Fintech Impact

Jason Pereira talks to Ehsan Shariati, CEO and Co-Founder of Functionland. The company is the distributed storage platform that allows you to store data on the blockchain but utilizing your own dedicated hardware. Episode Highlights0.33: In Functionland we are creating a decentralized Google cloud. Basically, like the cloud providers that we are getting services from like storage, backups, computation power and running AI algorithms on their servers, says Ehsan. 1.00: Ehsan's company is decentralizing the hard infrastructure so that everyone become a provider to others and they all can basically provide services to each other2.47: We have a can full of companies there that are providing most of the storage for the Internet at this point and all of the tools get built on cloud providers, says Jason.6.37: Blockchain has given us the power of P2P transactions basically without any middleman and we used that power in the hard work, says Ehsan. 7.41: Ehsan says that they are utility token not a financial token and the token is there to support the utility of the ecosystem which is storage and computer and application providing.8.12: If you have the hardware, you can get all the basic things for free because the tokens are there to pay for it by itself.9.51: In our system there is no central key. You are the owner of your keys and no one else can access your files or decrypt except you, says Ehsan. 11.18: We connect your wallet, your wallet sends the request, encrypt the file with that signature and send it for backup, says Ehsan.12.01: Ehsan explains if there is a fair approximation that the things you are providing are a beauty play for people who have tremendous amounts of storage need or people who also are developers. 15.00: The vision that we had was actually to create a platform that monetizes open source. We want to create a direct channel between the creators like app developers, content creators with the consumers, says Ehsan.3 Key PointsEhsan decided to create plug and play hardware that any user could plug into the Internet, and it became a DAB server. It gives you the power to own your own data.Ehsan explains how secure it is to have mine data stored on someone else device that could be sitting on their desktop?Ehsan talks about the entire fragmentation of the data and how that works. Tweetable Quotes"We are a partner of five coin, and we work together on the protocol set that we have. But the approach is different because five coin is more focused on B2B business." – Ehsan"We opened a per-order campaign for one month and the initial storage that we have when we go live by the end of the year is 2 petabytes and that would be start." - Ehsan "I have been at developer like for 15 years and the vision that we have that to monetize open source, that's something I know that it's very interesting for a lot of developers." - EhsanResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorEhsan Shariati – LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Hemant More, CEO of Arcons Technology. Arcons is a suite of software targeting RA's and advisors in the US specifically helping them with various cloud solutions, online billing, CRM reporting, trading, and client portals.Episode Highlights0.38: Hemant founded his company in 1998, and they started their enterprise helping RA's. The initial product that they offered was related to billing.1.09: The beauty of Arcons' company offerings is that they allow firms to come to them with customization requests, and they are able to offer specific new features for firms that will be like a white cloud service.4.49: Once you log into our suite of services, you could do all the things you do to run your business like you could do portfolio management, trading, reporting, CRM, and everything works off the same common database, says Hemant.7.29: We either work with the firm to discover the overall solution, or sometimes we start step by step process where we handle biggest pain first and make it a continuous improvement process, says Hemant.9.00: We also create documentation and videos of client cases. We train their end users, and once the initial version is done, we work on the next version based on what enhancements are needed, and cycle repeats, says Hemant.14.15: Hemant created a solution for company due to which their quarterly work was reduced to three to four hours with one click, which included billing calculation and revenue sharing and creating really good invoices that could be e-mailed automatically.15.28: In technology things are changing rapidly. If there is more automation or more avenues for automation, the more things people have to remember to do.3 Key PointsHemant talks about the robust workflow process that he helped build for a client. He shares what it is like to engage with him? What is the onboarding look like? Is there a discovery process for helping client workflow or is that something client comes back to Hemant with afterward? Hemant provides a service whereby they can customize the report output to match exactly what the advisors need and that makes them extremely happy.Hemant is currently adding a support for power API, which means that all the data in our system can be easier and can easily analyzed by any business user.Tweetable Quotes"Our firm has a very good reputation in terms of client service. We provide excellent support, and we are always willing to brainstorm what new features could be added to make people's lives easier, their workflows better and errors could be eliminated." – Hemant"We could give people a statement of work saying this is what we will deliver, and this is how much time it will take and this is how much it will cost." - Hemant"We don't do enough sales and marketing and that has been our biggest challenge. We have really good software and service and the one that is our clients, loves it." -  HemantResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorHemant More – LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Rebecca Wilde, Managing Director of StockSnips. StockSnips is an AI and natural language processing platform that harvests data to provide stock purchase and sale indicators, bringing artificial intelligence to the world of stock selection. Episode Highlights0.38: At StockSnips we are providing investors with a low-cost high performing portfolio model that leverages our proprietary sentiment signals, allowing investment managers to go ahead and provide a competitive edge to their clients, says Rebecca.0.57: Rebecca has found a way through AI, natural language processing, and machine learning to derive a quantified signal that is a robust proxy for measuring investor sentiment.3.14: What Rebecca wanted to solve is how independent RAs can get back into the game of active management and not have to go down the rabbit hole of simply falling behind the passive indexes that have performed greatly.4.01: Rebecca talks about the type of unstructured data that they are harvesting in order to make the recommendations.6.54: We have message sentiment DK model that solves the problem of how you take raw sentiment data and create a signal from it, says Rebecca.12.13: It is a nice thing to see that all algorithms are picking up very accurately what is going on in the market and it's able to provide that up capture but also protect on the downside as well. 14.46: Rebecca talks about portfolio composition. How many positions do you typically hold for things and is there any allocation to cash?19.32: If there was an easier way to reliably predict the style rotation, sector rotation, size rotation of markets we can be able to build much more robust models, says Rebecca.3 Key PointsThe cost of doing signal generation, getting the technology up to speed, and delivering it at scale is unfathomable for any individual investment manager to do on their own, says Rebecca.Rebecca has constructed a model with the wall street equity research firm where they have gone ahead and used growth value, quality, removed momentum and replaced it with a new sentiment signal and that has significantly outperformed many benchmarks.Rebecca is working not only on the education of artificial intelligence aspect but also how one can use this in its strategy or how can you use this in marketing to go ahead and gain new clients.Tweetable Quotes"You will find a lot of Robo advisors are taking very basic measures of sentiment and then making trades, which is moving markets and it is a big problem." – Rebecca"We are kind of in our go to market approach. We have been targeting smaller independent RA's who have found great success." – Rebecca"The fact that our models are entirely systematic, there is no human intervention, and it remains low cost. It leads to a very, very scalable model." – RebeccaResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorRebecca Wilde: LinkedIn | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Rohit Mittal, CEO of Stilt. The company is an online lender that specifically targets immigrant and unreserved populations who have very specific challenges when trying to obtain debit and credit. Episode Highlights0.32: Stilt is a Fintech company focused on immigrants. When immigrants move to a new country, they don't have a credit history or credit score and it's very difficult for them to access financial products.1.11: We are continuing to serve the immigrant population and recently we also launched a new product called Onbo, where we leverage all the infrastructure that we built at Stilt to help other companies serve their target markets, says Rohit. 6.17: When we started the company, we said immigrants are not an exception, they are actually the policy for us. So, we build everything in our company focused on immigrants, says Rohit. 7.52: All immigrants are stretching for is content that's helpful to them and they come to our site or blog pages and then they apply for a loan and then we apply underwriting model built specifically for this market, says Rohit.8.40: Rohit talks about the efficacy of how his risk model working thus far because what he is saying is we can’t get access to Fico score but let’s compile other data into basically a different version of that.10.31: The banks have the biggest balance sheet and so they do the most lending and they are still stuck in their old ways and it's very difficult for them to bring in new data sources to serve a new population. 13.15: Immigrants first get to know about us in a non-financial context. They look at our content, they get to know about the company, they know we are legit, they become familiar with us and when they need financial products then they come to us and apply for a loan, says Rohit. 14.48: We are seeing this infrastructure of lending that we have built is actually valuable to other companies who want to launch a lending product, says Rohit.19.06: Rohit explains what happened in the modeling process or what data in the modeling process ended up being important?3 Key PointsRohit answers how he had discovered a problem in the market and decided to fix it and how Stilt was launched?Different companies have used different types of underwriting methodologies to serve the customer segments that they are going after.There are traditional lenders who want to expand their running capacity and there are people looking for other markets other under service verticals. Rohit talks about his target market.Tweetable Quotes“The core of the idea to build Stilt just started with our personal experience of not being able to find an apartment in New York mainly because of my credit history.” – Rohit“The credit bureaus and the credit scoring agencies are also incorporating new data sources although but they're doing it very slowly as compared to Fintech.” – Rohit“You can actually launch a lending product in a few weeks with the infrastructure that we used to build Stilt instead of building everything again on your own.” – RohitResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor LinkedIn - Rohit Mittal Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Robert Sofia, CEO of Snappy Kraken. The company is a well-known platform in the advisor community for helping advisors market their business through social media and other venues. Episode Highlights1.32: Robert's love was in marketing and in 2009 he launched his first marketing consulting firm for advisors. He scaled that up to serving about 800 advisors at its peak. It was a good business, but it was all services. 2.30: Financial advisors offer tremendous value. They can do so much for people, but most don't know about them, and most advisors aren't marketers.3.18: Financial advisor industry had a really tough time in understanding or at least wrapping their head around organic marketing and bringing people into that, says Jason.5.46: Technology and content are two things to build relationships at scale to get entire 97% of the opportunity.8.07: Your contact list is your most powerful asset. Your contact list is the thing that is going to become all your future business, says Robert.12.00: Robert talks about the use of canvas the feature that they have added in the last 12 months. 13.44: Robert says that they wanted to create a way that advisor could send a broadcast message to all of their clients or all of their prospects individually.15.23: We are trying to enable real time authentic communication in a way that scales for the advisor, says Robert.17.41: We knew the only way to truly serve advisors was to also help them with their branding websites...18.44: Our plans are to create one seamless branding website and marketing experience that is of the very best quality available in the industry but still price accessible, says Robert.21.36: Robert talks about the onboarding process for an advisor. What is the time commitment, how much effort they put into in on a weekly basis and how much of it is on them and how much of it is just provided? 23.45: Robert has got two companies that he is integrating right now. He is actively engaged in the integration that will impact the industry.26.06: When you are going down a path and everything changes, you got to immediately adjust with that is very challenging and it's something that challenges us every day, says Robert.3 Key PointsRobert shares how he is scaling marketing for advisors effectively and how are they solving marketing problem for many?When you go out into Snappy Kraken to find campaigns you want to use, you can choose based on two things. It's who is the audience and what is the goal.Recently Robert went through an acquisition, and he picked up a company called advisor websites. He talks about the logic and thinking about that acquisition and what he plans to do with it.Tweetable Quotes"If we can help advisors serve more people with financial planning, that means better outcomes for everyone people." - Robert"Most advisors don't think about growth and scaling correctly. What they think is "I just need more leads and how can I get more leads." - Robert"Often we are so caught up in the moment of either success or rejection and failing to realize the absolute truth." - JasonResources 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 Kevin Victor, VP of Sales & Partnerships at Mako Financial Technologies. It is essentially SASS for wealth workflow automation. Episode Highlights02.00: Kevin says that in 2018 it seemed very difficult to have strong remote operations and that in itself was a challenge. More importantly it has always been a headache that private equity firms, VC firms, alternative investment firms, or anyone who ultimately leverages this agreement to complete investor onboarding are an absolute nightmare. 04.30: Kevin talks about the unique type of workflow arrangement. How do you go from your firm's internal documents to the wide variety of account opening forms while going between a household to just let alone individual investor documents, non-Reg, TFSA, RSP?08.01: Most advisors have discretion over how they manage money. If you are dealing with major bank, Jason can pretty much guarantee you that if he goes to 12 different advisors at random, they all have different portfolios and how they match. 09.50: Different firms have different offerings or more focused offerings, and we are simply going to configure and supply that for you, says Kevin.11.05: Kevin talks about digitizing investment selection, digitizing unique firm documents, digitizing standard custodian forms, or any other third party after relying upon to execute client's operations with the capacity to do so. Let's analyze it for the client and give them solutions that make sense.14.26: Mako has the ability of doing three things, collecting data and the data is up to grabs. Populating forms that everybody wants to populate and creating the workflows, says Jason. 20.57: God forbid you are at the 9th inning as an advisor, and you identified a mistake by the custodian. You just have to simply resend the fix, or all interact within the platform, and the client is still going to receive that same white label experience, says Kevin.21.34: You don't have to start from the beginning, so the burden and efficiency are the burden is being resolved. The efficiencies that are being gained by the advisor, same experience for the investor, the turnaround time is important as well if we are reducing the burden of, operational deficiencies, human errors now go up things that are now being corrected on the advisor's behalf. They are going to be able to execute and open up the client's account much faster. They are going to be able to complete that transfer in much faster. 3 Key PointsKevin talks about the genesis of the company and where did the idea of launching it come from?Kevin shares how Mako Financial has created something that adapts to handle high variability; the firm and accounts for a 10/10,000 fund codes that exist in this country and all the ETF. He talks about how his company deals this large degree of complexity. Jason and Kevin talk about advisor and firm complexity issue and also about the complexity in dealing with different custodians.Tweetable Quotes"Digitizing was easier for Robo advisors, because they were a homogeneous uniform group." - Jason"For relationships where you don't have full integration, we also have other options." - Kevin 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 Jeff Keltner, Senior VP of Business Development at Upstart. It is an online lender that utilizes artificial intelligence throughout various parts of the underwriting life cycle in order to issue policies as quickly and effectively and with a better risk profile than conventional.Episode Highlights0.32: Upstart is an AI lending marketplace where we power bank and credit union lending programs across a variety of products including unsecured consumer loans, auto refinance and purchase loans, says Jeff.1.03: The other key thing we work with our partners on is helping them acquire new customers. We not only serving their current customer base but being able to find new customers effectively and efficiently for their institution, says Jeff.3.16: We run a marketplace for consumers at upstart.com where they could come and we will pair them with one of our bank or credit union partners depending on the risk profile, the geographic footprint, and things like that, says Jeff.4.02: The credit file has hundreds if not over 1000 pieces of information about a consumer and most lenders reduce that credit file down to four or five things.8.02: Jeff says that they have got banks that are regulated by every major regulator and credit union. They have been through exams with these loans on the portfolio and most of them are driven by the desire to serve customers better.10.11: Every consumer-oriented bank Jeff has talked to is mainly focused on "how I better serve the consumers that I am working with and that drives more than expected what they want and their willingness to take a little bit of risk."13.18: In the era of online lending, sometimes people are applying for loans at multiple places at once, and you may not have the information about the latest loan taken out on the Bureau you got because they took it out the day after they applied for you.16.01: At the end of the day, it always comes down to cost distribution in almost any business, and that determines your potential market size for any product, says Jason. 19.49: We find that the model that public sector workers often are more creditworthy of their credit score, says Jeff.3 Key PointsJeff talks about the entire consumer lifecycle compared to vendor life cycle and how they go about getting approved and how does it work differently with you than at elsewhere. When someone submits the online form, and we are going to assess the risk and we are going to assume at this point that everything they told us is true. That may not be a good assumption, but for the risk model, we kind of says given these inputs, what's the risk, says Jeff.Jeff explains the difference between getting digital and really optimizing these processes in the productivity enhancements.Tweetable Quotes"The most online lending was kind of the digitization of the process, but not fundamentally changing how we thought about risk." - Jeff"Avoiding the downside at all costs is hugely a concern for most people because this is an industry that almost rewards people for saying no." – Jason"We also use connectivity to the bank account to look at transaction history and that actually helps you identify three things at least." – JeffResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.