>> they grew 60% in the order. they are firing on all cylinders. they are expanding to other categories. their capital division is something investors are looking at. they are clearly firing on all soldiers on that front. also expanding into other categories. square capital division is something investors are looking at. they have offered loans to 70,000 merchants in about $400 million of loans in the first year. that is an exciting opportunity to expand the relationships they have. >> how strong is their product pipeline? >> it's amazing for the ecosystem, it will accelerate the use of mobile payments, which the actual places you can use your apple pay or android they are quite limited. to think of them rolling it out to the 2 million merchants they use is a great development overall for consumers. >> bridgwater has hired john rubinstein as co-ceo.

the current co-ceo is set to turn his focus on his investing role. this comes after reports of tensions. >> bridgwater has a culture of fighting things out internally, debating, having people vote on who is right. >> bridgwater has a culture of fighting things out internally, debating, having people vote on who is right. it is very weird to anyone outside of bridgewater, but inside, this is the norm. this is really about having jensen focused on investing, rather than running the company. co-ceo, that is a more administrator role at rate -- bridgewater, so this is emblematic that they want him more focused on investing. jensen is known to be a very smart man and that is what they are focusing on. rubinstein has an extensive career in technology. >> a strange fit, then. >> more and more, people are

describing bridgewater as a technology company. they use quantitative strategies to make a lot of their decisions. ramy: still to come, highlights from a week full of interviews and international women's day inspired us to ask what is the state of gender equality in business? ♪

ramy: welcome back to "bloomberg best." i'm ramy inocencio. each week, we welcome leaders in business and politics for exclusive come in depth conversation. we start with the chairwoman of the u.s. securities and exchange commission, mary jo white, who sat down to discuss financial regulation and reform. >> it's always an evolving landscape in terms of what is optimal regulation, including watching weather impacts are going forward. you want attention, but nobody wants to relive the financial crisis. many of those rules that the agency, that other agencies have executed on, have made a much more resilient as a market structure, as a financial system. >> if we were to roll back some of what the sec and other agencies have done, you believe we would be exposing financial markets to greater potential for

another crisis. >> without question. >> recognizing all the accomplishments you have had as chair of the sec, when you have done in concert with other regulators, it's fair to say, is attempt to change the culture on wall street and financial services. to what degree have you been successful? >> i think both week, and much of wall street, has been significantly successful, but there is a distance to go. changing culture is not an overnight or even a five-your project. what you find when you try to change culture, particularly in significant ways, you change it at the top. we have been successful there. you may change it in the trenches but you have a swath of middle managers are you have to make sure the message is taken in, absorbed, lived.

it is an evolving responsibility. >> foreign policy will be extraordinarily important and difficult or the next president of the united states, may be more difficult than any president in our lifetime. what is the most important thing that needs to be employed the first 100 days? >> investment in diplomacy, a lot of talk in certain circles in the campaign of military force, where we would use it, what we would do. but truly building these coalitions is what is required to bring about political solution. there is not one conflict on the global stage that can be simply settled by the barrel of the gun. even a terrorist challenge, building the coalition, you have to cut off financing, share information about who is who in order to protect our people, make sure the wrong people don't come into your country.

>> i feel like diplomacy is the least of what we have heard of it all of these debates and meetings. >> i am a diplomatic nerd, but it does not make a sound bite, it does not make the bumper sticker. go listen. that will not necessarily work on the campaign, but one hopes that cooler heads will prevail. there are a lot of career foreign-policy professionals across the administration, regardless of who is in place, so we hope investing in the kinds of coalitions you need, understanding military force can be a component of dealing with violent people especially, but it has to be a part of a full strategy. because you cannot succeed otherwise, ultimately, people will come to that conclusion. >> we have dramatically had to reduce our assets.

we have taken the risk on our balance sheet down in half. faced with that headwind, from 2014 to 2015, we doubled our return on equity. we have to do a lot of managing the cost in our investment bank. we will not rest until we deliver a return on three that covers the cost of capital. >> that is an industrywide problem. wishing is not going to fix it. >> we are going to execute here at barclays to get there. i do fundamentally believe that if we are going to rely on the global -- e markets -- capital markets, i don't believe the world will feel safe if we rely on a world where the investment banks cannot raise capital, cannot earn a fair return to their shareholders. it is not a stable platform.

>> how long before a course corrects, what is the catalyst? >> i think it is happening now. all of the banks are looking at how to manage these balance sheets with far less risk on them, but in a way that delivers profitability to our shareholders. >> here is the third argument, the culture simply cannot be fixed. you are paying $20 billion in fines. a lot of that started here at the investment bank. >> i do believe wall street lost its way in the late 1990's. i do believe money became too much of a motivational factor. banking has to reverse back to the time when it was a profession, when being a practitioner in the profession of finance was like being a lawyer or doctor.

we have a lot to atone for, we made a lot of mistakes, but no doubt, the only existential risk to barclays is if we get it wrong in the future on conduct. >> why are you certain you can change that conduct and culture? >> i started in the banking industry that had the right culture. it is going back to something i have seen before, and everybody in this room wants to get there. ♪

ramy: you are watching "bloomberg best." i'm ramy inocencio. tuesday was international women's day. while our guests was not with us to talk about gender equality, we asked many of them to reflect on their experience as women in the workplace. their answers were impassioned and illuminating. >> if there was one prescription to get more women, to get closer in the pay gap, what would it be? >> there are plenty, i wish there was one soundbite answer, but there are definitely some strides we can make. for example, mandated parental leave. if you give them a break, they are more likely to come back after. there is a study that shows that that can save companies money in that first year.

continue to advance women and promote them help. the one i'm focused on, the gender investment gap. that can earn women hundreds of thousands, if not millions more in their career. i wish there were one answer, but there are several. >> everyone knows wall street is getting better, and in some cases women leading the way. are we just waiting for time to get us to where we have women with s.t.e.m. caliber abilities, where they will do better? >> it is not getting better. post the crisis, there was less diversity. i would take the opposite side, and it is costing wall street a lot of money. why? women are not investing to the same degree that men are. mostly male financial advisors.

i love every one of them, but they do a much better job for men. they lose their male clients at a rate of 5% of the year. in the year after their client dies, the spouse leaves that same financial advisor at a rate of greater than 70%. >> i call myself an impatient optimist. the world is getting better fo women, butot quickly enough. we need to do a lot to move that forward. >> we blame corporate america, but is it society? when it comes to take my child to the doctor, the school calls me. i consider myself the primary giver, i am the mom. is it the government or us holding us back? >> all of the above. we need to have paid family leave work for women in this country. we don't have a great program.

i think it's a policy change but i also think recognizing this is work at home, and as a society, say that we want to change that. economists say you can do three things, recognize it, reduce it which we have with innovation, and then we had to distribute it. we have to have these conversations in our homes and that role model in society. >> in terms of productivity and companies that do the best, they are here in the u.s. are we sending the right message in terms of policies, maybe they cannot afford it. >> the tech sector decided to be competitive, but if they want to keep their best women in the workforce, they are offering very generous paid family leave policies. not just for women, but for men, too. it is ok to take time off and come back to your job. in california, the business community pushed back a lot when

they put their paid family leave policy in place, but it did not decrease competitiveness of of california companies, and they've been doing it for a decade. >> in this day and age, we should have more women in key leadership position. women represent 50% of the population. i am an innovation junkie, i believe diversity equals innovation. yes, i mean gender, nationality, but mostly innovation comes from diversity of thought. if you are in a board room -- i know this. i'm on a board. you want more diverse perspectives to advise you, to represent the shareholders, because that is where the world is going. it is about more input. >> that is agreed upon in theory, but in practice, when you see more and more proxy

fights, the numbers are not there. >> at the end of the day, asking ourselves, is this person good, not, are they like me? but are they good? >> the five biggest activists have sought 174 board seats, got 108 total. they have filled them with less than 7% women. at the same time, if you look at the s&p, which has filled 446 board seats, 26% have been filled by women. >> first of all, those are discrete people who clearly have not absorbs all the data. the data tells you the more diverse your boards are, the better performance you will get.

i have some good news on that front. there was a report yesterday that talked about the survey of business owners and we now have 10 million businesses owned by women in this country, which is a tipping point. the rate of growth has been 2.5 times all businesses. today, irepresents $1.4 trillion worth of revenues and 8 million jobs. so as more women owned more companies, there will be greater opportunities that are not even counted when you look at the fortune 1000. there will be more opportunities, assuming we keep the pressure on access to capital. >> small and medium enterprises, which is where most of the economic growth is. >> that is because the women are doing it on their own. you have guys like carl icahn putting 35-year-old guys on five, six, seven dashboards. would it not help women to be on those boards?

>> no question, but as you see more women go into senior position, that argument will become defunct. there are more women, especially among the millennials who are getting opportunities earlier to lead. as more data comes out to talk about performance -- remember, those who do not get it will have the data. the more data that talks about outperformance of diverse boards, the more you will see change. ♪

ramy: wall street lost a legend this week when john good friend died at the age of 86 at the head of salomon brothers. he was a transformational figure. his impact can be found in the financial industry. we discussed his legacy on bloomberg television. >> back in the 80's, he turned solomon into one of the most successful banking firms. he lost the job because of a trading scandal. >> i take real issue that say that john gutfreund did this and that. he invented the modern age. >> he foresaw that people would remember him with a negative taste in their mouth. >> i did a morning must-read

this morning. let's bring up this morning. he took the pulse of the place simply by wandering around and asking questions of the traders. >> he gave the new york times a quotation in the 1980's saying that he changed the way that the fundamental world was. >> i think that is beautifully put. he would say that what people have forgotten was a limited tool for risk, as they invented modern wall street. they did not have the derivative trades that we had. what is so important about this is the when of it. it is when john gutfreund did it. >> we must not forget that he

hires and fires our very own michael bloomberg. >> i was not going to bring that up. mark, you are a brave guy. i know that michael has immense affection for him. i wish we had heard the fabric of the past from mr. staley today. i was taken about his comment today, that it was like being a doctor or lawyer. staley wants to take the modern wall street back to the fabric that henry and others know. that really struck me. >> he was a big part of "liar's poker." he said, it made michael lewis, but it ruined him. >> i would put that over to immense graciousness. when i ran into him over the years, he was eventually

-- immensely gracious about how things had ended out in his public service, which was really the social fabric of new york city. john went from where he was, to the collapse of the career, but he made something of it afterwards, which was really important. ramy: that is all for this edition of "bloomberg best." i'm ramy inocencio. thanks for watching. ♪

david: inside the magazine's news room in new york city. a device that tricks your cell phone into revealing its serial number. meet the play boy who will introduce you to marco rubio's sugar daddy. all that and more in this week's issue of "bloomberg businessweek." let's go meet the editor. i'm here with the editor of "bloomberg businessweek." in the global economic section of the magazine this week, a profile of the president of brazil in the midst of this scandalous corruption scandal that's widened and widened and widened even more. guest: that's so