26. Jeffrey Zients, director, National Economic Council

Jeffrey Zients heads up the National Economic Council and is the assistant to President Obama for economic policy. He is also spearheading an effort to bring financial services innovators to the White House. The program started under his predecessor, Gene Sperling, but has picked up steam under Zients. This initiative, which reaches beyond financial services to energy, healthcare, and more, effectively means the executive branch of the federal government is more concerned with innovation than many, many banks. That should give you pause.

27. Stuart Lacey, CEO, Trunomi

Lots of smart people are trying to solve the authentication problem, but most of them are thinking about it from the bank’s point of view. And well they might — $79 billion will be spent on Know Your Customer initiatives in 2015, according to Stuart Lacey. He’s looking at the problem from the bank’s point of view, too. But he also wants customers to have control over their data. Trunomi provides “distributed, democratized, decentralized” authentication that puts the customer in charge of his data and makes banks more secure. This is a struggle he takes very personally, and one that is taking place whether we know it or not. Right now, for example, services like Facebook and Google are building profiles of millions of kids too young to know what Facebook or Google are.

28. Luvleen Sidhu, chief strategy & marketing officer, BankMobile

Led by Chief Strategy Officer (and millennial) Luvleen Sidhu, BankMobile is trying anything it can to convince millennials to bank with it. It offers more than your typical mobile bank — a savings account and credit, in addition to all the typical banking bells and whistles. This summer, the bank is combing big cities with “street teams” to engage potential customers, and will make a heavy push on college campuses in the fall. It is truly an effort to keep an eye on. After all, if BankMobile’s efforts don’t get millennials to join the bank, what will? Sidhu knows millennials are capricious and not loyal — in fact, she’s counting on it.

29. D’ontra Hughes, CEO & founder, Spare

D’ontra Hughes was working at a hotel, that also housed a popular nightspot, when he noticed a problem. Neither the bar nor hotel lobby had an ATM, so customers had to cross a busy street to use a third-party ATM if they wanted to have cash on hand. Hughes had a flash of insight: that it would make more sense if the hotel or bar, both of which kept cash behind the counter, could simply dispense it to customers. They could then “buy” the cash using a mobile app. This is what Spare, currently in beta testing with a number of businesses in southern California, hopes to accomplish. Entrepreneurs like Hughes who are working to bridge the worlds of physical and digital money will be extremely important — not just for partying, but for empowering cash-dependent consumers both in the U.S. and around the globe.

30. Stuart Marks, entrepreneur & investor

Struggles with EMV and NFC have given U.S. retailers a bad rap with innovation, but John Lewis, a U.K. department store chain, is setting a laudable example. Entrepreneur and investor Stuart Marks was tapped to help the company launch its own startup accelerator, JLAB, a year ago. The latest class of applicants included 21 startups, of which five were mobile payments companies: Quedi, Go Kip, OneScan, Droplet, and ZenCard. Though none of the payments companies made it into the accelerator class proper, John Lewis’s strength in startups can only be a heartening sign for banks and startups alike. Marks offered the following advice to startups — and established businesses — upon JLAB’s launch last year: “However good your technology is, without sales and an understanding of your customer, you have no business.” Preach!

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