Provoke.fm Media

Hosted by Brett King, JP Nicols, Jason Henrichs

Business Entrepreneurship

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Episodes

100

Latest episode

Oct 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

#1 Global Fintech Network

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60 recent

October 22, 202632 min

The New Kid on the Neobank Block

Barq means lightning in Arabic, and for once the brand name might be underselling it. One million users in three weeks, more than 15 million users across over 210 nationalities today, with around $118 billion processed since launch. In this episode hosts Jason Henrichs and Brett King are joined by Mohamed Al Sabea, Chief of Staff and Chief Strategy Officer at barq, to discuss the rapid growth and strategic approach of barq, a digital payments company in Saudi Arabia. For context, barq has achieved in two years what has taken many of today’s neobanks the better part of a decade to accomplish. And then last month, they did something even rarer: raising $329.5 million in a Series A funding round that values the business at $1.85 billion. It is the largest Series A round in MENA / GCC history. Barq is also the fastest growing neobank outside of China serving 70% of the Saudi banked population in just two years. Listen as the trio explores how barq achieved its lightning-fast user acquisition, built trust through transparency, and planned for regional expansion and new product offerings. Stay tuned for more!

October 16, 202657 min

The Philosophy of Consciousness

In this week’s Futurist network we are joined live in the Dubai studio with two active AI architects, Jean-Baptiste Isnard (founder of Quantum Spirit) and Dr. Julia Michelin (founder of LumaBrush AI) a returning guest. The issue of whether AI is conscious continues to be debated at large but the question is perhaps not about if they are conscious but how the debate itself will change the view of human consciousness itself. In this very philosophical conversation Jean Baptiste and Julia present us with many of the challenges that emerge when mankind has to deal with embedded AI that is smarter than us collectively, while not necessarily being conscious or aligned. There’s no debate that AI is coming, but perhaps the biggest contribution it will make is helping us instead our own consciousness and the breadth of intelligence in the world around us.

October 15, 202626 min

Nu Way of Banking: Nubank Makes Its Mark in the U.S. and More

In this episode, Brett King sits down with Carl Rivera, Chief Product Officer at Nubank—one of the world’s largest digital banking platforms—to discuss how Nubank is redefining modern banking. With customer-centricity at its core, Nu continues to pave new paths in financial services. In this conversation, Brett and Carl discuss Nubank’s exponential growth, international expansion, U.S. market entry, design philosophy and product strategy. They also explore Nubank’s recent launch and leap forward with Nu Global, a multi-currency digital account for people with global lives. From the beginning, Nu had a cultural value mission: to be the first bank that customers love fanatically. People go to banks for the most important decisions in their lives. By prioritizing customer experience and intuitive UI, Nu ensures users can easily navigate financial tasks—from KYC to global remittances—with the same ease as using a familiar social network or app. Building across borders. Listen now and stay tuned for more!

October 12, 202625 min

The Collision – What AI Does to Us

In this episode of Banker’s Bookshelf, Paolo Sironi sits with Eric So, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Global Economics and Behavioral Science, to discuss his new book “The Collision”. The conversation opens on a distinction most AI talk skips. The industry asks what the technology can do for us. So asks what it is doing to us: to the skills we still bother to build, to our tolerance for difficulty, to what we remember, and to the way we judge the world. He treats AI less as a tool upgrade than as an invasive form of intelligence already reshaping the people who use it. The frame is Steve Jobs’s 1980 line that a computer is a bicycle for the mind, the most efficient mover on the chart. So’s revision is blunt. In the age of AI, the bicycle has become a motorcycle. It offers speed and self-propulsion, and it multiplies the cost of a bad decision. The title is chosen for the same reason. “Adoption” and “shift” sound orderly. “Collision” names a rapid force that is changing human intelligence and machine intelligence at the same time. From the research, he draws four rules. Value the struggle: products sell the removal of friction, but struggle is how knowledge becomes yours. Students who outsource essays look strong at home and collapse in the exam room. Value who you are without AI: a polished deck you cannot defend is not your work, and the same failure shows up in a client pitch. Reinvest the surplus: history’s transformative tools did not merely speed the old task; they let people reach harder problems. Saved time spent scrolling is a wasted surplus. Make AI a cognitive trainer: personalized tutoring has long delivered a two-sigma learning gain, and AI can approximate it only if it walks you to the answer instead of handing it over. Banking sits in the middle of the argument. The sector’s instinct is to strip friction and automate cost. So’s warning is cognitive short-termism: fewer juniors, less mentoring, and a thinner bench of people who can still trace a problem when the model is wrong. Efficiency that deskills the institution is not a saving. It is a debt. The episode is a call to treat AI as a behavioral problem, not only a productivity one.

October 2, 202659 min

The Voice of the Future

Alex Serdiuk is the co-founder and CEO of AI voice company Respeecher in Kiev. Alex and Rob Tercek discuss how synthetic voice generation will transform the motion picture industry, including some surprising reversals such as: how AI voices will change the global distribution strategy for feature films; how human actors can benefit from AI voice clones; why ethical approaches to AI yield optimal results; how the talent guilds have come to accept AI in film production; the business value of trust in times of rapid change; new legislation to prevent deep fakes.

October 1, 202633 min

Episode 19: Investing in Africa’s Digital Future (September 2026)

In this episode of Breaking Banks Africa , Matteo Rizzi sits down with Selma Ribica, founder of First Circle Capital, to explore Africa’s evolving fintech and venture capital landscape. Ribica reflects on her journey from M-Pesa to investing, highlighting how mobile money demonstrated the potential for technology to bring financial services to underserved populations. She explains why First Circle Capital focuses on early-stage fintech founders and how regulation, talent, capital and market maturity shape opportunities across Africa. The discussion also covers regional differences, developing entrepreneurial talent, helping startups scale, and the realities of building and fundraising for a first-time African venture capital fund.

October 1, 202651 min

Emerging Infrastructure for Next Gen AI-based Financial Tech

As banking, wealth, and commerce converge, customers increasingly expect one view of their financial life — a view they often get from third-party apps rather than their bank. Are banks misdiagnosing what is holding them back? In this episode Brett King connects with Rob Rooney, Co-Founder and CEO of Hyperlayer to discuss emerging infrastructure for next-generation AI-based financial technology. Some listeners will know Rob from his 30-plus years at Morgan Stanley. He ran Morgan Stanley International through Brexit, and later became Global Head of Technology, Operations and Firm Resilience. Hyperlayer is addressing a challenge common to almost every bank: the desire to launch products as fast as the neobanks, but institutions are hesitant to touch the core. By placing a programmable layer on top of a bank’s existing core system, Hyperlayer enables institutions to build and launch new products in weeks, with governance built in from day one. Listen as Brett and Rob discuss: What convergence costs banks Why seamless banking is an infrastructure problem, not a design problem Why core replacement is not the answer and more Enjoy the episode, and don’t forget to share!

September 28, 202621 min

Pulp Finction

In this episode, Paolo Sironi welcomes Chris Skinner for an unconventional episode: not the presentation of a business manual, but a financial thriller. In Diary of a Ponzi Scheme — the first novel in Skinner’s Pulp Finction series — a broke operator launches a fund invested in stablecoins, crypto, and digital currencies, then pulls his wealthy circle into a scam that only works as long as new money keeps arriving. Skinner explains why he moved into fiction: to smuggle how finance works into a story, so readers learn tokenization, CBDCs, and crypto without being lectured. The conversation ranges across the wider series like fintech fundraising, a last branch in town, climate activism, and an AI attack that stops payments to return, again and again, to the same question: how do you scale trust?

September 21, 20261 hr 6 min

Open Source and Superintelligence

Independent AI researcher Mark Pesce returns to the Futurists with an update on the latest advances in open source artificial intelligence. Mark talks to co-hosts Brett King and Rob Tercek about a wide range of topics: small open-source models that run on the desktop and the smartphone; AI agents that work the “night shift”; NVIDIA’s pivot to open source AI; the disruptive threat to the leading US AI labs; the rapid rise of AI-enabled intrusions and the threat to the smartphone; personal AI filtering and assistants; AI agents to manage the smart home; faceless appliances as a precursor to liquid interfaces and the end of apps; fostering cognitive dependency and offloading cognitive work to companion apps; pacing the frontier; super intelligence; geopolitical rivalry.

September 17, 202635 min

Unlocking Financial Access

As a Peace Corps volunteer with an engineering degree from MIT, Doug Ricket, Founder and CEO, PayJoy, a leading financial services provider for underserved consumers across emerging markets, learned first-hand what it means to build trust in underserved communities. The experience in West Africa sparked a long-held interest that eventually put Doug’s engineering and tech background to work to make a true financial impact and build a mission-driven business for underserved consumers, 20 million of them to date across 9 countries (Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Colombia, and the Philippines) Listen as Doug shares his founder journey with Brett King and explains why he left a comfortable path in tech to help first-time borrowers build credit and access broader financial services and payments. Smartphones have become essential economic infrastructure. A smartphone can be a customer’s first productive financial asset and first step into formal financial access, creating financial opportunity for consumers otherwise locked out of traditional credit and payments infrastructure. 40% of PayJoy’s customers are new to credit; 37% are first-time smartphone users. How does PayJoy build a credit profile for someone who’s never had access to credit before? What sets their approach apart from traditional lenders? Listen to find out.