Digital: Disrupted: Does the Financial Industry Actually Get Digital Disruption?

Paul Muller: Alright, I want to talk FinTech. And an organization that knows a heck of a lot about financial services and the modernization of digital practices is our show sponsor Rocket Software, do make sure you check them out at rocketsoftware.com to see why over 10 million IT professionals rely on Rocket Software every single day to run their most critical business apps, processes, and data. So, this could be the one question that makes the entire show. I have a feeling we could burn through 30 minutes with just the answer to this question. I am curious, I've read your bio, tell us a bit about your background. How did you come to be so focused on the financial services sector? You've always been a dollars and cents nerd?

Patrick Young: Not always a dollars and cents nerd, but I was always interested in it. You alluded to it earlier. The missing link here is cars. I am a psycho, deranged petrol head. I mean in my past I have been, and actually I continue to be, occasionally a commentator on old car racing. When I was a schoolboy at 15 years, I ran the first two series of historic car races. At that stage, it was sort of post-war cars in my native Northern Ireland that had never been seen before. It was the first entrepreneurial venture. I found it fascinating but the one thing that we all know, even then before the values of old cars were nothing like they are today, you needed money. So therefore, I thought, well, I better become financially literate.

So, being an auto didactic kind of a guy, I set out to try and understand finance better, that led me into trading my own account and doing all sorts of things. That brought us up to the crash of 1987. And actually, I found myself being interviewed for a job on Black Monday in 1987, that was October the 19th that led me into the derivatives business. I'm a specialist in derivatives largely because I can manage sentences. I ended up teaching people how to use derivatives on behalf of various exchanges that got me interested in the models. I'd always been fascinated by technology. And I mean the technology we're talking about when I was a kid was computers that you wouldn't even manage to find that level of technology in a Fitbit today, Fitbits are about 30 times more powerful.

I ended up thinking, gosh, this whole financial business looks really, really backward. Fast forward, I started doing business on the internet in 1994, and have been there ever since, been involved in finance, understanding the transformation of finance. And I got so frustrated. I wrote a book called Capital Market Revolution, which really, I think was a revelation to many people about just where the financial markets were going to go. And then that led me to advising most of the world's major exchanges as they started transitioning away from what they called open outcry. Those guys with the pretty colored jackets who were all waving at each other and shouting at each other on a floor into the digital world. And from there I worked with multiple new investors. I was the chief executive of the Transylvanian Stock Exchange. You never knew the Transylvanian Stock Exchange existed. Now you will probably never be able to forget that there once was a Transylvanian Stock Exchange. I've been on the board of other industry associations around the world. I build exchanges because that's just the kind of rock and roll guy that I am. And obviously I am totally, completely and utterly a marketplace and FinTech nerd these days, but still with a huge passion for cars.