In the 13th century, Kublai Khan, the Mongolian emperor who founded China’s Yuan Dynasty, upended monetary convention with a magisterial edict: Accept my money, or die. The threat of execution was not so novel back then, of course. The Khan’s true innovation lay in his refashioning of money itself. The grandson of fearsome Genghis realized he could finance his realm untethered to finite supplies of precious metals. No longer would his geopolitical reach depend on backbreakingly mined and...

Can blockchain build a better bank? That was the subject of a roundtable discussion I attended (and co-programmed) at Fortune's inaugural Brainstorm Finance conference last month. The conversation, moderated over lunch by my colleague Jeff Roberts, was a wide-ranging one. It covered the evolution of decentralized technologies, the path forward with respect to regulation, and a host of other related topics. Here's a sampling of what the speakers had to say. The first theme to emerge involved...

Now that we've had a little more than a week to decompress from our time in Montauk for Brainstorm Finance, we've been reflecting on everything we learned and culling the key trends that emerged from our discussions with top executives. That's why, in lieu of a guest on this week's "Balancing the Ledger," the three of us—Robert, Jeff and I (Jen)—jointly hosted the show, rehashing the conference and the soundbites that echoed beyond the stage. Here are a few of the most salient predictions and...

Tally, a San Francisco-based financial technology startup, has raised $50 million in new venture capital funding. Founded in 2015, Tally aims to automate the financial services of consumers at low cost. The company’s first product, released last year, offered an automatic credit card debt payment service. In March, the firm added an automatic savings account service. Jason Brown, Tally’s CEO and cofounder, told Fortune he plans to use the latest cash injection to hire software engineers to...

It’s almost time. The conference we’ve been building for more than a year is just over a week away: Fortune’s first-ever Brainstorm Finance conference kicks off on the beach in Montauk next Wednesday, June 19. My Ledger co-authors (Jeff and Robert) and I, along with our fantastic events team, have been working night and day to ensure that all the topics, issues and controversies you care about—everything that keeps you reading this newsletter—are literally center stage at Brainstorm Finance....