Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Professor Ben Charoenwong, an Assistant Professor in Finance at the National University of Singapore. Today Ben is going to talk about some research he has done specifically in the RegTech field. Ben explains how dealer broker firms would not have wanted to invest in all these technologies on their own, it's the fact that there are some regulations that kind of forced them to get software.Episode Highlights1.40: RegTech is short for regulatory technology or software that is designed specifically for the purpose of improving or assisting with compliance with rules and regulations. 6.09: At the end of the day, everything is all about liability and the only way to make companies accountable is to make them liable, says Jason. 9.00: When you look down the list of like the top 20 broker dealers, it's a mix of whether they are caring or not a lot of this business line of having custody.11.04: There are many proprietary software solutions for document handling and storage that jumped about 30% when this rule was signed and started to be implemented and there is just a dramatic jump in the firms adopting the software solutions.12.44: Ben saw an almost exact equivalent jump on the hardware side. The estimated IT budget for each company increased by about 30 to 40% and consequently the profitability of these firms increased by about five percentage points.19.14: The most profitable per dollar of revenue firms that exist at this point are typically sole practitioners running at a high level of automation and it's interesting.24.04: Ben talked about his research, and did he complete any form of causation like was it the elimination of bad actors or we could just attribute this to a Hawthorne effect?27.35: If you think about this SEC 175-A rule it is very basic and just says, all these other financial regulations, just can you comply with them always.3 Key PointsThe main thing about customer asset segregation is that the brokers that were not carrying or using other brokers as custodians, that was fine because that's a third party and it's very hard to steal customer assets when it's sitting with someone else, says Ben. Realistically companies looked at SEC rule that basically talks about banking versus investing and they must have thought immediately like we need a software solution. James explains what he saw in terms of the implementation and its efficacy of it.The technology component seems to have the operational effect that's almost equivalent to like having the FBI come check the firm, says Ben.Tweetable Quotes"In the face of increasing regulations in the financial services sector, it's become fairly difficult for humans to actually make sure they are in compliance." – Ben"You always have all the independent parties who are making decisions as to how things are to work." - Jason"It's a known phenomenon that computers tend to not get scrapped, they trickle down for a long period of time until they're useless." – Jason"I don't think regulation is going anyway anytime soon. It's going to increase even more."- BenResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.bencharoenwong.info/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Will Robinson, CEO of Encapture. The company brings machine learning to banks and lenders to help them understand what is going on with their data and make better decisions. Anywhere anyone signed, any place someone showing up and having to fill out paperwork or submit supporting documents to do something at a bank is where Encapture can get involved. Episode Highlights0.58: Encapture is a machine learning platform in the intelligent document processing space. They are good at finding and extracting important info out of documents. 4.02: Will explains how they collect documents required for loan processing and helps to save time and manual effort. 7.36: The big impact over the last several years is the ability to read through unstructured documents, says Will. 14.00: Will explains why it is important to feed really good clean data into your model in the first place.15.45: Jason talks about how the relative tightness of Encapture's data set really does play in quite well into being able to have that human versus machine interaction. 18.10: Will explains how some of their prospects are familiar with machine learning, how it works, and they understand kind of the limitations of it doesn't do everything and it doesn't do everything 100% accurately. 23.37: Will says that they kind of take the mindset if we can go solve everything there is to solve with the current product they have, then they will think about doing more. 25.39: As per Will getting people to really buy in and believe into where they are going has been harder than he had thought. 27.17: Will says there are so many problems out here. So many things to get solved and the way that we even solved them, we are getting better at that. 3 Key PointsWill shares how they are using machine learning to save lot of time and effort in data processing. Will explains how training a machine learning system is very similar to feeding it data. There are different methods of training where you feed it massive datasets, like thousands or 10s of thousands of samples of documents and you let the machine learning kind of figure it out on its own and come back to you with results. Will explains how they are not making decisions about credit or about new account openings, they are simply looking for the data in the documents and making that hunt and peck a lot more efficient. Tweetable Quotes"Our focus of the last several years has been in developing our own technology and trying to find some compelling sticky use cases in the financial services space to apply our tech." - Will"There are probably 30 examples that we can give as tangible to bank and so much of it is dependent upon who are we talking to in that meeting." – Will"It's incredible how far machine learning has come to mimic kind of a natural conversation between a system and between a person." - Will "There is a super long tail of community banks and kind of smaller regional banks that would love this technology that has never been exposed to it at all." - WillResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookWoodgate.com – SponsorLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInhttps://encapture.com/about/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to James Tait, CEO of Underwrite Me. It is a platform that allows insurance advisors to quote and handle the entire application that underwriting cycle through one unified platform and does so in 11 countries around the world. James explains how the platform allows each insurer to configure their rules and consistently with their philosophy without asking different questions or without having to agree to exactly the same philosophy. Episode Highlights06.02: At Underwrite Me, someone puts their details in the portal and says these are their general health concerns. First the underwriting of their health condition as an individual happens and then the persona gets recommendations on pricing on insurance companies.07.51: As per James it was a painful process over the years to convince everybody to come on board. It wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but the fundamental for them was that they were trying to improve the market. 08.58: James explains how they partnered with a couple of very large financial advice firms, and distributors in the UK that provided some of the attractive business volumes. 10.01: As per James there is a lot that they provide to the insurers even outside the marketplace that they are providing to do that. 14.50: James explains how the flexibility within the platform made it much easier to get everybody to agree on a common approach.19.14: James shares how they are focused on three regions at the moment, UK and Ireland, Asia Pacific and North America.25.01: Every industry at the moment, whether it's personalized medicine or personalized advertising, personalization is definitely the future of life insurance, says James.26.10: One change that James would like to make in the industry is ease of access to electronic health data.3 Key PointsJason and James talk about the early days of Underwrite Me, and how James convinced or how he got the insurance companies even come to the table on this?James explains how they are trying to improve both sales and customer experience.James shares his journey and how 22% of the financially advised UK life insurance is written through the Underwrite Me platform.Tweetable Quotes"By launching Underwrite Me, we were putting something in place that I think everybody would agree would make financial advisors' lives much, much easier and in a market, that's probably struggled to grow over the years." - James "Imagine if you had an extra month to make revenue with no additional investment like that is just profound in terms of size." - Jason"Underwriting is a field that is changing really rapidly at the moment and it's really interesting the differences around the world in the focus of that development. So, a big topic at the moment is how we incorporate predictive models, artificial intelligence, machine learning within the underwriting process." - James Resources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.underwriteme.co.uk/our-people/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Nicholas Bernardo, Founder & CEO of OnBord; a simple, secure tool with automated compliance features that will save you time and money while onboarding new clients. OnBord is built to streamline the new client experience for not only the advisors but also their clients.Episode Highlights03.02: Nick talks about his profile and what prompted him to launch OnBord. He also talks about how simple the tool is and the feedback that he has received from few of his clients. 05.32: Jason and Nick talk about the inconvenience caused during manual data filing or data gathering process. 06.17: Nick explains how they have created the ability to do a bulk transfer. Now they are working to eliminate that custodial spreadsheet so that if you are an advisor looking to leave a wire house or leave a broker-dealer that's protocol or non-protocol you have all kinds of limitations around what you can take. 7.18: Nick talks about their data gathering process and how they don't actually hold any of the client data.  09.32: Nick explains OnBord's entire work process flow and how it is all automated.11.04: Nick explains once the client completes the flow, they also receive an e-mail from the firm, welcoming them again, stating kind functions of the CSA and then also putting out the e-mail as disclosure documents that way that is one step that the CSA team has to do. 13.10: Nick explains how they are currently working on the KYC module right now so that they can update that and push it right back to the advisor's CRM. 18.20: Nick explains how OnBord shows real time status of clients filling in their information and how it helps to save a lot of time and efforts. 23.05: Features and functions we have an unbelievably long list of features and functions that. We want to put out there, but right now it's about solving the core problem right and showing the most value to the same, says Nick. 31.00: OnBord is a core technology for almost every RA in the in the country and maybe even in the world.3 Key PointsNick talks about how well OnBord uses automation to create great user experience. He says that they are not asking them complicated questions, they are asking the minimum amount of information that the custodian wants in order to open their account.Nick explains how they leverage text as a means of engagement of the consumers.Any business that gets new clients and needs information to get from the client to their database and potentially you know signed off on a form, that's our opportunity, says Nick.Tweetable Quotes"We are looking to make use technologies to flatten this whole experience out and that way the advisor and CSA, all they have to do is manage the process." - Nick "If you are a broker dealer and you need to update KYC on an annual basis, we'll be able to administrate the entire process for you." – Nick"Getting people's attention via text message and a reminder say hey by the way we need to get this done it. We're finding that you know response times are faster." - NickResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Justin Adler, co-founder of NorthOne. It is an online Business Account with built-in features to make business banking fast and easy. Justin helps people with this entire profit for a system, they put people in envelopes or supplements, but nevertheless it's basically splitting up by dollars or percentages and making sure that when the taxman comes calling the money sitting there when payroll comes, it's done which is fantastic.Episode Highlights0.54: When launching NorthOne Justin Adler's goal was to transform what would be a really burdensome experience of traditional banking into one that's simple, fast and efficient. NorthOne is like Uber for banking and financial management.04.19: When setting up his business Justin visited several places and did in-depth research. He realized that the problems we seen growing up were so widespread and so commonplace and they really resulted from the fact that small business owners are generally really good at what they do. They are great at your craft, but they are so ill prepared and ill set up for the financial management side.06.16: By launching NorthOne, Justin aimed to remove the opportunity cost of doing day-to-day banking from the business owner so that we could turn the really burdensome banking experience for small business owners. 07.50: Justin co-designed a feature called the Northland profit first envelope system. This allows the small business center to literally, with one click on drag and drop, an automatic budgeting system so that whenever they deposit money, the correct amount is sequestered for things like rent, payroll, taxes. 11.02: As per Justin, one of the biggest threats to the economy today is the failure rate of small businesses.13.13: One of the big features that Justin and his team worked on this year has been really about defining more convenient ways for folks to get paid and make payments. 16.09: Justin says that they focused on integrations that really allowed the bank account to do what it does best.3 Key PointsJustin shares how he has built a system to basically implement the entire cash flow model.Many small business owners use cash basis accounting to make decisions for what they can, what they can afford, what they can buy. A lot of what Justin has also focused on this year has been building integrations so that the business center can get a wider circumference and expand on the view of what's going on in their business through the Northwest Bank account.Justin shares how he sees the future of the product and the best way to serve the customer. NorthOne is a platform that really kind of connects that small business center to a variety of different proxy tools and services that they need. Tweetable Quotes"NorthOne is a digital challenger bank specifically made for the needs of small business owners across the country." – Justin"We worked with our team to really figure out how to take that functionality ACH and take it as fast as possible." – Justin"We have always stood behind the idea that if you make a product service, it's good customers should be happy to pay a fair price for it." - JustinResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Santiago Burridge, executive chairman of Lumiant. It is a platform that helps advisors discover what really matters to their clients and helps them have more deep and meaningful conversations and guides them along the way to a deeper and more meaningful and prosperous engagement. Episode Highlights0.38: All the extraordinary conversation that happens between an advisor and a client currently now goes into a filing cabinet and we anchor experience in something we can control, which is a product, says Santiago.4.33: You can't help people in relation to their life unless you understand what drives them in life and that is their values and it's not their goals because goals change, and values tend to not, says Santiago.9.21: If you lead with the client's life, not with your product, the client is going to work with you and that's the subtle pride pitch between selling and serving, says Santiago.17.55: The computers aren't the thing. Computers are the thing to get us to the thing and the financial plan is not the thing. The financial plan is the thing to get the things. The values and goals are the thing that gets you to that thing, which is financial planning, says Jason.23.23: When you are in a bad health situation or need surgery, the doctor is the shining star and the most important person in your world. But when everything is going ok or not ok or just average every day, financial planners are the most important.24.38: One wish for something to change in the industry is that 51% of advisers should be women. It's currently 16 to 20% and it's a disgrace and it's a poor reflection on what we do, says Santiago.3 Key Points90% of people who walk in to see an advisor and non-financial spouses, they generally do not know what they need to do, and these non-financial spouses have been utterly ignored by our profession forever, says Santiago.When we thought about bringing the whole client journey through a platform, it is values, goals, key advice, strategies and tasks to achieve and live the best life and what risk are they willing to accept to live their best life, says Santiago.Santiago is building nudges into the part forms and the ability to remind their clients of things that they need to do. But it's more than a task.Tweetable Quotes"When we thought about technology that has been used in the financial services industry today, we realized that everything's been built for the sale." – Santiago"Everybody wants change, but no one wants to change and it's the most frustrating thing in the world." – Jason"Supporting entrepreneurialism and independence, helping this industry achieve its potential is the thing that excites me to continue the work, day and night since I was a kid." - SantiagoResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/santiago-burridge-1a830b6/?originalSubdomain=auhttps://www.lumiant.com.au/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Guy Anderson about what happened in these past years of 51 episodes other than this one. As per Jason When it came to technology innovation, it was the bigger issues that were looked at first, but now we are looking at the smaller problems.Episode Highlights1.59: Jason shares what was his top pick for the most interesting fintech solution for 2022. 2.04: As per Jason the closest thing to the most revolutionary, coolest thing he has seen wasn't in Fintech and that is GPT chat. This year more than any product he was rather impressed by good execution. 04.02: Jason really appreciates Nudge; it is a tool for automating client communication and collaboration. Then there is Hubley a checklist or process mapping system. 06.09: There is a software now that ensures that everything involved with settling an estate is done first and foremost, but also as fast and as painlessly as possible. 09.40: Historically the distribution of financial products followed specific channels where you typically go to one person for one thing your investment guy, your insurance guy all that and we have seen that slowly expand out with multi licensing.10.15: Jason explains how and why the number of financial decisions that people face on a day-to-day basis is increasing.13.48: There is a certain type of person who is going to listen to a robot running their financial life start to finish. That's the reality of it, says Jason.16.28: If we keep on talking about being the future of this business, that is going to be the differentiation point because that is not going to be what is basically done, says Jason.21.49: Crypto is a technology that is unfortunately that is useful and unfortunately that use is lost and rampant speculation in most cases.23.32: In a lot of ways the crypto purists will tell you your mistake was leaving it on someone else's wallet, says Jason.26.02: Jason talks about his initial plans in 2023 and how he is going to bring in new and some of the old guest in the upcoming podcasts. 3 Key PointsFintech is going to revolutionize, and it has already started to revolutionize our business. Jason shares his views on where does he sees revolutionizing is going to impact advisors versus all the other aspects of the fintech space?Jason shares how much of this Fintech filters down into the hands of individuals and what impact does that have on the advisory business? GPT chat is a function of GPT 3 which is a general-purpose technology artificial intelligence that has been being experimented with and now they have kind of opened it up and it allows people to ask whatever question they want of it or to ask it to compose whatever text it wants. Tweetable Quotes"Buy now, pay later is still most hated but best example of embedded finance." – Jason"I see a lot of issuances coming to the business and building up deeper relationships with your clients and just being able to be better and just be being better advisors' long term." - Guy"Any new technology is always met by a bunch of scam artists." - Jason Resources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Yasser Abou-Nasr, Senior Vice President of product at Dwolla. The company is a payment infrastructure company specifically specializing in account-to-account transfers.Episode Highlights0.30: Dwolla is a modern payments platform that really becomes an engine that a lot of our Fintech or software companies or corporate enterprises want to embed in their stacks because they actually have sophisticated a2a problems that they want to solve, says Yasser.2.20: There was a decision to make a pivot around 2016 where Dwolla focused on helping businesses get paid and payout necessary use cases that really have to pay payments through modern API.6.11: One use case we are seeing is that people being really creative with helping that are under underprivileged and how they are able to leverage our platform to make cash flow readily available for those, says Yasser.8.04: It's just amazing to see how many different people are realizing the opportunities to embedded finance and finding that Dwolla is kind of that opportunity and that really helping us position and go to market. 9.18: Some customers use us as essentially, they are able to give cash advances to their drivers and their drivers are able to kind of pay back those loans as well through our network, says Yasser.12.21: Yasser wants to go ahead and be that payment service provider where they can actually leverage the data, make smart decisions and actually get payments to the financial Institute.15.47: Yasser says that they are looking at data aggregation and enrichment for them to bring other value adds to kind of help enrich the transaction or the decisions or the risk behind those transactions.17.05: RFP, request for payment is going to do some amazing things. Yasser has learned from other markets like India that they're way mature with instant payments. 19.01: Any type of position has risk involved with that and if Yasser can minimize risk and increase that position for a faster funding, then everything kind of follows right behind it.24.55: There are endless possibilities with a2a payments and that's what gets Yasser excited and kind of really coming in every day.3 Key PointsEveryone in vertical SaaS companies is trying to disrupt the certain industry that has pain points or problems especially around funding or positioning, says Yasser.The banks are just not best positioned especially when it comes to API's and how they want to manage innovation and Fintech find a big struggle to work with banks.The fact that open banking is regulated has really pushed a lot of innovation in a2a because of consumer piece, says Yasser.Tweetable Quotes"We actually power complex a2a payments as well and because of our solution people come to us." – Yasser"Effectively you are the pipes that no consumer sees but alleviates frustration when it happens." – Jason"We are excited about all the different use cases in industries around. We ran a report earlier and we see ourselves in 80 different industries." – YasserResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/yabounasr/https://www.dwolla.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Mark Higgins, Chief Analytics Officer and Co-Founder of Beacon. It is a company that provides cloud solutions to financial institutions to run their data and analytics and a number of other interesting and high-level things.Episode Highlights0.33: Beacon is a financial technology company focused on the capital markets. These are the sort of wholesale trading that happens in foreign exchange and commodities and interest rate derivatives.4.55: Mark had decided to start their trading and risk management system as a development platform that has all that enterprise technology stuff in it and so that quants and data scientists and people like that don't have to be experts at enterprise technology.8.00: The financial institutions have had a sort of 30 plus year history of on-premises data center computers and there is a particular kind of mental model that goes along with that.09.02: Mark shares how their product is this combination of two pieces. One of them is sort of an out-of-the-box set of trading and risk management applications and the second part of the platform is the developer environment where they can go and build their own tools.10.28: Mark says that they are very open with their underlying technology and development environment. Their clients get all of our source code, and they can write their own code in the environment. 12.02: In the early years of the company, Mark spent a lot of time being pretty reactive from a product perspective where basically their road map was whatever the next big prospects wanted them to build, and it kept changing all the time.12.35: Beacon is a big change for people. Jason talks about the implementation timeline for something like this for the people or companies.17.41: Institutions start using Beacon for one particular thing or whatever particular business problem they have and when their developers start using Beacon to build new stuff for the desk, then a new project comes up and they're like, why don't we just use Beacon for this, says Mark.3 Key PointsOne thing where Mark helps people with Beacon is how to use the cloud in the right way because beacons sort of automates all the cloud infrastructure management in the elastic compute stuff.Beacon came into the market after 4 iterations Mark shares how he ended up having to modify and adapt this product that he didn't expect initially.Beacon gives you a lot more flexibility in doing the kind of ad hoc analysis because you have access to elastic computing, says Mark.Tweetable Quotes"The quant has outsourced the most important thing that any developer can do, which deploys your change into production." – Mark"The thing that we didn't properly understand about selling to big institutions is that it's really hard to sell to them when you're a little company." – Mark"I just love the idea of helping the whole industry to get more efficient and productive through using better tools." - MarkResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-higgins-63b0264/https://www.beacon.io/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Andrew Kirkland, President, and Co-Founder of Justwealth. The company is a Canadian based Robo advisor that deals directly with consumers but also collaborates with financial advisors.Episode Highlights0.29: Justwealth is an online portfolio manager also known as a Robo advisor and Andrew is bringing investment services to Canadian investors via a very efficient model by using technology.2.55: Just of just wealth is for justice and acting in the client's best interest of all time we are regulated with the Ontario Securities Commission which means we have fiduciary standards to act in the best interest of the clients that we deal with, says Andrew.3.32: Andrew's co-founder background is in the asset allocation space. He actually manufactured some portfolio models for large banks and other high net worth portfolio management in Canada.5.25: It was important for us to make sure that we are building a broad product lineup and if someone looks at Justwealth lineup portfolios, we have a many more options than other Robo advisors, says Andrew.8.25: Andrew says that they have different portfolios for different account types. You could be accumulated in accumulation phase in one of our growth portfolios and invested in a non-registered account.10.13: Justwealth's portfolio investment questionnaire provides questions as to help us figure out which risk level that you're associated and for us, risk is really determined by your ability to take on risk and coupling that with your willingness to take on risks, says Andrew.14.07: Andrew says that they felt that their investment offering of having more options attracted somebody who may have more objectives that need to be met.16.09: People are beginning to realize that costs associated with the bank are just too high for the service that they are getting.18.00: Andrew says that they have financial planning channel, and they are working with financial planners, and they are referring or outsourcing the investments decisions to us20.43: Andrew wishes to have unlimited amount of funds to explain their services to all the people. 21.38: The biggest challenge in new company is to teach yourself to be patient for the public and the users to understand your service, Andrew.3 Key PointsFinancial plan can change and will change between today and 15 years down the road, but people just want to get an understanding for on the right track record and that's what our service can provide from a financial planning perspective, says Andrew.From a cost perspective, the people to have the most gain are not necessarily the millennials. Millennial will get the savings over time, which is phenomenal.Andrew shares where he is finding the majority of his client base.Tweetable Quotes"We are trying to make it as efficient as possible for people to get access to sound, quality, and diversified investment portfolios." – Andrew"In earlier times, there were a lot of costs that associated with the current model that inflated the end cost to the investor." – Andrew"We also have a family that targets or utilized often within RESP and education savings plans." - AndrewResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.