 So just to set the stage, he's the corporate in the jeans and the boots, and I'm the entrepreneur and the coach. We like to look like something different. Dan, I'm really excited that you are here and talking about financial inclusion. You know, we can make money reducing the cost of being poor and not making money off the poor. And it's exciting that American Express and other folks, you know, PayPal is here and other folks have real revenue targets around a mission where the market overlaps with justice. It doesn't happen every time. Fair trade. You have to subsidize some of the costs. With this, that's actually you can make money, smartphones, big data, reducing the cost of being poor, financial inclusion. That's new. And so we've had corporate sponsors before. You're one of the first to have actual revenue targets around things that the entrepreneurs in this room would be working at, things that the Village Capital Financial Inclusion Corridor are working at. So that's new. Why is American Express there? Why is this now a corporate goal? Why does this make sense as a business? Well, there's a saying that inspires me every day that it's expensive to be poor. And that couldn't be more true in the financial services arena. The things that you and I take for granted, caching a check, paying a bill, sending money to somebody you love, they're incredibly time consuming and very expensive for a huge population here in the United States and across the world. There are over two and a half billion people in the world that are financially excluded from the traditional financial system. Here in the U.S., incredibly, there are anywhere between 70 and 100 million adults, almost a third of our population that don't have access to bank accounts. And so when they want to cash a check, they're hard-earned money that they've gotten, some working two or three jobs, they have to go to a check caching location, stand in line for 30 or 40 minutes, and then just to give them cash, the check caching location takes anywhere between 2% and 4% of their check to give them cash. And then when you have cash, what can you do with it? You can't do anything really. With cash, you can't pay your bills with it, so you have to go to another location, stand in line for another 40 minutes, and get a money order to pay your bill. So for a typical cable bill that might cost $50, you pay $11 to get a money order to pay that bill. And with technology, that just doesn't have to be the case anymore. We actually can dramatically reduce the cost, simplify the experience, take all that unproductive time away, and create alternatives to what traditional banking is, and do so profitably. So for us, my charge coming into American Express a couple of years ago were, how can we rethink financial services because of what's happening with technology? And what I found is there is a huge population that needs this technology, and it inspires us to create different and innovative ways of thinking about products. Has American Express done any official sizing of the market of financial inclusion in the U.S.? Well, in the U.S. alone, I'll just give you a couple of statistics, and you can define it any way you want. The FDIC defines it as that about 70 million Americans who are either unbanked or underbanked. And underbanked means you use things like a pawn shop or a check cash location. You may have a savings account, but that may be it. The study just came out that anywhere between 50% to 65% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Right. So what's the size of the problem? What about the size of the market opportunity? If you're doing things like reducing the $11 out of $40 cost of paying a bill and the hour and a half cost, what's the economic opportunity to? So this population spends about $1.3 trillion of spending the U.S. alone. So the myth that they're not disposable income is completely wrong. Right. But the fees and interests that the underserved population pay last year alone was $89 billion. So like bounce checks, you know, it's checks you write, and you bounce, I don't know how many of you have seen a, actually the Ts and Cs of a checking account recently. The typical checking account terms and conditions is 110 pages long, which is two times Romeo and Juliet. Okay. And the only thing they have in common is they're both sort of a tragedy in their own way. So Americans spent over $30 billion last year on bounce checks. On bounce checks. $30 billion. A lot of banks still do what's called high-low sorting. So if you have three checks that come in, one for $10 is one for $50, one for $100, they'll cash the $100 check first to put you into overdraft immediately, so you have $40 in your checking account. So they get three overdraft fees instead of maybe one that might have occurred. And so... Institutionalized predatory... It's, there are a lot of bad practices that are out there, payday loans are probably the worst of them all with interest rates that can be 20 times credit card rates that can be anywhere up to 300, 400% interest rates on that. So my thought is that technology can take that $89 billion that's spent right now. And you know, sort of the personal goal we have is how can we return half of that back to the underserved population? How do we take that $90 billion and save at a minimum $45 billion? Because the problem is it's not that people don't have revenues don't equal expenses. It's that the cash flow is very uneven. Prices may be coming in when your expenses are low and then you can get hit with a, you know, a car accident, a leaky roof, whatever medical emergency. And then once that happens and you have no savings, you go into this downward spiral. And so if we can return that money back into the economy, back it to people and start to encourage things like savings, we might be able to make a real dent in the issue. For AmEx, you know, you have kind of an exclusive brand. With the brand comes privilege is one of your things. These are folks who are not privileged. How, you've been kind of an exclusive brand, how do you brand and tell the story around financial inclusion? And then you're even putting on a movie here. Yeah. How does the brand and the story fit in? Yeah. Well, there are a lot of conversations around that at the board level and at the senior level in terms of what does it mean for us to rethink what our brand stands for? And our brand is always stood for, you know, in my view, sort of integrity, security, service. Not necessarily mass affluent, although our most famous products, you know, our charging credit card and the black card and that kind of thing are obviously at the mass affluent. But the company is 164 years old. I mean, it started as a freight forwarding company and there's nothing less sexy than freight forwarding on. We basically sent overstage coach and the Pony Express packages from one coast to the other coast for people that were going out West and needed to move things and that was an express. Yeah. Right. It was literally that's where it came. And American Express were together and created this. And so the brand has not always been mass affluent. It started off more populous than that. But the the issue for us is that technology is fundamentally changing financial services right now. If you stand still, you will fall behind. And honestly, we could now, for the first time with technology, think about new segments of the population in ways that we never could do before and serve them with a great value proposition. And that to me was the key. The data smart phones. You've got to get software platforms, smart phones, and then relationships with a bunch of retailers to reimagine what banking could be out there. And you can do that profitably, but be a consumer champion at the same time. And so our whole idea was and the rallying crime, the company was move our brand from being exclusive to being inclusive. And that was a big step to the company. And the time that it's a pivot for some huge company for American Express. When we saw the success we were having with some of the products that you mentioned, you know, it really started to resonate and it's inspiring, quite frankly, to be part of a company that's actually trying to address financial exclusion. Yeah. And why the movie? You've got it. They've got a great documentary that is showing here. Why tell a story about it? Why tell the story of the need the way this movie does? And if you haven't seen it, you should see it. We're showing it. Yeah. So the documentary is called Spent Looking for Change. We worked with Davis Guggenheim, who some of you may know of. He did an Incommonion Truth and Waiting for Superman. And what we really wanted to do is that people hear statistics around financial exclusion. Right. About 70 million people or $89 billion of fees. But most people do not understand that this isn't just about the very lower income level. This is really about the new middle class is the way that I define it. Every single one of us in this room either knows a friend or personally or a family member who is struggling right now. In some way shape or form. More now than before. That's happening. Absolutely. It's happening in my family. It's happening to everybody. We all know somebody. And what we wanted to do is with this documentary, and I encourage everybody to watch it. It's 38 minutes long. It doesn't take a lot of time. But we released it on YouTube because we didn't want to do whatever there's an exclusive film. Right. Because it was like, let's release this free of charge on YouTube. Just about 18 million people have seen the documentary. 18 million people. Wow. Yeah. Which is why I have to say that we had a couple of members of a couple of senators and congressmen put out press releases saying, you know, all Americans should see this. Yeah. And the reason we put out the movie and there's nothing about America's first in there. It's like at the very end of their credits that say we have to sponsor it. But it was to put a human face on the problem because if you really want to start a conversation about financial inclusion and have it be a real issue, it's a little like I saw some of the presentations that some of the folks did this morning. Yeah. And they tell stories. Right. About individuals. And it makes things come alive. Right. And I think to really, really address this problem, there needs to be a whole ecosystem that comes together. It can't be government. We can't rely on the government to address this problem. They don't have the resources to go and do it. Or the way. And it's a very divided, you know, very partisan body right now. And so to expect them to pass legislation of some sort that is going to fundamentally fix financial exclusion, I just don't think we can count on that. I also don't think we can just count on academia to put out research papers, although they put out extremely important bodies of work. Or the nonprofit world. This has to be a partnership between government, regulators, private enterprise, public NGO, that kind of thing. And so we wanted this conversation to start with this. And we wanted people to not just intellectually get the problem, but emotionally get the problem. And we show this at the Consumer Financial Services Board, the CFPB, and to their board. And after the film ended, like the head of it said, we got to take a couple of minutes just to compose ourselves, because it's heartbreaking when you see what people go through. It really can bring tears to your eyes. And you're a big company and you want to figure out what to do next and where to move. So you're doing a lot with AMEX Ventures, working with startups. Tell me how that works and how you make a decision. So we've got a couple of things that we are trying to do. I mean, one of the things is that we do have some resources within American Express to leverage against this problem. We are doing a financial inclusion lab in which we are asking academia to submit research, which we will fund, and that website goes live later today. We also set up a venture arm here in Silicon Valley in which we look to invest in companies that are promoting financial inclusion. We've set up $100 million fund out here. We look at a couple of areas, but financial inclusion is one of our biggest. We just closed our first round in a company called Signify yesterday. I think we announced it this morning. Signify works in seven developing markets where they, on an opt-in basis from customers, look at cell phone records and do an algorithm to look at credit worthiness. Because as many people know, traditional FICO scores and your credit worthiness scores, they don't look at things like your rent payment or what's your most recent record. I mean, there's a lot of things they exclude, and therefore people can't get a loan at a reasonable interest rate because so much of the data is not used. And so we think that this is just one very interesting model of many to support in looking at all of the different forms of data that might form sort of a different type of scoring methodology to extend credit. Because if you can extend credit to somebody at reasonable interest rates or an installment loan capacity as opposed to forcing them to go to pawn shops or give up their loved items or go to payday lenders or title loan companies, that's a good thing to go do. Right. So big data lets you extend the credit. Yeah, exactly. And your co-investor there is a mid-yard network. Yes. It's one of our long-term supporters here, but also been involved with it forever. Right. So this is your first investment. It's also obviously your first co-investment out of this thing. How did you have to figure out how to partner, how to make the deal work in terms of terms? Well, we have a venture arm out here. There's six people out here in Silicon Valley. Right. They're incredibly experienced in looking at the entrepreneurial community, the startup community. We looked at over 300 companies last year, for instance. And so we encourage anybody who's working in the arena of financial inclusion to submit to us. We look at all of them. We do screening criteria around it. And we want to invest in quite a number of companies in the arena. So we just have a little bit of time. I'm seeing McFly. Where will this be in five or six years? What do you see happening? So I think we're entering the era of the non-bank, is the way that I think about it. Where you can do, the bank branch infrastructure is such an antiquated out-of-date concept. It's incredibly expensive. Bank branches, thousands close every year. Where do they close? All, 97%, in neighborhoods where the median income is below the national average. So they're putting bank branches in rich neighborhoods, taking them out of poor neighborhoods. But the great thing is we don't need bank branches anymore. We don't need to go to a bank branch to cash currency, to get a checking account. You can do all of this now in the palm of your hand with a smartphone or even a feature phone through text type of functionality and software platforms and go to a retail store and have a cashier be sort of the equivalent of what a teller used to be. And so this idea of the post office maybe doing something, there's some very innovative thinking about how you can reimagine consumer financial services. And I think it can be extraordinarily powerful in solving this issue if we all come together around it. Yeah, that's great. We can talk more, but it looks like we're out of time. Okay, thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. Thank you. Have a great. Thank you. Thank you very much.