Michael Imerman, financial data scientist and associate professor of finance at Claremont Graduate University, appears May 9, 2022, on The Sherman Show as he winds down a sabbatical as a visiting scholar to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. At the San Francisco Fed, he has been advising a dedicated fintech group at the bank of innovations in this field and emerging risks. (Standard disclaimer: Dr. Imerman notes the views and opinions he shares here are his own and do not necessarily reflect the San Francisco Fed or the Federal Reserve system.)

Starting his conversation with hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau (2:51), Dr. Imerman defines fintech as “the collision of emerging technologies and financial services.” While financial services providers have been using information technologies for decades, something different has been occurring over the past 10-15 years. “We’ve had tech companies, both big tech – the Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple – as well as start-ups moving into this space,” he says. “These are companies that historically have had nothing to do with financial services. Over the past 10 years, they’ve moved into the space that has been traditionally occupied by the incumbents: banks, asset managers, insurance companies.”

Among other developments, Dr. Imerman discusses the “shakeup” posed by “neobanks and challenger banks” (13:05), fintech lending (14:17) and the financial “incumbents catching up” with the fintech challengers (16:33). Dr. Imerman stresses importance of regulatory oversight to ensure consumer protection and manage systemic risk at a time when fintech is accelerating and democratizing accessibility to financial services (20:29). Messrs. Imerman, Sherman and Lau also discuss central bank digital currencies (31:32) and what excites Imerman most about the future of financial tech innovation: quantum computing (36:15).

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