2017 Innovators to Watch: 19 to 24

19. Adam Ludwin, CEO, Chain

Blockchain is currently one of the most prolific areas in finance, and as the leader of one of the most prolific blockchain startups in current operation, Adam Ludwin has had a busy, busy year.

The success of Ludwin’s startup, Chain, within fintech might be due to the fact that Ludwin is approaching blockchain technology as someone with a fintech background. A previous venture partner at fintech-focused firm RRE Ventures, Ludwin’s insight into financial systems is serving him well as he partners, experiments, and integrates bank after bank, FI after FI, with Chain’s blockchain technologies (the startup recently announced a partnership working with NASDAQ and Citibank).

20. Lilach Bar-David, CEO Pepper (Bank Leumi)

When Israel’s Bank Leumi (the name means National Bank in Hebrew) decided to launch the country’s first truly digital bank, Pepper, it tapped Lilach Bar-David, then executive vice president of business development and strategy at its subsidiary issuer, Leumi Card.

With an initial team of just eight, Bar-David set about redesigning the banking experience from the ground up, beginning with a Temenos core and a startup mindset, which is a natural thing in Tel Aviv, one of the world’s startup hotspots. Bar-David brought designers into every stage of development, and earlier this year launched Pepper with a trio of products — lending, saving, and peer-to-peer payments. It was also important to her that Pepper was not staffed by bankers, but rather people “passionate about the possibility to implement real change” and as obsessed with pleasing the customer as Amazon.

A new core, a new mindset, a new brand — it remains a mystery why banks in the U.S. fail to follow this path.

21. Silvio Tavares, CEO, Cardlinx

Card-linked offers would seem like yesterday’s news if it weren’t for the continued foundering of mobile payments. Cards seem to be moving from strength to strength, even getting embedded biometrics from Mastercard.

Silvio Tavares left his position as global head of information products at Visa to head up Cardlinx, an association promoting card-linked offers — not that the offers aren’t just as much “mobile-linked” as card-linked, Tavares stressed to Bank Innovation in a recent conversation. Loyalty and rewards are still mobile’s (last?) best hope, as Starbucks demonstrates. Apple is finally warming up to QR codes, whose U.S. adoption has been tamped down by patent issues, so it may be that the final victory of mobile payments comes from merchant-funded rewards, and advocates like Tavares and his group at Cardlinx, which includes major players such as Microsoft, Mastercard, Discover, Samsung, and Facebook.

22. Marco Streng, CEO, Genesis Mining

With the price of bitcoin pushing $3,000, you’d have to be an absolute fool not put all your money into it today, ammiright?

Maybe not — after all, bitcoin has crashed and will crash again (and as soon as it does you better — buy buy buy!). Marco Streng, CEO of Genesis Mining, takes a different approach. His company, which mines cryptocurrency using renewable energy in Iceland (most coins are still mined in China, using coal power) offers investors the chance to buy hash power — the mining power itself, which will go into a diversified spread of coins, moving risk away from your current bitcoin-heavy portfolio. Genesis is able to compete on price using more expensive labor and facilities than its Chinese competitors, because Iceland has an abundance of geothermal power, a cold climate, and a friendly, stable government. The skyrocketing price of bitcoin will bring more attention to other cryptocurrencies as investment vehicles as well, and if just one of them hits and goes from $0.000038 to $00.14, well then, baby you’re a rich man, too.

23. Ben Lynch, Founder, Jude

Is the bank of the future going to be fueled by bots? Maybe in New Zealand, with startups like Ben Lynch’s Jude. Breaking into the fairly innovative New Zealand banking system is harder than it sounds, but Lynch’s efforts to build an intuitive assistant seem to pay off. Lynch’s startup, launched in May 2016, built Jude: a banking bot that can vacillate between multiple accounts, set calendar reminders, and transfer funds. As chatbots and voice assistants move more into the mainstream of financial services, helped along by the emergence of devices such as Apple’s new Homepod, the Google Home, and of course, the Alexa assistant in consumer homes, “banks” like Jude might become more and more common in the coming years–Lynch is already on it.

24. Andrei Cherny, CEO, Aspiration

Millennials want banking to be simple, digital, and — apparently — socially-conscious. Aspiration has all three pieces covered. The company’s CEO Andrei Cherny envisions a different kind of bank — one that “helps make the world a better place.”

“Customers want more than just a piece of technology, they can get any financial company that they want, so they need something different,” Cherny told Bank Innovation recently. “It used to be about choosing ‘closest branch,’ now it’s about choosing a brand that speaks to you and your beliefs.” And for many customers, those beliefs lay outside of their financial lives. “We saw that there’s this huge growth in the percentage of people who are thinking of economic factors when they make purchases,” Cherny said. “But there’s never been a way for people to know,” until Aspiration’s new tool, launched in April, which rates companies based on their impact on, say, environment, or how they treat their employees.

Conscious and digital banking? Count us in.

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