Fintech Impact

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

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

Jason talks to Alan Gurung, CEO of SIFA. It is an artificial intelligence-powered platform for financial advisors to leverage their data, be more efficient, and garner insights from that data.Episode Highlights:01:52: It is a man versus machine argument instead of a man and machine argument.02:51: Generative AI seems almost scary to many, but the reality is the future belongs to those who utilize the robot correctly.05:29: AI works on explicit rules and logic to solve specific problems and is very rigid. Prerequisite rules and logic have been put together, whereas generative AI works a lot more on patterns. It's able to create new content on the back of those patterns that's been exposed.06:37: In SIFA, Alan and his team gain data that financial advisors use. They analyze the endpoint of all financial advisors trying to do with that data and trying to streamline that process as much as possible. So, the moment when people come on to decipher, what they can do is they can import their unstructured data through recordings from meetings or notes from meetings and start to have a conversation with that data.12:20: Alan explains how they come right at the start of the process of individuals once they record the meeting, they can import them into the cipher as well as gather data from all the other areas.13:15: Think about where advisors tend to spend the most amount of time or rather where they pay people to end up, saving them a lot of time, it's the middle and back-office side of things.14:11: People just hire other people to do stuff they hate as opposed to improving that process.17:32: Alan explains what the future of their application is what other features they are planning to implement.19:53: Alan sees support chats on every website, but in some of these to date the bots have been very, very rudimentary.23:45: The difficulty for Alan has been to work alongside data, and for a lot of financial advisors they realize the impact AI and machine learning might have on their overall business. 3 Key Points:Alan explains about AI and generative AI and how they are different. Alan talks about the integrations that they have done. He explains custodial integrations and couple of other CRMs.Alan explains how they are fundamentally changing the nature of the work in the back and middle offices.Tweetable Quotes:"SIFA is a virtual assistant that allows financial advisors to communicate with their data and generate insights." - Alan"A lot of individuals who seek out financial advisors one of the main reasons they do so is because they don't have the knowledge for certain questions they want to answer. But in actuality, a lot of people don't even know what questions to ask." – Alan"Small finance advising has been a somewhat delicate dance between logical decision making and emotional decision." – Alan"The interesting thing about the financial advice industry is that the demand for financial advisors is greater than the supply of financial advisors." – Alan"If I can teach other people how to be better with their money, maybe I can be better with my money as well." - AlanResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-gurung-186714168/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Matt Lister, CEO of Cloud Advisors. It is a company in the group benefits space, and one of the unique things they have done is they have built a benchmarking system that helps inform business owners as to basically how their plans stack up against competitors in the same space and helps advise around best practices and design. Service is free for employers. Paid by advisors and providers.Episode Highlights:01:04: Cloud advisors use the Canvas employee benefits marketplace. Matt explains how they show employers how their benefit plans stack up.02:23: Every advisor got their own limited pool of experience regarding different sectors, different types of companies.06:35: Matt explains how their system has options for employers that have no coverage, they can get a sample plan.07:17: Matt explains how their system intakes the benefits plan and breaks it down into hundreds of different variables that one can then compare by industry, region and group size.09:57: Matt explains how they developed the bar score, and it stands for benefits, action, retention, and it's like a credit score.14:15: With Covid, Matt has seen the geographical boundaries breakdown and even if you offer hybrid work, remote work, people are not drawing on labor from within driving distance of their office anymore, says Matt. 16:42: Being more competitive, when we dig into the actual benchmarking, we typically organize it by benefits included versus not included on our intro report, says Matt. 17.14: Matt talks about the type is benchmark that they do. There are basically 2 types, he says.19:41: Matt talks about the database that they have built and how they segregate problems and solutions.21:18: Advisors have their preferred solutions. They have exclusive rates and all of that can be customized on that evaluation so that the employer gets excellent bottom line.22:30: Matt says that they recognize that business owners are busy, and they have got businesses to run, and insurance is only a small component of that needs to be done efficiently and effectively and conveniently.3 Key Points:Matt talks about the big determinants, basically how benefits programs get structured in terms of, different industries or different careers, different development stages, what are the big factors implemented that should be impacting, and how a plan is designed. Cloud Advisor has been in the marketplace coming up eight years and when they first developed the database, they had a very limited amount of data in it to perform the benchmark. Matt shares how they achieved about 15,000 employee benefit plans.Matt talks about the client output and how they visualize the actual results.Tweetable Quotes:"We show them how their current programs stack up by industry, region group size as well as how they can improve their program." - Matt"When I started in the industry, my dad had spent most of his career working for a public crown corporation with the incredibly robust union." - Matt"We will connect not just with the vendor and the vendors; information will actually perform an instant quote and an instant proposal so that the employer has everything they need to." - MattResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInLinkedIn - Matt Lister’s LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Alex Murguia and Wade Pfau, co-founders of RISA. It is an online questionnaire and tool for helping determine what an individual's retirement styles are like and specifically helping advisors steer them toward the type of retirement solutions that help ensure that they both succeed, but also that they are comfortable and their preferences on how they wish to retire or how they wish their income to be general in retirement come about.Episode Highlights01:05: The risk that people face in retirement is different from pre-retirement, with the sequence of returns, risk, and market returns.04:46: Alex shares how they took reoccurring constructs and then wondered could they quantify them that were reliable and in a manner that was valid.06:28: Jason is not a big fan of bucketing, but for some clients like visualizing and understanding that might be the difference between them panicking and being comfortable.08:41: Alex informs that they have an implementation matrix, which is how someone prefers to implement financial advice.11:07: You always have to overlay the numbers; the advisor has to help you sort of curate through that journey.19:23: As per Alex there is no annuity proposal in much the same way that there is no like government worker puzzle in the United States.22:23: The distribution of advisor preference largely comes down to licensing standards.24:38: The best salespeople are the people that get to close loss the soonest.38:12: As per Jason, people spend a lot of time these days talking about understanding client bias.3 Key PointsAlex explains how they kind of take a step back and say what strategy is the one you should begin with when it comes to retirement planning? People either need safety or they won't accept risk, and they are different degrees of willing to basically lock themselves into something, so it's static.The first step of retirement income planning is to identify your retirement style and then build your financial plan and then take your risk tolerance questionnaire and choose your asset allocation and so forth.Tweetable Quotes"With COVID after reading a certain amount and collecting notes, we realized that there were certain constructs that seemed to be reoccurring motifs." – Alex"We all have different risk tolerances. We all have different preferences for security." - Jason"I may, as a consumer, have not known that there are different strategies that there are and here is the strategy that looks like it does fit best with my own psychological considerations and makeup." - Wade"The end consumer doesn't realize that there are options available to themselves for different retirement income strategies." - Alex"There are a few things that in research frustrate me more than trying to break an advisor value down to a percentage cases per year." – JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://retirementresearcher.com/about/Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Christine Brunsden, CEO of Benefits2, a web-based application designed to help people and medical practitioners identify disabilities that qualify for the Disability Tax Credit. It also assists them by saving time and money while increasing the rate of success when applying for the Disability Tax Credit.Episode Highlights02:56: Through her teenage years, Christine's daughter went downhill, and she ended up going through some really terrible stuff.03:52: Christine realized how hard it is for young people who are aging out of the system, they don't have the proper support.05:44: Medical practitioners are burning out record numbers. They are not motivated to take their after-hours to fill out third party forms for the government09:41: Christine shares an example of a woman who did her disability tax credit with Benefits 2 on January 31st.11:09: The hard part for everyone involved in tax refund is that nobody has ever taught anything about this in school.12:02: Christine explains how her platform helps people qualify for disability tax.12:45: The government tried to bring in the disability tax motors restrictions act and fix the fee at $100. 17:08: Christine thought the disability tax credit promoters were really predatory in nature, taking that big percentage.19:10: Christine is a huge advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion, and he is also a huge advocate for people with disabilities.24:18: The Canada Caregiver credit, medical expenses, and disability supports deductions home buyer's amount.25:09: 60% of all people who have the disability tax credit are over the age of 55, and the RDSP is not even a benefit for that.26:22: It's not a disability tax credit. It's really an enabling for people with ordinary everyday impairment to their activities of daily living.3 Key PointsChristine shares her daughter's ordeal and how her teacher called her out in front of all of her peers at the age of 6.Christine developed Benefits2 to leave more money in the hands of persons with disabilities and their supporting family members and to ensure Canadians have an option that complies with the disability tax credit promoters restrictions act.Christine explains how they created a platform, a complex algorithm in the background that once you have answered your questions related to your particular impairment, they write the application for success for you, you get a code and the PDF of the application and e-mail.Tweetable Quotes"My eyes are really wide open around the disability taxpayer." - Christine Brunsden"If the credit doesn't apply to you, maybe you're not working, but maybe you have a supporting family member, and you can transfer the credits to that supporting family member." - Christine Brunsden"Our marketplace will have diversity, equity inclusion, calendars that support all the different awareness dates throughout the country and internationally." - Christine BrunsdenResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Mounir Felloula, CEO and Co-Founder of Puulse. It is a challenger bank, that has specifically partnered with the company's HR departments to help enable their employees to have a positive banking experience from the moment they get paid.Episode Highlights01:51: Mounir explains what Puulse is and the services that they provide. 03:43: Mounir explains how they facilitate money getting to the employee's app from day one?05:22: Puulse's specific attack vector was to work with HR Partners to try to basically get involved with the companies.05:39: Puulse have a strong fintech part, but they are also like a nature tech pack because, basically they are able to know when someone finishes a job.08:09: Mounir shares how companies are now conscious about their workers.10:02: Companies that tie up with Puulse don't own the data payroll. The data platforms don't have the expertise to push money to look at regulation to know which license you need to have to push the money, when and how to clean the dealer configuration.11.10: More than 1000 people can implement the Puulse HR software, says Mounir.12:55: Mounir's aim is to facilitate everything related to gig workers.13:21: Mounir talks about employee's initial reaction of the app and what they are planning to launch in the future.15:09: Puulse's goal from the beginning was not only to bring workers, but to build the banking infrastructure to help people to be financially independent.16:25: People want to get paid daily, so this is possible, but the guardian is structure, which basically pays your taxes, restrict it.16:52: Human life is very exciting, and you can do plenty of things you can use to travel.18:56: Mounir discusses about the challenges they faced when launching Puulse.21:20: To build a culture that is effective and enjoyable that people want to be a part of and are happy to go up to every day, and that is unfortunately and a difficult task, but it's achievable.3 Key PointsMounir shares how they come in the middle and create liquidity on one side to the other.Mounir explains how they help companies facilitate on time payment.Mounir talks about the future of Puulse and its growth. He also discusses what they are planning.Tweetable Quotes"When we get the money, we are kind of a box that comes in the middle and start to push the money automatically that cover this gap basically." - Mounir Felloula"We notice when we start at the beginning about talking to HR companies and HR software, every people like every gig, workers complain to their employers, then they get paid all of them when they notice that what someone pays faster, they jump to one up to another." - Mounir Felloula"I can basically go between these jobs and vendors very quickly just by flipping apps and we are talking about essentially a commodity. We are talking about rides. So at the end of the day, if they don't support what the other guys doing and making it easy, then they are going to lose people pretty quickly." - JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Kelly Waltrich, CEO of intentionally, a well-known marketing firm within the advisor and fintech space that helps companies market themselves effectively and get results.Episode Highlights01:16: Most people didn't get into a business to market it, they got into a business to do the thing that they wanted to build.05:09: Kelley is extremely particular about the firms that they work with. They conduct a pretty in-depth review of the companies before they agree to market them because they have to have a couple of things right.05:46: It's sort of blows Kelly's mind how little founders and leaders are sort of inspecting the world around them and understanding what they are up against.07:21: Kelly talks about a major red flag when people don't know the competitive landscape.08:51: Kelly shares how they try for the most part, to just make sure that the brand is solid and what the messaging is going to be.10:29: As per Kelley it is important to clearly define goals and she is a stickler about the goal-defining process.11:54: Most ironically, in industry, it's always about helping people reach their goals.15:23: Just because you hung a shingle doesn't mean people are going to walk in and just hand you money. 19:09: Kelly shares how they track revenue through growth of all of their clients.25:47: Your brand is being distributed. More people are seeing it. It's so worth it, and Kelley tells everybody the same story.28:58: Kelley is on a crusade to help firms realize the value of modern marketing that it should have a seat at the table, that it should be driving strategy, and then it should be a driver of company revenue.3 Key PointsKelly shares how she was really compelled to create a company in that everyone in it had a strong industry context, understood the competitive landscape, understood the inner workings of each of the firms, and understood how everything needed to be connected.Kelly explains what content map is and how they use it.Kelly explains how they spend a lot of time building content strategies and content plans that fuel the overall demand generation plans. Tweetable Quotes"When everybody was reevaluating what they were doing with their lives. I wanted to build a firm that could turn that around for this industry and help firms deploy modern marketing to generate revenue, turn their marketing efforts into revenue generating activities." - Kelly Waltrich"I am building this technology. It is so awesome. It's going to change the way advisors work." - Kelly Waltrich"We make sure that we have a story that we can work with because, at the end of the day, we can't create campaigns, we can't drive opportunities." - Kelly Waltrich"Once you have given us your granular, thoughtful, realistic goals, we get after it, and we put a plan together, and we say this is, this is what it's going to take, this is what it's going to take from your time." - Kelly WaltrichResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://intention.ly/team/kelly-waltrich/Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Jose Luis Salas Calcáneo, Sales Manager at Checkbook.io. It is an online platform for not just processing payments and pushing money to where you need to be but doing it in every method from digital to the old-school methodology of SNL.Episode Highlights00:43: As per Jose checkbook is 6 in one payment disbursement platform. They have six different railways in which they can disburse money, and the beauty of the platform is that the recipient can choose how they want to receive money.02:06: Instead of focusing on the people who were sending money, leaders at Checkbook decided to give a nice experience to the recipient. 03:55: Real-time payments depend upon both people having an account and a balance.05:43: Jose talks about paper cheques and how they still provide it to the end users. 07:47: Jose explains instant payments that entail instantly moving money from your existing Visa and MasterCard.09:47: Besides trying to convince people to value, funding something that basically has physical checks really shows a fly on the wall for that one.12:45: Jose says that they sign a contract, and then they have an onboarding process.13:34: There are people who want to use Instant Pay, NBC only, or ACGH and RTP, but we need to enable that we see what is the full experience for your final recipients we test, validate and deploy, says Jose.14:11: Jose explains how they integrate with some accounting and integrate with accounting seed, SAGE interact, and QuickBooks. 15:41: Jose talks about the benchmarking on how much time and effort is saved by AP departments in terms of being able to streamline the processes.17:24: Jose talks about the migration problem and the unbanked people. He would love to bring a solution for them.19:34: Jose loves connecting with people and solving problems.3 Key PointsJose talks about the six channels of payment that they have in place at Checkbook.io.Checkbook is the bridge to the old world and the new world.Jose explains if they have any integrations into billing processing software or is it just all native.Tweetable Quotes"We are also one-sided platform. For example, if you wanted to send money. You and me in some other environments, we both need to be in the same environment." - Jose Luis Salas Calcáneo"With the printed checks that we are doing now, we are just implementing the magnetic ink, which it might sound like that is not that important, but you have no idea how important this is." - Jose Luis Salas Calcáneo"Sometimes people actually don't want to reveal their account number, routing number, and it makes sense." - Jason"This is getting a lot of traction mostly in loyalty programs, people want to pay their customers, for example, for being loyal and being our current customer using these cards, and it's real." - Jason"We connect with the API of flat, then everything gets connected, and it's done. So you have a lot of money in reprocessing and returns." - Jose Luis Salas CalcáneoResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://checkbook.io/Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Sharon Bauer, founder of Bamboo Data consulting. It is a niche privacy and security consulting firm that basically helps companies figure out how to foster trust and responsibly profit off the use of their data. Sharon's purpose is to empower businesses to make better decisions that will build sustainable privacy and security programs so that they can instil confidence in their customers, partners, and investors.Episode Highlights02.52: Data and monetization of private data came to be through companies like Google and Facebook.06.07: Sharon explains how laws were first and foremost designed around the surveillance economy.12.28: Sharon shares while setting up frameworks, what are the key best practice areas they look at. 17.02: Sharon explains the importance of having a standard contractual clause.19.20: Sharon talks about the misconception around data breach and how that happens.20.22: The SEC passed the rule that basically requires everybody to be certified if they are going to be a vendor that is used by someone licensed by them.26.33: If you are not going to respond to the liking of the individual or in a timely manner, they are going to go to the privacy commissioner.29.30: Sharon highlights awareness and bringing awareness to employees and making them feel really empowered that they are doing the right thing and that they are trying to work with their existing processes. 31.03: It takes 8 months to a year to truly implement a privacy program that is robust and operational.35.06: Privacy is not always top of mind for all companies. It is a huge, endeavor to educate, educate, educate, and bring awareness so that.3 Key PointsSharon explains how explains privacy program is for companies. If you have a chat on your website, an AI tool or maybe not even an AI tool, but it is recording. There is a transcript recording that chat and you are collecting information from the EU or UK users. You need to seek explicit consent.You need to make sure that the vendor that you are in business with also has good privacy and security practices and are not using that data for their own purpose.Tweetable Quotes"It has become a highly profitable stream of revenue to basically harvest this data and utilize its direct ads and doing a number of other things." – Jason"If you are collecting personal information from residents in the EU or UK or in the US, or any other legislate or jurisdiction, you need to consider whether those regulations also apply." – Sharon"Most recently Facebook came under fire again because they were collecting personal information for the purposes of hitting ads at them instead of seeking explicit consent to do that, what they did was they embedded it in the terms of use terms of service." - Sharon"I feel so fortunate to be working in an industry that is very collaborative and everyone is so supportive of each other." - SharonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Reese Harper, CEO of Elements. It is a financial planning company focused on delivering deep, meaningful conversations between clients and advisors, but specifically focused on the key things that they need to focus on in order to be effective in their financial planning journey. Episode Highlights1.36: Reese shares how the idea of launching Elements came through? What factors motivated him?06.38: Reese tried to create a more efficient way to answer questions without him having to do any of the data entry or data maintenance. 07.49: As per Reese they are trying to get deeper in conversations, but not have as many extensive presentations as they are trying to put in front of people. 13.48: Saving money, spending money, paying taxes and paying debt are the four elements that are the four vital signs that cash flow is made-up of.16.02: Reese explains how the elements financial planning system scorecard works. 18.58: Reese discusses the obligation that they have as the software provider in a world where it's all about financial health. 21.28: As per Reese both benchmarks and heuristics are important and right now, they just have heuristics in the system. 23.37: Reese supports the idea of advisors using guidelines and benchmarks to motivate clients toward a healthier state when needed. 26.27: Insights engine is what are we going to surface to the advisor to show them what's going on with their clientele.30.12: Reese shares the success stories and how well the app is received by clients.33.37: Reese explains how their entire clientele is not on meetings. He is batching responses and he is doing it asynchronously.35.52: A DSO that employs like 200 dentists, it's really hard to cost effectively work with rank-and-file dentists, says Reese.3 Key PointsReese discusses an easy way to measure holistic financial health. He shares how the elements financial planning system helps clients to collect and organize financial data and then gives a snapshot of all their key financial health metrics–in one view.Reese talks about the three main ways that they use to interact with clients.The advisor mobile version is mostly meant for real-time analysis, and when you get on the phone with the client, you will be editing data on the fly with them. The web is there for triage and sort of book-level clientele, explains Reese. Tweetable Quotes"If you ever tried to build your own software for your own needs, using your own money from profits from another business that like an advisory business to pay for software, you realize very quickly that it, it's very challenging." - Reese"You could really overwhelm people quite Quickly if you say we have to collect all the financial vital signs that exist in the world." – Reese"Benchmarking is kind of the V2 of what we see coming. It is when you can create internal when you have a large enough internal sample, you can start creating financial health metrics." - Reese"Almost everything that matters to you in your life has some representation on your phone screen." - JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/reeseharper/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Richard Vinhais CEO of WAX. It is a platform for ensuring collectible items of high value and making sure that if anything goes wrong with your treasured collectible or sentimental value object that basically you are protected. In addition, they have helped people with custody and leverage of these assets with that.Episode Highlights1.42: Richard talks about his background and how his journey started. 08.22: Chubb is the world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurer. They have 200 billion in assets, maybe 40 billion plus in gross premium. They are who you want and they kind of concentrate on the high network space. 10.10: Richard talks about the lending business that they launched the previous quarter which is really in pilot.11.15: Richard explains in the collection management process there is an element of doing kind of a rapid income analysis on the individual rapid employment data. 13.14: Richard shares how they determine the value of assets and what is the process that they follow. 17.08: Cash is not as cheap as it, it was even six months ago. If you look back even a year ago when money was virtually free, that is just not the market conditions today. But there is still always a space for an individual that's looking for a quick infusion of cash, says Richard. 19.05: Once we are vaulting, we are responsible that means the insurance needs to be fully in place. The conditions of the vault need to be exceptional, says Richard.22.05: As per Richard, understanding the collector mindset is everything because every collector, they have their own tribe. Every collector also has their why behind, why they collect.25.12: As per Richard, they could open up the valves to allow anybody to enter their ecosystem which will certainly grow the top line of the business, but as claims start rolling in because they not thinking about the quality of what is coming in, then you are no longer running a profitable business. 3 Key PointsRichard explains the technology aspect of Wax and where is the tech coming to play, and how is he delivers Insurance on collectibles?Richard talks about the range of products that they have launched or will launch in future. The list included the collection management, model line insurance, lending, and then vaulting.Richard talks about appraisals, how that was going to work and how it changes the current experience.Tweetable Quotes"Collectibles are now seen as an alternative investment whereas in the past it was just kind of seen as a toy or a strange hobby or target demo has disposable income." - Richard Vinhais"The lending product was an experiment that we put into play last quarter, and we see this as a great way for individuals to kind of unlock value in the collectibles that they have." - Richard Vinhais"The amount of research we went into to find the correct vaulting partner was staggering, mainly because we want to make sure we're doing right by our clients, and we don't have to worry about it." - Richard VinhaisResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.wax.insure/about Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Brad Joudrie and Ken Lotocki. Brad is the Chief Revenue Officer of Conquest, and Ken Lotocki, Chief Product. Today they are going to talk about the changes, growth and challenges that have occurred in the past 2.5 years. Episode Highlights1.16: Brad and Ken talk about conquest planning and its origin stories.02.24: Ken talks about the adoption of new technologies and innovation in Conquest Planning. 03:30: There's a lot of in every other profession out there in terms of innovation, whether it's medical profession or legal profession or so on, more and more tools are being built to help make it easier for that professional essentially to do their job and financial planning, specifically building that plan.05.02: Brad and Ken discuss about the challenges they faced and how they implemented processes that helped them to save lot of time and effort.06.14: Jason mentions how Sam built strategies such a way to help advisors work with their clients and understand exactly what's being recommended to them.09.35: It's an easy enough conversation to explain to a client that if you delay you get more money, says Brad.11.18: Brad explains how Sam has shaved hours off the process using automation. 19.02: Ken and Brad discuss about the work and the process of hiring people.21.58: Ken explains how they invest heavily in technology.25.10: Ken talks about their partners and how they are very happy with the stable of partners they have from a venture perspective.27.01: Brad and Ken talk about the next feature or next thing that they are going to do in the company.33.03: There has only been three companies Jason has known of that have ever sold financial planning software outside of their own jurisdiction effectively.45.52: We understand better how advisors and financial professionals are working with their clients today and then have conquest to be agile itself to work within their ecosystem, says Ken.48.16: Ken shares how they are in a different situation than they were when they first sat down.53.21: There are a lot of good advisors, a lot of great advisors out there just approach it.3 Key PointsBrad and Ken talk about the launching of Conquest Planning and how as the company grew it adopted cloud technologies and innovation. Brad and Ken talk about the business and how big the team was when they first started in the company.Brad explains how the company's scaling was almost as a B2B as opposed to an enterprise product.Tweetable Quotes"The club speed knows which club to hit knows the distance, the thing and but in the end it's the advisor." – Brad"You landed the single biggest enterprise contract last year that none of the competition probably heard of yet, so kudos I think that's a testament to just how differentiating you are in the product market." – Jason"We have kept our team reasonably lean, I would say on the distribution side of the House, and that has been fairly intentional." – Brad"I love what we do and I love the fact that everyone in our company is passionate like we were." - KenResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Dave Carr-Pries, Vice President – consulting services at InvestorCom. Today they are going to talk about how the implementation of CFR and Reg BI has basically panned out in the last year and where the successes and challenges are? Episode Highlights1.31: InvestorCom is a fintech company, they provide software really focusing on helping the industry make better financial decisions, and with that means their focus is on compliance solutions that aim to make being compliant as intuitive as possible and removing friction and barriers from advisors of dealers. 2.58: Without an advisor or an investor doing anything, when fund companies change their products or things change about their products, suddenly a portfolio may become unsuitable, says Dave.7.23: Dave discusses what is the kind of data points for the elements that you look for significant change.09.30: People like complaining about work and it's like this is not hard. You need to have investment thesis for how you actually manage portfolios and do it consistently and then you just have to look for changes that are pertinent to that, says Jason.14.02: Dave shares how they filter and pass data down to people and give them what to look at.15.30: When an advisor is presented with kind of a relative comparison, things do move slowly and we are starting to see a trend and making recommendations of products that stack up, says Dave.17.40: Jason discusses how it is not hard from the advisory perspective to have a documented process.20.01: Anyone who just basically buys nothing, but passive indexes have an easy time says Jason.22.01: As an advisor professional judgment is about identifying red flags and if there are any red flag be prepared to document your justification relative to those flags.29.30: We put out a process, our documentations are in place, this is really called practice management 101, says Dave.31.02: To not think through the advisor experience and how to make this a manageable experience is a gross failure of management like that, says Dave.3 Key PointsJason and Dave talk about the big changes in regulations both in Canada and US and InvestorCom dealt with the changes. Dave explains how they have taken self-monitor solution that builds the industry audit trail and added advisor alerts. Dave shares that they are working on the product recommendation side and how to do that product comparison or consideration of primitives.Tweetable Quotes"People probably made decisions that weren't good or interpretations that the regulator won't agree to." - Jason"This kind of change management or change monitoring process mean thanks to the regulator's kind of a new thing. So, no one really knows what that magnitude is." - Dave "My concern is people for shooting an arrow and then drawing the bullseye around it." – JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorDave – LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Adrian Johnstone, Co-founder, and President of Practifi. Practifi is an advisor centric CRM that was developed on the Salesforce platform but is not Salesforce itself and has made a name for itself in terms of leveraging the advantage to build better automation workflows and tools for advisors.Episode Highlights0.44: Adrian explains that they use the term performance optimization platform in Practifi. They use salesforce as the chassis, but they are actually a product sitting on top and none of the nasty overlay stuff.6.07: Adrian explains that their system is designed to provide the answers to questions you are not yet thinking like, who do I need to call, what do I need to call them about, what might I have missed from a compliance perspective and serve that information up to the right person at the right time.9.20: Adrian told someone that they need to do something along the way is one thing, but what they have done is embed things like the data capture and data transfer within the workflow itself.13.44: Many people don't realize that Salesforce and Microsoft are in pretty much every business where Salesforce exists, but they don't necessarily play great together on their own.17.19: Adrian shares how they have built very specific integrations at an industry level, and they will continue to do that as well. 19.20: Adrian says that they also see newer firms coming into the market who look at integrating the Salesforce and what they find is that they are going to integrate to something that they know everyone has customized because there are a very few standard Salesforce instances out there.21.58: Anyone who's going to really exercise the technology, then we are a great solution because you don't lose any of the flexibility. You just gain such a strong starting position, says Adrian.3 Key PointsPractifi is designed to cater for a multifamily office with complex relationship trees, many to many kinds of structures within there, as well as managing all of your other relationships.Adrian explains how they got away from standard stuff available on salesforce and built what Practifi Propel, which is an entire analytics suite and gives users the comprehensive time series data that one can really look at across the business.Adrian shares how he wants to create a more unified experience between the Salesforce and Microsoft Stacks because they know the Office 365 world is ubiquitous and they want to make that as seamless as possible.Tweetable Quotes"Having something purposely built versus generic from day one is a big advantage for anyone starting off from day one." - Jason"Practifi is not trying to be the solution to the retail banker. It's a solution to the wealth to the financial intermediaries." – Adrian"As the underlying platform changes, you are forced into reinvesting in building because it doesn't stand still and so you can't." – AdrianResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianjohnstone/https://www.practifi.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Don Scott, CEO of Frank Mortgage. It is a new company looking to take the bias out of shopping for a mortgage and make sure that consumers get the best rate possible. Don talks about the surprising piece of feedback that he has received post launching Frank Mortgage. Episode Highlights4.30: The market has a flaw in the way it's set up. The brokers are supposed to represent the customer, but we are paid by the lenders so that can steer a bias into the process and bias because it's not necessarily the same compensation between lenders may not be identical, says Don.5.44: Some of the brokers out there provide wonderful service for their customers. But there is this inherent flaw in the way that business is set up. So, customers often enter the process feeling very uncertain and not informed, and they often exit the process feeling the same way.8.51: Features matter as much as rate does to a lot of customers. It's always not just a pure rate decision and we can help them understand all of that, but then they ultimately can make their own decisions, says Don.12.49: There is a customer adoption and acceptance that has to take place for this kind of product and ultimately where we get down the road is where we can ask the customer for less and go to direct source to get more information, says Don. 17.00: Don explains how customers select products in the portal, how they move to the documentation stage and stages of approval with the lender.27.24: At the end of the day, incentives are often designed to control that person who is the bottleneck or is that person is going to write that business, says Jason.28.06: Raising capital is a major challenge that Don had faced while launching Frank Mortgage. 29.36: As per Don there is a great opportunity to enhance the experience of consumers in the mortgage market and the feedback, they are getting consumers is confirming that it's very positive so far and they don't see the competitors that are in the marketplace.3 Key PointsDon explains how the market has sort of turned into a Marcus. It's very focused on maximizing the outcomes from the brokers of the lenders and not so much for the customers. There is a lot of data scrubbing and a lot of back and forth between the broker network and lenders, but it's of time and resources, and with a digitized process like this, you can simplify that and deliver a complete file 100% of the time that has some algorithmically driven underwriting, says Don. Talking about feedbacks received from consumers Don says that they have heard in surveys that more and more consumers want to have online solutions for mortgages. So, they presented one to them and now Frank Mortgage is getting positive feedback about the experience. Tweetable Quotes"I have been around the mortgage market quite a long time, funded some of the medium and small sized lenders that are in the marketplace space know their businesses fairly well." - Don"It's not the customer that's paying us and so our economic incentive isn't always aligned with the customers best outcome." - DonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason talks to Greg Leroux, founder of Retirement Optimizer. It is a Canadian software that optimizes your retirement specifically around strategies on drawing down your assets over time to ensure that you successfully make it to the finish line.Episode Highlights0.42: In existing financial planning software, you enter a series of inputs regarding your assets, spending expectations and what you want your retirement to look like and what you have to fund that, says Greg. 0.55: As per Greg, the difference that we have at Retirement Optimizer is that we apply an optimization engine to the de cumulation side of things.2.56: Many clients ask, what should you be doing instead of the rule of thumb and the answer is there is no answer. Because it depends on lots of things and that's why when it comes to decumulation and retirements or in a game of chess, computers generally beat people, says Greg. 4.53: In any situation you are setting up with the spreadsheet, you are going to be making assumptions about the future, and your assumptions are by nature going to be wrong because we don't know what inflation is going to be over the next 30 years, says Greg. 6.02: Greg started with a company that was a performance reporting company to comply with CRM two requirements and allow people to look at their rates of return and benchmark them against common indices.7.21: Greg was originally contracted by a financial planning firm to build a suite of tools for them. And, once we actually had the solution working, they wanted to go into business with us and commercialize it more generally. 12.21: Computer says you have enough money to retire. It says that you might fall a little bit short if you were just using bucket approach of withdrawing assets. But that might not be where you're concerned. You might want to stretch things, says Greg. 13.18: As per Greg, the output of our system is a series of interactive graphs and tables on a computer screen. But many people who are retired and don't want to be staring at computer screens they can produce a report.17.00: Greg doesn't work under a subscription model like many financial planning pieces of software; instead, it's on a pay per use basis.18.56: As per Greg we are going in two directions right now. One is to make it even more user-friendly for the individual who doesn't necessarily have a financial planner. And other direction is to make it more complex for people who have crazy systems of accounts that include money that's offshore or overseas.3 Key PointsThe majority of people who are entering retirements have real estate as a substantial fraction of their net worth, but they don't intend to live in the same house until the end of their retirement. They intend to downsize at some point.Greg shares his thoughts on conjunction of financial plan with other standard financial planning software. Tech has been red hot industry for the last bunch of years, and it is really difficult even for highly skilled, highly compensated people to resist the siren song of California.Tweetable Quotes"I would like to see the industry evolving towards a computational stuff being handled by computers and human interaction being handled by humans." - Greg"Attracting, retaining talent as long as possible is probably the biggest challenge." - GregResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/grleroux/?originalSubdomain=cahttps://retirement-optimizer.ca/welcome Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's episode of Fintech Impact, we have Marcilio Oliveira, Co-Founder of Sensedia. It is a platform that provides API access through microservices for different financial institutions around the world, basically connecting them seamlessly. They are helping the enterprise companies around the world to become more connected, open and digital using the modern integration platform and API.Episode Highlights1.03: Marcilio says that they created Sensedia 15 years ago to help companies to modernize their enterprise sectors. 1.14: In last ten years we have been 100% focused on API management platform to help companies to connect the core data in digital experience, partner journeys and innovation and in the last five years we created a nice, specialized solution for financial institutions, says Marcilio.3.08: The connection between the legacy system with mobile apps, with ecosystems from partners and with different kind of digital experience or digital behaviors is done using API.6.32: Companies are looking for Sensedia when they are trying to evolve the digital experience or part integration ecosystem positioning for open banking service, or they are looking for innovation.7.53: FTX conference in Dallas was amazing because we have around hundred financial companies there and all of them trying to discuss about strategy, not only about Tech, says Marcilio.8.04: API is a tech subject, and it supports new business model, new functionalities, new partners model and new positioning.15.40: Many banks have created their own API management plan because they are using these as internal APIs.16.04: All the financial institution will be part of one or more ecosystems because they have a chance to be the heart of the ecosystem to create their own ecosystem by exposing API.19.05: As per Marcilio, we are going to nice space where everyone needs to be a part of ecosystem.20.03: Companies should be more open and digital and connected and not looking for tech or for business strategy.3 Key PointsMarcilio shares what is the percentage of existing institutions that were non digital before and converting over versus native Fintechs that have come into the market?Fintechs are not looking for a hard discussion about tech integration. They are looking for the good experience in the digital world. So, we have invested a lot in digital experience for the companies beyond the API, says Marcilio.Marcilio shares his thoughts on where is the lack of openness? Is it a reticence of companies entering the space like departing from their norms of keeping things closed and being very defensive with data?Tweetable Quotes"We are focusing the enterprise companies. We are looking for the traditional companies and usually they are asking for our help in three different scenarios." – Marcilio"The open banking is not about regulation, it's about movement and in my perception, Canada will move fast about regulations." – Marcilio"If the company is looking for position as the central of ecosystem, they need to improve the developer experience." - Marcilio"Technology is not a strategy. Technology is there to enable your strategy." - Jason "My motivation is when I explain stories about customers and people show interest to listen more. I love to share stories from achievement with good customers." – Marcilio.Resources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInhttps://www.sensedia.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcilioso/?originalSubdomain=brPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Timothy Nuy, Founder and Co-CEO of Finclusion. The company is an African based neobank that is basically tackling a lot of the structural issues in banking in Africa in a digital way. Episode Highlights1.11: Today our lending products predominantly are either employed or merchant distributors ranging from earned wage access to payroll loans and from buy now pay later to merchant lending facilities, says Timothy.2.06: Timothy explains how he predominantly distinguish clients with our AI based credit scoring where they have consistently outperformed the markets from a collections and repayment perspective on the back of our scoring models.5.14: The traditional data is oftentimes not available on our type of supply and field. Also, the easily accessible credit score, simple repayment behavior isn't available. What is available is a whole lot of different data points that by themselves aren't actually predictable, says Timothy.9.03: Timothy explains how does the business side of the business differ from the personal credit scoring?11.10: Pledging security it depends on the market. In some markets it works, many other markets it doesn't. But depending on the relationship we can take a risk.13.01: One of the benefits of building some of the infrastructure in Africa from scratch is that infrastructure gets built based on modern day design principles.14.17: Buy now pay later has been something that has largely been a newer innovation in the Fintech space and within the last 24 months it's really taken off, says Jason.15.02: Today we can offer credit better than anyone else, but that's a leap. IT doesn't mean we'll always be better than anyone else, says Timothy. 16.01: We basically unconverted ownership of a client into our world and really achieve long term client stickiness, says Timothy.17.07: Timothy would love for the African rails to work as well as they do in India where you could just digitally verify anyone's identity and get access to their data in a readily simple, straightforward way.17.51: Getting people brought into the company culture and building together, creating that feeling of togetherness without actually being able to be together in the same office has probably been the hardest thing to do, says Timothy.19.20: Africa has been in the loss from probably the last 30 years. But Timothy truly believes it is going to convert and end up in the same space as a Brazil or China or India.3 Key PointsTimothy talks about the core problem that has to do with the AI based models on credit scoring you deal with in Africa compared to more developed nations like the US and UK.Timothy’s company does future wage access where they give you a loan which you can repay over 12 to 24 months using about 30% of your income as a maximum installment.The reality of not being able to pay for goods and services at checkout is a much bigger problem in the African population than the rest of the world.Tweetable Quotes“I feel there is no one really addressing the credit gap effectively with products and solutions that truly address the market needs on the ground and we could make a real difference.” -Timothy“We work with any employer more than 200 employees, but we prefer to work with larger employers.” – Timothy“No one would ask you for your house title for a small loan in the rest of the world probably via emerging markets where there's still an opportunity.” - TimothyResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/timothynuy/https://www.finclusiongroup.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's 250th episode we have guest host, Guy Anderson to interview Jason Pereira. Guy asks Jason what he has learned till now and where he is going from this point. Episode Highlights2.08: There are a lot of integrations in the US market, but Jason would actually refer to a lot of those integrations as borderline superficial.3.25: As per Jason there are a couple of ways to look at big trends. We can contrast the US market versus elsewhere because in US market everybody got baseline technology.4.35: If you went too far and just focused on digitizing and optimizing your process without focusing on how you can provide deeper, greater value to a client, you didn't do yourself a service in that regard, says Jason.5.24: In the developing markets, Jason is seeing a lot of unique and interesting ways of trying to get more people access to financial services, which is enormously important.8.40: The longer you depend on a system the more likely you are to depend on it for a longer period of time, says Jason.9.23: One of the single biggest bottlenecks with old systems is the inability to get the data open and out and then put into something elsewhere.11.28: Netflix and all that were big examples of technology uptake during COVID where people were using streaming systems. Jason explains whether he saw an uptake in Fintech adoption during COVID or not. 16.54: Flow charts technology to basically make a decision or to basically confirm that the planning solution you make is solid, that is foundationally found fantastic nudge.21.55: To monetize open banking, they're going to figure out a way to monetize it through the companies that are giving it to you, which is going to basically come back to you through fees, says Jason.23.31: When Jason started four and half years ago, Fintech was new term and we were in a big hype cycle at the time and he was seeing solutions left, right and center, novel things and different ideas but that's slowed down because the industry had hit maturity plateau at this point.28.33: Jason sees a world where money or decisions with money are going to be minute and the challenge is that this is a cognitive burden on humanity. 31.45: Google basically gives you every financial service for free and monetizing out the data and that should be scared to every sector of finance. 3 Key PointsJason talks about the challenges that he has seen in the sector that perhaps are limiting the advance of some of the Fintech companies.  When it comes to how to digitally transform businesses, many institutions don't have internal people that can think at higher level and nor the incentives designed to do that, says Jason.In Canada Jason had released the paper on open banking framework and when he started reading it, he stopped reading it very quickly because timeline set out was completely unrealistic.Tweetable Quotes"There is a lack of surprisingly digital on-boarding systems that exist in any country." – Jason"There is no way that we are going to meet the demand for developers in the future." – Jason"It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks sometimes." - JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Brooker Belcourt, Founder of Covey; an online platform for new inspiring portfolio managers to earn credibility by sharing their best ideas online in order to establish a track record and hopefully establish a career input for the management.Episode Highlights1.20: Covey seeks to solve the problem of finding investment analysts by creating a community to find and reward the best investment analysts so that we can all copy them and generate higher returns.3.07: People use Covey as a way to get into investing or to learn more about it or to play with virtual cash before playing with real cash and they use it to earn rewards.4.19: Covey tracks 50 matrix in real time and you have a shareable portfolio that's like probably the most robust mock portfolio software online right now. 7.09: Brooker explains that they post all trades to an immutable ledger so that the client won't have to hire auditors to come and verify their fidelity account or their e-trade account, which is actually really expensive.10.03: Brooker has observed that the great managers, great analysts tend to stay great and it has been described in academic research as the phenomenon called performance persistence.11.27: There are a ton of barriers to entry to becoming a great investment analyst. If you went to some big investment bank, you could probably become an investment analyst. But otherwise, if you're great, you may not be discovered, says Brooker.13.47: Brooker have received a lot of interest from the hedge funds to buy their analyst data and what we have to do though is structure the right deal that benefits the community of people who contributed that data.15.08: Brooker says that they had to think with their community how do they actually identify who is an amazing investment analyst and they came up with five or six metrics and looked across things like total return of course.18.57: Doing something that is totally new for you and getting VCs on board was probably the highest hurdle for us, says Brooker.3 Key PointsBrooker explains why community database information is valuable to others than to the people who are looking in Covey's ideas.In 2023, we are going to be launching the Covey copy trading style product that allows you to invest in the top analyst list, says BrookerBrooker explains how that entire reward mechanism allocates rewards to the different analysts. Is it just based solely on short term performance over a period of time or are there other metrics taken to consideration?Tweetable Quotes"It always struck me as odd that where this data rich world is investing and yet we have no way of like sorting through the masses to find the best." – Brooker"We are going to build more infrastructure to make it easier for people to follow and get the benefits of following the best people and little branches of investing.' – Brooker"If we built a fund around the top analyst and their ideas, we could allow anyone to invest in that front and then we can compensate some of the undiscovered investment analysts who otherwise wouldn't have been able to manage money." - BrookerResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Ari Brojde, Founder and CEO of Estateably, a leading provider of digital solutions for the North American trust and estates industry. Episode Highlights0.50: Estateably is a Canadian estate administration software that makes sure that when your loved one passes away the owner's burden, that is, the administrative work left behind by an estate is dealt with in a quick, efficient, and accurate way in order to get the thing closed as soon as possible.08.23: In August Estateably was nominated as software the year and the Trust in the space states category and Canadian Lawyer magazine in October and in December of 2021 they gained 140 professional customers. So it was, it was a great year for Estateably in 2021 and they have managed to continue on that success in 2022. 14.18: If a company is using Estateably, they are going to be able to work with you as the executor to get all the necessary inputs that are required throughout the entire estate administration process, they are going to collect information about the deceased, where they lived, where they died, where they married, all they kind of important information that goes into the probate application process. They are going to get information about the beneficiaries. 17.41: Ari says that there are sometimes between 100 and 150 different tasks that are associated with the completion of an estate and what's critical for people is to be able to stay on top. As an executor Estateably may not always be open on your desktop and so it's very important to be able to have the deadlines that are to be met and to get e-mail reminders sent to your g-mail will simplify things. 21.12: Estateably's is Canada's first real estate administration solution based in the cloud. Ari shares how sometimes they would go for demos and companies would sign-up just by hearing that they are a cloud-based solution.3 Key PointsAri talks about what happens when someone passes away and what it's like to have to settle in the state and what needs to be done? Ari explains how Overall there are about 420 hours and statistics show of manual administrative work that needs to be accomplished.By using Estateably, the user will be able to prefill all the forms, all the letters that are required to go out to those service providers to cancel accounts, and it's going to save at least ten times the amount of time that it would take to do everything manually. One of the features of Estateably is Gmail Calendar Integration. Ari talks about why that's important and what it accomplishes? Tweetable Quotes"When we asked the people that trust companies to show us what kind of software they use, their eyes kind of glazed over and they said, what are you talking about?" - Ari "A power of attorney is just a different form of fiduciary relationship and takes much to be able to tweak the original platform to be able to create a new product line." - Ari ResourcesFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorAri – LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Wilbur Swan, CEO of Catchlight. It is a company that uses AI to help advisors basically find and close better leads. Episode Highlights0.50: Catchlight plays a new kind of solution for advisors which focus on what we call lead optimization, which is common in other industries, but new to financial advisors, says Wilbur.4.13: Fidelity Labs started with infidelity in 2005 and had a mix of roles in almost 20-year period of working with the businesses to accelerate ideas called as digital acceleration, as well as incubating an entirely new concept, called as full staff incubation. 5.20: Fidelity Labs for those who haven't seen it is a good combination of subject matter expertise, resources and of course money to help with the ideas for innovation, says Jason. 6.08: Wilbur's company is now as of T3 publicly launched and available for advisors to subscribe to and it's an ongoing relationship with Fidelity Labs.10.08: The advisor gets into our web UI, uploads a spreadsheet that includes all of their leads and system then goes toward taking the core data about leads and we enrich it using the same type of data partners that large companies typically use to understand their marketing, says Wilbur. 14.15: With machine learning models we split models capturing like does the person have the means that they would need financial advice? Do they have complexity in their life and are they encountering life invents that suggest how the timing is good for the advisor to pitch that prospect, explains Wilbur. 16.05: When you aggregate the data across state advisors or across several advisers is super interesting to marketing people who are thinking about personalization, says Wilbur. 19.04: Wilbur is particularly focused right now on a tip of the iceberg and easy solution for advisors to use around how do you gauge better with one-to-one prospects.21.07: Wilbur says that they are growing really quickly. Just a few months ago they posted 20 open roles and still they are looking for many more.23.06: Financial advisors provide really valuable service and Wilbur would love to see them be able to provide it to more people at greater scale via Catchlight.3 Key PointsIf you can unlock the potential of your advisors in the marketing and selling, they are doing, it makes them more efficient in terms of use of their time, says Wilbur. Catchlight's UI output is almost similar to what Google search does. Its page ranks the best matches for you at the top of page so you can focus on the best places to find your effort.Fidelity and Fidelity partnership bring to bear large amounts of data to study to figure out how Salesforce actually works.Tweetable Quotes"We aim to help advisors improve growth through AI powered insights on three things like who should they call, how should they pitch them and what should they pitch them." - Wilbur "We are also continually improving. In our learning model our data science team is constantly evolving in the background to best identify the prospects for a given advisor." - Wilbur "You are soaking up a ton of data from publicly available sources and serving up against that next best prospect." – JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Shirin Oreizy, Founder and CEO of Next Step, an award-winning Behavioral Design Agency with offices in San Francisco, CA & Boston, MA.Episode Highlights1.00: Next step is a behavioral design agency because we sit at this intersection of leverage and being able sentence and how we help our clients design and their marketing and product experiences for their clients and ultimately, we are trying to help them better understand how people really making decisions about the brand or so that they can ultimately drive better engagement or adoption for their products and solutions, says Shirin. 3.01: Shirin explains what behavioral science is. It's the study of how people really make decisions. We put the emphasis on the word really because there is another field of study called economics that we all have heard about that also looks at decision making.5.47: Typically, when we work with startups, we are helping them create lifts anywhere from 30% to 300%, says Shirin. 7.35: Shirin explains that she is helping startups who have found early product market fit and now need help scaling or if they’ve plattued and need to get unstuck.10.39: What we are really trying to do is figure out these different behavioral science  principles, which one of them has legs to it? Which one of them do we think is going to work for you and your situation? explains Shirin19.34: Shirin says that as humans we have evolved to remember stories. We haven't evolved to remember random facts and figures and features. 22.08: Shirin explains that their goal is to determine where can we introduce these Behavioral Science based nudges in the marketing or product for the biggest impact relative to effort and how we  can remove friction from the behavior we want users to take. 23.25: Jason says that the first things he discovered when he got into his business were it's a lot harder to make people move in inch than you would ever think. 29.01: There is a special offer for listeners of this podcast. Shirin has an offer limited to 3 startups per month where they will do a free behavioral science consult w their team. Listeners have to mention that they have heard about Next Steps that through FI podcasts and fill out their online form on https://hellonextstep.com/.3 Key PointsShirin explains why behavioral science is important for startups and how her Behavioral Design Agency is helping them? Shirin explains how her company's starting point, or the testing is all principles and ideas that have already been proven out in research in academia. Shirin and Jason talk about a few cases where Shirin's company helped startups increase their top funnel. Tweetable Quotes"I was always looking to figure out how we can create a more data-driven way to help our clients with their marketing efforts and growth efforts." - Shirin Oreizy"We have had a lot of great success working with technology companies, bringing it to life." - Shirin Oreizy"It's about that person's individual journey that leads to their version of rational decisions." - 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 Michael Butler, President & CEO Grasshopper Bank. The company began operations in 2019 & is a client-first digital bank serving small businesses, start-ups, & investors supporting them across the innovation economy.Episode Highlights1.14: Grasshopper Bank was a digital bank that was formed about 12 months before the pandemic hit with its primary purpose was to deliver digital financial solutions into the business and innovation economy and that was its formation and the primary purpose 4.19: In March, Grasshopper Bank launched a totally digital treasury management solution for small businesses. 6.52: One of the biggest, hottest growing parts of ventures fintech and to the extent that we are, we consider ourselves more of a fintech with a bank charter, we think there is a real kind of alignment of mindset as it relates to working with these companies, we have a great deal of knowledge of how FinTech’s work because of using them on platforms or evaluating them for a variety of different purposes.7.27: Business becomes another leg of this stool in which if you are in the venture capital business and you are promoting a fintech, trying to get them aligned to a bank that they have a banking as a service relationship for them is an accelerator to the growth of the portfolio company, which then goes back to the success of the venture firm.16.12: Michael could never get enough of is entrepreneurial thinking and creativity. He thinks that the world becomes a better place when we can manage entrepreneurial thinking and creative thinking and better things come from it.16.49: Michael did a a deep dive evaluation of people and make sure people were enrolled, that they wanted to be in, that they were capable of being in, that they understood the strategy and were excited about executing against it. 3 Key PointsMichael explains how they differ and solve the problem of banking for the small Business Innovation economy. Michael Butler has got the company website and they have basically resections, banking, lending and fintech in particular. Michael says that they capture the deposits that are leaving the industry by creating relationships with fintech companies and then the other leg of the stool is we want to be involved in other lending activities that are associated with the business and innovation economy, not just venture but.Tweetable Quotes“Banks have a hard time due to its historical kind of tight regulatory environment and its ability to attract top talent on the technology side and to deliver industry-leading technology solutions.” - Michael Butler“We have embraced the fintech movement and we use a partnership model to create our platforms and create the experiences that we think we need for our customers.” - Michael Butler “So that's where the demand comes from this, this combination of industries shifting into more of technology-oriented products and services, small business and then the people who are running those businesses and their psychographics related to being technophiles versus not and demanding a digital solution.” - Michael ButlerResources 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 Akshay Singh, Founder & CEO of Indyfin; the investor experience platform that has redefined the way consumers find, research, review, & interact with financial advisors.Episode Highlights1.08: Indyfin is about simplistically setting independence like yelp meets mash.com, but for wealth management, if you think about Indyfin, the most important thing is helping financial advisors and the potential clients establish trust with each other, no platform online or marketplace online digitally is able to do that, says Akshay. 5.45: Google has figured out that user data or user feedback, what these clients are saying is super important. So, Google is able to identify a lot of these keywords that people are putting in their searches and match that up with the profile of these advisors.12.23: There is other data-driven information along the lines of how much assets did visor manage, how many households and then there are in depth ratings around various skills that divisor has state planning, financial planning, managing investments, taxes, retirement, followed by in depth reviews from all of the published reviews that this advisor has, says Akshay.17.36: Indyfin also offers affiliate partnerships where Akshay and his team are getting some consumers from and again, they go through the matchmaking experience, and they connect the consumer to the advisors. 19.33: Advisors are kind of finding this data to be super helpful. The next stage that we find that kind of once advisors go live with their profile, they obviously have a public profile and that is very exciting, but then when they start to find it. They starting to rank for certain words and that's super exciting. 26.02: Akshay's vision is in the future; financial advisors would actually be doing zero marketing and that's something that we really believe in and we are just helping the industry transition to that place.3 Key PointsIndyfin is giving financial advisors a platform that they can count on to help them collect feedback from their existing clients in a highly structured manner. Through Indyfin how the advisor's benefit is that any prospective client who is going to show up on devices calendar for a meeting to make sure that they are qualified and in the process of their sharing information withIndyfin, which may be helpful for the advisor to show up for the meeting, Indyfin will select that information. It's purely administrative and Indyfin basically gets all that information, explains Akshay.The most powerful form of business are referrals and those are getting harder and harder, and they are also not very structured. Second most powerful thing is validation and referrals, validation. Tweetable Quotes"I have been solving the same problem from the beginning, which is how do we help consumers better manage their finances." - Akshay "I know we will get to the testimonials; we will get to the growth. But getting the fundamentals right is so important and hear what's driving everything is client feedback." - Akshay "My job is advisor would be so much even more fun that's you've got to identify who those net promoters are and be able to ask them for the referral." - AkshayResources 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 David Whitcomb, VP of Product at MX. It is an aggregator of aggregators in that it provides tech companies & traditional finance companies with a way of accessing a common data format across multiple different data aggregation companies & kind of pulls into data from all includes above and spits it up. Episode Highlights1.00: MX not only connects with other aggregators, but the company also connects directly with some of the biggest things in North America for direct API access. 6.08: Once the data is refined and is in enhanced state, MX creates personal financial management tools out of it. 9.00: To the average consumer, they are starting to see if they haven't seen the new grading technology in MX which allows them to put the transactions from the bank account or their investment accounts into an app or into a dashboard or into some other places, says Jason. 10.15: MX has created a ton of intelligence around grabbing different data models, specifically around the council transactions. Normalizing the transactions, adding content to it around categorization classification of what the transaction is so that when a user of MX product or service gets the output of that account transaction we have, we've normalized all of it and have an often typically enhanced it so that it's more readable and more usable for whatever is being built, says David. 14.04: Everyone is getting into the payments world, which means a person is connecting their accounts at lots of different places and in many cases those connections then create a council of their own, says David. 25.02: With the shifts in the way payments are being made or with the shifts in the way consumers are engaging payments, we sell a lot of data that can enable our stuff. We are accessing account numbers, routing numbers to enable some of those use cases. We see that by ensuring that the data we have is leveraged in the right ways. 3 Key PointsDavid and Jason discuss about data normalization. When data is received directly from the bank, VN, API, or via another aggregator, the data is in often different formats. It often has different values added into it or different parameters to that transaction; David explains how MX helps to simplify the entire process. David shares how they use multiple layers of analysis. They have been using human intelligence in conjunction with computer analysis for the past decade.David explains what proprietary and competitive advantage is and what is the consumers data. Tweetable Quotes"So historically, personal financial management has been what I would say is called financial literacy." - David"I think a lot of people are finding themselves there, and with tools like MX offers, it allows you to centralize that stuff more quickly so that you can effectively manage." - DavidResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorDavid Whitcomb – LinkedIn | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Shep Hickey, founder, and CEO of Bryzos. It is an online steel marketplace. Any kind of marketplaces are financial solution, and Shep incorporated Fintech solutions into the platform itself.Episode Highlights1.03: Bryzos is an online steel marketplace that has Fintech features that allow a buyer or seller to go all the way with procure to pay.2.17: Bryzos absolute origin is really about creating a solution for the daily grind of sourcing, bringing and getting sales down the road.4.28: The mill distributor who are making some materials are primarily on the sell side and on the buy side you also have distribution like there have an offline customer that needs something.5.00: The mechanics for Shep remain unchanged even if someone needs a couple foot of steel or few miles of pipe.6.40: Shep is reducing the opportunity for human error by reducing the amount of time. They have a structured way for buyers to enter what they need versus what Bryzos makes for them.8.11: For every single seller you have as a buyer, you have one to one relationship, which is an enormous amount of administrative, says Shep. 9.02: When Shep and his team were sitting down to solve and create a real end to end solution, it was always known that they had to create a buy now, pay later solution.10.51: Buy now pay later, Shep offered primarily through the vendors. He discusses whether they offer another facility for those vendors who are willing to do that?11.30: Someone who is really understanding working capital, they are outsourcing their credit risk at no cost, says Shep.13.51: Energy related steel is one of the most complicated things to trade online because it is so heavily specific and there's also sort of subjective piece, says Shep. 17.50: There is no way that industrial products are not bought and sold online. Buyer has no clue who seller is and the reason that was able to occur is because we removed all the financial risk and that's exciting, says Shep. 3 Key PointsTraditional process is that buyers come in, they create a bill material, they get sent out to the sellers, the sellers will quote it, and deal be created. It's really the buyers creating the demand, says Shep.Shep talks about how they facilitate the financial transaction deal side.Shep talks about where he sees the steel industry, whether it is going beyond just the steel side at this point or not.Tweetable Quotes"I don't believe in the end that Bryzos is just a steel platform. This is an industrial goods trading platform." – Shep"We have completely allowed the seller to outsource any credit risk when it comes to selling their products." - Shep"We have a whole module that manages and neutralizes the risk of the movement of goods and money. It allows reconciling inline versus what happens traditionally when you ship something." - ShepResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorShep Hickey – Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Tyrone Ross, CEO and Co-Founder of Turnqey Labs. The company is a new fintech that's looking to solve the problem of crypto reporting within traditional finance.Episode Highlights1.00: Turnqey is an API suite that is geared to be an integrator aggregator in the marketplace for all things crypto asset data. The end goal is to harness the power of data and analytics to develop a more durable, equitable, transparent financial system.4.52: Tyrone was at Eaglebrook Advisors. Tyrone helped Chris King start Eaglebrook, which is an estimating platform for crypto for advisors. 5.59: Turn division for Turnqey had always been in Tyrone's head. He knew that building UI immediately puts you in competition with everyone else that has UI, and advisors love dashboards clients.07.24: At Turnqey, Tyrone is building infrastructure layers.12.01: If you look at the data, it shows between the 2019 and 2020 tax year, crypto transactions tripled, 362% increase, says Tyrone. 13.51: Tyrone talks about the feedback mechanism that he is developing between the RA and Turnqey.14.25: The investors that Tyrone will be working with the 25- to 45-year-old segment, ideally in that 100,000 to like 5 million segments.16.32: One of the things that Tyrone wanted to do this time around with his start up that he didn't do last time was to have customers before the launch.17.10: The goal for Turnqey is that they are selling B2B and not going directly to the platforms.19.15: Tyrone is a purist. He believes in crypto assets and crypto networks. For those who grew up like him, it had to operate outside the traditional financial system. 19.53: An ETF is only going to benefit the people that are very upset that we don't have, one who is privileged, wealthy elite people who don't need it, says Tyrone. 21.33: Tyrone has established a new company. He has established the reporting structure and made sure that the APIs work and provide feedback. Next part for him would be to develop some type of risk management space. 23.54: Tyrone says that everyone knew how easy it was to work with people who don't fit the actual profile of a wealth management client, so now it would like to expand on that a little bit. 3 Key PointsTyrone talks about the breakdown of the integrator aggregator marketplace.Turnqey Labs not only monitor location change, but they also monitor cost base. Tyrone talks about crypto ETS, he explains his thesis and shares his viewpoints. Tweetable Quotes"You are basically talking like the number of transactions. Client's transactions are one thing, transactions leaving the place their custody to different places, including private wallets. Now we are talking about something incredibly complex." - Jason "The next Gen investor, the next Gen RA, nobody is building it and I know it because, I was traveling around the country and, meeting awesome people and going to some of the largest RA platforms." - Tyrone"If someone can't pay us, we are going to give them a virtual family office experience like all of our clients are going to get." - TyroneResources 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 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.

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.