Fintech Impact

Jason talks to Daire Burke, head of Canada for Swoop Funding. Swoop Funding is an Irish-based company that works in multiple countries. It provides companies with access to a platform that aggregates lending solutions to meet their needs from various commercial blenders. Episode Highlights:00.46: Swoop is an online marketplace for small businesses looking to find funding for their business. We are giving business owners a tool to quickly find and compare funding products from right across the market, says Daire. 04.24: In Canada, over a million companies are turning over less than $10 million, and those are the businesses that can probably benefit from our platform the most. The important point in the design is that this is a free-to-use service for businesses.09.30: This is a real challenge, especially in Canadian banks, unless it is a small business loan backed by BBC, which the government backs, they’re not going to take a risk, but there are alternatives out there for funding, says Jason.10.43: We have a range of other digital lenders, non-bank lenders, grant writing agencies, angel groups, and we are trying to ensure we have a marketplace to fit all the financing needs of smaller and medium business owners would have, says Daire. 15.40: We have done white label projects with some of the biggest banks and their subsidiaries in the UK and NatWest, and that’s allowed them to serve their clients with other products that they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to, like grants or equity, explains Daire. 22.31: Access to publicly available data on companies would benefit so many different areas of this industry. When you’re getting information on the business directors, the filings, the financials, and kind of proliferation of data have so many benefits, not just in transparency but also in designing new products and meeting the needs of businesses, says Daire. 3 Key PointsSwoop Funding is trying to make small businesses get the most value from their data, empowering them to use data to find all of the products out there that can create value for their business. For the lenders in the Canadian SME lending space, the growth they have had over the last number of years has been very high, and you have to look at the reasons why that happens.Daire explains that they have a massive period of growth for their business in covid because they were acquiring all new users trying to figure out what type of government funding programs they could be available. It enabled them to serve their users the best way that they could at that moment. Tweetable Quotes“There are some green sheets on opening up with digital, fintech, and non-bank lenders that use different models to make decisions.”- Daire Burke“The corporate beneficial ownership registry has been a real sticking point in an issue for a while and many standpoints.” – Jason Resources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorDaire Burke – Website | Linkedin  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Lori Weir and Jeff Harvie. They are going to specifically talk about how they have helped advisors and firms deal with implementing new systems to help them better support themselves in this new regime CFR. Lorie started the company in 2015, and they set out to help investors feel more confident that they were invested in products that met their risk tolerance and financial goals.Episode Highlights:4.04: CFR is one of the biggest regulatory changes we have seen probably in the last 20 years, says Jason5.28: When we looked at the opportunity with our platform or open architecture, the way we use data, we looked at the CFR requirements and said we could help firms scale the requirements so that they can demonstrate that they're meeting the obligations, says Lori.13.21: There are so many permutations around selecting equity, and that really falls into what the role of the advisor is now, says Jeff.23.01: One of the things that we have proven out in the last 12 months is that we can prototype and roll-out required modules because we’re sitting on top of the data, and we can move to rollout a module without changing the advisor experience, says Lori.28.57: We do provide the ability to drift monitoring. We can provide an indication to advisors like are they red, orange, green, or where are they sitting in terms of the spectrum of client portfolio and can they take on or take off risk from the call the road forward, says Jeff.3 Key PointsJeff started out doing suitability oversight, and suitability oversight requires an understanding of the client’s risk profile to make comparisons for securities transacted on a client account.There have been so many standalone processes, and we have been digitizing them and simply replicating in multiple places. So, if you are inputting something once it gets used across the process and can be viewed by anyone, says Lori.Our platform can help firms organize RTQ and score to 100 via risk scoring within our applications that are proprietary to us so that we can score individual securities and compare those two at a client or an account level from a security selection perspective, says Jeff.Tweetable Quotes“Our solution set is built around the back, mid and front office to enable a seamless experience for the investor, the advisor, and the head office folks providing oversight.” - Lori “We just make it easier to collect, update, and monitor client information, which is vital.” - Lori “We really strive to make sure that the client information is as up to date as possible so that you can do a true reconciliation on, where the client is at from a risk appetite.” - Lori Resources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttp://www.foureyes.financial/https://www.linkedin.com/in/loriweir/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffharvie1/?originalSubdomain=ca Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Louis Retief, Co-founder and CEO of Hubly. Hubly is an advisor workflow automation tool that helps take information from CRM’s and create actionable and easy to develop and implement workflows for advisors.Episode Highlights:1.41: New consumer financial products disrupt how people interact with their finances. But what we care about at Hubly is how this product innovation in new consumer products disrupts your professional service workers in financial services to serve their clients, says Louis.9.23: As per Louis, tools providers in the advisory space think about the financial advisor as to the end-user, but advisors don’t use half the tech in their business. 14.44: Louis says that they have been trying to find where there is room for standardization across the advisory industry.15.36: There is a massive bottleneck around the scheduling process of getting clients scheduled in for their review or check-in. The preparation component for those meetings and tracking all the follow-ups and the advisors’ promises. 19.29: Louis says that they see the CRM as the redundant compliant database for the client Ledger. So, they push activities back into the CRM to ensure they have that complaint history that is very important for regulators.23.23: Louis explains that they are limited in their ability to develop best practices, so they are working towards a future where they can have user-generated content on best practices workflows. 24.09: We want to spotlight the back-office workers. There is a lot of focus on the advisor and many tech bills for the advisor. However, they are not the main users of any software in a product or a firm, says Louis26.19: Our success is measured by how many more end-clients can access our advisors’ services, says Louis3 Key PointsIn the financial advisory business, you provide one of the most complex services. Unfortunately, people don’t realize how complicated a service you are delivering to your clients, so we built a robust solution, says Louis.You built a workflow engine essentially to integrate with different CRMs, pull that data in, and build simple to create, implement, and manage workflows that help advisors run their practices, says Jason.Louis explains that they have already built a couple of things into Hubly, making the ongoing service component a lot easier in their workflows. A user can create a workflow rule called a recurring rule.Tweetable Quotes“Hubly has many features that allow for personalization on a client level that CRM workflow technology does not qualify for.” - Louis Retief“Advisors want to have the one-ring version of the software, but no software package in the world is world-class at everything.” - Jason“We are very much focused from a cultural standpoint as a company. Focus on processes and workflows for our own business.” - Louis RetiefResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorLouis Retief – Linkedin | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Marc Pickren, CEO of The Americas for TurnKey Lender. A global financial technology SaaS that has created and deployed the world's most impactful embedded finance platform since 2011. Episode Highlights:1.40: After having a conversation with Elena, Marc came on board as an advisor Slash unpaid CEO for a few weeks to try and see if there was a good relationship there and then eventually accepted the position as CEO for the Americas with the goal of moving their headquarters eventually from Singapore to the United States. 4.03: If you see an opportunity within a nation for some form of alternative lending, you have the audience or whatever it is. You can always try to build it all yourself from scratch, but being able to count on something that is proven to work in multiple jurisdictions, I can't imagine having little nuances of how different countries handle things differently, says Jason.5.00: The reason why we originally based out of Asia pack is because the kind of end of currency digitization of wallets. Then telecommunications is much further ahead in some of those countries, like in some of those countries you never really see anybody change paper currency, It is all electronic, says Marc. 08.40: Since digital lending has been around since 2014, the band Magic had the top hit rude that date; digital lending has been around that long. You have 2022, and now suddenly, all of these companies are realizing. "Well, how is the auto finance? The automotive industry survived?" says Marc. 13.56: The biggest challenge we are solving in 2022 is reformatting our home page to simplify understanding that this is a company. You can spend 20 minutes of your PowerPoint with lots of words and graphs, and people say we still don't know what you do, so we're trying to simplify in terms of our positioning, says Marc. 3 Key PointsThe Americas is a global company with 180 clients, 50 countries, and over 50 million people on the platform, and The TurnKey Lender was founded to solve a big challenge and something that is even looming heavier, which is the democratization of finance for North Americans and other parts of the world. The biggest challenge that we are solving is just explaining that lending is not something that people should be afraid of; they should embrace it because of the multitude of positives that come from it, explains Marc.Subprime to prime sub-lenders will do loans down to lower credit levels. So if you were in a situation like a veterinarian and care credit turns you down, you could partner with a third party that would ensure that no matter what the lender's kind of position is, you are willing to lend, particularly in a healthcare situation says Marc. Tweetable Quotes"The democratization of money is something that is catching on globally." - Marc Pickren"When you encounter a problem in a new country, odds are you've seen that trick before in a different way." - Marc Pickren"The number one reason why most people are coming to us is just because of customer data." - Marc PickrenResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Dimitri Dadiomov, CEO of Modern Treasury. Modern Treasury is a payments architecture system that focuses explicitly on payments and payment automation. She talks about how they differentiate themselves and dominate payment automation within this space.Episode Highlights:1.14: Jason asks, what were you trying to accomplish in the first place as related to automation functionality, and what was the origin of the modern treasury?2.39: The collection part has mainly been solved in the online payment, but much more goes into it beyond just collecting that money, says Jason.8.19: The significant part of making the money movement easy is to hold onto the context of payment from the moment it initiated through to its final resting place in the general Ledger, says Dimitri.11.39: Dimitri says that they help companies by providing better information, visibility, and alerting things. But they are very focused on delivering the best software experience, and there is enough complexity in that. 15.10: Dimitri says that they hope to provide better data tracking, workflow, and process. Every team that they engage with finds some new feature and use case where different types of users are engaging with the system.18.49: Jason asks if you had one wish or something that could change in your company or the industry as a whole, what would it be? 20.36: Dimitri says that when you have something that is pretty critical, companies tend not to want to buy that from a startup because that scares them. So, the hardest thing for them has been buying, earning, and preserving the trust as they scale up their operations. 22.02: Watching our customers grow means whatever they’re trying to bring into the world, and our business, in some ways, is pegged to them that’s exciting and refreshing to watch, says Dimitri.3 Key PointsThe Internet is messing with new parts of the economy that haven’t been messed with before. Many companies are building automated clearinghouse (ACH) infrastructure. Wire infrastructure is not core to what they are trying to put in the market, says Dimitri.Every transfer uses modern treasury software and API in the company we are working with. They built their company on top of our product, and it is exciting to watch them grow and not have to build a whole department which is our focus, says Dimitri.Dimitri thinks that the broad adoption of real-time payments and instant transfers would make an enormous difference. A lot of the problems that companies face today are using 50-year-old technology for the core payment processing pieces of the banking system.Tweetable Quotes“If you zoom out and look at what has been happening with the web economy, it’s been penetrating and messing with different sectors of the economy.” - Dimitri Dadiomov“Magical software is not something you have to use all the time, and it might not work for you.” - Dimitri DadiomovResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorDimitri Dadiomov – Linkedin | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Mohamad Sawwaf, Co-founder and CEO of Manzil. Manzil is a Canadian-based Islamic banking and finance platform. In today’s episode, he is going to talk about Islamic finance and how he is using Fintech as a platform for distributing Islamic finance in schools. Episode Highlights:1.15: Manzil was created to fill the gap of the 1.6 million Muslims here in Canada to get into homeownership and wealth management solutions and start to build their wealth for the first time.5.05: No one is talking about any desire to circumvent the tax code. It is to recognize that the tax code is designed to allow certain things like home purchases to happen in a way that is not going to be punitive from a tax perspective, says Jason. 8.27: Murabaha is a cost-plus situation. Therefore, this is the number one stipulation for entering into these transactions or focusing on asset-backed or asset-based transactions.11.00: There is a massive misconception about recourse on the asset. If you have an asset that hasn’t fully paid off, you have full recourse on that asset. Sell it off, make yourself whole again, and give it back to the client whatever is left. There’s nothing wrong with that, says Sawwaf.17.54: Jason asks, what else is lacking in the current ecosystem that needs to be brought to the table for people who need to borrow or operate in a whole all manner? 19.35: Funding and capital attraction into programs is a genuine big concern that we’re still solving. We do have access to retail-based capital, but at the institutional level, we need to get that good cost in place and launch this at scale, says Sawwaf.22.40: The endowment fund is the largest globally, and one of my friend who went to Harvard was getting a loan from the endowment fund. But the rules around him paying back are super egregious. So you cannot pay this back early even if you want to.3 Key PointsWhen you think about Islamic financial solutions, there is a religious component to how these structures are derived and executed in the marketplace. We can go over the theory, and in theory, everything sounds fine, says Sawwaf.16.01: We are a 100% digital platform. This is the only way to penetrate our community across the country without establishing bricks and mortar, retail branches, or offices that the typical financial institution would do, explains Sawwaf.There are so many advisors down there who specialize in dealing with student debt because every program in a word for forgiveness has all kinds of complexities. Tweetable Quotes“You can’t take money from me because money lending in Islam is not a commodity. You can’t earn money from money, and it’s not allowed.” - Mohamad Sawwaf“Christianity got around the usury laws within the Bible, which was to discount bonds originally.” – Jason“Talk to me about the risk mitigation for the non-primary party in diminishing Musharakah or declining balance type of transaction.” – JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorMohamad Sawwaf: Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Steve Sanduski, Co-founder of ROL Advisor. ROL Advisor is an online platform that helps advisors or helps coach advisors through a process to help clients focus on return on life as opposed to returning on their investments.Episode Highlights:0.54: Steve explains that they decided to create a new legal entity, hired some developers, and created digital tools that they call the ROL advisor, which stands for return on life. And the focus is really on helping financial advisors become life advisors essentially.1.50: Jason says that the returns are one thing, but at the end of the day, one thing matters are getting what you want out of life.2.13: What we are doing here at ROL advisor revolves around the discovery process. We think of discovery not as a one-and-done process but as an ongoing process throughout the life of the relationship, says Steve. 7.06: There is a series of 20 statements in the ROL index. These twenty statements are divided into ten categories, such as whether or not a person is getting a return on his/her schooling, housing, or accomplishments.8.20: The ten aspects are broken down into three categories, and then we give a score on a scale of 1 to 100 for each of those three categories, well-being, progress, and freedom, says Steve. 10.19: When advisors are working with a client not as an asset under management or not as dollar signs but working with them one on one as a human being for whom you can add some value and for someone that you care about, and at the end of the day that is what the client’s going to remember, says Steve. 12.07: We have six broad categories of life transitions, and within each of these six categories, we have anywhere from maybe five to ten life transitions related to each of those categories, explains Steve.26.32: Steve wants to have a superpower of taking in all of the information from many different areas and sources so that he can synthesize and reconfigure it and communicate it back out in such a way that many people can understand it and benefit from it. 3 Key PointsOften, financial advisors get a little frustrated when they see the behavior of their client, and they can’t understand why the client is doing this thing or why they are not doing something that they know is good for them, says Steve.Technology can augment the conversation like our tools are doing, but ultimately it is about the advisor and the depth of the connection, empathy, and understanding they have with clients, says Steve.Most financial advisors have been successful over the past few years because the markets have been good, so getting them to try and adopt a new way of doing business has been a little bit difficult because they are happy with what they are doing.Tweetable Quotes“So much of our current behavior is influenced and derived from our formative years’ experiences.” – Steve“It is just human nature that we want to keep doing what we are doing, particularly if we are successful.” - SteveResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorSteve Sanduski – Linkedin | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Laurent Bensemana, President of Ndex Systems. Ndex systems is a portfolio management software providing clean or scrubbed data for the industry. Ndex is a custodial-based company established in 1999. Laurent’s original objective was to build the ideal assistant for the financial industry. They never saw a distinction between money managers for retail brokers, discounters, product manufacturers.Episode Highlights:3.11: To expand our coverage, we have to ingest data from any source because clients don’t have all of their wealth with one firm, says Laurent.5.45: The client wants to pay for advice, but they don’t want to pay for the data entry. So we started offering that to the accounting industry to help them quickly reconcile and normalize the data to feed it into their accounting systems, says Laurent.13.15: If you want to have the best in class for everything, it’s not going to be one product. It’s going to be something that integrates the best in class, says Jason17.25 The value that gets built off a platform is greater than the value of the cost of the platform itself.19.00: Ndex gives a firm commitment and puts it on paper that your data is your data. Laurent explains that they are not here to sell data to any other group. What they do with a user’s data is they feed the application to capitalize on the Ndex tools and provide the data to whomever the user instructs them to.23.22: The financial industry, as the independent, believes in the human contact of the financial sector and how important it is in the comfort it brings to the investor. 26.52: Laurent says that they are not looking to compete with another technology platform. They are open and want to work with their competing technology platforms to alleviate their arduous tasks and focus on things that are much more interesting and unique to their offering. 3 Key PointsNdex has become a data bridge no matter where the data resides or what format it resides in. We can ingest the data, reconcile it, normalize it, and put it out to use either Ndex or peripheral tools that are best in their particular market segment, acclaims Laurent.Easily 50% of what we do, whether development or business orientation, is our colleague’s and clients’ feedback, says Laurent.The financial industry’s competition is not the financial firm next door. The financial industry competition is with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.Tweetable Quotes“One of the greatest compliments we get from the custody industry is that they tell us clients who deal with Ndex seldomly call them for data issues because we clean up their data. However, we understand that their task is also complicated and demanding.” – Laurent“Plaid and other data aggregators have figured out how to tie into different bank accounts worldwide, cleanse that data and give someone a standard data format.” – JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorLaurent Bensemana – Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Kison Patel, Co-founder, and CEO of M&A Science. M&A science produces a product called Deal Room, a platform for monitoring the entire life cycle of an M&A deal. M&A science is a company with multiple product lines covering education and technology for managing the M&A process focused around making M&A more of a collaborative people focus process.Episode Highlights:2.00: Kison says that they originally focused on diligence management. The traditional way was using an Excel tracker to request documentation from the company you are acquiring and then follow up with clarification questions. 6.10: In the early days, you used to have physical data rooms if you look at business. You had the banker boxes and had somebody to guard the access to get to this room. So you would have to fly in to review the documents, scan them, and put them on the server, says Kison.11.00: Jason asks, where did a lot of M&A learning come from? Is that coming from success stories you played, or are HR people coming and playing a role in this? 13.10: Kison explains that they are working directly with corporations because they had more stake, and they had to own the results. So if they can help them produce better results, that was a big win for them. 19.23: Jason asks Kison if you have one wish for something that can change in your company or industry as a whole, what would have been? 19.33: 90 plus percent of the time, when we look at problems, it is just some communication breakdown. Better reminders and more transparency on good frameworks work well on communication, says Kison.22.52: The challenge is getting the right skilled people to keep evolving the company. It becomes such a big emphasis on hiring because it allows you to get the talent in to optimize operations and help optimize the customer experience. 3 Key PointsEach organization is there to serve its customers. For us, the acquisition is what ultimately will mean for the customers, how we serve them and how we will come together to help them better, says Kison.A skill we don’t learn enough in school is sitting back and figuring out the obstacles. If you want to learn how to do that, spend some time teaching, says Jason.HR piece is probably one of the biggest challenges that we are coming across today, and it’s tough because that’s part of the muscles you got to develop, says Kison.Tweetable Quotes“As you go through a deal process, there is a leader in the very front end that is running around hunting the deal, doing the negotiation stuff.” – Kison“Some projects manually manage tracking stuff and can be completely automated. And it is not so much about replacing the rolls or limiting the rolls. It is more about shifting from activity that’s not valuable.” – Kison“Sometimes, part of the problem is we don’t necessarily equate the sufficient degree of time required to communicate properly.” - JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorKison Patel – Linkedin | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Dave Connolly, co-founder, and CEO of Knudge. Knudge is an automated client communication and collaboration tool that ensures that financial planning and advice are done digitally and effectively.Episode Highlights:0.40: Knudge is trying to solve a shared pain point in the industry, helping clients take action on the advice given. Knudge is a platform that allows advisors to have a repeatable process for assigning action items to their clients, says Dave.04.59: Jason suggests that at the end of the day, a financial plan without implementation is equivalent to just expensive toilet paper. It’s pretty much pointless.06.05: Dave says that we are learning that advisors are using knudge, providing some voiceover around the use of knudge with their clients in the meeting, and explaining that they are using this new technology to help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.08.03: We have integrations with Red Tail and wealth box. We’re working on integrations with other CRMs, and either way, we have a CSV import, so it’s really easy to bring your contacts into knudge, says Dave.14.04: Knudge allows recipients to specify their preferred time of day to receive reminders. In addition to that, they can specify a specific day or time to receive a notification about that item on any discrete action item. 16.50: We set out to build this platform that allows advice and has a repeatable process for managing the client action items and automating all follow-ups. We are getting great feedback from our clients that it’s working, says Dave.18.15: In Knudge, putting all action items into a list and having due dates associated with them, knudge can provide peace of mind for both clients and advisors, says Dave.26.03: Knudge is not a back-office tool. It’s taking your CRM and contacts and making them real users on the other side who receive communications from you via this automated platform.3 Key PointsThe things that have long-term implications on your overall financial well-being require some guidance earlier in life.Knudge is not different than what you would put into an email. It has got a title details section and then parameters around when you want it to post and how you want the reminders to go.Not many companies are bold enough to put their full road map and future road map on their website and let people vote on it, says Jason.Tweetable Quotes“Everyone being busy these days and having a trusted advisor reminding you to take action on your work things that are easy to kick down the road or ignore are welcome.” – Dave“I don’t know where to start as an advisor, so talk to me about getting started. I want to facilitate all the reminders that you’re doing.” – Jason“Once you have established a diversified and properly managed portfolio, the planning side has far more ROI in terms of time spent on someone’s life.” - JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorDave Connolly – Linkedin  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.