Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Sam Kawtharani, VP of Product with Railz. The company collects data from different accounting systems, create a standardized file format, allows that information to be pushed into other products and vendors, and create unity around different accounting reporting systems.Episode Highlights0.36: Railz is a single API provider for accounting and financial data on small and medium businesses or SMBs in general. With Railz, they are solving the noise in the financial data that one would have in a typical business. 0.54: We are able to connect, normalize and set analytics that you are able to consume and make the decisions, whether it's a lending application or business floor management tool, says Sam.5.50: From a tax perspective, banking and e-commerce flow into our accounting system. The lending, management of payables, and receivables are some top three use cases that Railz deals with, and we are always working on expanding into that space, says Sam.7.11: Railz products can be customized based on the business industry and the business's financials. You get the chest to monitor your portfolio after it because you have access to that information for up to a year before you have to renew it.11.12: With Railz, we have two-way sync where we allow you to pull your bills and push back bill payments to the vendor. We can create that synchronized workflow for business workflow management, explains Sam.17.21: Every service provider has its own draconian rules for the cause of how you access the data, what you can do with it, and what not. These are some of the challenges which make it part of what we're building and removing nightmares for other customers.3 Key PointsRailz is taking all noise of data and translating it into something where customers and FinTechs can make sense of it and make a decision based on that.The credit cards are able to reconcile it back into the accounting system through journal or expense entries so that as a business owner today, you just see everything landing in your accounting system, and instead of doing their entry, you are doing a quick review and closing your month-end.One tricky thing when you are trying to build in Fintech or if you are a third-party fintech, your adoption depends on the adoption of your feedback.Tweetable Quotes"What is nice with using Railz is now that you can ask the businesses to grant you access to their financial and accounting information." – Sam"Except insurance and lending measurement of payable is another use case we are seeing, and there are two use cases of management of payable." - Sam"Open banking is one thing, but open data is a long-term play, and it's important to make it easy for people to move between venues when we have access and rights to it." - Sam Resources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Justin Fitzpatrick, Chief Innovation Officer of Income lab. An online platform that basically lets you do dynamic retirement planning.Episode Highlights01.47: Justin says that they are laser-focused on retirement income planning. He explains that they typically live alongside one of the widely used generalized financial planning systems for when client relationships need to go deep on retirement, whether it's incoming withdrawal, sourcing, tax planning, spending decisions. 07.00: A lot of people were a little dissatisfied with that framing of success and failure. We talked with a lot of advisors who were already talking with clients about adjustments. The problem was they couldn't actually show a client when an adjustment would be made or paint a longer-term picture of what a life might look like if you adjust in this way. So, we really homed in on helping advisors paint that picture, says Justin.13.10: Justin says that retirement is one of the nastiest, hardest problems to deal with. There are so many unknowables and unknowns, so it's for somebody who loves analytics. You can really dive in, but it would be hopeless to try to present that to every client. So, we have really tried hard to listen to our advisors, to listen to our consultants like Derek around you know, how can we help advisors best? Present this in ways to clients where they are going to understand and follow the plan. 14.43: Justin talks about inflation household by household, when they lasted innocent an adjustment. He says that it is great work for a computer but terrible for a human. So that's the kind of thing that we are trying to make this kind of service. Long term advice service really scalable for a practice. 20.03: Jason says if you are fortunate enough that your Monte Carlo score is 100% every time that you go and do it great like you got you tell clients they got next to nothing to worry about. But if the score is less then Income Lab frames the news in more human terms and makes it more digestible. 3 Key PointsJustin talks about the software that they are using and what is their software doing that is different than everybody else?Jason talks about the visualizations that Justin and his team have created around patterns of retirement income and patterns of retirement spending. He found those both insightful and also easy to understand for clients to show that too often the focus is on you know how much his portfolio generate every year. Jason appreciates how good Income Lab's features are and how user friendly they are.Tweetable Quotes"Retirement isn't static, people don't plan and follow it to the letter until they die or run out of money. Clients don't fail in retirement, they adjust." -  Justin"There is a lot of fear and anxiety around retirement, but we found that kind of more realistic dynamic planning really improves not just the objective outcomes for people in retirement. That is obviously super important, but also kind of a subjective experiences of clients and retirement." - Justin"There are clients, who say that retirement is dynamic, that adjustment is normal." - Justin Resources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Mark Warnquist, CEO of InShare - an insurance tech that focuses on distributing protection solutions to the on-demand economy to lift the gig workers of the world. Episode Highlights:0.50: With InShare, we set out to do something better and move faster than incumbents and build solutions that benefit and help the on-demand economy, grow and protect the gig workers on whom the on-demand economy largely depends, explains Mark.7.30: Mark talks about method of distribution. He tells the listeners whether he is still right downs to the end-user level, or is that still in the works, or is it largely more fleet-based?8.16: Jason asks, some insurance companies have added dongles that plug into your utility board to collect information. How are you collecting the information?10.43: We need to be very mindful as we deploy and talk with platform companies about the products, like how you deploy the products to do the right thing for gig workers in a way that will not destroy your operating model, says Mark.14.50: We need to know a certain tech component to the underwriting, which is very important. The burrito in the back versus the passenger in the back is a very different exposure, says Mark.17.14: The more that we can learn today is going to position us not just in today's sharing economy but tomorrow.18.10: The property sharing space is the other area where data and the same principles can be brought to bear, and that's in our road map for 2023 and beyond, says Mark.21.32: The United States has the greatest protection gaps than any developed country with gig workers. 22.51: We have to have insurance companies trust us, give us authority, give us the pen to rate their balance sheets, and that takes a great team. We are doing it, and that's been a challenge, says Mark25.09: You can't spend any time at Uber and deal with hundreds of gig workers, hear their stories, and not feel for them. There is a big gap in that, and we are in a place where we can help solve that, and that feels good, explained Mark.3 Key PointsUber and Lyft bought the insurance of need, and still, these are the insurances that cover the drivers, passengers, and third parties during each period. Mark explains how did he face and overcame the challenge of underwriting with so many tiny little contracts and doing so without putting himself in a bad spot. There is no substitute for having world-class talent because it's the only way to get anything done.Tweetable Quotes"The law of large numbers in the insurance world says that if I offered to everybody or a specific target niche, I could figure out, on average, the risk." – Jason"The insurance protections extend if you were on dispatch or that you were working on the provider platform and not on another platform." – Mark"The opportunities are there, and we have to be smart about prioritization like any company, but the market pulls huge, and I just wish we could move faster." - MarkResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorMark Warnquist – Linkedin | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Gerti Dervishi - Chief Growth officer for Flybits. The company helps financial institutions utilize the context of clients, individual situations, geography, and other factors that help serve up better next recommendations. Episode Highlights:1.08: Flybits the company is rooted in R&D. For many years, the research group built a lot of intellectual property and patterns behind the technology that continues to partner with academic institutions to move forward the agenda of innovation. 03:42: There are so much data that you are regularly giving to a person who makes decisions to look for things you are replicating before they get to the conclusion, says Jason.04:15: Gerti's company is very heavily rooted in research, and they bring all data together, which is no small challenge. 04:40: One extremely important thing is that you have to do things in a privacy-preserving way to deliver services, says Gerti.05:01: We do tokenization not only for extremely important privacy-preserving but also for security purposes, Gerti.08:27: The one thing we do when we partner with the customer or financial institution is we almost act like an extension of their innovation team, says Gerti.12:23: Gerti explains some of the most popular use cases from the consumer angle. 12:30: The card is a very big driver in our business. Consumers are particularly driven to that product in terms of spend, rewards, and offers because it's a product they probably interact most with, says Gerti.13:24: Mortgages are a very big deal, but we see unique here is that thanks to some of the functionality that we bring in terms of how we create the different datasets, says Gerti.17:05: We have created a set of utilities and tools very quickly and existing mobile applications that can be empowered with a recommendation system, explains Gerti.19:11: On the channel side, one of the biggest things right now in the market is the metaverse, and it is another channel that we are going to be interacting with, says Gerti.3 Key PointsGerti says that they are primarily focused on financial services, including insurance and banks, but they are an experienced design and delivery platform that makes the organization's personalization ready from data to the customer experience.We see more and more the creation of data alliances where multiple different essentially verticals converge into a financial transaction or outcome, says Gerti.Gerti explains how he brings a variety of products and creates a customer-centric rather than a product-centric approach where a multitude of different parts of financial services will cater to improve the overall financial status is important.Tweetable Quotes"We bring together the internal knowledge of an institution and how you bring that with external components." – Gerti "You started probably taking a bunch of standard datasets that you expect, so what products do they have like geographic location and all." – Jason"From a technology perspective, we are about to see some significant improvements and leaps in terms of customer experiences, which drives me." - GertiResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today's episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira is going to talk to Cato Pastoll, the CEO of Loop. They will discuss Loop's platform and how it helps companies operating as Canadian businesses get access to banking services in another market. Episode Highlights:0.43: Loop is an online banking and payment platform. They help companies that are operating as Canadian businesses to get access to banking services in another market.4.33: Cato says that they help companies get access to local banking in different markets. 7.46: Cato explains that they have been able to automate the account opening process in terms of customer verification, ID collection, and all that type of stuff required to verify customers. 9.33: Cato says that they save companies time because we offer all things in one platform, and that is easy to use. We save the money because we give it all this way for free. 10.44: Customers are delighted, specifically because they are saving a huge amount of money on every dollar they are spending in non-Canadian currencies. 12.09: Cato made it easier to deal with a major problem before allowing for potential companies to expand into a jurisdiction without the burden. 13.20: With our card, you get 55 days of interest-free spending when you spend money on the card. We offer the first 55 days of working capital that you have for zero cost as a merchant, says Cato.15.21: It's not like we are giving you anything for no cost, but giving it to you for no cost means that you can use our product in the finance network and capital gap and save a lot of money, says Cato.19.08: There is way too much of a structural gap between the capital that small companies can access and large companies can access, and that's driven by an efficiency more than a risk equation.23.06: Cato is not able to take any credit away from the founder of the business because they are 100% responsible for their own success, but the impact we were able to have by supporting them when nobody else would is a really exciting thing that kept him going every day.3 Key PointsThere are now banks in the US that will open accounts for non-US residents, and the way that we do that is we are helping facilitate all the KYC and KYP processes required to onboard customers.Companies have loved the loop product so far. We have had people posting status recently on Twitter and social media accounts talking about how much money they are saving with Loop versus their bank cards that they were using before. There are many acquirers or merchants, and processors who will help you collect money in different currencies by charging your customers in different currencies.Tweetable Quotes"We are helping simplify the process and operations of managing your business across borders." – Cato"We have the ability to make domestic supplier payments through the exchange network, which is other countries' local payment rails." – Cato"We really want to demonstrate a lot of value to customers in this segment by giving them embedded value in our products from the get-go well." - CatoResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira speaks with Jessie Vaid, creator, and CEO of ReadyWhen. ReadyWhen is a digital legacy manager that assists you in putting all of your essential information in one place so that when the worst comes, your family will have a head start in settling your affairs, as well as other kinds of beneficial tools and use cases while you are still living. Episode Highlights:05:56 Jessie started mapping out what she thought she would need to build the solution. At that point, she started discussion with her co-founder Sachin Bella and at that time he had unfortunately lost both of his parents and so he is actually gone through the loss and he knew the issues and problems surrounding being that executor in that probate process.08:48: Jessie thinks we have learned a lot in the last almost two years now. We identified some of the pitfalls and issues of building and providing a solution. Once we got the product to market, the feedback was very consistent amongst professionals. 09:13: Jessie says that their business model is B2B and B2C. They do not try to sell, you know, one license at a time. They have that option through our website. But they know that they need to get to the large corporations. Jessie needs to get the MG's and they need to get the buying from the professionals until they become that whole sold name within Canada.14:13: It also includes the ability to leave notes to loved ones, pictures to loved ones, and also videos to love ones. It also provides with having that ability to have that final message that taped in and released only upon your passing to your children or to your spouse.15:30: Everything is digital. What about all your digital accounts that you may have? What about your rewards points? What about those Aeroplan points? What about those credit card rewards points if you don't use them or if you don't transfer them? They are just going to disappear.23:03: The reality is if you are not there for the hardest times of the client's life, you are not earning it. 3 Key PointsIn 2020 is when we. got the prototype built and in late 2020 is when we actually released our MVP. In 2021 we were primarily getting the word out and getting users into this system, says Jessie.Jessie explains what kind of features they have applied to the software to enable it to serve its purpose beyond that of just a basic document storage.Prosper by sunlight is a new digital platform that they have released whereby they are focusing on the individual that wants a hybrid digital solution, also being able to speak to an advisor and get guidance and direction from the real life person on the other side. This solution focuses on wealth insurance and Wellness.Tweetable Quotes"We wanted to build a solution, to provide Canadians peace of mind knowing that if you pass away, everything would be in one central location and I think that is the motif of what we did." – Jessie"Our goal now is to really work on ensuring that the information is easily flowing into ready when." - JessieResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Stefania DiBartolomeo, Founder & CEO of Physis Investments. This investment is an ESG and impact investing platform for reporting sustainability amongst companies.Episode Highlights:05:34: Physis is an indent in the Greek world and means everything that is alive on Earth. It comes from the same root of physics. Physics is the law of nature, physics from entering Greek is everything that's alive. So a Physis investment, it's reinforcing our mission. The concept of investing, where respecting everything it's alive.11:21: We can also go as granular as really going deep down in saying if you have invested in Apple, the new iPhone has over 40% recycled. If you are investing in Nike I mentioned before, Nike owns Converse and every single pair of Converse is made with eleven plastic bottles, recycled from the ocean, says Stefania.13:34: In the beginning because every single company reports information in a different way and not all companies report all the information. I can say a couple things. First, the level of disclosure has improved incredibly, over the last three years, says Stefania. 16:10: Thanks to Physis data. We are a platform that is the life of financial advisors in their day-to-day life. They can input any portfolio in the platform, and become aware of the impact, provide this disclosure to their clients with a customized report, but they can also have access to tools and functionality to build a better portfolio. 3 Key PointsStefania explains that they have automated this data collection for over 10,000 companies worldwide. Then we process data quality checks with emails, algorithms that are assessed by the company over a six years of historical data and by peer valuation. This means that if we take the suit, two emissions or one company we evaluate this youth group mission based on six years of historical data. We compare this by their level of production or revenue and then we evaluate how well they're doing compared to peer analysis.Measuring how a manager or measuring how an index or whatever it is you are using to execute on this, how it's doing not just beyond the current score of like, hey, it's scores 96% in terms of how clean it is compared to everything else. But actually, the windshield down to water usage, labor issues, carbon emissions, like being able to measure the cumulative impact of that overtime and how that ticket you can measure that, you can track when it starts to deviate. The first thing an investor wants to do is sign up, once you sign up, they can start using functionalities as we have called look up so they can just type the ticker of the of or an icing of any security. It can be a portfolio of funds; it can be a single company. Tweetable Quotes"I wanted to start really when I was in college, and I was studying portfolio management and I started feeling disconnected from older classical investments because they had one goal in mind to make more money and I felt the need to add extra factors to just the financial performance." - StefaniaResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Anita Koimur, Co-Founder & COO of Liveflow. Liveflow is an online platform that pulls data into Google Sheets from various accounting software to allow and enable different workflows and processes more efficiently than currently can be done within that native software.Episode Highlights:3.42: It's amusing and bizarre that the balance sheet and income statement are the first things up there in the accounting world, and most accounts don't even prepare a cash flow statement because they do what they're supposed to do, says Jason.5.10: A business owner would have multiple spreadsheets, and it's just a nightmare to organize them into a single place, especially if it's Excel, and we just wanted to help them automate everything, says Anita.12.20: People ask us to integrate the chart platforms, but it's not something very close yet, because we do want to be a financial platform first, and that's something that we can consider going forward, explains Anita. 15.51: We are very open-minded, and we always say if you have any idea, please submit it because apart from you, there might be like 100 other people wanting the same idea, which will help us prioritize what to release next, says Anita.19.46: The whole world is moving toward transparency, and Anita thinks the apps should think about bringing business. She wants more connectivity of apps because some don't allow them to pull the data inspector.20.36: Hiring people very fast is one of the biggest challenges that are not truly sold to startups. The most important part is to be a match on the culture fit, not necessarily 100% of the skill fit.3 Key PointsBanks are not well synchronized with accounting platforms. Accountants, CFO, and business owners often need to collaborate on banking data, and it's very tiresome to switch between the banks, says Anita.People still use budgeting and QuickBooks and set it up with their mouse, which is not as convenient as Google Sheets for the keyboard. They want it to be there, and they cannot switch to Google Sheets and their budgets overnight.With Liveflow, you connect to your QuickBooks account or multiple accounts as an accountant, and you pipe all these standard reports in different tabs in your Google Sheets.Tweetable Quotes“We are building a fundamentally new category of software. We sit at the intersection of SAAS, accounting, banking, business analytics, and collaboration.” – Anita“You can have as many options as people on earth, and you cannot build something that fits everyone in terms of like dashboards that would execute the job they want.” - Anita“I love our customers because they are very creative people. They tell us what they want, which is amazing!” – Anita  Resources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.liveflow.io/https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitakoimur/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Bill Petruck, Founder and CEO of funding matters. Funding matters is a light fintech with a series of calculators and other tools that help not-for-profit charities. It helps generate donations more easily by showing people the actual tax implication of various donation schemes and options and helping kind of grease the wheels towards making that happen.Episode Highlights:1.08: Bill developed an application called gift tabulator, used as their secret weapon for illustrating tax-efficient charitable giving. A few organizations came to them and said - we would love to have your gift tabulator on our site. 3.10: You don’t just have to donate only in cash in many countries. You can donate assets, and those assets might have some sort of embedded gain in them already that if you sold them, you would pay tax, says Jason.10.43: With the gift tabulator, we also want to reach out to the end-user or the potential donor and provide the opportunity to the donor to share this with their financial advisor, says Bill.12.28: Bill explains what is the user inputting as the variables, and what are they getting as a result?12.46: Bill says that their objective is to create a landing page with a bit of a narrative to it, and that landing page then says, select one of these assets, so the user or the donor can go everywhere, from cash to stocks to mutual funds, etc.15.23: 99% of all donations to charity come in the form of a check or credit card, and 1% of the donations come in the form of appreciated asset donations, and we want to see that number start to increase, says Bill.16.32: Bill says that in the gift tabulator, they have clearly illustrated why people need to have a current estate plan, but the major reason is that they want to leave as much money for their assets as possible.22.31: There was a very strong push back that tax credits do not influence charitable giving within the not-for-profit sector. A $50 donation is not driven by tax, but the tax drives the $50 million donations.3 Key PointsBill explains how when you are starting to look at the $50,000 appreciated asset donation that is being transferred over to charity, you are getting the tax credit on it, but you are also getting tax avoidance.Bill explains how does the charity get your technical tools into the hands of possible people or people who might donate?Bill will be focusing on developing an educational curriculum through the college system as an online tool that will help organizations and individuals within those organizations become far more conversant and more comfortable in illustrating the positive outcome scenarios for their clients.Tweetable Quotes“Different countries have different schemes for how they recognize the donation. We live in Canada, and it depends on the provinces up to 50% or around there.” - Jason“Our objective was why don’t we create a gift tabulator to be an outreach for the charity and allow them to see the most tax-efficient ways to give.” – Bill“We have many charts available, and one chart says that this is the tax you would have to have paid, e.g., $5000, based on the taxable capital gain, and this is the actual cost to you of making this donation.” – BillResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Tim Rickards, managing director of social and content strategy for Hearsay Systems. Hearsay is a social media and content management system that helps businesses market themselves better in today’s social and digital age. Episode Highlights:00.38: Hearsay is in essence of client engagement platform, and the company helps agents and advisors consistently deliver a personalized human client experience01.04: Hearsay also provides a comprehensive data capture and analysis system that helps people understand how they can keep improving as they move forward. 02.26: Tim talks about the guidance that they give to advisory firms who are new to this space looking to basically market themselves digitally. 05.12: Hearsay Systems is solely dedicated to financial services firms. They have an understanding with insurance companies, asset managers, broker dealers etc.05.33: Tim shares how they offer a combination of options that can help them to get advisors post on social media.06.21: Tim does an organic social field enablement, they allow individual people to increase the gravity of their social presence and expand their networks to help drive business, so posting is important. 08.28: Tim shares how you can literally funnel somebody to the conversion experience via text. 10.32: Tim talks about the social realm and all other communication. He discusses how he is helping to get a prospect down the funnel using next best action.11.33: Jason inquiries about the enablement part of the platform. He asks Tim how Hearsay Systems continues to nurture that relationship before advisors get to some sort of conversion point.12.32: Tim shares how they focus on social reciprocity and encourage people to not be afraid to direct message somebody if especially they are not a client. 18.18: As per Tim, social selling allows other people to find Hearsay Systems so that we can help solve their problems. 19:44: At Hearsay Systems they have features that screen posts for specific language and images so that the company doesn’t have to worry that something is going to go out that is problematic. 22:45: As per Tim they are using social media to help each advisor or agent grow their business, increase the number of policies there, their assets under management, etc. 3 Key PointsTim discusses how does Hearsay Systems stand out from the competition in the Financial Service spaceTim talks about text implementation and how is that being implemented and how is it different than what he is seeing? What is being done in the social realm? Tim shares instances and tells the listeners about the importance of having a good social reciprocity habit. Tweetable Quotes“We typically advise advisors to do, or agents is if someone responds and they’re not in your network, invite them to your network.” – Tim“People who are good salespeople have a both an intuitive and educated sense of when it’s time to dig in.” – Tim“Our view is that the technology is there to strengthen the human relationships and interactions itself, to replace them.” - JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.