Yours in Finance LIVE: Jane Barratt

The same questions asked of the people shaping the future of banking and fintech.

Welcome to Yours in Finance, where we track how banking is changing. This time we did it live.

We recorded our Yours in Finance LIVE series at Money20/20, and Jane Barratt of MX is the only live guest to take on the full set of seven questions. She says, “The tools part is easy. It’s the emotional part that is hard.”

About Jane

Jane Barratt, Chief Advocacy Officer at MX, is a long-time champion of financial strength. At MX, Jane works with financial institutions, industry groups, and government and regulatory bodies to make sure people have the tools and data they need to improve their financial outcomes. Her financial education courses on LinkedIn Learning are helping hundreds of thousands of people around the world build their financial skills. Before MX, Jane was Founder and CEO of GoldBean, an education-first financial advisory platform, and spent two decades driving growth for Fortune 500 companies.

Q&A

The interview is edited for brevity and clarity.

What’s one thing you want people to know about your work?

Nothing stays the same for very long. We all get married to ideas, to regulatory frameworks, to how things are working today. Give it 12 weeks or six months and things will shift.

Every year you come to Money20/20, there’s a different mountain everyone’s running toward. Two years ago it was stablecoin. Last year it was fraud. This year it’s AI. In two years it’ll be quantum. The fun part is that nothing actually gets replaced. It’s additive. Remember “it’s all about search,” then social, then mobile? We still have to do all of those, and now we have to do AI and consider the impacts of quantum too. If you’re not comfortable with change, you should probably go somewhere else.

What’s something people don’t know about you?

I’m an extreme extrovert. I love being around people, and coming here is like a nerd summer camp reunion every year. For my mental and physical health, I love to run. For my ongoing extroversion, I love coffee.

What’s difficult about managing money?

I’ll answer both personally and from what I’ve seen in the industry, because the two intersect. I grew up professionally in Asia, and in Chinese culture especially, people talk about money the way they talk about the weather or food. You talk about how much things cost and how much you earn. When I moved to the U.S., I found an almost Victorian-era shame around money. “Oh, you can’t say that.” “I can’t believe you asked me that.” That was my trigger. I became an informal advisor to a lot of people around me, and eventually I started an investing platform for beginners that put education first.

My fundamental truth is this: your money story drives how you manage money, and your money story comes from how you grew up. It isn’t about how much you earn today. It’s what you learned when you were six, or 12. Money is so deeply tied to identity and self-worth that people often know what to do, but they act in a way that reflects whether they grew up in a household of scarcity. It doesn’t matter how much money I have. I’m always going to feel a little bit of that “what happens if” fear.

For a few of my LinkedIn Learning courses I partnered with Amanda Clayman, an amazing financial therapist, and it was such an unlock. I could say, “Here are the tools. Here’s what the words mean.” She could follow with, “Here’s why this might be scary, here’s what might stop you, and here’s how you’ll feel after you do it.”

The hardest thing about financial services is that we sometimes work alongside people who are financially unstable themselves. They’re up on stage doing the dance about how everything is awesome, then going home unable to make rent. We don’t talk about that enough.

There’s a third piece too. We think in products. People don’t. They aren’t thinking about the difference between their savings, their checking, their robo-advisor and their credit card. We need to stop thinking in terms of products and share of wallet and start asking how we’re moving people forward. When you move people forward, they reduce their borrowing costs, grow their deposits, start investing and feel more secure. They become better customers. You’re enabling great outcomes instead of chasing them for an overdraft fee.

What do you like about digital banking?

I’ll expand it to digital tools generally. I love that they can adapt and evolve, and that you can fold new technology into them. Once you give people a digital tool, you can’t go back. You can’t say, “Sorry about that mobile app, we’re throwing it out.” A call center or a branch is pretty static by comparison. You can change the format, but it’s still people working within a confined environment.

I’d like to stop calling it digital banking, though, because “banking” still feels transactional. It’s really insights and advice, and support for your life. That doesn’t roll off the tongue, I know. But it ties to the bigger picture of what banking is for. Incentives aren’t always aligned with what the industry needs to do. Depending on interest rates, we either chase deposits or build the loan book, and it swings between the two. Does that help people? No. They need both, and they need to manage their lives no matter what interest rates are doing. Redefining digital banking as a way to support the life you want to lead reframes the industry nicely.

What’s a financial decision you’d be happy to outsource to an AI agent?

Scenario planning. I’ve said for a long time that our financial data is a rearview mirror: here’s what you spent, and wow, you really messed that up. I want the windscreen view instead. What decisions am I making today, and what impact will they have downstream?

This goes back to the emotional side. I really want to buy a sauna. It isn’t a small decision. I know it will cut into my savings and mean less growth, but I can’t quantify that off the top of my head. Show me three or four outcomes of doing it or not doing it, and the opportunity cost, not just today but 20 years from now, for something I’ll probably enjoy for a year or two and then get sick of. I’ll probably still buy it. But at least I’ll know.

What financial habit or behavior are you unwilling to automate?

Shopping. And I’ll die on this hill.

I know we’re all excited about agentic commerce, and it’s been a big balloon of thought pieces and panels for a while now. But roughly 70% of U.S. GDP is consumer spending, and about 80% of that is driven by women. Did anyone ask a woman if she wants agentic commerce? 

A lot of the problems being put out there aren’t actually problems. The shopping apps are already great. Running out of paper towels isn’t an existential crisis that requires an agent. And there’s an under appreciation that shopping is dopamine. It’s entertainment, and it can be a group activity. How we acquire things means more than “I need paper towels.”

There’s also trust. I’d hope for regulation around surveillance pricing, because more data doesn’t always work in your favor. And I don’t need an agent to get me a great price on half a pallet of paper towels I have nowhere to put.

Then there’s fraud. My husband thought he bought sneakers from a legitimate-looking running retailer. There was a one-letter difference in the URL, and it was a completely spoofed site. His only clue was that he never got an email receipt. Luckily he’d paid through PayPal, where he saw it had been set up as a recurring payment of $90 a day, and he was able to cancel it. Most people wouldn’t catch that in time. Add bots talking to bots, each telling the other “you look legit,” and that’s scary.

And I like nice fabrics. You want to feel a cashmere-silk blend before you pay for it. An agent isn’t going to know that.

What earns the right to be someone’s primary financial relationship?

At the center are aligned incentives and trust. “Primary” can mean a lot of things: the credit union where my salary goes, or the investment platform holding most of my assets. For me, primary is someone who can anticipate my needs and use my data in a way that improves my outcomes.

That’s still a North Star. I can’t say anyone is doing it spectacularly well yet, but it’s getting better with personalized insights. Treat me like a generic middle-aged woman and I’ll cancel you. Treat me like complicated Jane, who has a lot going on, and you’ll earn my trust, my respect and my business. Primary is less about the assets and much more about whether you use my data to improve my outcomes.

How do you define a bank?

A bank, or a credit union, or any primary institution, is a place that, from a trust, safety and regulatory perspective, both takes care of and grows your life’s work. We spend our time and exchange it for money, and an institution takes that money. That has to be taken seriously. It’s not cavalier, and it isn’t just checking regulatory boxes. I care what happens to my money, and I want the companies I work with to care too. A financial institution needs to keep evolving while keeping its trust, safety and regulatory guardrails intact.

Off the card: With the evolving 1033 landscape, how do you expect the latest moves from big tech to play out in the connectivity of systems?

There’s a short-term answer and a long-term answer. I can’t speak for any company specifically, but the economic cycle is that you invest a ton of money up front and hope it pays off. With 70% of the economy being consumer spending, the payoff comes from getting people to buy more through you. An agentic process without guardrails or a clear regulatory perimeter means the short term will be messy. We saw it this week with JPMorgan Chase and agents, with Amazon blocking agents and with Schwab building its own AI assistant. There will be push and pull.

The biggest X factor is that AI is expensive and people aren’t paying for it. If we’re not paying, we’re the product. It is changing behavior, and people are outsourcing decisions to agents, but right now it’s subsidized by investors. If I got a bill for how much AI I actually used, I’d say, “I don’t need that.” So we’re in an exploration phase. It will probably keep expanding for a while, and then I’d guess there will be some contraction. We’re already seeing it in workplaces that went from “burn all the tokens you like” to “use that brain a little.”

What is the last thing you bought that you’re still thinking about?

I’ve been coming to Money20/20 for about 11 years. Every year I wear heels, and every year I end up crying. This is why we don’t outsource to agents. Who would tell an agent, “I need a platform, pony hair Nike Air Force 1”? I stumbled across them right before the show and thought, “I’ve actually found a way to be both tall and comfortable.” I’m obsessed with my bedazzled pony hair shoes.