Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 89 and this week's episode is all about fintech and Python career paths. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches. My name's Kelly Schuster Perez and I'm a teacher who codes Kelly a little bit hesitant there to jump right in. Are you okay? This week everything going all right. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You know, it's going well. I'm just really excited to have one of my best old time friends, old friend on the show. A couple of weeks ago we had another friend from London and this week we have another friend from London. I feel very international again so very excited. Sean Tibor: Would you like to introduce our mystery friend this week? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Mystery friend. Yes. So mystery friend is Xavier de POW. He is a fintech start up and I have so much more to say about him in the middle bit but he started his career at Merrill Lynch in London and fixed income. After ten years he was the CEO of a digital challenger bank and then again ten years later he went into a private bank with $75 billion Euro. Yeah, I didn't know all this stuff about him and then in 2020 he went back and he's an entrepreneur and he's starting up or has started up several at Fintech and now he's launching LendX co CEO of LendX and I have no idea what he does really. So that's why we invited him on the show, Fintech. Sean Tibor: So welcome Xavier, it's wonderful to have you. Xavier De Pauw: Thanks. It's great to be here. Sean Tibor: Well we're going to jump right into the winds of the week so we can get on with the rest of the episode. But Xavier, will you share with us something good that's happened to you this week or something that you've made happen? Xavier De Pauw: Can I pick two? Absolutely. The really easy one is we live in London. I've lived here for more than 20 years. The weather is London weather but today it feels like Miami weather. So that's a great way to start the day with some Sunshine. The professional win is we've launched a company called Startup last year. The win this week. One of the wins there this week is around marketing, branding. So we're spending a lot of time with a creative agency and we picked a new name, pick the whole new branding literally today, this morning. So I can't say much about it but the Lending's name will change but super excited about that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's very cool. We try to rebrand ourselves. Sean Tibor: You're speaking my language. I spent a lot of my career doing marketing and branding work so I'm excited to see the new branding when it's ready to be revealed. Xavier De Pauw: Yeah, it's exciting if we talk about careers right? There's so much that goes into that. And we were wowed by what the guys built so far and then they said to us, well it's a bit rough at this stage. Give us time now that you've chosen, which one will make it look better? And we thought, wow, okay, if this is rough, then we're really excited to see the next phase. Sean Tibor: There is also something that's really nice about having a product or service or a company that you've worked. And you've put so much time and effort to finally have kind of the right front end on it in terms of what your customers and consumers will ultimately see, so that it really reflects all the hard work and thought that you put into the work. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I have nothing to say about this topic because Sean did all of our branding and marketing for us. Sean Tibor: All right, we'll move on. We can talk marketing. That'll be a separate episode all about marketing and Python. So, Kelly, why don't you go next? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay. So mine is a quick win. I started back doing a learning path. Something that Sean and I always talk about is the constant learning that we have for ourselves and our growth in a topic. I know Sean has been learning a lot with AWS and the Cloud, and I kind of went on a holding pattern. So last night, in light of the Pie Bites launch of their Free Ten Bites, Bob and Julian, you guys owe us a shout out for that. But in light of that, they launched ten Free Fast API bites, and I completed my first one. That one was really easy, by the way. The second one seems to be harder. But I'm going to start learning about Fast API. Sean was talking about it a lot last year, and I know that you guys were really excited about the launch of those bites. And yeah, I got a lot of learning going on. I figured if I'm going to teach about request and the request library, I better know what an API is. Sean Tibor: And then you can take it to the next level and have your own API that the students can use, right? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yes. Better than dad jokes and Chuck Norris APIs that send out bad things on your whiteboard. Sean Tibor: Yeah, a little control goes a long way. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: What about you? What was your win? Sean Tibor: Honestly, my win this week was we have a new project manager coming on board with our team to help coordinate and work with outside groups within the company that we need to work with. And we were kind of having this conversation about the direction that we should take. And I had a very strong opinion about how to make this all fit together and flow. And I was really worried about alienating this new person that was on the team with my strong opinion. So I was really careful about the way I described it and tried to really make sure that this person understood that I was coming at it from a place of, let's make this super streamlined and effective and clear for everyone, including you, that this is all going to work together and be more seamless than what we've done in the past. And by the end of it, he was on board and he wanted to do it and wanted to do it in the way that I proposed, with his own additions and ways to make it even better. So I felt really good about that because I was a little nervous about going in and saying, this isn't going to work for me. Right. And here's how we should do it. And I wanted to be very careful about that. And that caution seems to have paid off because I think our relationship is stronger now as a result. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's a fine line when you come in with a preconceived idea and you know it's going to work because I know you're a perfectionist. So you've thought through everything that could go wrong about an idea and then trying to win people over. Maybe it had to do with all your teaching skills. Maybe, yes, maybe. Any sales this week? Have you any fails you want to share? You don't have to. That's optional. Xavier De Pauw: Oh, God. It's generally a good week. We're in the phase where we're building. Everything is going according to plan. Actually, I would say one. This is an interesting one for budding developers and entrepreneurs. Is we're somebody who signed a contract. Pretty important role, actually, within the company. We're still an early startup. Every hire was super important. Signed a contract last month and announced us yesterday, Monday that actually they're not joining. They've been bit back by their bigger fintech company that they're working for. So it's one of these you don't attach too much attention to it because there's a few other good candidates that luckily we also had to choose between. So we have reengaged with them. But it's one of the things that when you join a start up, people don't seem to realize if your employee number six, seven, whatever, and you decide to make that choice, it has a massive impact. Working for Meryls, that happens. It is what it is. But here you lose a month in an early stage startup that would qualify as a loss in your definition, I think. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. But then from those fails, though, you learn to readjust, and that's all about what throws at you. So you have that readjustment phase of learning and pivoting. It's a huge skill that I think a lot of the times we try to teach as parents, as teachers about how do you pivot from something that really can set you back and how do you change that pivot to something that is profitable, whether it's profitable with a grade or profitable with a learning expertise, it sucks. Xavier De Pauw: It's not great. It's really bad news. However, we had a short list of great candidates go back to them. So it's how you rebound from those setbacks, really. So don't waste time on it. It is what it is. Move on, move forward. That's really key absolutely. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And that's why we love our sales of the week, because it is that enlightening experience. Sean, do you have fails this week? Sean Tibor: Yeah. My fail is a fence post. So not metaphorically, not some software term that no one's heard of. It's literally a fence post. And this has been going on for years. On the side of my house, I have a fence that I put up when my kids were small so that they could go around. And over the course of the years, when I first put it in, it's beautiful. It's perfect, measured properly, swung freely, all those things. And then my first fail came about, which is that apparently when I put it in, I put the fence post three inches over the property line into my neighbor's yard. And so when they went to go redo their fence, they offered to relocate the fence post. They moved it over, and now the gate didn't close because the fence post was in the wrong spot. And this was perpetually high on the HoneyDo list of when are you going to fix that fence? And I never got to it. I never got to it. And my wife, being the take charge person that she has got a handyman to fix it, and he fixed it so that the gate will close. But now the fence post, because I had carefully and methodically sunk the fence post into a concrete footing in the yard and he was unable to relocate it, he just cut the fence post off and moved it over a few inches and then screwed it down poorly with a little bracket. So my fence post was wobbling back and forth and back and forth. You couldn't close the gate. And so I was finally like, okay, I have to find a way to fix this. And my Klugee engineering mind designed and printed a 3D printed bracket that I could Mount to the concrete footing and put the fence post in and have it stabilized. Well, it mostly works. So it is definitely more stable than it was before, but it's not perfect. It is good enough for now. But at some point, we'll probably have to reprint it and reattach it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You do realize you have to dig up all that concrete, right? Just throw that out there. Okay. Sean Tibor: And that would be fine, except for the fact that apparently I poured the concrete underneath my sprinkler lines for the yard. So getting it out, I have to be extremely careful. I can't just whale on it with her. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I know a good contractor, by the way. Sean Tibor: Okay. I'll have to talk to him, Kelly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay, so mine is actually work related. That was a funny one, though. We talk about this a lot when we reflect. Sean and I have not had the reflective opportunity for my third quarter going into my fourth quarter class this year. And let's just say that not everything is always rosy as we sometimes make it to be. We do tell you that the fails do happen. Last quarter, I was blessed with some amazing coders that I taught for three years who were just everything I threw at them was. Yes, bring it on, bring it on, bring it on. Well, this quarter is not so willing. And I'm having to pivot a little bit on some of my lessons that I even did in the beginning. And it's something that you do as a teacher. I wanted to just push forward and let's keep going. And we're going to talk about functions because this is where we're supposed to be. And Sean and I always have this conversation about, you know, it's the teacher who makes the curriculum, not the curriculum that makes the class. And so the teacher has to read the room. And I've got a really large awakening coming up and a lot of back teaching to get them where I want them to be. So it's a huge fail. Sean Tibor: And this is a tough part of the year, too, though. You're in the fourth quarter, it's the last part of the year. Students become less and less engaged from this point, which is natural. They want to get to summer. But you're also in that couple of weeks stretch right before the school spring break. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I'm just going to play Minecraft for the rest of the year. Sean Tibor: It works for me. Right. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And there's a lot of Minecraft or Twilio. Yeah, Twilio game. Oh, my goodness. Anyways, that's enough. We're pivoting. I'll let you know how it happens next podcast, how it's going. And we'll get on with that. So shift happens. Sean, you want to talk about our follow up series? Sean Tibor: Sure. So continuing with the last couple of episodes around data science and cybersecurity, what we wanted to do is talk to people in the industry who are working in jobs that really didn't exist or didn't look this way even ten years ago. So at the time that the shift happens video came out, which I think was about 20 04, 20. 05 was the original. And then there was like a reboot in 2008. They were talking about how a lot of the jobs that were coming don't actually exist currently, that they didn't exist at the time. And we're seeing this as more of an ongoing trend. It wasn't just a one time thing in the 2000s where future jobs are going to be created. If you think about where we were 15 years ago in 2007 and 2008, many of the jobs that exist today were not even conceived yet, or they were very nascent in their early stages. So that's why we wanted to bring in Xavier to talk about fintech in particular, because this is an area that has just particularly exploded over the last ten years. Many of the hottest startups right now are in these areas. We've talked about cyber security, data science, and I would say the trifecta now is bringing in Fintech to talk about the opportunities there and before, not to steal much of Xavier's Thunder, but one of the things that I've been particularly impressed with Fintech is that it's not just the kind of traditional, boring parts of finance that have been revolutionized by technology. There's some really interesting things that are happening in this space with everything from micro lending and bringing more services to financial services to people in developing countries that just weren't even possible without technology. And so that's why this area is particularly interesting and exciting is because it is really disrupting not just the technology space, but also the finance space. So that's hopefully my good lead up to introducing Xavier and having him give a little bit of background about his work and how he sees the Fintech space. But Xavier, is there anything to add to that or things that you've seen over the last few years with? Xavier De Pauw: No, I think it's a great intro. There's a huge amount to say about Fintech, which in of itself already is great because to your point, probably ten years ago, Fintech was kind of just in its infancy. I left Meryls in 2009, started a Challenger Bank, which became a digital challenger bank very quickly. So in 2010, eleven, we started seeing companies like Wealthfront betterment on the wealthtech sides in us creating new models. And that became very if you look today, what is Fintech is very difficult to define. You have now many different silos in the space. So you have wealth tech, you have the older payments, you have rectang, you have insured tech. So all the verticals are being targeted by innovation. If you like, can I ask a question real quick? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So Wealth Tech, I'm assuming that's like investment. Xavier De Pauw: Sorry, there's a whole new language that came out with that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I feel like I'm learning another coding language here. Back up. Xavier De Pauw: Let me take a step back. First of all, let me throw out a number 21. For every $5 invested in venture capital or invested by venture capital firms into private companies, one out of five was in infinite. So it's a huge part of that market. We're talking about $132,000,000,000 invested in the space. There are a bunch of huge names out there who have attracted all that money. So it's pretty kind of concentrated in the success stories lately. Some of those success stories, certainly the IPO ones, have seen prices drop right in the stock markets, but still, it just gives you a sense of the huge size of this. And that means also how did it start? I'm coming to your question, Kelly. It started by a bank. A bank is by definition a super complex entity, many different facets to it, shielded by regulation, opacity and whatnot, which meant that there were huge margins in there. And then clever people started thinking, hold on a second. I can do payments. I can do payments way better. Than the bank. That's where it really started, right. Or I can do transfer, crossborder transfers. And so people unpicked a tiny part sub sector of what a bank or financial sector does. And so it started. And so now you can look at it as vertical. So there's a payments, there's a wealth that anything to do with investment, wealth management, whatnot insurance companies, which are kind of financials as well. So there's the insurer tech, there's a lot of regulation stuff. So the rectang regulatory technology companies, not only in the fintech space, but largely in the fintech space. And there's a whole host of these verticals. Now, if you look at it, just a bit of history, in 2010, the fintech were trying to steal the lunch of the banks. It was heads on. Certainly on the B to C side, we will compete and take clients. Five years later, it was actually that doesn't work that easily. Why don't we team up? Fintech working together with banks and banks are particularly bad at Pivoting, at being agile, et cetera, or large companies in general, but certainly regulated banks even more. So there was a good way of working together. We are the kind of oil tanker that's going in the direction difficult to turn it and around it, you have a lot of speedboats, which are the fintech. And if one of the speedboats gets traction just on board, it bring it in into the mothership. And that helps the Motorship become Kelly, either become more efficient or it kills the innovator, which depends on how well you integrate. That's really on the fintech side of competition working together. And today I think more and more of that is happening. And so where probably the most visible things in terms of fintech are there's a lot of B to C stuff, those are the success stories. You see them because it's a proper hockey stick growth. Right. And you see the one with the few winners, you don't see the thousands of guys that don't make it. The B to B stuff rather is less visible PayPal. Now, everybody knows what PayPal, but if you think about it, initially something powering. There's a bunch of companies powering your payments, which the average consumer just never sees, but they are multi billion companies. Now, what I find interesting is we've gone from people picking a niche to do that, little niche better, gaining traction and the consumer expecting from all the other sectors in ecommerce and everything else, they're being bombarded with fantastic UX UI, user experience and user interface type of fantastic experiences and that they expected the same thing in banks. So the fintech tried to be more client centric, more transparent, better customer experience in general, which is not just the interface, but also just the full customer experience. The challenge that then has happened over the more recent years is, Kelly, I have how many apps on my phone and do I want to reopen, one app for the payment, one app for my investment, one app for. And so you can see some rebundling. So initially there was a complete unbundling. And now you see a partial rebundling. If I look at what we're building still called LendX, where we rebrand next month. So I can't tell you. But we're building LendX, which is a B to B SaaS. Actually, it's a SaaS enabled marketplace. But let's focus on the software as a service. You mentioned. Aws. And so we can go into a bit more detail on that. We are building a software as a service. And this is not just in fintech. Right. But before, let's say, I don't know, 20 years ago, certainly a core banking system. So the massive system on which the bank was running was typically on premise. It was something that you downloaded on your whatever on your service. Now, I still have a few banks running like that, but most of the banks are running on a cloud type based system, which is essentially a software as a service or a platform as a service. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I want to stop right there because I want to kind of summarize for everything and some of our listeners from our teachers, because I'm just putting this perspective and just because I've known you forever. So it's like this ever and ever. So this idea and this is the thing that blows my mind. And I think as an educator who has been teaching forever, we had bankers. Bankers went to the bank. They worked in the bank, and the money came to the bank. And they played on Excel spreadsheets and they did their little number crunching on Excel spreadsheet. They shared their Excel spreadsheets and print out 20 pages of Excel spreadsheets. And that was literally the life in 20, 03, 45, 67. Right. I Sean, everything was done there. It was when this shift started happening and the computers started coming where we said, oh, no. Right. Is that kind of summarized in a nutshell? Xavier De Pauw: Yeah, I think so. And you've seen that in other sectors first, that's the important bit is that you were buying your clothes or whatever in shops. Then all of a sudden, Amazon shows up and a bunch of other websites or apps that give you a whole different consumer experience. And then people look at their bank and they said, I still have to go to my bank between 10:00 A.m. And 04:00 P.m. In person and sign a bunch of papers. And why? Again, this is the B two C part, which is easier to explain. But on the B two B part, on the captain market space, it was the same thing. You have to know that until today. So when we built a digital challenge bank, we built a large corporate lending business, what we call the leverage loan space. So loans to companies on my private equity companies that market today, 2022, the borrower can reset their loan. How do they do that? Today? They send a Fax, get the Fax now arrived in your inbox. But we were on the desk receiving emails, which is here's, a Fax request to reset alone. It's insane. So there are still some of these things which have not been modernized enough, but that's a question of time. So when you look at that and your example of the spreadsheet is the same thing. So what we are building is actually in that lending space, people granting loans to corporates. How does that happen? It happens a lot of the time. Still, in Excel, there's a bunch of Excel files living in different places, there's data, there are documents living in different places, communications through email, through WhatsApp? Through all sorts of. And so when these businesses try to grow the scalability isn't there, operationally the security around the data, etcetera. Standardization, data. And so when these businesses want to talk to capital markets to raise funding, to be able to grant a lot more credit to a lot more corporate, the institutional investors look at it and say, well, we don't know if you guys can scale this. If it's secure for us to funnel money through you to borrowers, we are building that as a software, as a service. So you mentioned API. So this whole thing will be API is API based, It's software as a service that you can deploy onto. If you are a non bank lender, if you are a new bank, if you're a credit fund granting credits to corporate, you take this full vertical stack that we're building and your entire back end, back office, middle office servicing of all these loans, all that is done in one single platform. So your data is sent to be stored. And it's an innovation in that space which hasn't seen a lot of innovation so far. Sean Tibor: I want to add a dimension to this, Xavier, that I think is really important and doesn't probably get enough attention, which is the scale factor of working in finance as you described. It's a clear understanding of I have services, I have transactions, I have things. One of the things that people overlook is the sheer volume of transactions that happen both on the BDC and BDC spaces, where not only are we talking about hundreds of millions if not billions of financial transactions daily going through all of these systems around the world, you also have the layer of all the B to B transactions, resetting loans or changing investment mixes or even buying and selling. If you're doing trading on investments, that can happen. And success is measured in nanoseconds for a lot of those transactions. And then you also then multiply that by the complexity of all these financial institutions integrating and working together and communicating. And that's where we start to see that this is something that previously was only really tackled by the big banks, by the big organizations that had a lot of capital resources and leverage to be able to implement these things. And because of the rise of cloud and platform as a service and tools like Python, now startups are able to enter the space and be disruptive because a startup can scale to the level of, say, a bank of America in their area and be able to handle that volume of transactions. And as long as it remains profitable, the scale factor is there. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Before you answer that, I want to sidestep because Sean hits on a point. And this is something I want to think about before you answer your question. So a lot of times when we're teaching code to six, seven and 8th graders and even sometimes younger, why are we doing this? And that scalability. We teach them. Here's your data set of ten numbers. Now we're going to go through a four loop and have fun. And they're like, yeah, I could do that with my calculator. Kids don't understand that. Scalability, like when we're pulling JSON files off of requests using the request library, I'm pulling tiny amounts of data. But we're talking, like Sean said, a large amount. And that's where this teachable moment comes in about why code is so important in the banking industry and the cybersecurity. So go back on the scalable. Xavier De Pauw: Go, yeah, this is what technology has brought, right? You can scale almost infinitely again if it used to be, especially now you mentioned again, you mentioned AWS or Azure or whichever cloud you want to talk about. But that gives you kind of infinite power to process whatever you want. On the scaling point, I'll give an example, which I live through, which is actually a small example, because part of the bank that we built, the one that I ran as a CEO, was in Belgium, so relatively small country, but still there, I think within three years, starting from zero, we built a digital bank with online investments and savings and what not. But the investment platform was deemed, as I don't want to say, the best, but probably one of the best in the country. And I was explaining this to a bunch of students, actually. They said, well, yeah, you have to think about it in three years, from zero to being one of the best platforms to invest into usage funds. And to your point, Sean, we managed to scale that so quickly through technology by being agile. Also because we focused on, let's build that better than anybody else. And we didn't have to deal with 1000 other things that a normal bank has to deal with. So you can be really focused on doing one thing extremely well. What I would add to that is, in terms of scaling, what's new, certainly the last five years is there are a number of things that have been built already. So fintech revolution, if you like revolution has been happening for a decade or slightly more. It means that for example, today we are building a full vertical stack. So most of these platforms go really wide. They build a system that can be applicable to many different things for many different sectors, many different applications. We turn it around, we go deep into the vertical. So we're not going wide. We just want to do everything for lending operations, et cetera. We don't need to build everything ourselves anymore. So we need something that builds the schedule for a loan. If I grant a loan, what are the payments principal interests? What are the terms of this loan? How does that project in time? Well, we're building on a core banking system called Mambu. It's one of the new bank as a service platform. So everything is now as a service, right? Bank as a service, software as a service, lending as a service. You just plug in the cloud and go. But that means we are building this thing. In six months, we will have an MVP Life, which will have bank grade infrastructure using another company called Modular, which will enable us to open bank accounts for every borrower and every loan, instantly reconciled payments, et cetera. And so what we're building in six months would have probably taken us three years if had we started five years ago, because we would have had to build all of this ourselves. So then the question is, what skill? Given the context, what skill do you need? Or what are we really adding to the value? It's domain knowledge. I've been in the space and the sector for more than 20 years. So I understand what I need. I understand what are the really good components that exist, then you need to integrate them together, put your own layer on top of it. Not just API, but literally we're using Stitch, Snowflake and a bunch of other things where we literally stitching these things together really efficiently so that the end user has a completely seamless experience, looks at this and said, wow, this is one platform. I can do everything here, not knowing that behind the scenes. You mentioned APIs. There's API integration up to our eyeballs. All this has to work really seamlessly, right? That's a very interesting skill set. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So every developer encoder says, oh, I know what he's talking about. Stack overflow. Now coders, go and buy that piece of software and that library and that piece of code. So it is it's stuff that from a Python person. That's what makes things so great, because you can pick and choose and you put your own flair onto things to make it personal. So you might have code that someone else wrote or you'll have a package or you'll have some other, like you were saying, modular tech side, and it is putting it in your own way to package it. See, it makes sense. I know fintech now I can work in the job fair. Xavier De Pauw: I would go a step further. And if you look at the large core banking systems, but even the large CRM, the customer relationship management systems, take a Salesforce. Sales was a great example. Again, it lives in the cloud, you can do it, but now it lives in the cloud. It's their native. Then you can integrate a bunch of things into it, which you would have needed big teams to do that. Now those teams sit within Salesforce and so they have what I would call, I don't know what they call it exactly, but I call it, it's like an app store where if you say, well, I've got my CRM, but I need to know your customer application, I need a payment application, I need it, whatever. And they basically have a list. So you go onto their website, you say, I need this, they give you ten names and it's almost drag and drop. Right. Which actually leads me to another. So I'm wondering, I think when I say drag and drop, if we take a step back and you said that if I had to take my job at Merrill Lynch, which I started 20 years ago, again, I would need to know how to code in Python. I'm pretty sure I would not stand a chance otherwise to get in because knowing Excel and VBA and whatever, that's nice. But you can do now so much more. So people certainly quantitative roles and mine was semiconductor, you would need that. What I'm really interested in is, on the one hand, I would tell everybody listening, learn Python because it gives you a job, it gives you more probability of getting the job. On the other hand, there's one thing which I'm really interested in is the rise of the no code platforms. So there are a bunch of people who are coding going into these large groups and saying, well, your bankers should be banking, they shouldn't be coding. So here is a tool where you can literally drag and drop a few things and create code without actually coding. I'm wondering if that really works extremely well, then you won't need to know Python anymore. But then, yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: They already have. So we met a kid who created when he was, what was he, 14, 1513, I think 13 created a drag and drop block program for Python. His reasoning was not because everyone needs a code block code, but was because he was lazy and he didn't want to type. Right. All developers and all coders always tell us we're lazy if we have to do something twice and we're going to find a way to make it. So we only have to do it once if it takes us, even in Sean's case, a couple of months to do something that will save him time 20 years down the road, he's going to do it because developers and coders don't want to do things the hard way. So I can see how coders how you would have now a banking system. Because the last thing we want to do is listen to a bank and go, but I need this little piece. Well, here's your block. You pick a block. Xavier De Pauw: Completely. It makes sense. You don't want to do the same thing all over again. So if you build it once, you can then drag and drop it across. When I was at this wealth management asset manager firm, there was a young guy there on the trading desk who came in and who said, hey, you're the head of innovation. Why don't we teach you how to work with Python? Because I see people sending mailing lists, sending emails one by one. If you spend 2 hours doing a bit of Python code that will be done at the push of a button, you have a list of names and addresses. And I looked at him and said, yes, you can do that. Some people get but impossible to get the whole bank to subscribe to that. But I think if you join a bank or any company within the financial sector, to your point, show there's huge scale, huge amounts of numbers, data sets. So if you're investing, there's historical data that you need to look at, and all sorts of financial data is just numbers everywhere. So getting codes to scale, that is crucial. Yeah. Sean Tibor: I think you brought up a great point with the no code movement that this is really indicative of a profound shift in mindset within not just the fintech area or finance, but across many industries, which is what's really important. What are the important things for doing your job at creating value for your company? And I think it really goes to show you, 20 years ago we would have told people get really good at using Excel if you want to go into finance, right? Use all the tools, use all the plugins, learn some VBA, optimize it. But where we're moving to is now this world where data is flowing. It doesn't just go from a database into your Excel spreadsheet where you can manipulate it and then you can send it out. It's flowing from place to place. The data is changing. It's constantly updating. And the skills and the things that are valuable are the ability to access that data, to be able to manipulate it and reintroduce it and pipe it to other places, whether that's through Python code or no code or C Sharp or whatever it is your platform is. It's that connection to other systems and flowing the data to where it needs to go. And I think what we're really getting at is, yes, you could have a career in finance using Excel and you can still be that extremely proficient and create value. But if you wanted to really set yourself apart, being able to embrace that mindset shift in the way that we perform our work and the way that we do it can set you above and beyond your peers. When it comes to your ability to make things happen. Xavier De Pauw: Totally. I mean, I would really challenge that. You can start in finance without basic skills and coding. I just don't see it. I would challenge that certain roles, probably you still can. Right. But it has become really important. What you said on data is really interesting. There's two points I would make. One is on the live data, I'll give an example of what we're building, and then that segues very quickly into defy and blockchain types of stuff where data is just all over the place. I mean, in a positive way. Right. It just doesn't sit in one place. But on live data, to give you an example, again, what we're working on, you grant a loan, you do financial analysis of a company as you underwrite the credit risk of that company. That used to be done based on order to accounts, which are by definition six months old. But now we plug into a company like Kodak or Validist. There's a few of these companies in Europe, in the UK, they plug themselves into a bunch of digital accounting packages like zero and so on, and they aggregate so our clients using our technology can suck all the counting data from these companies and then do a live credit assessment of today's data, which is very different from punching in numbers into an Excel sheet and seeing what that does. Right. So in terms of quality of data is one thing. Then, in terms of if you think about that, we're storing all that data into one data Lake, massive data architecture there. That's a whole different job. That's really super interesting with a tool that can visualize directed data out of that. If I take a step back and I say what we're doing is we're taking financial data, we're storing it centrally, we're standardizing it. We're making sure it's live, connected and accessible by all the stakeholders, by the borrower, the lender originated by the investors, by the lawyers, by everybody. Okay, Kelly, I pretty much described the blockchain. We don't describe ourselves as web three or defy type of lending platform. But if I look at what we're doing, we're essentially enabling the digitalization or tokenization of loans of any credits that we would have on our platform because we standardize the data. So ultimately you've got a meta data sitting there, which you then can shoot off into any direction, and somebody can then split it up and tokenize it, do whatever they want with it. That's an interesting segue. That technology is super interesting. I think there's a lot of buzz around that. There's a lot of, what's the polite word, a lot of nonsense being talked about that if you look at the currencies themselves, that's a different topic. I find it still quite speculative. I still don't really understand what drives the supply, demand, et cetera. But the online technology is super interesting. If you think about innovations you go and browse on the site. Let's say you're on the Amazon website and you want to buy a home trainer bike or something. Well, people like Clara are now embedding credits in those ecommerce platforms. The next step is to have that in your browser. So why have it embedded in the website? This can live just in your browser, and the browser should know who you are and give you kind of personalized financing options. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's scary browser knowing who you are. I mean, they already know who you are. But I just think of all the stuff that can happen once we shift, and that goes back into the fact of the strength and the need of cybersecurity and how you embed a lot of the fact into that. So I don't mean to cut you offshore. I don't mean to cut you off because we're coming to and there's so much more. I told you, this always happens. Time flies when we get together. But I have about five more minutes. So I'm going to let Sean ask question if he has a question, because I know he has some good questions. Sean Tibor: The biggest question I have is this is a tremendously exciting space, and I've never been one who is like, wow, finance. That's my jam, right? I was always the marketing guy and systems and everything. But it's fascinating how many different factors go into this and all the different pieces and the new offerings, the way that the whole ecosystem of fintech is growing. If you had one piece of advice for someone who was maybe like a student who is skeptical about finance, why would I go into finance? That sounds boring. What's the piece of advice that you have for them that might give them a little bit of direction or spark their interest in this space? Xavier De Pauw: I love finding that's why I'm in that space. So I have to try and make abstraction of that. So nothing to do with the space, but some of the things that the statistics I mentioned before, there's a huge amount of capital flowing into this, which is driving a huge amount of innovation and change. And that in of itself is super exciting. When you come into a space that, frankly, is still catching up with other parts of the economy and the world. In terms of innovation, that's pretty cool. You can literally start doing things in a completely different way. And actually, if you take that further, the things we touched on earlier, decentralized finance web three, the technology online, the cryptos, entirely new business models. Financial models are being created. God knows where it will go. But just in terms of crypto, and I don't like talking about the cryptos themselves, but there's roughly $2 trillion of new value that's been created. If you take all the crypto that exists today, what they're valued at is roughly from nothing to 2 trillion listing has just mushrooms. So it's a space which is evolving at such speed that it's Kelly, interesting. We used to think about finance as you go to the bank. Today, finance has become embedded, so it's no longer I need a loan, I need the payment. So if you think about the boring parts of finance, there's still plenty of boring technical stuff to be done. I love doing that. So I'm in there. But if you think of the other stuff, the user experience, how can you make a shopping experience seamless? It's the Amazon shops. They build bricks and mortar shops where you walk in, walk out, grab your stuff, and a payment has happened. That's pretty cool. That's almost magical, right? Somehow the shop knows who you are, has debited your account, your card. Why there's no more cards for me, it's that it's changing the way we do things intrinsically in our lives, which happened to be linked to your financial part. You could do something similar in the health sector or whatever. But the finance sector is certainly a really interesting option and not just boring financial stuff. Sean Tibor: The other really interesting thing, too, because it's so centered now. A lot of the innovation is centered on the customer experience. Whether that's an end user or a bank or another fintech, it's ripe for disruption. And it doesn't mean that you need to have a tremendous financial background to think about how things could be better. From my users perspective, right. It helps, but you can think about it in terms of this process of paying for something is not ideal. How can I make it better and actually come up with a viable service? Xavier De Pauw: When I built the Challenger Bank, what was great is I came from a capital market background and I worked together with the UX UI creative guys. And so I've grown to really love that space. And you're right, they typically don't really like or understand or have any affinity for the technical stuff. But those skills are important because you need a user experience that is. Wow. Right. To attract to use it. That's a great part of any digital experience. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: But also the fintech experience I'm going to plug real quick before you go. So for people like me who's only taking cocaine, never took stats because Sean always talks about stats. And Cody, I don't know those. Jose Portia has a really good finance course on Udemy. Sometimes he plugs it in for a nice $21, but it is an expensive course. But if you check it out, we'll put the link in the show notes. I started it. Lots of Pandas, lots of numpies, lots of Python basics. So, John, go ahead. Sean Tibor: Nice. Xavier De Pauw: All right. Sean Tibor: Well, we're going to wrap it up here. There's obviously plenty more to talk about when one dollars out of every $5 is going into VC investment in fintech. There's a lot going on here. We're going to wrap it up and save more of the conversation for another time, but if you'd like to chat more with us about this, you can always reach out to us on Twitter teaching Python You can also reach out to us through our website at Teaching Python. Fm, we'll post contact information for Xavier if he's willing on our show notes as well, so you can reach out to him if you have questions or want to learn more about what is currently known as LendX and will shortly be known as something new and even more exciting in the near future. But before we go, I did want to say thank you, Xavier, for joining us. It's been really fun to talk to you and if you'd asked me ten years ago if I would enjoy having a conversation about finance, I would have said no. But now this is the hottest, coolest thing going in the technology space. Xavier De Pauw: Welcome to the dark side. Sean Tibor: All right. So for Teaching Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This is Sean, this is Kelly signing up.