Editor's note: This interview first appeared in HumanCapital, a newsletter by Washington Bureau Chief Melanie Waddellabout the people who shape the financial regulatory space.

Fintech policy was the big debate inWashington recently during the Financial ServicesRoundtable's FinTech Ideas Festival, with former Google ChiefInformation Officer Douglas Merrill supporting more regulationand Cathy Bessant, chief tech guru for Bank of America, citinga notable tidbit for all of us parents with kids headed(eventually) to college.

“By 2020, in cyber disciplines alone, we'll be deficit 1.5million jobs — i.e., where we've got jobs and no workers,” Bessantsaid on May 1. The message for college-bound kids: “Go intocyber!”

This week's Human Capital highlights key takeaways from Merrilland Bessant during the fintech event, which included a lot of talkabout artificial intelligence. But I also checked in with JoeZiemer, vice president of policy at Betterment, later in the weekto get his view on where fintech regulation is heading.

Fintech companies, Ziemer said, “are generally working to makefinancial products and services more accessible, more efficient andavailable at a lower cost,” so fintech “is too broad of a termto state whether or not more regulation is needed.”

In Ziemer's mind, firms “should be regulated based on what theyspecifically do.” Digital advisory firm Betterment, for instance,is “appropriately regulated like any standard advisory firm.”

Where the interest lies in new regulation for fintech companies,Ziemer argued, is “in areas where there are currently gaps inthe regulatory structure, such as cryptocurrency.”

But former Google CIO Merrill, who's now CEOof ZestFinance, believes the fintech space is “woefullyshort of regulation.” Fintech companies participating on thepanel with him, he said, can't “agree about what the core goals are[in the fintech space], which tells us that we have a regulatoryframework to get done.”

Added Merrill: “It's been a tough first quarter forFacebook and for some prominent financial servicesorganizations; having a good regulatory framework maybe would havehelped.”

While the financial services space has seen “our share” ofregulation “for a lot of good reasons,” BofA's Bessantsaid, her preference is “self-regulation or standards that areset by the technical part of the industry or bybusinesses” themselves.

“I'm worried less about a public policy role than I amabout getting all of the stakeholders together, because I thinkthat the task is monumental and the urgency really has tobe there.”

As to AI, Bessant sees its benefit as making financial servicesfirms “faster and cheaper at what we do.”A little-talked-about fact, she noted, is that AI is“incredibly relevant … in stress testing or capital management inrisk management — the power to use data predictively and thepower to use data at scale is, in fact, a key component ofworld-class risk management.”