Breaking Banks

In this episode of Breaking Banks host Brett King sits down with Farbod Sadeghian, Founder and Executive Chairman of TheBlock. Based in Dubai, TheBlock is a fintech collaboration space dedicated to fintech, blockchain development, and crypto, bringing together fintech, AI, and capital markets to build the next economy of virtual assets,

The conversation covers the origin story of TheBlock and the UAE’s regulatory landscape—specifically the Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA). They also discuss how TheBlock is building a virtual asset community that enables faster speed to market through direct collaboration with onsite advisors and strategic partners.

By connecting people, infrastructure and opportunities, TheBlock offers end-to-end support to help companies launch, operate and scale within the digital economy.

If in Dubai, stop by! 

In This Episode

Financial institutions (FIs) are currently navigating a “perfect storm” of technological, market, and consumer shifts. They face a multi-front war: constant economic and regulatory pressure, soaring consumer expectations for 24/7 personalization, and the existential threat of megabanks with massive tech budgets.

To survive and thrive, FIs must move beyond “pilot purgatory”—where 95% of generic AI pilots fail—and adopt a banking-specific AI workforce,an AI-powered intelligence layer for modern banking.

In this episode of Breaking Banks host Jason Henrichs is joined by Dan Michaeli, CEO & Co-Founder of Glia, a digital customer service and banking AI platform serving over 700 FIs, and Madeline Fredin, SVP of Growth & AI Transformation at Alloy Labs to explore how a self-learning institutional brain unifies data across the organization. By starting with the contact center—the richest source of unstructured interaction data—banks can build a foundation that shifts their entire operation from reactive service to proactive growth and agentic workflows.

In This Episode

Kiah Haslett walked into our Hot Takes session at the Alloy Labs annual member meeting with a thesis she’d been sitting on, and it’s a good one: in a lighter-touch regulatory environment, the prisoner’s dilemma rewards whoever moves first. The strategically correct move, she argues, might also be the morally bankrupt one. And she’s not sure that changes the math.

Dara Tarkowski — who sees the grand jury subpoenas before anyone else does — pushed back. Not on the logic, but on the premise. The statutes didn’t go anywhere. The switch can still be flipped.

And underneath both arguments is the question we’d been wrestling with the day before: if most banks only have a debt mindset — protect the downside, don’t lose, get your principal back — what are they leaving on the table? And what does it actually cost them to keep waiting for clarity that isn’t coming?

Joining Jason Henrichs are Kiah Haslett (Fintech Takes Banking), Dara Tarkowski (Much Shelist, P.C.), and Rick Geloff (Bank of North Dakota).

In This Episode

This week on Breaking Banks Brett King interviews bestselling author Igor Pejic about his new book Tech Money: A Guide to the New Game of Technology Investing, available May 26th. Brett and Igor discuss turbocharged innovations, frontier technologies, and how AI and technology investment are changing our future.

In this wide ranging conversation, Brett and Igor also debate the implications of wars fought largely by AI and how tech-first defense players like Palantir, Anduril and others are changing the sector from an investment perspective.

In This Episode

This week on Breaking Banks, we feature sister podcast, Social Currency, powered by Sunrise Banks. Social Currency introduces us to some of the most innovative changemakers in finance, technology, and social impact—leaders who are dismantling barriers and reshaping their industries.

In this episode hosts Tyler Seydel, Chief Fintech Officer, and Eric Schurr, Chief Strategy Officer at Sunrise Banks are joined by Brian Tate, President and CEO of the Innovative Payments Association, to discuss where payments policy and innovation are headed next.

A graduate of Howard University with experience at the Financial Services Roundtable during the post-crisis reform era shaped by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Brian draws on decades inside Washington to unpack what’s coming for fintech, prepaid products, and the broader banking ecosystem. From regulatory modernization to emerging technologies, he shares his outlook on the opportunities and challenges that will define the next chapter of the payments revolution.

To hear more episodes of Social Currency go to provoke.fm or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.