Welcome to Almost Here, Round the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.

Future Technologies always to transform our lives for better or worse are the focus of this podcast.

Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used.

We're just around the corner.

From Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, 3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more.

All right, this is Tracy Murda, and you're here with Future Tech Podcast.

Today, I would like to welcome my special guest, Michael Bernielli,

the chairman of Zien and co-founder of the special commercial think tank in London,

which he co-founded in 1994.

Welcome, Michael, and thank you so much for your time today.

Well, Tracy, good to hear you as well.

Well, I wanted to sort of pick your brain. First of all, tell me how did you start your company?

What made you come up with this idea and sort of have a vision for it?

Well, Zien was founded really to try and help people make better decisions. Back years ago, we were enamored of areas like risk management and new technology,

and we were very conscious that on the boundary between finance and technology,

not enough firms in our opinion were doing research, really in two ways,

the use of technology, which I think seems self-evident, but also

the creative use of finance. And over the last 22 years, we've done a whole variety

of things directed primarily to looking at the fundamental question of when we know our

financial system is working.

So these things have ranged from the exploration of mutual distributed ledgers,

these days known as blockchains back in 1995,

...