The Money Hackers

How a Group of Misfits Took on Wall Street and Changed Finance Forever

By: Daniel P. Simon

Narrated by: Jakob Lewis

Businesses, investors, and consumers are grappling with the seismic daily changes technology has brought to the banking and finance industry. The Money Hackers is the story of fintech’s major players and explores how these disruptions are transforming even money itself.

Whether you’ve heard of fintech or not, it’s already changing your life. Have you ever “Venmoed” someone? Do you think of investing in Bitcoin--even though you can’t quite explain what it is? If you’ve deposited a check using your iPhone, that’s fintech. If you’ve gone to a bank branch and found it’s been closed for good, odds are that’s because of fintech too.

This book focuses on some of fintech’s most powerful disruptors--a ragtag collection of financial outsiders and savants--and uses their incredible stories to explain not just how the technology works, but how the Silicon Valley thinking behind the technology, ideas like friction, hedonic adaptation, democratization, and disintermediation, is having a drastic effect on the entire banking and finance industry.

Upon reading The Money Hackers, you will:

• Feel empowered with the knowledge needed to spot the opportunities the next wave of fintech disruptions will bring.
• Understand the critical pain points that fintech is resolving, through a profile of the major finsurgents behind the disruption. Topic areas include Friction (featuring founders of Venmo), Aggregate and Automate (featuring Adam Dell, founder of Open Table and brother of Michael Dell), and Rise of the Machines (featuring Jon Stein, founder of robo-advisor Betterment).
• Learn about some of the larger-than-life characters behind the fintech movement.

The Money Hackers tells the fascinating story of fintech--how it began, and where it is likely taking us.

Great Book, but a little underdone by the Narrator

I really loved this book. it was a great read and quite enlightening on the subject of FinTech. I don't want to make slight of his work, but for me I could have used a little more expression through this read. I felt like he just did t really have any interest in the subject matter. I'm sure the Narrator is good at the job I just wasnt feeling his performance. However I would have to say that my issues with the narration aside, it was not enough of a con to make me less enthralled by this thought provoking piece of literature.

Quick tour, some context, lots of touts

The main content here is a series of business operators reciting very quick and sketchy versions of their basic pitches, about like what you see when you go to the firm's home page. It is useful to get a reasonably brisk survey of what various startups are doing. There is a limited amount of context, financial history, and critical thinking layered in, never very deep or searching. That is more the standard dismissive Silicon Valley newbie wet-behind-the-ears view of history and the driving narratives. It is very journalistic, with no lack of breathless cheerleading, intensified in effective shallowness by the affected casualness and adolescent vocalizations of the narrator. The concept that incumbent banks are myopic, sclerotic dinosaurs is way overplayed, as if repetition would make it more true, and I think, poorly supported. A few of the startups featured will no doubt see significant success. But often what I hear is a broken record of the standard digital cheerleading, as if reciting "innovation" ad nauseum (like adding more exclamation points !!!!!) would evidence greater believability or substance.