Fintech Impact

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

Jason talks to Andrew Kirkland, President, and Co-Founder of Justwealth. The company is a Canadian based Robo advisor that deals directly with consumers but also collaborates with financial advisors.Episode Highlights0.29: Justwealth is an online portfolio manager also known as a Robo advisor and Andrew is bringing investment services to Canadian investors via a very efficient model by using technology.2.55: Just of just wealth is for justice and acting in the client's best interest of all time we are regulated with the Ontario Securities Commission which means we have fiduciary standards to act in the best interest of the clients that we deal with, says Andrew.3.32: Andrew's co-founder background is in the asset allocation space. He actually manufactured some portfolio models for large banks and other high net worth portfolio management in Canada.5.25: It was important for us to make sure that we are building a broad product lineup and if someone looks at Justwealth lineup portfolios, we have a many more opt

Jason talks to Greg Leroux, founder of Retirement Optimizer. It is a Canadian software that optimizes your retirement specifically around strategies on drawing down your assets over time to ensure that you successfully make it to the finish line.Episode Highlights0.42: In existing financial planning software, you enter a series of inputs regarding your assets, spending expectations and what you want your retirement to look like and what you have to fund that, says Greg. 0.55: As per Greg, the difference that we have at Retirement Optimizer is that we apply an optimization engine to the de cumulation side of things.2.56: Many clients ask, what should you be doing instead of the rule of thumb and the answer is there is no answer. Because it depends on lots of things and that's why when it comes to decumulation and retirements or in a game of chess, computers generally beat people, says Greg. 4.53: In any situation you are setting up with the spreadsheet, you are going to be making assumptions about th

In today's episode of Fintech Impact, we have Marcilio Oliveira, Co-Founder of Sensedia. It is a platform that provides API access through microservices for different financial institutions around the world, basically connecting them seamlessly. They are helping the enterprise companies around the world to become more connected, open and digital using the modern integration platform and API.Episode Highlights1.03: Marcilio says that they created Sensedia 15 years ago to help companies to modernize their enterprise sectors. 1.14: In last ten years we have been 100% focused on API management platform to help companies to connect the core data in digital experience, partner journeys and innovation and in the last five years we created a nice, specialized solution for financial institutions, says Marcilio.3.08: The connection between the legacy system with mobile apps, with ecosystems from partners and with different kind of digital experience or digital behaviors is done using API.6.32: Companies are lookin

Jason talks to Timothy Nuy, Founder and Co-CEO of Finclusion. The company is an African based neobank that is basically tackling a lot of the structural issues in banking in Africa in a digital way. Episode Highlights1.11: Today our lending products predominantly are either employed or merchant distributors ranging from earned wage access to payroll loans and from buy now pay later to merchant lending facilities, says Timothy.2.06: Timothy explains how he predominantly distinguish clients with our AI based credit scoring where they have consistently outperformed the markets from a collections and repayment perspective on the back of our scoring models.5.14: The traditional data is oftentimes not available on our type of supply and field. Also, the easily accessible credit score, simple repayment behavior isn't available. What is available is a whole lot of different data points that by themselves aren't actually predictable, says Timothy.9.03: Timothy explains how does the business side of the business differ

In today's 250th episode we have guest host, Guy Anderson to interview Jason Pereira. Guy asks Jason what he has learned till now and where he is going from this point. Episode Highlights2.08: There are a lot of integrations in the US market, but Jason would actually refer to a lot of those integrations as borderline superficial.3.25: As per Jason there are a couple of ways to look at big trends. We can contrast the US market versus elsewhere because in US market everybody got baseline technology.4.35: If you went too far and just focused on digitizing and optimizing your process without focusing on how you can provide deeper, greater value to a client, you didn't do yourself a service in that regard, says Jason.5.24: In the developing markets, Jason is seeing a lot of unique and interesting ways of trying to get more people access to financial services, which is enormously important.8.40: The longer you depend on a system the more likely you are to depend on it for a longer period of time, says Jason.9.23: O

Jason talks to Brooker Belcourt, Founder of Covey; an online platform for new inspiring portfolio managers to earn credibility by sharing their best ideas online in order to establish a track record and hopefully establish a career input for the management.Episode Highlights1.20: Covey seeks to solve the problem of finding investment analysts by creating a community to find and reward the best investment analysts so that we can all copy them and generate higher returns.3.07: People use Covey as a way to get into investing or to learn more about it or to play with virtual cash before playing with real cash and they use it to earn rewards.4.19: Covey tracks 50 matrix in real time and you have a shareable portfolio that's like probably the most robust mock portfolio software online right now. 7.09: Brooker explains that they post all trades to an immutable ledger so that the client won't have to hire auditors to come and verify their fidelity account or their e-trade account, which is actually really expens

Jason talks to Ari Brojde, Founder and CEO of Estateably, a leading provider of digital solutions for the North American trust and estates industry. Episode Highlights0.50: Estateably is a Canadian estate administration software that makes sure that when your loved one passes away the owner's burden, that is, the administrative work left behind by an estate is dealt with in a quick, efficient, and accurate way in order to get the thing closed as soon as possible.08.23: In August Estateably was nominated as software the year and the Trust in the space states category and Canadian Lawyer magazine in October and in December of 2021 they gained 140 professional customers. So it was, it was a great year for Estateably in 2021 and they have managed to continue on that success in 2022. 14.18: If a company is using Estateably, they are going to be able to work with you as the executor to get all the necessary inputs that are required throughout the entire estate administration process, they are going to collect

Jason talks to Wilbur Swan, CEO of Catchlight. It is a company that uses AI to help advisors basically find and close better leads. Episode Highlights0.50: Catchlight plays a new kind of solution for advisors which focus on what we call lead optimization, which is common in other industries, but new to financial advisors, says Wilbur.4.13: Fidelity Labs started with infidelity in 2005 and had a mix of roles in almost 20-year period of working with the businesses to accelerate ideas called as digital acceleration, as well as incubating an entirely new concept, called as full staff incubation. 5.20: Fidelity Labs for those who haven't seen it is a good combination of subject matter expertise, resources and of course money to help with the ideas for innovation, says Jason. 6.08: Wilbur's company is now as of T3 publicly launched and available for advisors to subscribe to and it's an ongoing relationship with Fidelity Labs.10.08: The advisor gets into our web UI, uploads a spreadsheet that includes all

Jason talks to Shirin Oreizy, Founder and CEO of Next Step, an award-winning Behavioral Design Agency with offices in San Francisco, CA & Boston, MA.Episode Highlights1.00: Next step is a behavioral design agency because we sit at this intersection of leverage and being able sentence and how we help our clients design and their marketing and product experiences for their clients and ultimately, we are trying to help them better understand how people really making decisions about the brand or so that they can ultimately drive better engagement or adoption for their products and solutions, says Shirin. 3.01: Shirin explains what behavioral science is. It's the study of how people really make decisions. We put the emphasis on the word really because there is another field of study called economics that we all have heard about that also looks at decision making.5.47: Typically, when we work with startups, we are helping them create lifts anywhere from 30% to 300%, says Shirin. 7.35: Shirin explains

Jason Pereira talks to Michael Butler, President & CEO Grasshopper Bank. The company began operations in 2019 & is a client-first digital bank serving small businesses, start-ups, & investors supporting them across the innovation economy.Episode Highlights1.14: Grasshopper Bank was a digital bank that was formed about 12 months before the pandemic hit with its primary purpose was to deliver digital financial solutions into the business and innovation economy and that was its formation and the primary purpose 4.19: In March, Grasshopper Bank launched a totally digital treasury management solution for small businesses. 6.52: One of the biggest, hottest growing parts of ventures fintech and to the extent that we are, we consider ourselves more of a fintech with a bank charter, we think there is a real kind of alignment of mindset as it relates to working with these companies, we have a great deal of knowledge of how FinTech’s work because of using them on platforms or evaluating them for a varie

Jason Pereira talks to Akshay Singh, Founder & CEO of Indyfin; the investor experience platform that has redefined the way consumers find, research, review, & interact with financial advisors.Episode Highlights1.08: Indyfin is about simplistically setting independence like yelp meets mash.com, but for wealth management, if you think about Indyfin, the most important thing is helping financial advisors and the potential clients establish trust with each other, no platform online or marketplace online digitally is able to do that, says Akshay. 5.45: Google has figured out that user data or user feedback, what these clients are saying is super important. So, Google is able to identify a lot of these keywords that people are putting in their searches and match that up with the profile of these advisors.12.23: There is other data-driven information along the lines of how much assets did visor manage, how many households and then there are in depth ratings around various skills that divisor has state p

Jason Pereira talks to David Whitcomb, VP of Product at MX. It is an aggregator of aggregators in that it provides tech companies & traditional finance companies with a way of accessing a common data format across multiple different data aggregation companies & kind of pulls into data from all includes above and spits it up. Episode Highlights1.00: MX not only connects with other aggregators, but the company also connects directly with some of the biggest things in North America for direct API access. 6.08: Once the data is refined and is in enhanced state, MX creates personal financial management tools out of it. 9.00: To the average consumer, they are starting to see if they haven't seen the new grading technology in MX which allows them to put the transactions from the bank account or their investment accounts into an app or into a dashboard or into some other places, says Jason. 10.15: MX has created a ton of intelligence around grabbing different data models, specifically around th

Jason Pereira talks to Shep Hickey, founder, and CEO of Bryzos. It is an online steel marketplace. Any kind of marketplaces are financial solution, and Shep incorporated Fintech solutions into the platform itself.Episode Highlights1.03: Bryzos is an online steel marketplace that has Fintech features that allow a buyer or seller to go all the way with procure to pay.2.17: Bryzos absolute origin is really about creating a solution for the daily grind of sourcing, bringing and getting sales down the road.4.28: The mill distributor who are making some materials are primarily on the sell side and on the buy side you also have distribution like there have an offline customer that needs something.5.00: The mechanics for Shep remain unchanged even if someone needs a couple foot of steel or few miles of pipe.6.40: Shep is reducing the opportunity for human error by reducing the amount of time. They have a structured way for buyers to enter what they need versus what Bryzos makes for them.8.11: For every single seller

Jason Pereira talks to Tyrone Ross, CEO and Co-Founder of Turnqey Labs. The company is a new fintech that's looking to solve the problem of crypto reporting within traditional finance.Episode Highlights1.00: Turnqey is an API suite that is geared to be an integrator aggregator in the marketplace for all things crypto asset data. The end goal is to harness the power of data and analytics to develop a more durable, equitable, transparent financial system.4.52: Tyrone was at Eaglebrook Advisors. Tyrone helped Chris King start Eaglebrook, which is an estimating platform for crypto for advisors. 5.59: Turn division for Turnqey had always been in Tyrone's head. He knew that building UI immediately puts you in competition with everyone else that has UI, and advisors love dashboards clients.07.24: At Turnqey, Tyrone is building infrastructure layers.12.01: If you look at the data, it shows between the 2019 and 2020 tax year, crypto transactions tripled, 362% increase, says Tyrone. 13.51: Tyrone talks about

Jason Pereira talks to Ehsan Shariati, CEO and Co-Founder of Functionland. The company is the distributed storage platform that allows you to store data on the blockchain but utilizing your own dedicated hardware. Episode Highlights0.33: In Functionland we are creating a decentralized Google cloud. Basically, like the cloud providers that we are getting services from like storage, backups, computation power and running AI algorithms on their servers, says Ehsan. 1.00: Ehsan's company is decentralizing the hard infrastructure so that everyone become a provider to others and they all can basically provide services to each other2.47: We have a can full of companies there that are providing most of the storage for the Internet at this point and all of the tools get built on cloud providers, says Jason.6.37: Blockchain has given us the power of P2P transactions basically without any middleman and we used that power in the hard work, says Ehsan. 7.41: Ehsan says that they are utility token not a financial

Jason Pereira talks to Hemant More, CEO of Arcons Technology. Arcons is a suite of software targeting RA's and advisors in the US specifically helping them with various cloud solutions, online billing, CRM reporting, trading, and client portals.Episode Highlights0.38: Hemant founded his company in 1998, and they started their enterprise helping RA's. The initial product that they offered was related to billing.1.09: The beauty of Arcons' company offerings is that they allow firms to come to them with customization requests, and they are able to offer specific new features for firms that will be like a white cloud service.4.49: Once you log into our suite of services, you could do all the things you do to run your business like you could do portfolio management, trading, reporting, CRM, and everything works off the same common database, says Hemant.7.29: We either work with the firm to discover the overall solution, or sometimes we start step by step process where we handle biggest pain first and make it a con

Jason Pereira talks to Rebecca Wilde, Managing Director of StockSnips. StockSnips is an AI and natural language processing platform that harvests data to provide stock purchase and sale indicators, bringing artificial intelligence to the world of stock selection. Episode Highlights0.38: At StockSnips we are providing investors with a low-cost high performing portfolio model that leverages our proprietary sentiment signals, allowing investment managers to go ahead and provide a competitive edge to their clients, says Rebecca.0.57: Rebecca has found a way through AI, natural language processing, and machine learning to derive a quantified signal that is a robust proxy for measuring investor sentiment.3.14: What Rebecca wanted to solve is how independent RAs can get back into the game of active management and not have to go down the rabbit hole of simply falling behind the passive indexes that have performed greatly.4.01: Rebecca talks about the type of unstructured data that they are harvesting in order to

Jason Pereira talks to Rohit Mittal, CEO of Stilt. The company is an online lender that specifically targets immigrant and unreserved populations who have very specific challenges when trying to obtain debit and credit. Episode Highlights0.32: Stilt is a Fintech company focused on immigrants. When immigrants move to a new country, they don't have a credit history or credit score and it's very difficult for them to access financial products.1.11: We are continuing to serve the immigrant population and recently we also launched a new product called Onbo, where we leverage all the infrastructure that we built at Stilt to help other companies serve their target markets, says Rohit. 6.17: When we started the company, we said immigrants are not an exception, they are actually the policy for us. So, we build everything in our company focused on immigrants, says Rohit. 7.52: All immigrants are stretching for is content that's helpful to them and they come to our site or blog pages and then they apply for a

Jason Pereira talks to Robert Sofia, CEO of Snappy Kraken. The company is a well-known platform in the advisor community for helping advisors market their business through social media and other venues. Episode Highlights1.32: Robert's love was in marketing and in 2009 he launched his first marketing consulting firm for advisors. He scaled that up to serving about 800 advisors at its peak. It was a good business, but it was all services. 2.30: Financial advisors offer tremendous value. They can do so much for people, but most don't know about them, and most advisors aren't marketers.3.18: Financial advisor industry had a really tough time in understanding or at least wrapping their head around organic marketing and bringing people into that, says Jason.5.46: Technology and content are two things to build relationships at scale to get entire 97% of the opportunity.8.07: Your contact list is your most powerful asset. Your contact list is the thing that is going to become all your future business, says Robe