Today’s show is amazing on two levels. First, my guests, Ida Rademacher and Jamie Kalamarides, explain new frontiers of thinking about how financial services, including insurance and retirement funds, can promote real financial health and inclusion.

And second, the whole conversation is permeated by a critical theme, an insight that needs to be elevated from the background to the foreground in every discussion of how to do better for financial consumers. That second theme is that we are going to have to break down the walls -- dismantle the siloes, get rid of the boxes, make connections, graft together hybrids -- across the ecosystem of both finance, technology and regulation. 

Listening to these experts talk, you can almost see our current world -- labor markets, financial markets, the economy, consumer behaviors -- transforming out from under the rigid structures we now use to organize our industries and regulatory regimes. For decades, we’ve had slow-changing financial products that we regulate through a slow-changing (and ever-growing) set of laws and regulations. We have distinct legal and regulatory frameworks for banking and investment and insurance. We have old definitions of products, each subject to specific rules on how they should be designed and offered. Suddenly, today, many of these old structures are becoming obsolete. And, increasingly, we can see that many of them are actually standing in the way of better solutions for consumers.