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Conversations with Tyler

Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2021

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Gifted young Argentines tend to leave home to "make it in America" and never look back, but after earning a degree from Harvard, writing a book about the Spanish Civil War, and living in the United States for 12 years, Pierpaolo Barbieri has returned to Argentina. And he's bringing foreign capital and talented expats with him. Pierpaolo's FinTech startup Ualá works to bring universal banking to a Latin American market in which huge swaths of the population are still stuck using cash for everything. By giving the working classes power over their own money, he hopes to produce greater prosperity and social mobility in his home country and beyond.

Pierpaolo joined Tyler to discuss why the Mexican banking system only serves 30 percent of Mexicans, which country will be the first to go cashless, the implications of a digital yuan, whether Miami will overtake São Paolo as the tech center of Latin America, how he hopes to make Ualá the Facebook of FinTech, Argentina's bipolar fiscal policy, his transition from historian to startup founder, the novels of Michel Houellebecq, Nazi economic policy, why you can find amazing and cheap pasta in Argentina, why Jorge Luis Borges might be his favorite philosopher, the advice he'd give to his 18-year-old self, his friendship with Niall Ferguson, the political legacy of the Spanish Civil War, why he stopped sending emails from bed, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded April 12th, 2021

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:08.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:12.6

Learn more at mercatis.org.

0:15.2

And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit

0:20.4

ConversationsWithT Tyler.com.

0:26.4

Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

0:29.9

I'm here today with Pierrapalo Barberdi of Argentina.

0:33.4

He is the CEO and founder of Huala, a major fintech firm in Latin America.

0:39.1

He's an executive director at Green Mantle, a geopolitical consulting firm, general

0:44.1

all-around very smart person, and his senior thesis that he wrote at Harvard called Hitler's

0:49.3

Shadow Empire, the Nazis and the Spanish Civil War, was later published by Harvard University

0:54.7

Press.

0:55.7

Hello, welcome.

0:56.7

Thank you, it's a great pleasure to be here, Tyler.

0:58.9

Thanks for the invitation.

1:00.1

The onset of central bank digital currencies.

1:03.2

How will that change the world?

1:04.8

I think it has the potential to change the world dramatically, but it's going to take

1:08.2

time.

1:09.2

I think that the world needs a new way to send money across borders.

1:14.3

And I think that over the medium run, what the Chinese are trying to do with their own

1:18.8

digital currency threatens the overall supremacy of the dollar and the ability of the United

...

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