Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Brigit Carroll, the policy lead for the Americas at Wise. Wise is a company that has previously appeared on the show. Jason has invited Bridget to discuss the progress or lack thereof regarding open banking in North America. They discuss various topics related to cross-border payments, banking apps, and the challenges faced by the industry. Bridget emphasizes the need for transparency in pricing and reducing the cost of remittances. They also talk about the evolving narrative of fintech disruptors and the importance of collaboration within the payment ecosystem.Episode Highlights00:42: Bridget provides a recap of what Wise (formerly known as TransferWise) is all about. 01:18: Wise is a global payments company that focuses on providing the best solution for moving money across borders. 02:22: Open banking is seen as a crucial component of the overall modernization of the payment ecosystem in Canada. 08:33: Bridget emphasizes the importance of faster payments, stating that Canadians deserve it and it's not just a luxury. Failure to deliver on this promise would be detrimental to consumers and businesses during the cost-of-living crisis.11:26: Bridget emphasizes the importance of bringing Canada up to speed with the rest of the world.16:22: Canadian banks are not competitive and are expensive compared to other financial institutions globally. 18:06: There are long lead times for various initiatives, such as the retail Payments Activities Act, which is currently undergoing consultations. 27:10: Knowing that we are making a positive difference in the lives of millions of people around the world is incredibly rewarding. It's why we do what we do, and it's what keeps us motivated to continue pushing for better solutions and a more inclusive financial system, says Bridget.3 Key PointsBridget explains that payments modernization in Canada includes various aspects such as real-time payments, modern payment licensing through systems like RPAs (Request-to-Pay Agreements), open banking, and enabling fintech companies to access the payment system through amendments to the Canadian Payments Act.Jason highlights the frustration of waiting several days for a payment to clear and emphasizes that instant payments are crucial for individuals who cannot afford to wait for their paychecks or for small businesses seeking instant liquidity.Jason criticizes banks for their generic marketing approaches that fail to address individual needs.Tweetable Quotes"Canadian banks may strongly resist open banking, while noting that Europe has taken a legislative approach, and the United States has embraced free market capitalism." – Jason"Wise was the first non-bank to access the Bank of England's faster payment system, resulting in cost reductions for customers and significantly faster payment processing." - Bridget"Change needs to happen in collaboration with regulators and incumbents as well. It's not about disrupting for the sake of disruption, but it's about working together to create a better system." – BridgetResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Giuseppe Stuto, co-founder and managing partner of 186 Ventures. It is a venture capital firm founded by former high-growth tech executives themselves. They have been there, and they know how to advise people who are going through that same journey. Giuseppe explains that their criteria for investing in a company involve evaluating founder market fit, the competence and unique positioning of the founders, their understanding of the problem, and their passion and motivations for building the business.Episode Highlights:00:47: Giuseppe Stuto says that they are at an early stage precede and seed venture capital firm. So, they typically invest at the earliest stages. There may or may not be a company incorporated or maybe a business already with over $1,000,000 in annual revenue, but primarily invests in the US primarily in the Northeast.01:43: Giuseppe shares how he and his best friend started angel investing. 07:25: As per Giuseppe for the most part, they make sure that they leave that initial meeting with two or three ways they can begin to provide value to that founder.10:04: The investors focus on connecting companies with key team members and leveraging their extensive network of technical and industry experts to provide support and value to the companies they invest in.11:57: Giuseppe emphasizes their role in assisting founders by aligning their goals, providing insights, and offering support through various programs tailored for founders and operators.15:08: Giuseppe acknowledges that building an unsustainable model can be challenging to unwind, particularly in times of high cost of capital. 21:29: It's crucial to have a deep understanding of the local market when making investment decisions or implementing business strategies.24:19: In the context of early-stage startups, the definition of "early stage" typically refers to the initial stages of a company's development, usually up until the Series A funding round.3 Key Points:Giuseppe shares how in early 2019, the brand was founded and then in fall of 2021, they started investing out of their first institutional vehicle.Giuseppe talks about the 4 pillars that they consider when deciding upon investment.Jason expresses the desire to discuss the investments made in the fintech sector and asks Giuseppe to provide details about the companies they have invested in and what attracted them to those companies.Tweetable Quotes:"Never before was there more of a time where founders should partner. With firms that actually have institutional know-how and being able to build companies themselves." - Giuseppe Stuto"In mid 2021, later on the peak actually where many funds were coming to market, new ones particularly we decided to institutionalize our platform and raise our first fund vehicle, which is a $37 million fund today." - Giuseppe Stuto"The experience of having been there and done, that's incredibly valuable, but there's also an underlying thesis to the investments." - JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Jennifer Thomas, Director of Business development for XLR8. It is a well-known financial advisor CRM tool that is built over top of the Salesforce Platform. XLR8 is an overlay or custom version of Salesforce. Jennifer explains that they use all the power and strength and a wonderful thing that Salesforce offers, and then they came out-of-the-box with a fully customized version specific to the finance sector. Episode Highlights:01:19: Jennifer talks about the history of XLR8. How did it come to be and how does it evolve?03.20: Within XLR8 what we are doing is providing the out-of-the-box solution that is able to be and still intended to be sort of further customized, says Jennifer. 07:17: Jennifer explains how they are a little bit different in the Salesforce space and that they are not a transactional relationship. They don't just sell you licenses and then sort of move on.08:43: Jennifer explains how keep updating the system as per process and industry changes.10:17: Jennifer shares how filling gaps is something that they work with the different educational series that they provide.10:57: Jennifer thinks more from a relationship point of view. She doesn't think about business workflow enablement. 12:40: Sort of mathematics in your mind doesn't always go there with technology, says Jason.15:01: Jennifer is currently at a place where her successful business basically caters to the financial advisors.16:13: To sort of filter and disseminate information to our clients of what impacts them, what matters to them, what's important to them, what's useful to them, that is something that we have sort of taken on our shoulders, says Jennifer. 23:08: One of the things that often shocks advisors is the transition cost from CRM to CRM. Jennifer shares what people can expect when they are moving to any CRM. 24:17: Big data is the most valuable part of your business. It is everything, it's every note. It's everything about your clients.28:06: The support in Salesforce is largely handled through DIY stuff on their very good learning systems.30:31: There is some saying about lesson learned or once the lesson is better learned once you have experienced it.3 Key Points:Jennifer explains how the user journeys and the product itself are informed by the user's journey.As per Jennifer a lot of firms don't always investigate the full breadth or depth of the technology they have.Jennifer says that their focus is to make sure that they are an ongoing partner, and their clients are able to and open to and know that they can kind of come knock on their door anytime to ask questions and look for ideas. Tweetable Quotes:"If you are willing to invest the time and effort into the customizations of building your entire practice into Salesforce, you can spend a lot of time on a lot of money, but also get a lot of utility out of it not everyone is built for that." - Jason "You could get into some really deep things, but there are also a ton of really some little things that can be done in the system that takes essentially time really adds time back to somebody that's doing those things manually or kind of doing those things in a repetitive way." - Jennifer"Leveraging a best-in-class platform in a unique vertical which is a great trend and bright place to be as a good, sweet spot." - JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Daniel Cronin, CEO and Co-Founder of Integrated Finance. It is a platform that helps Fintech's launch with their payment systems all ready to go. Episode Highlights:00:31: Integrated finance is a platform that helps fintech's to launch or incumbents or add new offerings to their existing customer base.02:00: The APIs that work with Bank A are entirely different to the APIs that work with Bank B compounded times the number of banks you are working, says Daniel. 11:45: The four letters that scare at every American when looking to do business with Europeans are GDPR, and Daniel has built our platform from a security perspective and data protection perspective here in the UK and Europe and it just conforms to GDPR.15:52: There is a stranglehold on innovation because over half of the Fintech that wanted to launch with product X, either never launched or ended up launching with product Y because it was 10 times harder.23:32: If we don't make the cost of entry low or be as lowest as possible then any number of constrained, innovative ideas who do not have capital Rich will never see the light of day, says Jason.32:01: Forcing consumer protection is a great way to create innovation that is now more secure, says Jason.32:31: As crypto cools, fintech's become the higher risk category, and Daniel would be interested to see how that plays out over the next couple of years.36.32: The biggest challenge in the company where is it today is to fully evaluate the ecosystem that Daniel is trying to build and strategically add new partners as they grow.39.15: Finding something that you love where you don't get Sunday blues changed Daniel's life about 7-8 years ago it was running his own business.3 Key Points:Daniel explains how they target the payments piece, they go even more specific than that on account generation, because this is something that's often overlooked in Fintech.It's the mountain of non-differentiating stuff that needs to be built before you can get your head above the water line just to breathe.There is an asymmetric relationship with industries that are currently growing rapidly, and the way legacy industries are built to serve that growth.Tweetable Quotes:"Rather than focusing on the core assets of the back end of Fintech, we focus on homogenizing the experience our Fintech customers get." – Daniel"The principal reason you increase engagement with anyone in any industry is by giving them account, and that's why we are in the payment and account space to give Fintech and Non-Fintech greater control of their user base." – Daniel"When a customer comes to us, the first thing, we do is we analyze what their requirements are, and we set them up with a sandbox that works with the bank, and they can do what they want." – Daniel"We establish a marketplace where all gaps are filled, and we're doing minimal filtering of features for every single partner, and that drives major commercial alignment." – DanielResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/danielcroninif/?originalSubdomain=ukhttps://integrated.finance/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Ashley Aydin, Principal at Vamos Ventures. It is a venture capital firm that not only makes investments in various areas, including fintech but has taken a keen eye toward increasing diversity within their founder.Episode Highlights:01:41: Ashley explains how they only invest in the next and diverse founding teams. They also focus on impact-oriented companies. 01:47: Ashley mentioned diversity, but it also means equity, community, product, and environment on the equity front, it's about wealth agency created for founders, teams, and communities and access to funding and growth that facilitates social mobility in the Community front, it's creating a diverse pipeline of Angel investors of VC investors of role models for future generations.03:29: 60% of population growth is going to be fueled by that next immigrant chic right in the coming years.03:48: The world is changing fast as what we are seeing, and it's increasingly marked by Latin X and diverse entrepreneurial influence.05:29: Ashley explains how there is a demand for more financial education and literacy.06:49: As per stats, less than 3% of funding goes to diverse entrepreneurs, whether women, Black, Latino, or any underserved overlooked founder category or demo figure.08:37: As per Ashley there needs to be education early on as to what these careers are, whether it's building, operating, or investing, and that we need diversity in those spaces and different experiences.11:15: Ashley is building sort of outside of the venture partnership and advisor staff off deep functional experts in health and Wellness and sustainability and future work in fintech that either have had exits or have been in an executive position.13:21: The more LP capital that you have that believes in these missions, that gives emerging managers a chance, the better the VC landscapers and the startup landscape.15:30: The founding journey isn't just this glamorous thing; it's also caring about an aging parent and building a company at the same time.17:35: Emerging fund managers aren't so much emerging anymore that they are the standard right and that they have unique insight into investing and building funds.18:22: At the end of the day, the opportunities between success and failure in life often come down to a couple of serendipitous choices made by others that give us opportunities where they could have just as easily turned away and done nothing.3 Key Points:Ashley explains how diversity is important to them and how they use it to build technology.Ashley shares examples and instances how they promote diversity.Ashley talks about the venture partner program. How people could sign up to be a venture partner, come on as a venture partner and help advise companies about market strategy or how to fundraise etc.Tweetable Quotes:"There are a few different things we look at in Fintech, but I think the overall theme is empowerment and education." - Ashley"When we look at the sub-sectors and fintech and what is most interesting in that connection, it's things like alternative business lending, new payment structures platforms that focus on wealth generation and wealth building and access and education." - Ashley"We have seen that people are privileged, are coming to coming to the VCs end up not necessarily staying on the right side of the law either." - AshleyResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Ryan George, CMO of Docupace. It is a platform for paperless tools basically designed to automate your back office or the financial advisors back office that, eliminate a lot of the heavy lifting and pain that we go through daily.Episode Highlights:03:07: Ryan is working with and working for people who are sometimes in the background of the business, whether it's connecting to the CRM and having a wireframe into that business or another level of deep integration.05:56: As per Ryan, in the early 2000s, they sort of had the mainframe systems where everything was a locked technology ecosystem, and in terms of what it was able to do and what happened, that led to this explosion of innovation.11:01: As per Ryan industry average is around between 25 to 27% of the NIGO rate for large enterprises, which sounds extremely high because it is on Docupace, it's below 3% for their clients.12:00: As per Ryan, APIs are a big part of their integrations and a big part of their systems. 18:26 Ryan discusses how the pandemic drove growth in digital data gathering.24:37: Sometimes, your clients will lead you down the path to destruction. It's a matter of knowing where to draw the line and saying this is what's good for us.28:01: As per Ryan, there is a need to pivot, and we need to change things in order to get to where we are trying to do what we are trying to move, move faster, be more agile, be more innovative, serve customers in a different way.30:42: As per Ryan, they are not at the level of creativity to where people are coming up with creative solutions to solve because they don't know what the problem is yet.3 Key Points:Ryan shares a case study of someone he has dealt with who didn't have the interconnectivity, what kind of experience change they see within their company, and what type of productivity gains they get from this.Docupace provides tracking in the dashboards where if paperwork gets submitted, somebody must call and say, hey, where's Joe and sell his application.Ryan shares what are the new features of Docupace that they are going to implement in the coming years.Tweetable Quotes:"We want to be a cohesive glue that helps connect your financial planning software, custodian, and systems together as you integrate throughout the technology stack that you have at your firm." – Ryan"Often, it's not the technology, it's the humans that become the inefficiency in the system, and we are trying to find that." - Ryan"Do you have the people in management or middle management with the vision for how this all comes together, which is a is and it's a very difficult thing to fill because it's a Venn diagram." - Jason"People who understand the digital realm as to what's possible and being able to tie that all together. Those are the single most valuable people in our enterprises these days." - Jason"There are so many uses for being able for one person to get data from another person, and that is never going to go away in this business." - RyanResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInLinkedIn - Ryan George Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.