Dan DeFrancesco
Dan DeFrancesco writes about how technology and money reshape each other, using a newsletter voice and reported features to connect Wall Street, fintech, artificial intelligence, and everyday financial habits. His coverage stands out for blending insider accounts of market infrastructure and startup strategy with clear, accessible pieces on how those forces show up in consumer products, workplace norms, and personal finance choices. He currently leads Business Insider’s flagship daily newsletter, BI Today, and uses that platform to test ideas, interview executives, and involve readers directly in debates about the future of finance and technology.
The future of AI in finance might be about accepting what we don't know
DeFrancesco devotes a significant share of his recent work to the limits and risks of artificial intelligence in financial settings and beyond. In a finance-focused analysis, he argues that the future of AI in markets may hinge less on perfect model explainability and more on accepting and managing uncertainty, while stressing that firms still need to understand the tools they deploy. He draws on survey data showing that most quantitative investors do not yet use AI for investing, using those findings to undercut hype and highlight adoption gaps within some of the most data-driven corners of Wall Street.
Across multiple pieces, he returns to the idea that delegating too much cognitive work to AI carries hidden costs, warning about skill atrophy and overreliance even in seemingly mundane tasks.
His newsletter essays on AI examine not just technical capabilities but social and economic consequences, including the emergence of personal AI agents as a way for major tech companies to lock in customers. He frames these agents as one of the best chances AI platforms have to keep users loyal, exploring how convenience, customization, and dependency intersect in business strategy. In broader tech columns, he contrasts apocalyptic fears about AI destroying humanity with more grounded concerns about how automated systems could quietly erode judgment, employment, or infrastructure, pushing readers to reassess where the real risk lies. He also points to data centers as the clearest real-world expression of AI’s impact today, using their physical footprint and energy demands to connect abstract algorithms to concrete economic and environmental pressures.
The inside story of how Robinhood blew a huge launch so badly that Congress got involved
Earlier in his career at the masthead, DeFrancesco built a substantial body of work unpacking financial technology and market structure, often through deep “inside story” reporting on specific products and firms. His coverage of Robinhood’s failed “Checking and Savings” rollout traces how an attempted expansion triggered regulatory scrutiny, internal conflict, and ultimately congressional attention, illustrating how consumer-facing innovation can collide with the plumbing of the financial system. He applies a similar lens to JPMorgan’s Finn app, detailing how a finance product aimed at millennials ran into strategic missteps and execution problems before being shut down.
Across pieces on Brex’s rapid swing from aggressive hiring to staff cuts, Coinbase’s leadership culture ahead of going public, and the race among brokerages to offer fractional share trading, he consistently focuses on governance, risk, and competitive dynamics rather than surface-level product features.
DeFrancesco also follows how large banks and trading firms respond to structural changes in markets, such as the electronification of the corporate bond market and the rise of alternative data. His reporting on banks trying to hold on to a shifting bond market shows an understanding of how technology alters liquidity, pricing, and control for incumbent players. In stories on Vista Equity Partners’ acquisition of alt-data firm 7Park and the subsequent management turnover and strategy shift, as well as on Crux Informatics’ leadership churn, he uses executive moves and product pivots to illustrate how Wall Street experiments with new data infrastructure.
That emphasis on market plumbing reflects his earlier work covering derivatives, commodities, and fintech at specialized financial-technology and risk publications, giving his finance and fintech stories a trade-level familiarity with how instruments and platforms actually operate.
Higher education is becoming the newest playground for billionaires
In newer finance features, DeFrancesco turns to the growing influence of ultra-wealthy investors on institutions such as universities, connecting philanthropic headlines to longer-term bets and power structures. His recent piece on Ken Griffin’s multibillion-dollar gift to Carnegie Mellon University, with a large share earmarked for a new Miami campus, frames the donation as a strategic wager that intertwines higher education, regional development, and the preferences of a hedge fund founder. He focuses on how these large gifts can reshape where talent, research, and capital cluster, treating higher education as another arena where billionaire decisions function like market moves. The tone mirrors his fintech coverage: less about personalities, more about how money, governance, and incentives reshape systems over time.
Gen Z should follow these 2 rules to fix its Venmo habits
Alongside institutional and tech-heavy stories, DeFrancesco regularly writes about everyday financial behavior, professional etiquette, and how people navigate money in social and work contexts. In a piece on Gen Z’s Venmo habits, he uses simple rules to address bill-splitting and payment transparency, tying small choices in peer-to-peer apps to broader norms around fairness and social friction.
His column on the fine line between getting noticed and getting embarrassed on LinkedIn looks at personal branding as a kind of professional investment, outlining how engagement tactics can either build or damage reputational capital. Through BI Today newsletters near the end of the year, he stresses that job hunting and career planning do not pause with the calendar, offering practical guidance on networking and positioning at a time many people expect to slow down.
DeFrancesco also experiments with format in these pieces, using reader surveys, engagement prompts, and even Mad Libs-style riffs on AI-driven layoff announcements to pull audiences into the conversation rather than leaving them as passive observers. He extends that participatory approach to live Q&A sessions with executives, moderating discussions with figures like the MoviePass chief executive, a senior leader from prediction-market platform Kalshi, and the founder of vibe-coding startup Emergent to explore the business models behind buzzy consumer and frontier-tech products. His work on everyday “vibe coders” who build small, inventive AI tools to solve niche problems further illustrates his interest in how non-expert users appropriate complex technology for personal gain, reinforcing the connection between high finance, mass-market platforms, and the routines of ordinary users.
Together, DeFrancesco’s reporting and newsletter writing track the same thread: how financial systems, emerging technologies, and human behavior interact, from the plumbing of markets and the strategies of billionaires to the etiquette of Venmo, LinkedIn, and premium rewards cards.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.