Milken Conference 2024: Future of FinTech and the Metaverse

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

Mission Matters Business Podcast with Adam Torres