Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:00:04 · Laura Watkins, Pav Gill
[00:00:04] S0: This is Fintech Insider News. This week, Confide launches Agentic Governance Platform. Acorns buys Gen Z social finance app Fritch, and Huntington Bank partners with Google Cloud. And we'll be tackling all of this and more on today's new show. So don't go anywhere. Hello, and welcome to episode eleven ten of FinTech Insider News, brought to you by 11FS, the six time consultancy of the year that works with financial providers big and small to build the next generation of financial services. I'm Laura Watkins, Director of Media and Marketing here at 11FS. And to help me unpack the biggest and most interesting stories from fintech and financial services from the past week, I'm joined by a brilliant panel of guests. First up, I'm joined by Pav Gill, founder and CEO at Confide. Welcome to the show, Pav. Thank you so much for joining us. How has your week been? There's exciting news that we will be getting into very shortly, but just if you could reintroduce yourself to our listeners, so they know a little bit more about you. [00:01:16] S1: Sure. Thanks everyone. Nice to be here. So my name is Pav Gill, better known as the Wirecard whistleblower for good or bad reasons. And, yeah, it's good to be back. It's my second time on 11 FF, talking about Confide, which is the company that I founded two and a half years ago, following my, you know, whistleblowing experience and my life as a lawyer. [00:01:36] S0: Wonderful. And can you tell us a little bit more about Confide?
00:01:36 · Laura Watkins, Pav Gill, Vijay Konduru
[00:01:36] S0: Wonderful. And can you tell us a little bit more about Confide? [00:01:38] S1: So Confide began as a end to end whistleblowing software, as you can can imagine, when we first founded it. And now we've totally evolved into a full agentic governance risk and compliance platform, trying to achieve what I call singularity in GRC, in governance, risk, and compliance, which I think is how and where the world's moving towards. [00:02:00] S0: Fantastic. And we will be digging into that in a little bit more detail very shortly, but thank you so much for joining us. Next up, I'm joined by Vijay Kondur, head of business innovation and AI products at Huntington National Bank. Thank you so much for joining me this morning for you, this afternoon for me. How are you? Welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and Huntington, please? [00:02:23] S2: Hi, Laura. Thank you so much. It's fantastic to be here with this panel and with you. So I lead innovation and AI products at Huntington National Bank. This is a new role that I stepped into. Prior to this, I was the chief marketing officer for Huntington Bank. We are a super regional bank in The United States with a physical footprint that extends across 21 states, primarily in the Midwest and in the South. Many of our products and solutions and verticals are actually national. So in addition to the branch footprint, we do service a lot of different markets and and customers nationally as well. And this week's been particularly exciting for us because we've had a major, major announcement.
00:02:23 · Vijay Konduru, Laura Watkins
[00:02:23] S2: Hi, Laura. Thank you so much. It's fantastic to be here with this panel and with you. So I lead innovation and AI products at Huntington National Bank. This is a new role that I stepped into. Prior to this, I was the chief marketing officer for Huntington Bank. We are a super regional bank in The United States with a physical footprint that extends across 21 states, primarily in the Midwest and in the South. Many of our products and solutions and verticals are actually national. So in addition to the branch footprint, we do service a lot of different markets and and customers nationally as well. And this week's been particularly exciting for us because we've had a major, major announcement. [00:03:08] S0: Foreshadowing. Absolutely. We will talk about that in due course as well. Thank you so much. And last but not least is a welcome return to Maya Bittner, this time with a shiny new job title, chief product officer at Imprint. Welcome back. Can you tell us a little bit more about your new role?
00:03:08 · Laura Watkins, Maia Bittner
[00:03:08] S0: Foreshadowing. Absolutely. We will talk about that in due course as well. Thank you so much. And last but not least is a welcome return to Maya Bittner, this time with a shiny new job title, chief product officer at Imprint. Welcome back. Can you tell us a little bit more about your new role? [00:03:24] S3: Thanks, Laura. Absolutely. I know also big week for me personally. So I'm working at Imprint. Imprint does payments and loyalty so that brands can deepen their customer relationships. I'm really, really excited about it. You know, my background, I was a consumer fintech founder. I worked at Chime for a long time and became a real expert in credit cards specifically. And Imprint is, you know, really using credit cards and payments to help, like, the biggest brands, you know, build better relationship with their customers. So it's really fun. It's very exciting Imprint. This is literally my first week. So I'm brand new to everything. But just yesterday, we launched a deal with Albertsons, which is one of the biggest grocers in The United States. So it's really fun to be able to create new financial products for these brands' customers.
00:04:17 · Laura Watkins
[00:04:17] S0: Amazing. Well, congrats. Sounds like you joined at just the right time. And thank you so much for joining us on your on your first week. So now we have our panel. Let's get started with the news. Our first story this week has already been kind of announced. Confide launches agentic governance Platform, a story on FF News and other places. Confide has launched a new Agenetic Governance Platform designed to bring governance risk and compliance, GRC, into a single system. The platform connects case management, policies, risk, and audits, replacing fragmented tools with a unified record of corporate decisions and incidents. It is designed to oversee both human employees and AI agents, allowing businesses to define where AI can operate autonomously and where human approval is required. Every action taken by a human or AI agent is recorded in an audit trail, helping organizations demonstrate how decisions were made and concerns were handled. Confide says the platform is model agnostic and already serves users across more than 150 countries. Pav, obviously coming to you first on this. Huge congratulations on the launch. Hopefully, I represented that accurately for you there. But maybe you can tell us a little bit more about it and and sort of how this came to be and and the problems you're trying to solve.
00:05:33 · Pav Gill, Laura Watkins
[00:05:33] S1: Yeah. Sure. So agentic governance as a concept I think is still fairly new. What is not gonna be new for long is the fact that billions of agents are gonna be running companies alongside humans. Now how do you govern both of them? Right? So traditionally in the pre AI state, it was all about, okay, pre AI legacy software, mostly point solutions. There's a new regulation that came out, let's just get that point solution that fixes it, or we just built one ourselves. Whereas with the way that the world's moving towards that, I don't think any of those point solutions that existed before today's world would be ready enough to fix a lot of these upcoming problems and state of events. So that's what Confide is trying to trying to fix, not just, you know, how we govern agents and people, but also using agents to do a lot of the operational compliance work with the human in the loop. [00:06:30] S0: And sort of where do you think sort of the traditional tools fall short at the moment and the sort of, I guess, we're also future proofing, as you say, as so many organizations are likely to be run-in association with, if not run by AI going forward? [00:06:46] S1: I see like a lot of, I mean, given my background, you know, having lived through a massive failure at Wirecard, I think one of the biggest enablers of governance failures is data fragmentation. [00:06:57] S0: Mhmm.