Everything is Fintech Live: Caywood's Founder & CEO, Megan Caywood

Oh, this is the perfect segue because I think where we are now, like within like a decade, we'll be regaling like, I don't know, whatever it is, Gen Alpha about what, you know, banking was like back in 2025.

Like you actually had to open an account and manage it yourself.

Like, I think the next wave is we've had digital transformation over the past, you know, 20 years probably, but probably 10 years within finance.

But the next wave is agentic transformation.

And agentic AI are systems that don't just predict, but they act within regulated frameworks.

They execute, they audit, and they learn autonomously.

And what that means for the world of personal finance is that you're no longer going to have to worry about having a good user experience or a pretty dashboard or better insights because you'll be able to have a CFO in your pocket who acts effectively.

So that was the first premise I really came to with Kaywood.

It's like AI is intelligence.

The intelligence that we can now bring into financial services is phenomenal.

This was like when I started my career in San Francisco at Intuit.

That's where Scott Cook, the founder, started was with Quicken, like sitting at a dining room table with his wife, like with all these, you know, different bills and things everywhere.

And they both have like a Harvard MBA and they look at each other like, gosh, if it's this hard for us to manage our finances, how's the average American like, you know, doing on a daily basis with this stuff? It's complex.

So they created Quicken, which obviously Intuit's a phenomenally successful business.

So that worked out well for them.

But what we have now is whenever we have a new technology come to market, it shifts the art of the possible in terms of the experience.

It doesn't necessarily always create new industries.

It's like the classic examples like Uber and Netflix.

The taxi industry existed.

Streaming videos existed.

But it's the way that they delivered it with new technology created a totally new experience and a totally new business model.

And my vision is that AI will create a totally new experience and a totally new business model for the world of finance.

And part of that is because at Starling and at Barclays, what we were trying to do is take everything that currently existed and just make it easier.

Just automate it as much as you can, take out as many steps as you can, just try to make it easy.

But effectively, customers still needed to open the account.