Financial Inclusion And Education Empowered Fintech: Dinis Guarda Interviews Damu Winston, Global Head Of Web 3.0 Innovation At Amazon

Dinis Guarda interviews Damu Winston, Global Head of Web 3.0 Innovation at Amazon, in his YouTube Podcast. In this episode, they discuss profound insights on business innovation, fintech, and the importance of leveraging technology to drive financial inclusion. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net and citiesabc.com.

Damu Winston is a global thought leader and bestselling author known for his pioneering work in emerging technologies like Web3, Blockchain, and AI. He is Amazon's Global Head of Web3 Innovation and former AWS Emerging Solutions Leader. With a proven track record across diverse sectors including aviation, healthcare, and finance, he has led high-performing teams globally. 

As an entrepreneur, Damu is bridging innovation and education with his entrepreneurial ventures, such as Winston Trust and Finteachable. During the interview, he told Dinis:

“After more than two decades of my work across the world, I ended up finding myself back in Dubai in the middle of the UAE teaching every single bank here in the UAE on financial services, including diverse topics like fintech, blockchain, AI, design thinking, customer journey mapping, but my main course right now is something called future proof banker. It means taking all the things that I've learned from a young age living in West Africa to the things I did in the US. I've leveraged all those learnings even working in the healthcare and nuclear energy space and then brought it all full circle now to really teach how we will be future proof.”

Finteachable: Empowering fintech through education and support

Finteachable was founded by Damu. It is a platform for fintech experts to share their knowledge and expertise. He describes it as a "marketplace for fintech experts", aimed at providing personalised training to professionals. He told Dinis:

“Finteachable is a marketplace for fintech experts identity. I call them teacherpreneurs. A lot of us who are practitioners are academics. So I've created a platform, a really niche platform for experts like you and I too share our expertise with people who want those insights. I call it tribal knowledge. This is what we have, you and I, have worked in multiple projects and we understand how things actually get done versus what you see in textbooks; where oftentimes there are conceptual or case studies that are actually an anomaly. We try to teach what's practical and what's local. I'm teaching every single bank here in the UAE on how to implement some of the emerging technologies and things that they should be implementing today if they haven't already implemented.”

In addition to this, Damu has been involved in initiatives like COVID19fund.us, helping small businesses access capital during the pandemic. 

“COVID19fund.us is a platform to help small businesses gain access to capital. We saw that early on when we called the economic injury that people are experiencing today because that's literally driven because of all the lockdowns, because people are not moving as much tourism down etc. We saw that there was a need for people to get access to capital. So, we grant loans and then we're going to roll out another element of it around access to VCs and it's really again targeted on small businesses that are in the US.”

Blockchain: A pathway to trust and transparency

Damu is the author of the bestseller ‘I Don't Trust You, But Blockchain and Bitcoin Will Help’. The book addresses the growing issue of distrust in today's digital world and proposes blockchain as a solution. Speaking about the need for blockchain enabled financial infrastructure, he says:

“Blockchain as an infrastructure of trust means that the people are part of the network or the community. We see a common truth and so that’s what I wanted to highlight here. This understanding of blockchain technology is not as complicated as some academics try to make it out to be. It is an infrastructure technology something that most of us will never ever see whatsoever. All we really care about is that our solutions that we have work and so infrastructure is just like a road that we drive on or that we (when we fly) land on. It's just infrastructure.

I just wanted to find a way to demystify what the technology is and also talk about actual and real implementations that are happening in the UAE and around the world. I just wanted to highlight that we have so much distrust in the world and that we all need to establish a common form of trust amongst peers. 

I'm confident from what I'm seeing in industry and what I'm teaching that this blockchain is the way forward or DLT or Interledger, all of that I encompass it all together in the same bucket because there's small differences when we really look at it.”

Ensuring financial inclusion with blockchain technology

Winston stresses the transformative potential of fintech in addressing the needs of the unbanked and underbanked populations.

“A lot of people are under banks, but our entire financial infrastructure is transforming. It's being disrupted, it's changing! The reality of it is there are so many people that are unbanked and under bank but because of emerging technology like blockchain. I'm sure at some point because of AI et cetera, there's an opportunity like no other time that we've seen in history for us to create new products and services that did not exist before. 

This is why this is the perfect time to learn about fintech if you're not already in the fintech space or even learn about what's happening in other parts of the world so that you can create something that's either new for your region where you are or leverage something that exists somewhere else and create something that's fundamentally different, game changing, and that's necessary for the world that we live in today”, he comments about the emerging technologies like blockchain and AI as key enablers.