Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Marc Pickren, CEO of The Americas for TurnKey Lender. A global financial technology SaaS that has created and deployed the world's most impactful embedded finance platform since 2011. Episode Highlights:1.40: After having a conversation with Elena, Marc came on board as an advisor Slash unpaid CEO for a few weeks to try and see if there was a good relationship there and then eventually accepted the position as CEO for the Americas with the goal of moving their headquarters eventually from Singapore to the United States. 4.03: If you see an opportunity within a nation for some form of alternative lending, you have the audience or whatever it is. You can always try to build it all yourself from scratch, but being able to count on something that is proven to work in multiple jurisdictions, I can't imagine having little nuances of how different countries handle things differently, says Jason.5.00: The reason why we originally based out of Asia pack is because the kind of end of currency digiti

Jason talks to Dimitri Dadiomov, CEO of Modern Treasury. Modern Treasury is a payments architecture system that focuses explicitly on payments and payment automation. She talks about how they differentiate themselves and dominate payment automation within this space.Episode Highlights:1.14: Jason asks, what were you trying to accomplish in the first place as related to automation functionality, and what was the origin of the modern treasury?2.39: The collection part has mainly been solved in the online payment, but much more goes into it beyond just collecting that money, says Jason.8.19: The significant part of making the money movement easy is to hold onto the context of payment from the moment it initiated through to its final resting place in the general Ledger, says Dimitri.11.39: Dimitri says that they help companies by providing better information, visibility, and alerting things. But they are very focused on delivering the best software experience, and there is enough complexity in that. 15.10: D

Jason talks to Mohamad Sawwaf, Co-founder and CEO of Manzil. Manzil is a Canadian-based Islamic banking and finance platform. In today’s episode, he is going to talk about Islamic finance and how he is using Fintech as a platform for distributing Islamic finance in schools. Episode Highlights:1.15: Manzil was created to fill the gap of the 1.6 million Muslims here in Canada to get into homeownership and wealth management solutions and start to build their wealth for the first time.5.05: No one is talking about any desire to circumvent the tax code. It is to recognize that the tax code is designed to allow certain things like home purchases to happen in a way that is not going to be punitive from a tax perspective, says Jason. 8.27: Murabaha is a cost-plus situation. Therefore, this is the number one stipulation for entering into these transactions or focusing on asset-backed or asset-based transactions.11.00: There is a massive misconception about recourse on the asset. If you have an asset that has

Jason talks to Steve Sanduski, Co-founder of ROL Advisor. ROL Advisor is an online platform that helps advisors or helps coach advisors through a process to help clients focus on return on life as opposed to returning on their investments.Episode Highlights:0.54: Steve explains that they decided to create a new legal entity, hired some developers, and created digital tools that they call the ROL advisor, which stands for return on life. And the focus is really on helping financial advisors become life advisors essentially.1.50: Jason says that the returns are one thing, but at the end of the day, one thing matters are getting what you want out of life.2.13: What we are doing here at ROL advisor revolves around the discovery process. We think of discovery not as a one-and-done process but as an ongoing process throughout the life of the relationship, says Steve. 7.06: There is a series of 20 statements in the ROL index. These twenty statements are divided into ten categories, such as whether or not a

Jason talks to Laurent Bensemana, President of Ndex Systems. Ndex systems is a portfolio management software providing clean or scrubbed data for the industry. Ndex is a custodial-based company established in 1999. Laurent’s original objective was to build the ideal assistant for the financial industry. They never saw a distinction between money managers for retail brokers, discounters, product manufacturers.Episode Highlights:3.11: To expand our coverage, we have to ingest data from any source because clients don’t have all of their wealth with one firm, says Laurent.5.45: The client wants to pay for advice, but they don’t want to pay for the data entry. So we started offering that to the accounting industry to help them quickly reconcile and normalize the data to feed it into their accounting systems, says Laurent.13.15: If you want to have the best in class for everything, it’s not going to be one product. It’s going to be something that integrates the best in class, says Jason17.25 The value that gets bui

Jason talks to Kison Patel, Co-founder, and CEO of M&A Science. M&A science produces a product called Deal Room, a platform for monitoring the entire life cycle of an M&A deal. M&A science is a company with multiple product lines covering education and technology for managing the M&A process focused around making M&A more of a collaborative people focus process.Episode Highlights:2.00: Kison says that they originally focused on diligence management. The traditional way was using an Excel tracker to request documentation from the company you are acquiring and then follow up with clarification questions. 6.10: In the early days, you used to have physical data rooms if you look at business. You had the banker boxes and had somebody to guard the access to get to this room. So you would have to fly in to review the documents, scan them, and put them on the server, says Kison.11.00: Jason asks, where did a lot of M&A learning come from? Is that coming from success stories you played

Jason talks to Dave Connolly, co-founder, and CEO of Knudge. Knudge is an automated client communication and collaboration tool that ensures that financial planning and advice are done digitally and effectively.Episode Highlights:0.40: Knudge is trying to solve a shared pain point in the industry, helping clients take action on the advice given. Knudge is a platform that allows advisors to have a repeatable process for assigning action items to their clients, says Dave.04.59: Jason suggests that at the end of the day, a financial plan without implementation is equivalent to just expensive toilet paper. It’s pretty much pointless.06.05: Dave says that we are learning that advisors are using knudge, providing some voiceover around the use of knudge with their clients in the meeting, and explaining that they are using this new technology to help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.08.03: We have integrations with Red Tail and wealth box. We’re working on integrations with other CRMs, and either way, we

Jason talks to Will Trout from Javelin Strategy and Research. He is the director of Digital Wealth Management. We brought him on the show to talk about some of the bigger trends in the wealth and assessment market and how they are potentially going to transform the industry in the next ten years.Episode Highlights:00.48: Will says that as the name implies, and from a technology standpoint, we focus on strategy for financial services institutions and large fintech providers and look at the intersection of strategy and technology as to how firms can advance their competitive position using tech.09.04: Will says that the friction that inhibited advisor access to private capital investments still largely remains. iCapital and Cais alone will not solve this problem, particularly when it comes to private equity.15.48: To productize direct indexing, you can kind of rule about how it scale and overcomes margins, but the most direct indexing strategies are built around the public equity markets, suggests Will. 16

Jason talks to Jud Macrill, Co-Founder of Milemarker. Milemarker is a data solution company that helps financial services companies in an IaaS (Integration as a Service) specifically integrate data across many different platforms to get things talking to each other.Episode Highlights:00.36: Milemarker is born out of many years of frustration in the financial services industry. 5.02 Macril says that they find themselves more helping companies achieve a data warehouse experience whether they want to aspire toward a data lake or not. This is because data lakes are fundamentally unstructured data. 6.04: Jud says they see a huge opportunity to take every piece of information in their license data and help a client start to be actionable, experiential, and ultimately automated and efficient. 8.24: Jud says that they provide software which is our API technology, our data cloud, and our ETL processing in which the rules engine says, here is what your data is doing and when and how quickly it refreshes.11.01

Jason talks to Sebastian Skwarek, co-founder of PreciseFP. PreciseFP was a guest way back on episode 26 in the summer of 2018 with Co-Founder Don Whalen. Don talked about their digital onboarding platform or digital data gathering platform for financial advisors.Episode Highlights:1.25: Sebastian explains PreciseFP is the virtual data gathering and client onboarding platform, provides the ability to customize a client journey fully, bring data in-house, and then share that data with the tools that advisors use.2.22: There are many features with PreciseFP, but the key feature is that the advisors who come to PreciseFP are ready to use block finders and personalized and customizable fact-finders ready to use as the box. 10.12: Either CRM or financial planning software if we do not integrate with a given financial software, so either way, you will be able to move the data from a client-facing application, which is PreciseFP, into your CRM and then into financial planning software.12.08: Sebastian says that

Today is the 2021 year in review show and Jason brought back his colleague and occasional guest host, Guy Anderson, to interview him on the course of events and what happened in the past year. Episode Highlights:00.42: This is our second year in review, and Jason has done over 200 podcasts now in the fintech space. No one in the country understands the Fintech landscape better than you, says Guy04.08 Jason says that data tells other institutions about who it is you are. That data allows the current bank or financial institution to make decisions regarding services and products and other things that you can offer you. 06.10: We need to think about the ability to create technology that truly is client-centric in its focus, and to do that, we need to be able to access the data securely and effectively. 10.52: Swift data is a platform for securely storing your data. With this, if you have open banking, you can store everything. You could technically leave it in the institution connecting institutio

Jason talks to James Rockwood, founder, and CEO of Capintel. Capintel is an investment analytics company that tells you how your performance looks and does all kinds of proposal building, automation, and team collaboration tools that reduce the heavy lifting and let us go back to focusing more time on what matters that’s the one on one time with our clients. Episode Highlights:00.42: Capintel is an investment comparison proposal platform for financial advisors that help them organize how they present and pitch investment products to their customers. 06.15: Jason says that industry people focus on demonstrating how smart they are to the client instead of speaking their language.09.00: Most advisors deal with tons of different metrics and data. They have complex reasons for recommending fund A versus fund B or portfolio A versus portfolio B, says James. 11.40: One of the bigger things going on around the world is they move towards even greater transparency and regulatory reform around any number

Jason talks to Deven Hurt about the company Prediction strike of which Deven is the CEO and Co-Founder. Prediction Strike is a sports betting platform that treats athletes like stocks.Episode Highlights:00.45: Deven says, prediction strike is a sports stock market that allows users to buy and sell shares of athletes as if they were stocks. He said that they want people to start feeling like they are investing in players and using their sports knowledge as an investment.08.06: Jason says, based on the market dynamics, you probably always will play the role of the market maker for players with liquidity below a certain level and bench players whom no one knows their first name outside of their city.11.31: Jason affirms, as you guys are creating a market price, there will be some transparency in how you do it and specifically in the earnings. 19.26: Deven says we have started to work on partnering with athletes, and a big thing that we have told all the athletes is we want you to do whatever you want to do.

Jason talks to Steve Boms, executive director of the Financial Data and Technology Association, a.k.a. FDATA. FDATA is a global trade association started in 2013 - 2014 in the UK. Episode Highlights:05.38: Steve says, you don’t need to understand the mechanism of how electricity is traveling from the power plant through the transformer into your house. Similarly, we have to think about open banking. But you need to know what happens if something goes wrong.07.52: Open banking is all about competition, and it is all about a more inclusive, more accessible financial services system that meets you as the consumer where you are rather than it being dictated to you by a large financial institution. 17.45: Steve says you can let the industry figure out the standard and the technology to make it work. And this is how the third-party bank gets approved to play in the sandbox. 18.31: Home automation is nowhere near what it could be because you have to worry about these things, says Jason.19.25: If you talk t

Today’s episode is a recording of a brief intro that Jason gave to the recent Canadian advisor Tech Expo. It was the first financial advisor technology expo of its type in Canada, and that was put on by the Financial planning association Canada, for which Jason is the President.Episode Highlights:00.56: Digital transformation is about taking your practice and digitizing it, and reaping the benefits of digitization, efficiency, scalability, and hands-on experiences for both you and your consumer.01.12: Which of us doesn’t want to do the less heavy lifting, make more money, and provide clients?02.06 There are always opportunities around the outskirts of core technologies, and you need to treat your business like a business and think about how you can enhance it. 02.35: The dealers are too busy worrying about the mass audience in core technologies. So they are not going to get things like your booking scheduling systems. 03.01: If you don’t know what is out there in the marketplace or what others have

Jason talks to Gavin Spitzner, President of Wealth Consulting Partners. Gavin is one of the more recognized fintech experts in the US that consults with significant players on the state of their advisor technology and its future development. Episode Highlights:5.58: Gavin says it is not an institutionalized legacy in terms of how we ensure that we are delivering a client-centric and advice-oriented relationship where it always puts client interests first, and we are here to help and guide them. 8.57 Gavin suggests if you look at the research when clients leave, it's not about performance. It's all about the technology and communication you are doing.10.29: Jason inquires, what are the table stakes you think exist now and what are the better implementations over top of that? 11.42: Gavin recommends, "You have to make some of the decisions around what is high up on the value chain that I can uniquely bring value to and what else could I automate to digital engagement." 15.01: Jason suggests

Jason talks to Kevin Levitt; he is the Director of Industry and Business Development for Financial Services for Nvidia. The company is one of the driving forces behind the technology powering artificial intelligence today.Episode Highlights:00.38: Nvidia is a company that was started about 30 years ago almost, and they have really pioneered the use of graphics processing units. 08.12: What Jason has seen in academic studies is more accurate FICO scores in terms of calculating the probability of default.09.58 Jason asks, “What is the natural type of function for artificial intelligence disturbing the market today like what is the commonality around the things is replacing?10.20: Kevin says in the example of Siri virtual assistant or chatbot. In the context of financial services that are helping us to transfer a balance or to understand what our balance is, or pay a bill, it goes from there to assist the call center agent where we have a more complex problem. With the call center and the agent, the AI is actual

Jason talks to Denelle Dixon, CEO and executive director of the Stellar Development Foundation. Stellar is one of those coins that has been around for a while and has some very interesting use cases. Episode Highlights:1.08: Dixon says that the stellar development Foundation is a nonprofit, non stock entity whose sole mission and soul focuses on developing the ecosystem around the stellar network and also shepherding the codebase for the stellar network.4.33: There are lots of stable coins that are issued on stellar, and these coins are like USDC, and you can actually send the stable coin so that you don’t actually have to worry about any volatility in the cryptocurrency market itself, says Dixon.8.25: The notion of having stable coins actually creates an opportunity for the stability so that you don’t actually have to worry that when you send a transaction, affirms Dixon.9.03: Dixon says that we think about the financial system from where we sit, wherever that might be but it’s really hard to think abou

In today's episode, Jason will talk to Brandon Chapman, founder of Advisor Flow. It is a tool that helps advisors learn more about their clients in onboarding and acquire vital information to them faster and better. Episode Highlights:01.10: Brandon explains Advisor flow was incorporated last year. He was working on a project three years ago because he was so frustrated with using PDF and word documents to gather facts about his clients in his practice. Then, during the pandemic, it appeared every other advisor realized that pen and paper wasn't sufficient and efficient. 03.40: Jason suggests if you want to see who is ready to work with it, put an obstacle in front of them. 07.18: Brandon says, if a robot is emailing you to do something, it's very easy to ignore it, but if it's a human that you know is going to call you next or see you at the dinner party, there's a much higher chance you're going to do that thing.09.24: Jason asks, how much of the financial industry has been around relying on

Jason talks to Tom Carpenter and Jason Chomik from the financial data exchange which is an organization that works towards unifying data flow across different financial platforms.Episode Highlights:01.15: Tom explains that FDX is a not-for-profit organization specializing in an open banking or open fintechnical structure. They got an API that is open to use and one can freely use the API to ensure the safe exchange of data between organizations.03.46: The industry could work together that you had a governance structure that levels the playing field among Fintech's, financial institutions, and aggregators so that the market could determine the best way to deliver on consumer demand, says Jason Chomik.05.24: Open finance is probably the camel's nose under the tent of a broader set of use cases and a desire for consumers access, user data across a spectrum of industries, says Jason Chomik.11.50: Tom points out that on boarding many institutions is complex, and it is not a light undertaking, especially when you s