Emerging Trends in Fintech with Dr. Stephen Taylor | E187

In today’s episode, Jason Pereira talks to Dr. Stephen Taylor - Assistant Professor of Finance at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has worked in the financial services industry at Bloomberg, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Morgan Stanley, and Tudor Investment Corporation. In this podcast, they will discuss a couple of emerging trends, specifically in fintech and fintech education.

Episode Highlights:

• 00.35: Steven is in the line of teaching for the past four years. He is from a bit of an orthodox ethnic background. He has gained a lot of practical experience in the past while working with Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg etc. 
• 1.09 Jason curiously asks Steven, “What led you to teaching?”
• 1.29: Steven talks about his career journey and shares about his knack for academia from a very early stage in life. 
• 1.57: Jason says, “Today we are going to talk about emerging fintech trends.” He asks Steven to share the three big emerging fintech trends.
• 2.11: Steven shares his insightful views of the big trends in the fintech trends. 
• 2.43: He says peer-to-peer insurance is an area that’s just starting to expand; second on his list is asset management. Third, in his list is digital sharing of training strategies through various platforms.
• 3.10: Steven says his views are more from theoretical design aspects; he does not know much about the regulation side. 
• 3.15: While giving an example, Steven says, “Suppose within your immediate family you implicitly insure yourself. You have an accident, and your father might help you out with $200. This approach is a lot more cost-effective rather than going through the claims process where there are half a dozen people involved and overhead costs.” He shares his concern that “How do you formalize the insurance in a way that it is more than just family and friends’ agreement?”
• 4.06: Jason says, “People are often shocked and amazed by the size of the insurance industry in general. When you think about how many people are employed, by how many people specifically on the distribution side is the actual underwriting, and eventually called reinsurance space.” 
• 4.38: Jason further adds, “Reinsurance space isn’t that big really, but this is a distribution onerous.” He says that “I could see there is a tremendous amount of overhead.” 
• 4.40: Jason asks Steven, “In the theoretical context, how does peer to peer software that is just solely through digital distribution and lack of need for sales agents? and how would this product be discovered and basically applied or opted into by both sides of the transaction?”
• 5.00: Steven says he might like ideal visualization because it won’t manifest itself for decades to come or anything remotely close to it is. He says, “I would like to see it go to more of a setting where you get matched with people, you have similar risk profiles as yourself, and this could be done like pulling out a questionnaire survey.”
• 7.48: Talking about the digital investment side, Jason says, “We have the big waves of the Robo advisors coming in, threatening too deep to destroy the traditional models.” 
• 10.14: Steven says, “I would like to see what institutional hedge fund investor is five years ago to the day where there are certain limitations, but now you’re going to have hundreds of different opportunities to get into eventually, and it’s going to be a better space for everyone.”
• 11.13 Jason inquires, “We are talking about a pile of stock because of XYZ and do the short squeeze. But you’re talking about something far more sophisticated, right? You’re talking about like no is sharing the quantitative algorithms, and what not for trading is that the uppercase?”
• 11.34: Steven affirms, “I think the prototype for this right now is a platform called QuantConnect. they provide data infrastructure they provide back testing infrastructure, and you basically just cut up your algorithm in Python, and they’ll give you performance measures.”
• 12.28: Steven shares the challenges and competition faced by students in the Fintech industry. He says, “By the time you finish school, you should be able to code; knowing excel is just not enough.”
• 15.07: While providing an explanation for what programming is, Steven says, “If you learn to program well, you can automate basically all the tedious aspects of your job and then focus on the ones that really require human and electrical thoughts.”
• 17.18: Steven says the biggest challenge in terms of getting a job for a student is to convince your hiring manager that you’re able to take a deeper dive into ideas, and you’re able to take on projects and ownership around them. 

3 Key Points:

1. Jason and Steven are going to talk about emerging fintech trends.  
2. While talking about the challenges in the Fintech industry, Jason inquires, “How is educating people in finance changed in light of the proliferation of fintech? 
3. Steven talks in detail about the one thing that he would like to change in the Fintech industry; that is simpler regulation.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “The more transparency you add to any system, the better the overall costs go down.” - Stephen Taylor
• “Technology and software are eating the world, and they’re slowly starting to eat the world of financial education as well.” - Jason Pereira
• “I always love people concept of proficiency, and my favorite question in the interview is give me an example of the most complex macro we’ve ever built. I always get a blank stare.” - Jason Pereira

Resources Mentioned:

• Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
• LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
• Woodgate.com – Sponsor
• LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
• Stephen Taylor: Website 
• Podcast Editing

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