Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Christine Brunsden, CEO of Benefits2, a web-based application designed to help people and medical practitioners identify disabilities that qualify for the Disability Tax Credit. It also assists them by saving time and money while increasing the rate of success when applying for the Disability Tax Credit.Episode Highlights02:56: Through her teenage years, Christine's daughter went downhill, and she ended up going through some really terrible stuff.03:52: Christine realized how hard it is for young people who are aging out of the system, they don't have the proper support.05:44: Medical practitioners are burning out record numbers. They are not motivated to take their after-hours to fill out third party forms for the government09:41: Christine shares an example of a woman who did her disability tax credit with Benefits 2 on January 31st.11:09: The hard part for everyone involved in tax refund is that nobody has ever taught anything about this in school.12:02: Christine explains how her platform h

Jason talks to Mounir Felloula, CEO and Co-Founder of Puulse. It is a challenger bank, that has specifically partnered with the company's HR departments to help enable their employees to have a positive banking experience from the moment they get paid.Episode Highlights01:51: Mounir explains what Puulse is and the services that they provide. 03:43: Mounir explains how they facilitate money getting to the employee's app from day one?05:22: Puulse's specific attack vector was to work with HR Partners to try to basically get involved with the companies.05:39: Puulse have a strong fintech part, but they are also like a nature tech pack because, basically they are able to know when someone finishes a job.08:09: Mounir shares how companies are now conscious about their workers.10:02: Companies that tie up with Puulse don't own the data payroll. The data platforms don't have the expertise to push money to look at regulation to know which license you need to have to push the money, when and how to clean the deal

Jason talks to Kelly Waltrich, CEO of intentionally, a well-known marketing firm within the advisor and fintech space that helps companies market themselves effectively and get results.Episode Highlights01:16: Most people didn't get into a business to market it, they got into a business to do the thing that they wanted to build.05:09: Kelley is extremely particular about the firms that they work with. They conduct a pretty in-depth review of the companies before they agree to market them because they have to have a couple of things right.05:46: It's sort of blows Kelly's mind how little founders and leaders are sort of inspecting the world around them and understanding what they are up against.07:21: Kelly talks about a major red flag when people don't know the competitive landscape.08:51: Kelly shares how they try for the most part, to just make sure that the brand is solid and what the messaging is going to be.10:29: As per Kelley it is important to clearly define goals and she is a stickler about the goal-

Jason talks to Jose Luis Salas Calcáneo, Sales Manager at Checkbook.io. It is an online platform for not just processing payments and pushing money to where you need to be but doing it in every method from digital to the old-school methodology of SNL.Episode Highlights00:43: As per Jose checkbook is 6 in one payment disbursement platform. They have six different railways in which they can disburse money, and the beauty of the platform is that the recipient can choose how they want to receive money.02:06: Instead of focusing on the people who were sending money, leaders at Checkbook decided to give a nice experience to the recipient. 03:55: Real-time payments depend upon both people having an account and a balance.05:43: Jose talks about paper cheques and how they still provide it to the end users. 07:47: Jose explains instant payments that entail instantly moving money from your existing Visa and MasterCard.09:47: Besides trying to convince people to value, funding something that basically has physi

Jason talks to Sharon Bauer, founder of Bamboo Data consulting. It is a niche privacy and security consulting firm that basically helps companies figure out how to foster trust and responsibly profit off the use of their data. Sharon's purpose is to empower businesses to make better decisions that will build sustainable privacy and security programs so that they can instil confidence in their customers, partners, and investors.Episode Highlights02.52: Data and monetization of private data came to be through companies like Google and Facebook.06.07: Sharon explains how laws were first and foremost designed around the surveillance economy.12.28: Sharon shares while setting up frameworks, what are the key best practice areas they look at. 17.02: Sharon explains the importance of having a standard contractual clause.19.20: Sharon talks about the misconception around data breach and how that happens.20.22: The SEC passed the rule that basically requires everybody to be certified if they are going to be a vend

Jason talks to Reese Harper, CEO of Elements. It is a financial planning company focused on delivering deep, meaningful conversations between clients and advisors, but specifically focused on the key things that they need to focus on in order to be effective in their financial planning journey. Episode Highlights1.36: Reese shares how the idea of launching Elements came through? What factors motivated him?06.38: Reese tried to create a more efficient way to answer questions without him having to do any of the data entry or data maintenance. 07.49: As per Reese they are trying to get deeper in conversations, but not have as many extensive presentations as they are trying to put in front of people. 13.48: Saving money, spending money, paying taxes and paying debt are the four elements that are the four vital signs that cash flow is made-up of.16.02: Reese explains how the elements financial planning system scorecard works. 18.58: Reese discusses the obligation that they have as the software

Jason talks to Richard Vinhais CEO of WAX. It is a platform for ensuring collectible items of high value and making sure that if anything goes wrong with your treasured collectible or sentimental value object that basically you are protected. In addition, they have helped people with custody and leverage of these assets with that.Episode Highlights1.42: Richard talks about his background and how his journey started. 08.22: Chubb is the world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurer. They have 200 billion in assets, maybe 40 billion plus in gross premium. They are who you want and they kind of concentrate on the high network space. 10.10: Richard talks about the lending business that they launched the previous quarter which is really in pilot.11.15: Richard explains in the collection management process there is an element of doing kind of a rapid income analysis on the individual rapid employment data. 13.14: Richard shares how they determine the value of assets and what is the pr

Jason talks to Brad Joudrie and Ken Lotocki. Brad is the Chief Revenue Officer of Conquest, and Ken Lotocki, Chief Product. Today they are going to talk about the changes, growth and challenges that have occurred in the past 2.5 years. Episode Highlights1.16: Brad and Ken talk about conquest planning and its origin stories.02.24: Ken talks about the adoption of new technologies and innovation in Conquest Planning. 03:30: There's a lot of in every other profession out there in terms of innovation, whether it's medical profession or legal profession or so on, more and more tools are being built to help make it easier for that professional essentially to do their job and financial planning, specifically building that plan.05.02: Brad and Ken discuss about the challenges they faced and how they implemented processes that helped them to save lot of time and effort.06.14: Jason mentions how Sam built strategies such a way to help advisors work with their clients and understand exactly what's being recomme

Jason talks to Dave Carr-Pries, Vice President – consulting services at InvestorCom. Today they are going to talk about how the implementation of CFR and Reg BI has basically panned out in the last year and where the successes and challenges are? Episode Highlights1.31: InvestorCom is a fintech company, they provide software really focusing on helping the industry make better financial decisions, and with that means their focus is on compliance solutions that aim to make being compliant as intuitive as possible and removing friction and barriers from advisors of dealers. 2.58: Without an advisor or an investor doing anything, when fund companies change their products or things change about their products, suddenly a portfolio may become unsuitable, says Dave.7.23: Dave discusses what is the kind of data points for the elements that you look for significant change.09.30: People like complaining about work and it's like this is not hard. You need to have investment thesis for how you actually manage p

Jason talks to Adrian Johnstone, Co-founder, and President of Practifi. Practifi is an advisor centric CRM that was developed on the Salesforce platform but is not Salesforce itself and has made a name for itself in terms of leveraging the advantage to build better automation workflows and tools for advisors.Episode Highlights0.44: Adrian explains that they use the term performance optimization platform in Practifi. They use salesforce as the chassis, but they are actually a product sitting on top and none of the nasty overlay stuff.6.07: Adrian explains that their system is designed to provide the answers to questions you are not yet thinking like, who do I need to call, what do I need to call them about, what might I have missed from a compliance perspective and serve that information up to the right person at the right time.9.20: Adrian told someone that they need to do something along the way is one thing, but what they have done is embed things like the data capture and data transfer within the workflow

Jason talks to Don Scott, CEO of Frank Mortgage. It is a new company looking to take the bias out of shopping for a mortgage and make sure that consumers get the best rate possible. Don talks about the surprising piece of feedback that he has received post launching Frank Mortgage. Episode Highlights4.30: The market has a flaw in the way it's set up. The brokers are supposed to represent the customer, but we are paid by the lenders so that can steer a bias into the process and bias because it's not necessarily the same compensation between lenders may not be identical, says Don.5.44: Some of the brokers out there provide wonderful service for their customers. But there is this inherent flaw in the way that business is set up. So, customers often enter the process feeling very uncertain and not informed, and they often exit the process feeling the same way.8.51: Features matter as much as rate does to a lot of customers. It's always not just a pure rate decision and we can help them understand all of that

Jason talks to Professor Ben Charoenwong, an Assistant Professor in Finance at the National University of Singapore. Today Ben is going to talk about some research he has done specifically in the RegTech field. Ben explains how dealer broker firms would not have wanted to invest in all these technologies on their own, it's the fact that there are some regulations that kind of forced them to get software.Episode Highlights1.40: RegTech is short for regulatory technology or software that is designed specifically for the purpose of improving or assisting with compliance with rules and regulations. 6.09: At the end of the day, everything is all about liability and the only way to make companies accountable is to make them liable, says Jason. 9.00: When you look down the list of like the top 20 broker dealers, it's a mix of whether they are caring or not a lot of this business line of having custody.11.04: There are many proprietary software solutions for document handling and storage that jumped about

Jason talks to Will Robinson, CEO of Encapture. The company brings machine learning to banks and lenders to help them understand what is going on with their data and make better decisions. Anywhere anyone signed, any place someone showing up and having to fill out paperwork or submit supporting documents to do something at a bank is where Encapture can get involved. Episode Highlights0.58: Encapture is a machine learning platform in the intelligent document processing space. They are good at finding and extracting important info out of documents. 4.02: Will explains how they collect documents required for loan processing and helps to save time and manual effort. 7.36: The big impact over the last several years is the ability to read through unstructured documents, says Will. 14.00: Will explains why it is important to feed really good clean data into your model in the first place.15.45: Jason talks about how the relative tightness of Encapture's data set really does play in quite well into

Jason talks to James Tait, CEO of Underwrite Me. It is a platform that allows insurance advisors to quote and handle the entire application that underwriting cycle through one unified platform and does so in 11 countries around the world. James explains how the platform allows each insurer to configure their rules and consistently with their philosophy without asking different questions or without having to agree to exactly the same philosophy. Episode Highlights06.02: At Underwrite Me, someone puts their details in the portal and says these are their general health concerns. First the underwriting of their health condition as an individual happens and then the persona gets recommendations on pricing on insurance companies.07.51: As per James it was a painful process over the years to convince everybody to come on board. It wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but the fundamental for them was that they were trying to improve the market. 08.58: James explains how they partnered with a coupl

Jason talks to Nicholas Bernardo, Founder & CEO of OnBord; a simple, secure tool with automated compliance features that will save you time and money while onboarding new clients. OnBord is built to streamline the new client experience for not only the advisors but also their clients.Episode Highlights03.02: Nick talks about his profile and what prompted him to launch OnBord. He also talks about how simple the tool is and the feedback that he has received from few of his clients. 05.32: Jason and Nick talk about the inconvenience caused during manual data filing or data gathering process. 06.17: Nick explains how they have created the ability to do a bulk transfer. Now they are working to eliminate that custodial spreadsheet so that if you are an advisor looking to leave a wire house or leave a broker-dealer that's protocol or non-protocol you have all kinds of limitations around what you can take. 7.18: Nick talks about their data gathering process and how they don't actually hold any of t

Jason talks to Justin Adler, co-founder of NorthOne. It is an online Business Account with built-in features to make business banking fast and easy. Justin helps people with this entire profit for a system, they put people in envelopes or supplements, but nevertheless it's basically splitting up by dollars or percentages and making sure that when the taxman comes calling the money sitting there when payroll comes, it's done which is fantastic.Episode Highlights0.54: When launching NorthOne Justin Adler's goal was to transform what would be a really burdensome experience of traditional banking into one that's simple, fast and efficient. NorthOne is like Uber for banking and financial management.04.19: When setting up his business Justin visited several places and did in-depth research. He realized that the problems we seen growing up were so widespread and so commonplace and they really resulted from the fact that small business owners are generally really good at what they do. They are great at your craft, bu

Jason talks to Santiago Burridge, executive chairman of Lumiant. It is a platform that helps advisors discover what really matters to their clients and helps them have more deep and meaningful conversations and guides them along the way to a deeper and more meaningful and prosperous engagement. Episode Highlights0.38: All the extraordinary conversation that happens between an advisor and a client currently now goes into a filing cabinet and we anchor experience in something we can control, which is a product, says Santiago.4.33: You can't help people in relation to their life unless you understand what drives them in life and that is their values and it's not their goals because goals change, and values tend to not, says Santiago.9.21: If you lead with the client's life, not with your product, the client is going to work with you and that's the subtle pride pitch between selling and serving, says Santiago.17.55: The computers aren't the thing. Computers are the thing to get us to the thing and the financ

Jason talks to Guy Anderson about what happened in these past years of 51 episodes other than this one. As per Jason When it came to technology innovation, it was the bigger issues that were looked at first, but now we are looking at the smaller problems.Episode Highlights1.59: Jason shares what was his top pick for the most interesting fintech solution for 2022. 2.04: As per Jason the closest thing to the most revolutionary, coolest thing he has seen wasn't in Fintech and that is GPT chat. This year more than any product he was rather impressed by good execution. 04.02: Jason really appreciates Nudge; it is a tool for automating client communication and collaboration. Then there is Hubley a checklist or process mapping system. 06.09: There is a software now that ensures that everything involved with settling an estate is done first and foremost, but also as fast and as painlessly as possible. 09.40: Historically the distribution of financial products followed specific channels where you t

Jason talks to Yasser Abou-Nasr, Senior Vice President of product at Dwolla. The company is a payment infrastructure company specifically specializing in account-to-account transfers.Episode Highlights0.30: Dwolla is a modern payments platform that really becomes an engine that a lot of our Fintech or software companies or corporate enterprises want to embed in their stacks because they actually have sophisticated a2a problems that they want to solve, says Yasser.2.20: There was a decision to make a pivot around 2016 where Dwolla focused on helping businesses get paid and payout necessary use cases that really have to pay payments through modern API.6.11: One use case we are seeing is that people being really creative with helping that are under underprivileged and how they are able to leverage our platform to make cash flow readily available for those, says Yasser.8.04: It's just amazing to see how many different people are realizing the opportunities to embedded finance and finding that Dwolla is kind of th

Jason talks to Mark Higgins, Chief Analytics Officer and Co-Founder of Beacon. It is a company that provides cloud solutions to financial institutions to run their data and analytics and a number of other interesting and high-level things.Episode Highlights0.33: Beacon is a financial technology company focused on the capital markets. These are the sort of wholesale trading that happens in foreign exchange and commodities and interest rate derivatives.4.55: Mark had decided to start their trading and risk management system as a development platform that has all that enterprise technology stuff in it and so that quants and data scientists and people like that don't have to be experts at enterprise technology.8.00: The financial institutions have had a sort of 30 plus year history of on-premises data center computers and there is a particular kind of mental model that goes along with that.09.02: Mark shares how their product is this combination of two pieces. One of them is sort of an out-of-the-box set of tradi