I am delighted to share with our blog readers a new initiative to feature more women as guests on weekly episodes of our Consumer Finance Monitor Podcast.  We are launching the initiative with an episode this week featuring special guest Abby Hogan, a regulatory attorney and former analyst in the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

I became aware of Abby’s interest in being our podcast guest through the efforts of Devina Khanna, a Congressional staffer.  Devina has created a database of women in the financial services area (lawyers and non-lawyers) who are interested in speaking opportunities.  After learning of the database, I contacted Devina who graciously agreed to share her database with me.  I am pleased that we have received an overwhelming positive response from the women in the database to whom I sent invitations to be guests on our podcast.  In fact, to provide more opportunities for women to be our guests, we have decided to release a new podcast episode each week during the year, including this Thanksgiving week and Christmas week.  (In prior years, we released 50 podcasts each year, skipping Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks.) 

We hope our podcast listeners will find these episodes interesting and informative.  I welcome your ideas for topics we should cover on our podcast and for individuals we should invite as guests.