Fintech Impact

Jason Pereira talks to Kevin Victor, VP of Sales & Partnerships at Mako Financial Technologies. It is essentially SASS for wealth workflow automation. Episode Highlights02.00: Kevin says that in 2018 it seemed very difficult to have strong remote operations and that in itself was a challenge. More importantly it has always been a headache that private equity firms, VC firms, alternative investment firms, or anyone who ultimately leverages this agreement to complete investor onboarding are an absolute nightmare. 04.30: Kevin talks about the unique type of workflow arrangement. How do you go from your firm's internal documents to the wide variety of account opening forms while going between a household to just let alone individual investor documents, non-Reg, TFSA, RSP?08.01: Most advisors have discretion over how they manage money. If you are dealing with major bank, Jason can pretty much guarantee you that if he goes to 12 different advisors at random, they all have different portfolios and how they

Jason talks to Jeff Keltner, Senior VP of Business Development at Upstart. It is an online lender that utilizes artificial intelligence throughout various parts of the underwriting life cycle in order to issue policies as quickly and effectively and with a better risk profile than conventional.Episode Highlights0.32: Upstart is an AI lending marketplace where we power bank and credit union lending programs across a variety of products including unsecured consumer loans, auto refinance and purchase loans, says Jeff.1.03: The other key thing we work with our partners on is helping them acquire new customers. We not only serving their current customer base but being able to find new customers effectively and efficiently for their institution, says Jeff.3.16: We run a marketplace for consumers at upstart.com where they could come and we will pair them with one of our bank or credit union partners depending on the risk profile, the geographic footprint, and things like that, says Jeff.4.02: The credit file has hun

Jason talks to Sam Kawtharani, VP of Product with Railz. The company collects data from different accounting systems, create a standardized file format, allows that information to be pushed into other products and vendors, and create unity around different accounting reporting systems.Episode Highlights0.36: Railz is a single API provider for accounting and financial data on small and medium businesses or SMBs in general. With Railz, they are solving the noise in the financial data that one would have in a typical business. 0.54: We are able to connect, normalize and set analytics that you are able to consume and make the decisions, whether it's a lending application or business floor management tool, says Sam.5.50: From a tax perspective, banking and e-commerce flow into our accounting system. The lending, management of payables, and receivables are some top three use cases that Railz deals with, and we are always working on expanding into that space, says Sam.7.11: Railz products can be customized base

Jason talks to Justin Fitzpatrick, Chief Innovation Officer of Income lab. An online platform that basically lets you do dynamic retirement planning.Episode Highlights01.47: Justin says that they are laser-focused on retirement income planning. He explains that they typically live alongside one of the widely used generalized financial planning systems for when client relationships need to go deep on retirement, whether it's incoming withdrawal, sourcing, tax planning, spending decisions. 07.00: A lot of people were a little dissatisfied with that framing of success and failure. We talked with a lot of advisors who were already talking with clients about adjustments. The problem was they couldn't actually show a client when an adjustment would be made or paint a longer-term picture of what a life might look like if you adjust in this way. So, we really homed in on helping advisors paint that picture, says Justin.13.10: Justin says that retirement is one of the nastiest, hardest problems to deal with. Ther

Jason Pereira talks to Mark Warnquist, CEO of InShare - an insurance tech that focuses on distributing protection solutions to the on-demand economy to lift the gig workers of the world. Episode Highlights:0.50: With InShare, we set out to do something better and move faster than incumbents and build solutions that benefit and help the on-demand economy, grow and protect the gig workers on whom the on-demand economy largely depends, explains Mark.7.30: Mark talks about method of distribution. He tells the listeners whether he is still right downs to the end-user level, or is that still in the works, or is it largely more fleet-based?8.16: Jason asks, some insurance companies have added dongles that plug into your utility board to collect information. How are you collecting the information?10.43: We need to be very mindful as we deploy and talk with platform companies about the products, like how you deploy the products to do the right thing for gig workers in a way that will not destroy your operating model,

Jason Pereira talks to Gerti Dervishi - Chief Growth officer for Flybits. The company helps financial institutions utilize the context of clients, individual situations, geography, and other factors that help serve up better next recommendations. Episode Highlights:1.08: Flybits the company is rooted in R&D. For many years, the research group built a lot of intellectual property and patterns behind the technology that continues to partner with academic institutions to move forward the agenda of innovation. 03:42: There are so much data that you are regularly giving to a person who makes decisions to look for things you are replicating before they get to the conclusion, says Jason.04:15: Gerti's company is very heavily rooted in research, and they bring all data together, which is no small challenge. 04:40: One extremely important thing is that you have to do things in a privacy-preserving way to deliver services, says Gerti.05:01: We do tokenization not only for extremely important privacy-prese

On today's episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira is going to talk to Cato Pastoll, the CEO of Loop. They will discuss Loop's platform and how it helps companies operating as Canadian businesses get access to banking services in another market. Episode Highlights:0.43: Loop is an online banking and payment platform. They help companies that are operating as Canadian businesses to get access to banking services in another market.4.33: Cato says that they help companies get access to local banking in different markets. 7.46: Cato explains that they have been able to automate the account opening process in terms of customer verification, ID collection, and all that type of stuff required to verify customers. 9.33: Cato says that they save companies time because we offer all things in one platform, and that is easy to use. We save the money because we give it all this way for free. 10.44: Customers are delighted, specifically because they are saving a huge amount of money on every dollar they

Jason Pereira speaks with Jessie Vaid, creator, and CEO of ReadyWhen. ReadyWhen is a digital legacy manager that assists you in putting all of your essential information in one place so that when the worst comes, your family will have a head start in settling your affairs, as well as other kinds of beneficial tools and use cases while you are still living. Episode Highlights:05:56 Jessie started mapping out what she thought she would need to build the solution. At that point, she started discussion with her co-founder Sachin Bella and at that time he had unfortunately lost both of his parents and so he is actually gone through the loss and he knew the issues and problems surrounding being that executor in that probate process.08:48: Jessie thinks we have learned a lot in the last almost two years now. We identified some of the pitfalls and issues of building and providing a solution. Once we got the product to market, the feedback was very consistent amongst professionals. 09:13: Jessie says that their b

Jason Pereira talks to Stefania DiBartolomeo, Founder & CEO of Physis Investments. This investment is an ESG and impact investing platform for reporting sustainability amongst companies.Episode Highlights:05:34: Physis is an indent in the Greek world and means everything that is alive on Earth. It comes from the same root of physics. Physics is the law of nature, physics from entering Greek is everything that's alive. So a Physis investment, it's reinforcing our mission. The concept of investing, where respecting everything it's alive.11:21: We can also go as granular as really going deep down in saying if you have invested in Apple, the new iPhone has over 40% recycled. If you are investing in Nike I mentioned before, Nike owns Converse and every single pair of Converse is made with eleven plastic bottles, recycled from the ocean, says Stefania.13:34: In the beginning because every single company reports information in a different way and not all companies report all the information. I can say a couple t

Jason Pereira talks to Anita Koimur, Co-Founder & COO of Liveflow. Liveflow is an online platform that pulls data into Google Sheets from various accounting software to allow and enable different workflows and processes more efficiently than currently can be done within that native software.Episode Highlights:3.42: It's amusing and bizarre that the balance sheet and income statement are the first things up there in the accounting world, and most accounts don't even prepare a cash flow statement because they do what they're supposed to do, says Jason.5.10: A business owner would have multiple spreadsheets, and it's just a nightmare to organize them into a single place, especially if it's Excel, and we just wanted to help them automate everything, says Anita.12.20: People ask us to integrate the chart platforms, but it's not something very close yet, because we do want to be a financial platform first, and that's something that we can consider going forward, explains Anita. 15.51: We are very open-mind

Jason Pereira talks to Bill Petruck, Founder and CEO of funding matters. Funding matters is a light fintech with a series of calculators and other tools that help not-for-profit charities. It helps generate donations more easily by showing people the actual tax implication of various donation schemes and options and helping kind of grease the wheels towards making that happen.Episode Highlights:1.08: Bill developed an application called gift tabulator, used as their secret weapon for illustrating tax-efficient charitable giving. A few organizations came to them and said - we would love to have your gift tabulator on our site. 3.10: You don’t just have to donate only in cash in many countries. You can donate assets, and those assets might have some sort of embedded gain in them already that if you sold them, you would pay tax, says Jason.10.43: With the gift tabulator, we also want to reach out to the end-user or the potential donor and provide the opportunity to the donor to share this with their financi

Jason Pereira talks to Tim Rickards, managing director of social and content strategy for Hearsay Systems. Hearsay is a social media and content management system that helps businesses market themselves better in today’s social and digital age. Episode Highlights:00.38: Hearsay is in essence of client engagement platform, and the company helps agents and advisors consistently deliver a personalized human client experience01.04: Hearsay also provides a comprehensive data capture and analysis system that helps people understand how they can keep improving as they move forward. 02.26: Tim talks about the guidance that they give to advisory firms who are new to this space looking to basically market themselves digitally. 05.12: Hearsay Systems is solely dedicated to financial services firms. They have an understanding with insurance companies, asset managers, broker dealers etc.05.33: Tim shares how they offer a combination of options that can help them to get advisors post on social media.06.21: T

Jason Pereira talks to Art Harrison, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Daylight. It helps companies automate their data processes and create greater efficiencies around things like onboarding, documented population etc. Episode Highlights:0.34: Daylight’s mission is to enable companies to improve any interaction between people in the process. 10.50: To build a new platform or process, the developer starts from the inside and says, let’s build the data model or the data lake, and then we are going to build this new suite of tools that will change onboard everything, and then we will finally have clean data, and we see that still as a struggle.11.38: If you are always looking at that automation first, you are often not solving the root of the problem. We focus on breaking apart a traditional term that organizations use, digitization and automation.18.11: The challenges are the people on the front lines don’t know how to speak the language of the people who are building technology stuff, says Jason.20.

Jason Pereira talks to Sheldon Brow, founder of Pocket Finance; a platform for greater collaboration between clients and advisors giving them a personal financial management app on their phone that not only helps track their wealth but also educates them.Episode Highlights:1.04: Pocket finance is a dual interface fintech platform that could be a personal finance management tool for the consumers to help them safely and successfully navigate finance. 4.03: If a user has an average balance of 10,000 or more for six months or longer than they are making the minimum payment or low payment, you populate a notification that says you might want to change this to a different product to drop the interest rate in half to pay it off a lot sooner, says Sheldon5.01: The problem with banks is that the high-pressure sales that they have in there, it is this constant product dumping and doesn’t always mean it is a meaningful product for the client. 10.48: Being able to aggregate the data as one thing, any company c

Jason talks to Sarah Morton, Chief Strategy Officer at MeetAmi. MeetAmi is a company working to bring digital assets to Canada’s traditional wealth management space. We have brought her to this show to discuss how she will help evolve the industry into the digital asset space. Episode Highlights:00.35: MeetAmi is the company that Sarah has built to help advisors engage directly with digital asset investing on behalf of their clients. The company was founded a couple of years ago as they recognized the growth opportunities in the digital asset space, starting with cryptocurrencies but broader digital asset investing.1.37: We built our first product Ami Pro, a software platform to enable advisors to manage their client accounts and invest directly in digital assets on behalf of their clients, says Sarah.12.06: Sarah is launching inlearn which is our learning series. We have a fantastic head of learning, our Chief Learning Officer Chuck Hamilton, and he has been a thought leader in learning and blended lear

Jason talks to Seth Ross, General Manager for Dayforce Wallet and Consumer Services at Ceridian. Ceridian is one of the powerhouses of payroll worldwide, and Dayforce Wallet is a payroll tide banking and pays as you earn platform.Episode Highlights:0.46: It is an app and a debit card. The app allows you to see how much you have earned at any given point in between your pay cycles, and the debit card will enable you to go and spend it, says Seth. 2.16: Seth talks about the genesis of Dayforce Wallet and the challenge and opportunity that Ceridian saw, and why it stood up to this kind of extension? 3.27: It was always in the mind of David, CEO of Ceridian, that having real-time visibility on payroll would ultimately not just end with making things more convenient for the payroll manager but bringing that to the end-user and allowing them to get paid on demand, explains Seth.7.25: You are potentially the bank for some people, so talk to me about where you guys hope to take it from today, says Jason.9.1

Today we have Fidelma McGuirk, founder, and CEO of Payslip. Payslip is an Ireland-based payroll company that does work all around the world. She is on the show to discuss the challenges of working with multi jurisdictions and other complexities. Episode Highlights:1.10: Payslip enables a multinational company to integrate all their IT systems and payment providers in different countries into a payslip. All the data flow is secure, structured, and standardized across other countries, says Fidelma.8.49: We want to have one standard way of working worldwide. We want to have useful tools to automate manual work and reduce the risk. And then, we want to have one system of record for our global payroll data so that we know we’re managing it carefully. So, I set the payslip as that central global parallel management technology, says Fidelma.10.16: The traditional services aggregator model is an American model. For example, if you find experienced payroll leaders in the US, 4 out of every five payslips in the US are

Jason talks to Daire Burke, head of Canada for Swoop Funding. Swoop Funding is an Irish-based company that works in multiple countries. It provides companies with access to a platform that aggregates lending solutions to meet their needs from various commercial blenders. Episode Highlights:00.46: Swoop is an online marketplace for small businesses looking to find funding for their business. We are giving business owners a tool to quickly find and compare funding products from right across the market, says Daire. 04.24: In Canada, over a million companies are turning over less than $10 million, and those are the businesses that can probably benefit from our platform the most. The important point in the design is that this is a free-to-use service for businesses.09.30: This is a real challenge, especially in Canadian banks, unless it is a small business loan backed by BBC, which the government backs, they’re not going to take a risk, but there are alternatives out there for funding, says Jason.10.43:

Jason talks to Lori Weir and Jeff Harvie. They are going to specifically talk about how they have helped advisors and firms deal with implementing new systems to help them better support themselves in this new regime CFR. Lorie started the company in 2015, and they set out to help investors feel more confident that they were invested in products that met their risk tolerance and financial goals.Episode Highlights:4.04: CFR is one of the biggest regulatory changes we have seen probably in the last 20 years, says Jason5.28: When we looked at the opportunity with our platform or open architecture, the way we use data, we looked at the CFR requirements and said we could help firms scale the requirements so that they can demonstrate that they're meeting the obligations, says Lori.13.21: There are so many permutations around selecting equity, and that really falls into what the role of the advisor is now, says Jeff.23.01: One of the things that we have proven out in the last 12 months is that we can prototype

Jason talks to Louis Retief, Co-founder and CEO of Hubly. Hubly is an advisor workflow automation tool that helps take information from CRM’s and create actionable and easy to develop and implement workflows for advisors.Episode Highlights:1.41: New consumer financial products disrupt how people interact with their finances. But what we care about at Hubly is how this product innovation in new consumer products disrupts your professional service workers in financial services to serve their clients, says Louis.9.23: As per Louis, tools providers in the advisory space think about the financial advisor as to the end-user, but advisors don’t use half the tech in their business. 14.44: Louis says that they have been trying to find where there is room for standardization across the advisory industry.15.36: There is a massive bottleneck around the scheduling process of getting clients scheduled in for their review or check-in. The preparation component for those meetings and tracking all the follow-ups and the