The Irish Tech News Podcast

Briana Marbury grew up in Detroit with one bank in the neighborhood. She opened an account after her first job. Then came the overdraft fees, and the fees on the fees. She had a choice: gas and groceries, or the bank. The bank account closed. So she went to the check-cashing place on the corner, five dollars at a time, for years — while the unpaid fees went to collections and marked a credit file that had barely started.  
Financial exclusion doesn't always look like someone outside the banking system. Sometimes it looks like a closed account, a check-cashing counter, and a damaged credit file. Briana Marbury, President & CEO of Interledger Foundation, joins Theodora Lau to talk about living it — and about the unglamorous infrastructure work that could stop it happening to someone else.
But technology in and of itself was not going to be enough. They close the conversation on what’s next: Mexico, Colombia, and a growing push into US community banks and CDFIs. And on what gives Briana hope: that when she walks into a room with a government, they're not asking whether interoperability matters. They're asking how fast it can happen.
Hot take 🔥"I have a choice between either buying gas, buying groceries, or paying a bank fee bill — when I can go access my money right away at this corner store for five dollars."
🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
Keywords: fintech, personal finance, financial inclusion, payments, cross-border payments, remittances, Interledger Protocol, Briana Marbury, Interledger Foundation
#FinancialInclusion #CrossBorderPayments #Fintech #Payments
Timestamp:
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
01:09 Interledger Foundation Origins
02:59 Hidden Financial Exclusion
05:54 Personal Stories and Literacy
07:55 Interoperability for Inclusion
09:16 Fixing Cross Border Payments
13:48 Why Fees Persist
15:50 Lessons Working with Regulators
18:11 Plans for 2027 
More about our guest 
🌐Briana Marbury on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianamarbury/ 
🌐Interledger Foundation: https://interledger.org/  
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 
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Cork-based Zyte  recently released new research, after analysing 25,000 websites across the globe. The data suggests that the Open Web is Now ‘The Controlled Web’. Tech leaders are facing a strategic decision: allow open access to maximise visibility in search, or erect technical barriers to protect their content. I recently caught up with Shane Evans, the Founder and CEO Zyte to find out more about this.
Shane talks about his background, what Zyte does, AI, Zyte’s new research, and more.
More about Zyte:
Zyte believes that businesses deserve a smooth pathway to data. For more than a decade they have led the way in building powerful, easy-to-use ways to collect, format and deliver web data, quickly, dependably and at scale helping thousands of organisations make smarter business decisions, secure competitive advantage and drive sustainable growth.

Cork has become a cybersecurity success story, and the city's talent, universities and quality of life have helped attract and retain global technology companies for more than two decades. To find out more about this I caught up with Marianne Lee, Vice President, HR Europe for TrendAI, a business unit of global cybersecurity leader Trend Micro.
Maruanne talks about her background, why Cork has become a cybersecurity success story, Ireland's growing influence in global cybersecurity, how AI is hanging cybersecurity careers and more.
More about Marianne Lee:
Based in Cork, Marianne has been with the company since it established its European HQ in the city in 2003 and has had a front-row seat to both the evolution of the cybersecurity industry and Cork's growth into a major technology hub.
Today, Trend AI employs almost 300 people at its Model Farm Road campus and continues to invest in talent development, university partnerships and emerging technologies, particularly in AI and cybersecurity.

Every few years someone tells us banking is about to be disrupted. It never quite happens. 
So when Dharmesh Mistry and Lou Carlozo came on to talk about their new book, The Intelligent Ledger, I asked: Why is this time different?
Dharmesh's take? Banking has adopted plenty of individual technologies, from mainframe to client-server, internet, mobile, cloud. None of them disrupted anything. But the iPhone didn't win by being a better phone. Nokia was building a better phone. Kodak was building a better camera. Garmin was building a better GPS. The iPhone was all of them at once, and the market reorganised around it in under five years.
His claim is that banking now has its own version of that convergence — what he and Lou call the Quanvergence: open, accessible data; agentic AI; tokenisation; and quantum, arriving together rather than in sequence. Not the best AI bank. Not the best tokenised rails. All of it, in one place. 
So platform or pipe? And who will win? 
📱The Intelligent Ledger ships at the end of September from Palgrave Macmillan.

Hot take 🔥"Banks have already chosen pipe, but they're not admitting it. Nobody wants to hear it. If you're selling products and that's all that you're doing, you're making your money from margin on a product — that makes you a pipe. So just admit it and get on with it." — Dharmesh Mistry
Hot take 🔥"Change or die by 2032." — Lou Carlozo

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Keywords: Fintech, Financial Services, Agentic AI, AI, Quantum, Digital Transformation, Tokenization 

Timestamp:
00:00 Welcome and Guests
00:50 Introducing The Intelligent Ledger
03:29 Why Five Years
06:58 Convergence and Platform Shift
09:31 Skepticism and CEO Courage
13:38 Four Forces 
17:10 Small Banks Can Compete
22:05 Bold Claims and 2032 Deadline
34:37 Release Dates and Where to Buy

More about our guests 
🌐Dharmesh Mistry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharmeshmistry2020/ 
🌐Lou Carlozo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loucarlozo/ 

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

Alli AI, an AEO and SEO automation and white-label platform, recently published a really interesting white paper about invisibility for Fortune 500 companies, and the problem is true for European companies too, including Irish ones and could be a huge revenue depressor.
Alli AI has also released a Chrome extension that shows how visible websites are to AI. For example, if you run Costco through the Chrome extension you get 7 percent visibility. In Ireland the number is even worse with Musgrave Marketplace getting 1 percent visibility. To find out more about this I spoke to Kyle Duck the founder and CEO of Alli AI.
Kyle talks about his background, AI,  Alli AI Crome extension, Cloudflare and more.
More about Kyle Duck:
Kyle Duck is the founder and CEO of Alli AI, an AEO and SEO automation and white-label platform. Alli AI has served over 26,000 companies, from agencies to enterprise teams. Kyle's recent work focuses on how the internet is splitting between serving the needs of humans vs AI agents. 
Alli AI and Kyle have been featured in Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Hubspot, ClickUp, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and more.