Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Alan Gurung, CEO of SIFA. It is an artificial intelligence-powered platform for financial advisors to leverage their data, be more efficient, and garner insights from that data.Episode Highlights:01:52: It is a man versus machine argument instead of a man and machine argument.02:51: Generative AI seems almost scary to many, but the reality is the future belongs to those who utilize the robot correctly.05:29: AI works on explicit rules and logic to solve specific problems and is very rigid. Prerequisite rules and logic have been put together, whereas generative AI works a lot more on patterns. It's able to create new content on the back of those patterns that's been exposed.06:37: In SIFA, Alan and his team gain data that financial advisors use. They analyze the endpoint of all financial advisors trying to do with that data and trying to streamline that process as much as possible. So, the moment when people come on to decipher, what they can do is they can import their unstructured data through recordings from meetings or notes from meetings and start to have a conversation with that data.12:20: Alan explains how they come right at the start of the process of individuals once they record the meeting, they can import them into the cipher as well as gather data from all the other areas.13:15: Think about where advisors tend to spend the most amount of time or rather where they pay people to end up, saving them a lot of time, it's the middle and back-office side of things.14:11: People just hire other people to do stuff they hate as opposed to improving that process.17:32: Alan explains what the future of their application is what other features they are planning to implement.19:53: Alan sees support chats on every website, but in some of these to date the bots have been very, very rudimentary.23:45: The difficulty for Alan has been to work alongside data, and for a lot of financial advisors they realize the impact AI and machine learning might have on their overall business. 3 Key Points:Alan explains about AI and generative AI and how they are different. Alan talks about the integrations that they have done. He explains custodial integrations and couple of other CRMs.Alan explains how they are fundamentally changing the nature of the work in the back and middle offices.Tweetable Quotes:"SIFA is a virtual assistant that allows financial advisors to communicate with their data and generate insights." - Alan"A lot of individuals who seek out financial advisors one of the main reasons they do so is because they don't have the knowledge for certain questions they want to answer. But in actuality, a lot of people don't even know what questions to ask." – Alan"Small finance advising has been a somewhat delicate dance between logical decision making and emotional decision." – Alan"The interesting thing about the financial advice industry is that the demand for financial advisors is greater than the supply of financial advisors." – Alan"If I can teach other people how to be better with their money, maybe I can be better with my money as well." - AlanResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-gurung-186714168/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Matt Lister, CEO of Cloud Advisors. It is a company in the group benefits space, and one of the unique things they have done is they have built a benchmarking system that helps inform business owners as to basically how their plans stack up against competitors in the same space and helps advise around best practices and design. Service is free for employers. Paid by advisors and providers.Episode Highlights:01:04: Cloud advisors use the Canvas employee benefits marketplace. Matt explains how they show employers how their benefit plans stack up.02:23: Every advisor got their own limited pool of experience regarding different sectors, different types of companies.06:35: Matt explains how their system has options for employers that have no coverage, they can get a sample plan.07:17: Matt explains how their system intakes the benefits plan and breaks it down into hundreds of different variables that one can then compare by industry, region and group size.09:57: Matt explains how they developed the bar score, and it stands for benefits, action, retention, and it's like a credit score.14:15: With Covid, Matt has seen the geographical boundaries breakdown and even if you offer hybrid work, remote work, people are not drawing on labor from within driving distance of their office anymore, says Matt. 16:42: Being more competitive, when we dig into the actual benchmarking, we typically organize it by benefits included versus not included on our intro report, says Matt. 17.14: Matt talks about the type is benchmark that they do. There are basically 2 types, he says.19:41: Matt talks about the database that they have built and how they segregate problems and solutions.21:18: Advisors have their preferred solutions. They have exclusive rates and all of that can be customized on that evaluation so that the employer gets excellent bottom line.22:30: Matt says that they recognize that business owners are busy, and they have got businesses to run, and insurance is only a small component of that needs to be done efficiently and effectively and conveniently.3 Key Points:Matt talks about the big determinants, basically how benefits programs get structured in terms of, different industries or different careers, different development stages, what are the big factors implemented that should be impacting, and how a plan is designed. Cloud Advisor has been in the marketplace coming up eight years and when they first developed the database, they had a very limited amount of data in it to perform the benchmark. Matt shares how they achieved about 15,000 employee benefit plans.Matt talks about the client output and how they visualize the actual results.Tweetable Quotes:"We show them how their current programs stack up by industry, region group size as well as how they can improve their program." - Matt"When I started in the industry, my dad had spent most of his career working for a public crown corporation with the incredibly robust union." - Matt"We will connect not just with the vendor and the vendors; information will actually perform an instant quote and an instant proposal so that the employer has everything they need to." - MattResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInLinkedIn - Matt Lister’s LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Alex Murguia and Wade Pfau, co-founders of RISA. It is an online questionnaire and tool for helping determine what an individual's retirement styles are like and specifically helping advisors steer them toward the type of retirement solutions that help ensure that they both succeed, but also that they are comfortable and their preferences on how they wish to retire or how they wish their income to be general in retirement come about.Episode Highlights01:05: The risk that people face in retirement is different from pre-retirement, with the sequence of returns, risk, and market returns.04:46: Alex shares how they took reoccurring constructs and then wondered could they quantify them that were reliable and in a manner that was valid.06:28: Jason is not a big fan of bucketing, but for some clients like visualizing and understanding that might be the difference between them panicking and being comfortable.08:41: Alex informs that they have an implementation matrix, which is how someone prefers to implement financial advice.11:07: You always have to overlay the numbers; the advisor has to help you sort of curate through that journey.19:23: As per Alex there is no annuity proposal in much the same way that there is no like government worker puzzle in the United States.22:23: The distribution of advisor preference largely comes down to licensing standards.24:38: The best salespeople are the people that get to close loss the soonest.38:12: As per Jason, people spend a lot of time these days talking about understanding client bias.3 Key PointsAlex explains how they kind of take a step back and say what strategy is the one you should begin with when it comes to retirement planning? People either need safety or they won't accept risk, and they are different degrees of willing to basically lock themselves into something, so it's static.The first step of retirement income planning is to identify your retirement style and then build your financial plan and then take your risk tolerance questionnaire and choose your asset allocation and so forth.Tweetable Quotes"With COVID after reading a certain amount and collecting notes, we realized that there were certain constructs that seemed to be reoccurring motifs." – Alex"We all have different risk tolerances. We all have different preferences for security." - Jason"I may, as a consumer, have not known that there are different strategies that there are and here is the strategy that looks like it does fit best with my own psychological considerations and makeup." - Wade"The end consumer doesn't realize that there are options available to themselves for different retirement income strategies." - Alex"There are a few things that in research frustrate me more than trying to break an advisor value down to a percentage cases per year." – JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://retirementresearcher.com/about/Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 helps people qualify for disability tax.12:45: The government tried to bring in the disability tax motors restrictions act and fix the fee at $100. 17:08: Christine thought the disability tax credit promoters were really predatory in nature, taking that big percentage.19:10: Christine is a huge advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion, and he is also a huge advocate for people with disabilities.24:18: The Canada Caregiver credit, medical expenses, and disability supports deductions home buyer's amount.25:09: 60% of all people who have the disability tax credit are over the age of 55, and the RDSP is not even a benefit for that.26:22: It's not a disability tax credit. It's really an enabling for people with ordinary everyday impairment to their activities of daily living.3 Key PointsChristine shares her daughter's ordeal and how her teacher called her out in front of all of her peers at the age of 6.Christine developed Benefits2 to leave more money in the hands of persons with disabilities and their supporting family members and to ensure Canadians have an option that complies with the disability tax credit promoters restrictions act.Christine explains how they created a platform, a complex algorithm in the background that once you have answered your questions related to your particular impairment, they write the application for success for you, you get a code and the PDF of the application and e-mail.Tweetable Quotes"My eyes are really wide open around the disability taxpayer." - Christine Brunsden"If the credit doesn't apply to you, maybe you're not working, but maybe you have a supporting family member, and you can transfer the credits to that supporting family member." - Christine Brunsden"Our marketplace will have diversity, equity inclusion, calendars that support all the different awareness dates throughout the country and internationally." - Christine BrunsdenResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 dealer configuration.11.10: More than 1000 people can implement the Puulse HR software, says Mounir.12:55: Mounir's aim is to facilitate everything related to gig workers.13:21: Mounir talks about employee's initial reaction of the app and what they are planning to launch in the future.15:09: Puulse's goal from the beginning was not only to bring workers, but to build the banking infrastructure to help people to be financially independent.16:25: People want to get paid daily, so this is possible, but the guardian is structure, which basically pays your taxes, restrict it.16:52: Human life is very exciting, and you can do plenty of things you can use to travel.18:56: Mounir discusses about the challenges they faced when launching Puulse.21:20: To build a culture that is effective and enjoyable that people want to be a part of and are happy to go up to every day, and that is unfortunately and a difficult task, but it's achievable.3 Key PointsMounir shares how they come in the middle and create liquidity on one side to the other.Mounir explains how they help companies facilitate on time payment.Mounir talks about the future of Puulse and its growth. He also discusses what they are planning.Tweetable Quotes"When we get the money, we are kind of a box that comes in the middle and start to push the money automatically that cover this gap basically." - Mounir Felloula"We notice when we start at the beginning about talking to HR companies and HR software, every people like every gig, workers complain to their employers, then they get paid all of them when they notice that what someone pays faster, they jump to one up to another." - Mounir Felloula"I can basically go between these jobs and vendors very quickly just by flipping apps and we are talking about essentially a commodity. We are talking about rides. So at the end of the day, if they don't support what the other guys doing and making it easy, then they are going to lose people pretty quickly." - JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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-defining process.11:54: Most ironically, in industry, it's always about helping people reach their goals.15:23: Just because you hung a shingle doesn't mean people are going to walk in and just hand you money. 19:09: Kelly shares how they track revenue through growth of all of their clients.25:47: Your brand is being distributed. More people are seeing it. It's so worth it, and Kelley tells everybody the same story.28:58: Kelley is on a crusade to help firms realize the value of modern marketing that it should have a seat at the table, that it should be driving strategy, and then it should be a driver of company revenue.3 Key PointsKelly shares how she was really compelled to create a company in that everyone in it had a strong industry context, understood the competitive landscape, understood the inner workings of each of the firms, and understood how everything needed to be connected.Kelly explains what content map is and how they use it.Kelly explains how they spend a lot of time building content strategies and content plans that fuel the overall demand generation plans. Tweetable Quotes"When everybody was reevaluating what they were doing with their lives. I wanted to build a firm that could turn that around for this industry and help firms deploy modern marketing to generate revenue, turn their marketing efforts into revenue generating activities." - Kelly Waltrich"I am building this technology. It is so awesome. It's going to change the way advisors work." - Kelly Waltrich"We make sure that we have a story that we can work with because, at the end of the day, we can't create campaigns, we can't drive opportunities." - Kelly Waltrich"Once you have given us your granular, thoughtful, realistic goals, we get after it, and we put a plan together, and we say this is, this is what it's going to take, this is what it's going to take from your time." - Kelly WaltrichResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://intention.ly/team/kelly-waltrich/Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 physical checks really shows a fly on the wall for that one.12:45: Jose says that they sign a contract, and then they have an onboarding process.13:34: There are people who want to use Instant Pay, NBC only, or ACGH and RTP, but we need to enable that we see what is the full experience for your final recipients we test, validate and deploy, says Jose.14:11: Jose explains how they integrate with some accounting and integrate with accounting seed, SAGE interact, and QuickBooks. 15:41: Jose talks about the benchmarking on how much time and effort is saved by AP departments in terms of being able to streamline the processes.17:24: Jose talks about the migration problem and the unbanked people. He would love to bring a solution for them.19:34: Jose loves connecting with people and solving problems.3 Key PointsJose talks about the six channels of payment that they have in place at Checkbook.io.Checkbook is the bridge to the old world and the new world.Jose explains if they have any integrations into billing processing software or is it just all native.Tweetable Quotes"We are also one-sided platform. For example, if you wanted to send money. You and me in some other environments, we both need to be in the same environment." - Jose Luis Salas Calcáneo"With the printed checks that we are doing now, we are just implementing the magnetic ink, which it might sound like that is not that important, but you have no idea how important this is." - Jose Luis Salas Calcáneo"Sometimes people actually don't want to reveal their account number, routing number, and it makes sense." - Jason"This is getting a lot of traction mostly in loyalty programs, people want to pay their customers, for example, for being loyal and being our current customer using these cards, and it's real." - Jason"We connect with the API of flat, then everything gets connected, and it's done. So you have a lot of money in reprocessing and returns." - Jose Luis Salas CalcáneoResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://checkbook.io/Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 vendor that is used by someone licensed by them.26.33: If you are not going to respond to the liking of the individual or in a timely manner, they are going to go to the privacy commissioner.29.30: Sharon highlights awareness and bringing awareness to employees and making them feel really empowered that they are doing the right thing and that they are trying to work with their existing processes. 31.03: It takes 8 months to a year to truly implement a privacy program that is robust and operational.35.06: Privacy is not always top of mind for all companies. It is a huge, endeavor to educate, educate, educate, and bring awareness so that.3 Key PointsSharon explains how explains privacy program is for companies. If you have a chat on your website, an AI tool or maybe not even an AI tool, but it is recording. There is a transcript recording that chat and you are collecting information from the EU or UK users. You need to seek explicit consent.You need to make sure that the vendor that you are in business with also has good privacy and security practices and are not using that data for their own purpose.Tweetable Quotes"It has become a highly profitable stream of revenue to basically harvest this data and utilize its direct ads and doing a number of other things." – Jason"If you are collecting personal information from residents in the EU or UK or in the US, or any other legislate or jurisdiction, you need to consider whether those regulations also apply." – Sharon"Most recently Facebook came under fire again because they were collecting personal information for the purposes of hitting ads at them instead of seeking explicit consent to do that, what they did was they embedded it in the terms of use terms of service." - Sharon"I feel so fortunate to be working in an industry that is very collaborative and everyone is so supportive of each other." - SharonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 provider in a world where it's all about financial health. 21.28: As per Reese both benchmarks and heuristics are important and right now, they just have heuristics in the system. 23.37: Reese supports the idea of advisors using guidelines and benchmarks to motivate clients toward a healthier state when needed. 26.27: Insights engine is what are we going to surface to the advisor to show them what's going on with their clientele.30.12: Reese shares the success stories and how well the app is received by clients.33.37: Reese explains how their entire clientele is not on meetings. He is batching responses and he is doing it asynchronously.35.52: A DSO that employs like 200 dentists, it's really hard to cost effectively work with rank-and-file dentists, says Reese.3 Key PointsReese discusses an easy way to measure holistic financial health. He shares how the elements financial planning system helps clients to collect and organize financial data and then gives a snapshot of all their key financial health metrics–in one view.Reese talks about the three main ways that they use to interact with clients.The advisor mobile version is mostly meant for real-time analysis, and when you get on the phone with the client, you will be editing data on the fly with them. The web is there for triage and sort of book-level clientele, explains Reese. Tweetable Quotes"If you ever tried to build your own software for your own needs, using your own money from profits from another business that like an advisory business to pay for software, you realize very quickly that it, it's very challenging." - Reese"You could really overwhelm people quite Quickly if you say we have to collect all the financial vital signs that exist in the world." – Reese"Benchmarking is kind of the V2 of what we see coming. It is when you can create internal when you have a large enough internal sample, you can start creating financial health metrics." - Reese"Almost everything that matters to you in your life has some representation on your phone screen." - JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/reeseharper/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 process that they follow. 17.08: Cash is not as cheap as it, it was even six months ago. If you look back even a year ago when money was virtually free, that is just not the market conditions today. But there is still always a space for an individual that's looking for a quick infusion of cash, says Richard. 19.05: Once we are vaulting, we are responsible that means the insurance needs to be fully in place. The conditions of the vault need to be exceptional, says Richard.22.05: As per Richard, understanding the collector mindset is everything because every collector, they have their own tribe. Every collector also has their why behind, why they collect.25.12: As per Richard, they could open up the valves to allow anybody to enter their ecosystem which will certainly grow the top line of the business, but as claims start rolling in because they not thinking about the quality of what is coming in, then you are no longer running a profitable business. 3 Key PointsRichard explains the technology aspect of Wax and where is the tech coming to play, and how is he delivers Insurance on collectibles?Richard talks about the range of products that they have launched or will launch in future. The list included the collection management, model line insurance, lending, and then vaulting.Richard talks about appraisals, how that was going to work and how it changes the current experience.Tweetable Quotes"Collectibles are now seen as an alternative investment whereas in the past it was just kind of seen as a toy or a strange hobby or target demo has disposable income." - Richard Vinhais"The lending product was an experiment that we put into play last quarter, and we see this as a great way for individuals to kind of unlock value in the collectibles that they have." - Richard Vinhais"The amount of research we went into to find the correct vaulting partner was staggering, mainly because we want to make sure we're doing right by our clients, and we don't have to worry about it." - Richard VinhaisResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.wax.insure/about Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.