Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m your host, Alex Johnson, and today one of our favorite guests is back: Frank Rotman, founding partner of 37Maru and co-founder and partner emeritus at QED Investors.
First, we chat about what happens to an entire industry once its customers have concluded the game is rigged, which is why financial nihilism now shows up everywhere from ETFs built on sports bets to DeFi products costumed as savings accounts. Frank has a theory he calls p(win)=0; once someone concludes their probability of winning is zero, walking away from the game is rational.
From there, we separate the AI use cases ready for prime time from the ones that aren’t. Back office work like AML documentation and exception processing is ripe for automation. A bank chatbot delivering flawless, compliant financial advice is a different proposition. In financial services, 98% accuracy can still equal zero.
Finally, we close on student lending, an area where Frank has firsthand experience (having built a student lending company before QED), and firsthand ideas (having spent the better part of a year making the case for reform to the Department of Education and the IRS). His proposal for how the government could build a “truth file” on which degrees pay off is one of the more concrete policy ideas we discuss.
Expect a wide-ranging conversation. Frank has a gift for making financial nihilism, AI, and student loan policy sound like one continuous argument, and by the end, I’m convinced that it is.
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-rotman/
X: https://x.com/fintechjunkie
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