05/24/2016

CEO Keynotes: Ryan Caldwells Delivers His Entrepreneurial Vision

Ryan Caldwell Founder and CEO MX Technologies shared his entrepreneurial vision during a stirring CEO keynote discussion at the AFT Spring Summit at Orlando, Fla.

Ryan Caldwell founded MoneyDesktop in 2010 and has served as the company’s CEO since then. His enthusiasm for solving problems often compels him to work in tandem with employees in order to spread his motivational ideas throughout the company. Utah Business Quarterly highlighted him as one of the 10 Coolest Entrepreneurs and as one of its Top 40 Under 40. Signal Peak Ventures also named him one of the top 100 Venture Entrepreneurs.

At the AFT Spring Summit, Caldwell talked about what technological and other advances means to people. “A huge percentage of people go through their lives not realizing that all the innovation around them enables them to have these magical lives that are a hundred times better than the wealthiest king hundreds of years ago.”

He explained that forward-thinking individuals “have this moral imperative surrounding innovation, if you don’t give back you would be a thief.”

Caldwell also discussed major objectives the financial technology industry as a group needs to overcome, such as evolving into an advocacy-based industry because of increased choices and decreased switching costs.

Switching barriers or switching costs are terms used in microeconomics, strategic management, and marketing to describe any impediment to a customer's changing of suppliers. Many markets force consumers to incur costs when switching from one supplier to another.

“What the financial industry has to figure out is we have to start changing our cultures. We need to continue to update and refine the culture,” Caldwell explained. That would help in areas such as disruption, the biggest threat for fintech, Caldwell reminded everyone, “We (MX) are a big believer in culture. We cannot innovate for the world without passionate people. “

“We have a very fractured industry. In some cases, it spurs innovation in other ways it limits it,” Caldwell said.

He sees transactional data as valuable but currently underutilized. “There is no way that data is not going to be leveraged,” Ryan suggested.

Discussing the world in general, “we should find a way to get over these differences where we are competitive, of where we are in conflict, and find a way to unite.” Caldwell suggested societies have the responsibilities to stabilize the actual economies. I am concerned about the macro effect.”

In the course of the discussion, Caldwell suggested credit unions and banks deliver the ability and the best channel for fintech companies to help people stabilize the economy through innovation, advanced technology, and cultural shifts.