hot take: "AI should make it easy for the 95% to disappear so a human can spend all their judgment on the 5% that matters."
16:00 — Trust as "new car smell" 
19:00 — Inheriting trust through distribution: why showing up inside existing benefits relationships matters
21:00 — AI and the founder journey: "It collapsed the barrier between an idea and a prototype."
23:30 — Why understanding your industry still can't be prompted into existence
25:00 — What's next: Sail's move from app to infrastructure, and a bet that every banking app will handle tax-advantaged reimbursement within 3–5 years
26:30 — Closing: "We found money for you."

**

More about our guest 
🌐Danny Friday on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-friday-b86930112/ 

More about our host and One Vision Podcast 
🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 
🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 
🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 
🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision

Robotics and AI comes in many shapes and sizes revolutionising many different sectors. One of these sectors being revolutionised is the commercial cleaning industry, using autonomous cleaning, robotics, and innovation creating efficiency.
To find out more about this I spoke to Shane O’Flaherty from CleaningMachines.ie. Shane talks about his background, what CleaningMachines.ie does, robots, AI and more.
More about CleaningMachines.ie:
CleaningMachines.ie have been supplying and servicing the cleaning industry for decades. In that time, they have built up a wealth of knowledge and earned ourselves a skilled and committed team.
At CleaningMachines.ie, they don’t just sell cleaning equipment, they live and breathe it. Behind every scrubber dryer, industrial vacuum, or ride-on sweeper we offer, there’s a story of family, grit, and generations of hands-on experience.