Do you want more financial inclusion? Digital payment is your answer. Dr. Diane Hamilton’s guest, Richard Turrin, explains how digital payment brings financial inclusion to those who have less, are unbanked, or underbanked. Richard is the author of Amazon’s #1 Best-Selling book in Online Banking, Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution. Join in the conversation to better understand how China lays out a roadmap for the world’s digital future. Instead of having a paper dollar bill in your wallet, you’ll have a digital wallet and digital bills. You wouldn’t want to miss this episode!
I’m glad you joined us because I have Rich Turrin here. He is the author of some number one international bestselling books, including Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution. This is going to be a fascinating show about the digital currency situation in China and here and what to expect.
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Digital Payment: Bringing Back Financial Inclusion With Richard Turrin
I am here with Rich Turrin, who is an award-winning executive, previously heading FinTech teams at IBM, following a twenty-year career, heading trading teams at global investment banks. He’s also the author of the number one international bestseller, Innovation Lab Excellence. One of his books is Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution, which brings the story of China’s incredible new central bank digital currency to the west. He lives in Shanghai, China, where he’s had the privilege of living in China’s cashless revolution firsthand. It’s nice to have you here, Rich.
Diane, it’s a pleasure being here. Thank you for having me.
I was looking forward to this. You’re welcome. I know we’re both featured in the book 60 Leaders on Innovation by George Krasadakis. I hadn’t followed your Cashless book yet. I was interested in this. I want to get a backstory. Can you tell everybody who maybe isn’t familiar with what led to this level of success and what you’re doing now?
In the 2008 global financial crisis, as I knew it, my career ended like so many other people did. I was on a trading floor, and I designed fixed income products for about eighteen years. I wasn’t the guy who said, “Buy and sell.” I was the guy who had a math background. I worked with computer coders, lawyers, and a team of people who structured and made complex mathematically-driven financial products. That world ended in 2008.
In 2010, I got two duffel bags, and I came to China. I arrived in Shanghai and kept my New York apartment, of course. I came to Shanghai, and it was like being shot out of a gun. Shanghai, still is but even more so in 2010, was booming. I quickly picked up a teaching post at Hult International School of Business, where I became an MBA school professor for about two and half years and eventually wound up at IBM.
I was at IBM using computers and telling Chinese companies anything. I’m suggesting nicely how they can use computers, math, and many of the financial technologies that we developed in the west to bring them to China. I had about four and a half year career with IBM, and it was good fun. Now I’m an author. It’s a matter of counting the careers. There’s the banking, the IBM, the MBA school professor career, and now the author career. I counted four. If there’s a message in here, it’s to be flexible in life.
We have almost all the same. I used to be an MBA program chair at Forbes School of Business, and I teach a lot of MBA courses. I worked as a VAR with IBM, and I’m an author. What was the fourth?
I was a banker.
I was a loan officer.
[bctt tweet=”No one wants companies controlling all the money in the country, and that’s where the central bank’s digital currency comes in. ” username=””]That’s hilarious. We’re tied for the number of careers. We’re all flexible, and that’s a key skill. I talk to my nephew and my nieces about that all the time, be flexible.
The other one that is different is I was a pharmaceutical rep forever. As you look at some of the stuff you’ve done, it’s interesting because a lot of people who read this want to know more about digital currency. I’ve had people on talking about different forms of blockchain and Bitcoin. It doesn’t matter who I talk to, it’s confusing. We’re already paying with credit cards. All the money that you see in your bank isn’t in your hand right now. What do you mean by cashless and digital currency?
Cashless is easy. I’m a good example. I’m talking to you now from my home in Shanghai, China. I walk around the streets of Shanghai with no cash in my pockets, and I don’t need any. That’s the cashless part. The question is, how do you get there? There are several routes. Many people reading in the west have Apple Pay or Google Pay. They clearly have cards that you tap. That’s an early generation of going cashless. That’s the first way.
The second way is through mobile payments that are phone-based, and that’s where China excels and where China has done a lot. That’s way number two to go cashless. We’re all facing a positive and tremendous future where we’re going to take the next. The biggest step and will use what is called central bank digital currencies. That’s the end game. That’s the part where instead of having a paper dollar bill in your wallet, you’re going to have a digital wallet, and you’ll have these digital bills. They are the actual currency of that country, whether it’s the US, Canada, or China.
We’ve got this new digital wallet, and then everybody’s going to have one. That’s going to be the same as you having actual paper money. It’s a wonderful and positive future for everyone. Star Trek, did you ever see them use paper money? Our future is not going to be forever pushing around paper. It’s going to be digital. That’s what sci-fi has taught us, and that science fiction reality will come soon.
We get a lot of Star Trek stuff like flip phones and other things that eventually show up. It’s fascinating to look at what it will be. I want to talk about WeChat because you talk a lot about that in some of the questions I’ve seen. I don’t know if everybody’s familiar with WeChat here in this country, so can you explain what they are?
Let’s talk about WeChat and then after that, let’s talk about China and why China is important. China has two wonderful digital payment systems. One is WeChat, which is essentially a version of Facebook Messenger, probably the closest to WhatsApp. It’s green like WhatsApp, too. You send messages back and forth. On WeChat, you can send cash back and forth. That concept of money being socialized, forget about email as part of your WhatsApp functionality, and you can pay your landlord, pay anyone anywhere anytime. That’s wonderful.
How is it different from something like Venmo?
From a payment’s perspective, it pays stuff, and that’s true. They do that. WhatsApp has got nothing on WeChat. That comparison is only shallow. WeChat has every business in China connected to it, things like your utilities, all the stores, lots of retail, banks, and asset managers. You have one app, WeChat, and Alipay, which is run by Alibaba, the equivalent of Amazon in China. Both of these apps, WeChat and Alipay, give you 360-degree lifestyle coverage. Do you want to put money in your bank? You use WeChat and Alipay. Do you want to buy stocks? You use WeChat and Alipay. Do you want to buy flowers? You use WeChat and Alipay. My point is whatever it is you want to do in your digital lifestyle, it is on these apps.
Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution
It’s more developed than PayPal or Venmo.
Yeah. That’s where people have to be aware. When you use Google Pay or Apple Pay, there’s no surrounding ecosystem. You pay, and that’s about it. Yes, they have some partners, and maybe you can save a little bit here or there if you use them when you use Uber or whatever, but there’s no ecosystem. What WeChat and Alipay have developed is this tremendous ecosystem where your entire life is on the app. I call that version 1.0 digital payment for China.
Practically speaking, it is far in advance of anything that we have in the United States. I know because I use them both. China is now taking the next step in building digital infrastructure, which is to go past version 1.0 of digital payment in China and go to this central bank digital currency, where the central bank issues digital money, and it will make China even more digital. It’ll make a digital payment go more deeply into the economy. It’s transitional.
I want to understand this to make sure I’m keeping up with this. WeChat was developed by Tencent. Is this an individual company that’s running everything or is it the government? Who’s in control right now? I would like to have that.
WeChat and Alipay are both independent and private companies.
The Central Bank, is that going to replace? What happens to who is running everything?
This new generation of the payment system, CBDC or central bank digital currency, is a third payment system that will be complimentary to WeChat and Alipay. Anybody who’s aware of these companies will have read articles that say, “Central bank digital currency will reduce the amount of people using WeChat and Alipay.” That’s true to a certain degree. The central bank digital currency in China, its goal is not to pay for your electric bill. Yes, you can use it for that. That’s wonderful. No question.
Central bank digital currency is going to go places that WeChat and Alipay never went. For example, many of us who work get direct deposits. In China, if you get a direct deposit into your bank, you don’t get it through WeChat and Alipay. That’s considered a large value transaction that’s not handled by these programs. In a few years, you are going to get central bank digital currency directly deposited into your bank and that will be how you get paid.
Central bank digital currency is designed to go places that WeChat and Alipay don’t go and yes, it will certainly take usage away from WeChat and Alipay. Remember I said that WeChat and Alipay have these 360-degree lifestyles, they have ecosystems, and they solve all your problems. Central bank digital currency is a way to pay, and that’s great, but it does not have an ecosystem built-in. WeChat and Alipay are these digital platforms, and they’re not going to go away because they are tremendously useful.
Don’t they want the government to have control over the currency in most of these places? How do they feel about the private sector handling the currency when it didn’t use to be that way?
It’s going to be a question that the US is going to have to deal with someday. If you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “This is China. What does this have to do with us?” For that, trust me. If you look and read my book or if you look at China, what you’re seeing is that China lays out a blueprint or a roadmap for our own digital future. Like it or not, they’re ahead of us in the west, in the US, and in Europe for this digital payment stuff. What they’ve done is they’ve gone ahead. If you want to know where the US is going to be at some time in the future, look to China today. That’s why this is relevant.
[bctt tweet=”Digital payment systems bring financial inclusion to those who have less, are unbanked, or underbanked.” username=””]I want people to feel comfortable that I know there are issues with China. You can’t even say the name of the country in the US without soliciting different opinions. Let’s leave it at that. We would be remiss if we did not look at what China did in this area and learn from it because it’s good. Let’s go to WeChat and Alipay. They launched in China in 2014, and no one could have predicted how successful they would be, including the central bank and the companies themselves. They were smash hits, and they made China go cashless. Certainly, the tier one cities were all cashless by 2016 and ‘17.
You have to imagine, I live in Shanghai, a city of 24 million or so went cashless in about three years. For one, I never would have dreamed it, and most wouldn’t. What you were left with as you get to 2021 are these two big corporations, and they are controlling the flow of currency within China. Clearly, any central bank, including the Fed and the European Central Bank, would look at this and say that this is a good situation in the sense that it helped the country go cashless. It contributed greatly to the GDP growth of China and greatly improved the lives of poor people who are out in rural China who never had banks. They became able to use digital banking services and were financially included, all positive.
The PBOC or the People’s Bank of China acknowledges all this. However, the reality is no one wants two companies controlling all the money in the country or at least all the free-flowing money that’s used for most retail payments and a lot of wholesale payments. That’s where the central bank’s digital currency comes in as this third government central bank-style currency. That’s the question that the Federal Reserve Bank is looking at. The Federal Reserve is looking at two potential ways to help America go digital with regard to payment. The first way is, of course, a central bank digital currency.
The Federal Reserve is split on this. The chairman, Jerome Powell, is undecided and different Fed governors have come across pro and con. There’s a Federal governor from Boston, Lael Brainard, who is positive for a CBDC, and then there’s Fed Dallas President Kaplan who says, “No way. I’m not keen on this.” They’re split. There are about two in one camp saying 4 and 2 against. In the end, it’s going to be a while before the US issues its own central bank digital currency.
The second way that the US might go with digital payment is through what are called stablecoins. These are cryptocurrency that’s based on the dollar and the guys who are number one in rolling this out, and it shouldn’t be a surprise, is Facebook. Facebook is a company, and they have a tremendous impact on our data and on our lives. They’re going to have a type of money that you can use to make payment on WhatsApp. They already have Facebook Pay, which is credit card-based. They’re going to have this new payment system.
The Federal Reserve and other banking regulators are looking at what to do with it. “Should we allow and approve Facebook and a few other companies who are also big in the business to launch these corporate digital currencies?” China’s experience having these two corporations control payment is relevant because the United States is looking at the same situation. “What path should we go down? How much should we allow corporations and private companies to control digital payment and money in the US?”
It’s an interesting topic. I’ve had several people on the show talk about different aspects of what you’re talking about. Jim McKelvey, who created Square, was on, and we talked about some of the things they did. Wolfgang Koester was on, and he talked about cryptocurrency. John Tamny was on, and he talked about why we don’t need the Fed. If anybody’s reading this, those are interesting shows.
Let’s talk about Square because I use Square. In the United States, Square is a wonderful payment system. It is good. It has made all of our lives better, but it is fundamentally flawed because it is based on the underlying payment system for credit card companies. When you use Square, as a vendor selling books, I pay around 4% when I receive payment for selling a batch of books.
This is something I neglected to say before, and it’s a big omission. I hope you’re all sitting down. If I’m in China, when I make payments on WeChat and Alipay, they’re free. What I want to make clear to people is that FinTech, financial technology, companies like PayPal and Square are wonderful. I’m not knocking them, but they are based on a system of credit cards which is antiquated, which has fixed costs associated with it, which are controlled by 2 or 3 credit card companies, and they’re expensive to use. What I’m trying to make people aware of is that there is a new, better way.
Digital Payment: Instead of having a paper dollar bill in your wallet, you’ll have a digital wallet and digital bills.
When I say WeChat and Alipay are advanced, the first advancement is they made payment free for everyone in the nation. That should cause everybody there to fall backwards. That’s why I said, “Are you sitting down?” That’s the number one important thing. As to your point on how they make money, the answer is yes. Under certain circumstances, when you move money into your bank account, there is a slight charge, 0.1%. Not 1% or 2%, it’s so tiny. They make a little money on that, and they do make money in different ways when they have your money in their account, time value of money just like float on the bank, same kind of thing.
I saw they had over a billion active users, and you start adding that 0.1%.
Let’s give perspective to how big they are. The total usage for mobile payments in China in 2019 was $52 trillion. Let’s give some perspective to that because that’s just a number, and we know $52 trillion is big, but how big is it? The GDP of the United States is $21 trillion, so that’s big. Let’s give a couple of more comparisons to make it fun. The use of all credit cards and debit cards on the planet is $35 trillion.
How much is mobile payment in the United States? We’ve got $52 trillion for China, and the US mobile payment, inclusive of Venmo, P2P payment, in 2019 was $40 billion. I have a graphic with this. You see the big blue blob for China and the little teeny sliver where the US payment is. I get it. We’re big into cards, but still, US card uses only $7 trillion.
We have Bezos and Zuckerberg, and they have Ma. Why don’t we have the same level here? Why can’t we catch up? Why aren’t we on the same level?
That goes to regulation. 2014 is a year that should go live in infamy. It is a spectacular year. It is the year that China launched WeChat and Alipay. When they launched, they also had something else in their back pocket. They were both given the first private digital banking licenses in China. There were four tech companies in total who were given these, the two big ones are WeChat and Alipay. What the banking regulator said was, “We have 1.4 billion people. There was a huge unbanked population, and the only way that they could be reached was through digital.”
What the banking regulators and the central bank did was they allowed digital banking licenses for the equivalent of Amazon and the equivalent of Facebook. They did a bang-up job of building financial inclusion in China. There was a regulatory earthquake that fundamentally changed how big tech and banks related.
Here’s the part that’s interesting. The People’s Bank of China made these regulatory changes knowing full well that they would sacrifice business to the state-owned banks. In other words, it was going to cost them money to make this change, and they knew it, but they knew it would be beneficial. I ask you and our readers, can we imagine the Fed ever making a decision that would adversely impact the revenue of the major banks? It’s not likely. 2014 was a big year.
In the United States, we have this division between banks and big tech. There are certainly wonderful arguments for that. At the same time, we’ve been held hostage by the banks because the banks are not fundamentally digitally sophisticated. Our ability to use digital money in some form was held back and delayed because we had to wait for the banks to try to catch up, and they’re doing better. We all recognize that. We all use digital banking of some form, but it is still far behind where it could be and should be, especially if you compare it with an advanced society like China.
[bctt tweet=”The magic we’re looking for is a digital payment system that’s free.” username=””]In an advanced society like China, you got Jack Ma as this FinTech superhero, as you referred to him. I would like to know, how does he look to their government and everyone else? We get a lot of people who think Zuckerberg’s good, Zuckerberg’s bad perspective. What is the perception of Jack Ma there?
Jack Ma is respected, appreciated, acknowledged, and loved by some. What you don’t have in China is the sense of hero-worship. Our digital technology started out in the early days with the battle between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We have this concept of Elon Musk as the great hero. China certainly has heroes. Jack Ma is certainly loved and respected, but he doesn’t quite have the same superhero status in China that he does in the west. If you ask most people in the west, “Name the chairman of WeChat,” there’s silence. Nobody knows who’s the chairman of WeChat. He’s a great guy. He did almost as much to revolutionize and digitize finance in China as Jack Ma did, but nobody knows who he is. He’s a quiet guy. He’s not TV-friendly.
I’m trying to think of who it is.
He’s another Ma, which is amusing. The funny thing is all of these CEOs are certainly well-respected, but Jack Ma has a superhero status in the US that far eclipses his status in China. He is loved by a few, respected by all, and acknowledged for what he did, but doesn’t have quite the Spider-Man or Superman credentials in China that he does here.
It is interesting to see the differences between the cultures and all that they’ve done there and we’ve done here. What was the point for you, specifically, of why you wanted to write this book? You’re dealing with China, with the US, and a lot of different things. Who do you want to read this book?
I get emotional about this because I’ve lived here since 2010. I lived the changes, and I saw how it changed my life going to cashless, going to digital payments. When I would go back to the United States, “There’s Venmo. We’ve got Apple Pay and Google Pay,” I would see what’s going on, and I’d say, “This is a problem.” Digital payment is infrastructure no different than bridges and roads. I don’t have to tell anybody reading about them.
Frankly, our digital payment system is a bridge that was built around 1985, maybe the early ‘90s at best. It hasn’t been maintained or changed much since. As that gap between China and the US grew, I said, “People in the United States have to be made aware that we’re missing something here. This is good for society. This is GDP-positive. This helps people who are unbanked.” Let me make this clear. When I talk about unbanked in China, people think of poor rural communities and they don’t have a bank. That’s accurate. I can’t remember the stats, but there were large numbers, and they’re still.
The US has an advanced banking system, but the Fed itself has statistics and acknowledges that 23% of the US population is either unbanked or underbanked. To be underbanked essentially means you’re using check cashing or other non-bank expensive services. Even the United States, as sophisticated, and certainly there are banks everywhere, could benefit from these digital payment systems to bring financial inclusion to those in America who have less and are unbanked or underbanked. It’s not just China that has this problem. It is the United States as well.
Can we be overbanked? Is there a downside to this?
Digital Payment: China lays out a roadmap for our digital future.
If you talk about brick and mortar branches, the answer is sure. You can have too many in your town. The answer as well is, there can certainly be too many digital banks at some point. We have a lot of what are called neobanks, which are digital-only banks. They’re coming to the United States, and they’re quite popular now. There are only 2 or 3 of them that are super popular, but there are about 40 of them that may or may not make it because they may or may not get enough people to use them.
Can you have too many digital banks? Yes, there probably will be someday when there is a shakeout. However many of these digital banks exist, some of them are going to fail because they’re not making money. The real question is not so much about banking. The real question is, how do we pay? Even if I have the most sophisticated US digital bank today, I’m still making digital payments that are oftentimes being carried on these credit card payment rails that have expensive charges on them. The magic that we’re looking for is a digital payment system that is free, accessible to the majority of the population, brings financial inclusion, and is a pathway to bringing digital banking to all.
In China, Alipay and WeChat are pretty much it. For some reason, if Zuckerberg makes Facebook the next Alipay or WeChat, what happens with the monopoly situation?
If you look at the lobbyists going into Washington who are in opposition to a central bank digital currency being issued by the Federal Reserve and stablecoins like the DM coin proposed by Facebook, the biggest lobbying groups opposed to both of these two options for going digital. Do I have to tell you who it would be? Can you guess?
I can imagine.
The banks. We are at an inflection point. Banks have done a great job. As much as I don’t like fees and other issues, on the whole, we have to look at the banking system in the United States. It has been tremendously successful and tremendously good. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves other fundamental questions. Let’s look at bank credit cards. Should my coffee shop have to pay 3% or 4% as a vendor fee to receive a payment on a credit card in a digital era? Should I have to wait three days for the check to clear? These are fundamental questions.
What happened to the banks in China when this all happened?
They were disrupted and shocked. Banks have many silos and different divisions. This is exactly what I wrote in Cashless. Imagine that you’re the manager and you’re the head of the credit card division. People are using their credit cards in 2011, ‘12, ‘13, ‘14. More cards, more money, everything is good. In 2015, your credit card revenue went flat. In 2016, it went down. In 2017, it went down further.
The banks lost quite billions in lost card revenue because suddenly, there was no 2% or 3% service fee. There were no late fees. There were no penalties. All of this ancillary revenue that comes in from a credit card operation evaporated. People went for one thing, which is for free. It shouldn’t be a surprise. As soon as payment went free, all of your local shops said, “How was this credit card machine?” It’s gone.
[bctt tweet=”China controls their money already, and they don’t cut people off at will. ” username=””]Banks have to be prepared for this here. What do they do? Reinvent themselves and just be mortgages?
The answer for that is clear, and banks know this already. I read a great McKinsey article. They did a big survey of people in the payments business in banks. They all said, “Within ten years, it’s going to be free.” They are well aware that the disruption is coming.
How did they create that themselves?
The credit card companies themselves are going to be the winners. They will be able to reinvent themselves because they are already highly agile at giving you discounts, giving you a reason to use your card. They’re good at that. They’re in your head, and they’re doing surveys. Your bank is not. They’re not going to go broke.
There’s a common internet meme in the United States. If big tech got into banking, the banks would go broke. No. Big tech did go into banking in China, and the banks are all here. When I say they lost billions, it is true and factual, but there are all these other parts to a bank like a mortgage, car loans, and all these other parts that they’re still going to make money on. They’re going to have to adjust downward their anticipated revenue for payments. They are going to have to understand how to build digital platforms that attract customers and keep them using their banking services in a world where my money becomes hypermobile.
Banks are going to have to accept a world where now, if I want to move my account from one bank to the other, I have to get a certified check. There are steps. There’s stuff I have to do. In China, I go to WeChat, figure out what the maximum amount I can move is, I do it over 3 or 4 days, and the account is gone. In China, I have something called hypermobility of my money. My money can go anywhere. I can imagine it going for free. That’s the new world that banks are going to live in. Everything is going to have to be competitive.
There’s so much political unrest. You hear all these rumors. Someone said to me that they’re thinking of taking all your money out of your accounts for those who are wealthy, and some people believe that their money is fragile and somebody could come and take it away. With this, it puts people even more in that sense that they don’t have any control.
I’m reminded of two episodes. One is in a movie, and the other is for real. General Michael Flynn had his Chase branded credit card canceled on him because of the political risk associated with him as a client. He was quite shocked to find that suddenly his credit card didn’t work. There’s another wonderful scene in the movie Molly’s Game. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.
Yeah, Molly’s on my show.
There’s this beautiful scene where she’s trying to skip town. She gets her credit cards out, and they all go dead on her.
Digital Payment: Credit card companies will be the winners because they know how to reinvent themselves.
Bruce Willis is one of the Die Hard, the guy that hacked in and took his whole 401(k) away.
That I didn’t know, that’s a good one. I have to remember. There is a tremendous amount of fear-mongering about China’s central bank digital currency and the European or the United States central bank digital currency over control of money. Here’s the reality, your money is already digital. If you’re a bad person and if you do bad things, your money can be shut off today without a central bank digital currency immediately.
You’re worried about the horse leaving the barn because you didn’t close the big gate probably around the year 1985 or so when we started to get digital. We’re worried about it a little too late because it’s already a reality. Let’s speak specifically to the Chinese system. I get China is not the United States. Still, I read this every day, “China is going to control all the money. They’re going to shut everyone down.” China already controls all the money. The digital payment systems, WeChat and Alipay, are both connected to payment rails, your payment transfer system. Why use the Visa MasterCard? What they use in China is all run by the central bank.
The reality is there is no concerted effort by the Chinese government that I have seen, and I’ve been here for years, to cut off large sectors of people, groups, or whatever from WeChat and Alipay. Certainly, criminals get cut off like they do in the United States. This concept of, “China is suddenly going to control the money and cut everybody off at will,” they control your money already, and they don’t cut people off it. There’s no evidence that this is happening now. The central bank’s digital currency will not give tremendously new powers to either the Chinese or the American governments to cut you off from the financial system. If they want to, they can do that now.
Hopefully, that won’t happen. I could talk to you about this for hours because this is fascinating. I want to make sure that you get in a chance to share how people can find out more as I’m sure your book is fascinating. They want to read your book or find out more about you. Is there something you’d like to share, Rich, before we end the show?
I’d love for everybody to check my book out. The book is called Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution. It’s on Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. It’s in a whole bunch of places. It’s on all the digital platforms. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. I write about digital currency and this tremendous transformation that we’re all facing every day on LinkedIn. I’m also on Twitter. Connect with me in all those places. Most importantly, I want everybody to know that we have a wonderful future ahead of us. Payment is going to be free. It’s going to be easy and be better than ever. Do not let fear-mongers tell you otherwise. It’s a great future to live into.
Thank you, Rich. This has been fascinating. I’m honored that we were both featured in a book together. You’ve done so much to help with understanding innovation and so much more, so it’ll be fascinating to see what happens. Thank you for being on the show.
Diane, thanks for having me. Nothing I like more than getting the message out and talking to people. I look forward to hearing from you and everybody else out there.
I hope so.
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I’d like to thank Rich for being my guest. We get so many great guests on this show. If you’ve missed any past episodes, you can catch them at DrDianeHamilton.com. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you join us for the next episode of Take The Lead Radio.
Important Links:
- Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution
- Innovation Lab Excellence
- 60 Leaders on Innovation
- Venmo
- Alipay
- Jim McKelvey – Previous episode
- Square
- Wolfgang Koester – Previous episode
- John Tamny – Previous episode
- Molly Bloom – Previous episode
- Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution – Amazon
- Kobo – Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution
- Barnes & Noble – Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution
- LinkedIn – Richard Turrin
- Twitter – Richard Turrin
About Richard Turrin
Richard Turrin is an award-winning executive previously heading fintech teams at IBM, following a twenty-year career heading trading teams at global investment banks. Rich is the author of No. 1 international bestseller “Innovation Lab Excellence” which helped others make their labs more productive and take away the pain points that make innovation difficult. His most recent book is “Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution.” This book brings the story of China’s incredible new Central Bank Digital Currency to the West. Richard lives in Shanghai, China where he has had the privilege of living China’s “cashless” revolution firsthand.
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