Fintech Impact

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Pereira talks to Art Harrison, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Daylight. It helps companies automate their data processes and create greater efficiencies around things like onboarding, documented population etc. Episode Highlights:0.34: Daylight’s mission is to enable companies to improve any interaction between people in the process. 10.50: To build a new platform or process, the developer starts from the inside and says, let’s build the data model or the data lake, and then we are going to build this new suite of tools that will change onboard everything, and then we will finally have clean data, and we see that still as a struggle.11.38: If you are always looking at that automation first, you are often not solving the root of the problem. We focus on breaking apart a traditional term that organizations use, digitization and automation.18.11: The challenges are the people on the front lines don’t know how to speak the language of the people who are building technology stuff, says Jason.20.23: In terms of daylight, what Art and his team have done is they focus on the guardrails that are needed to bring the most value without letting even those frontline people overstep their bounds. 22.09: Daylight gives the users an ability to participate without overstepping their bounds, and then gives the other groups the ability to govern the release cycle and data flow in and out of the application.22.48: For Art and his company it was that separation of the experience from the data and really focusing on the different audiences that will participate in making the ideal experience for any process.24.31: Daylight kind of mirrors randomized approach to like how do we bring value today without burdening you with problems in the future?25.20: Daylight is focused on providing low code in terms of the process build. The SME is the expert but still empowers the IT folks to focus on what they want to do.31.19: Most people focus on doing the one thing they are told to do in front of them. They don’t necessarily understand that this is what is possible is feasible and just the enormous benefits to it.3 Key PointsDaylight is a workflow engine that provides the tools for putting workflow together for the end-user and all the intelligence, execution, and deliverables that go into it.Art tells the listeners about the origin - what was the genesis of daylight automation, and how did it come to be?When building a digital ideal customer experience, 95% of the use cases are always exceptions. When you get into the room and technology, some pragmatism gets lost with some people, says Art.Tweetable Quotes“In a busy business, you are moving so fast, and you don’t necessarily have time to think or map processes out, but then you pay the price in the long run.” - Jason“We have kind of found this happy medium where it who is skeptical about some end user focused solution.”- Art Harrison“It is interesting because of the mindset shift there because it stops becoming about the ones who control and action everything and it’s a relinquishing your control to ones who basically steward the efforts of the entire organization.” - Jason Resources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Pereira talks to Sheldon Brow, founder of Pocket Finance; a platform for greater collaboration between clients and advisors giving them a personal financial management app on their phone that not only helps track their wealth but also educates them.Episode Highlights:1.04: Pocket finance is a dual interface fintech platform that could be a personal finance management tool for the consumers to help them safely and successfully navigate finance. 4.03: If a user has an average balance of 10,000 or more for six months or longer than they are making the minimum payment or low payment, you populate a notification that says you might want to change this to a different product to drop the interest rate in half to pay it off a lot sooner, says Sheldon5.01: The problem with banks is that the high-pressure sales that they have in there, it is this constant product dumping and doesn’t always mean it is a meaningful product for the client. 10.48: Being able to aggregate the data as one thing, any company can set up aggregate data pretty quickly through all of these different conduits that exist. There are a lot of them out there, but then what are you able to do with that data in a meaningful way? And then how are you engaging the different relationships that there needs to be in that conversation and enhance that collaborative advice?12.21: The single biggest obstacle to getting financial plans done is data collection, and the number doesn’t matter how much money they make, says Jason.15.29: Sheldon wants their app’s notification to not just be a notification in front of a user’s eyes. He wants it to be clickable and actionable for the next best. 17.12: Technology doesn’t need to be scary to adapt and increase engagement, and you can automate and personalize some of it very easily.18.33: As per Sheldon, there are so many things that need to be changed in the industry one is opportunities to collaborate on advice.22.01: Everybody thinks they are an expert, and there is a reason why somebody goes sideways. 26.01: If the system puts a tremendous amount of onus on the individuals to not get hosed or screwed, then that is a predatory system.3 Key PointsSheldon launched Pocket Finance by taking inspiration from two sides - one is the consumer side and the other one is the advisor side. Sheldon Brow shares details of his career growth and how he noticed major problems in clients’ financial transactions, and how he helped to resolve big payment issues. He also shares what motivated him to launch Pocket Finance. Sheldon talks about the importance of data within the financial conversation and how he enables that.Tweetable Quotes“There are some advisors who believe that the heavy lifting is their value proposition” – Jason“Even creditor insurance on a credit card for independent advisors is a meaningful and quick conversation.” - Sheldon Brow“Almost everything that matters to us in the modern day, especially digitally, lives as an icon on our phone.” – JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPocket Finance – Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Sarah Morton, Chief Strategy Officer at MeetAmi. MeetAmi is a company working to bring digital assets to Canada’s traditional wealth management space. We have brought her to this show to discuss how she will help evolve the industry into the digital asset space. Episode Highlights:00.35: MeetAmi is the company that Sarah has built to help advisors engage directly with digital asset investing on behalf of their clients. The company was founded a couple of years ago as they recognized the growth opportunities in the digital asset space, starting with cryptocurrencies but broader digital asset investing.1.37: We built our first product Ami Pro, a software platform to enable advisors to manage their client accounts and invest directly in digital assets on behalf of their clients, says Sarah.12.06: Sarah is launching inlearn which is our learning series. We have a fantastic head of learning, our Chief Learning Officer Chuck Hamilton, and he has been a thought leader in learning and blended learning for the last 20 years.15.04: We see a shift, and younger investors are making a lot of money in the crypto world, but they need advisors who can help them navigate that and recognize the tax implications and how to reinvest it, says Sarah18.24: It is important to orient where you are in the digital asset world and where your clients are, and if this is something your clients want today or they want tomorrow, it is  time to start thinking about it.23.09: The challenge is the objections in the market to keep things the way they are versus adopting how they come, says Sarah.3 Key PointsMeetAmi is the only multi custodian platform in the market to address the different use cases. The custodians will be different depending on how quickly the advisor may need to access the asset.It is important to orient where you are in the digital asset world and where your clients are, and if this is something your clients want today or they want tomorrow, it’s time to start thinking about it, says Sarah.ETF is an interesting model, and it provides you exposure. But with our model and cost structure, the advisor can hold the asset directly for their clients, and they can make the management fee rather than the ETF making the management fee, and the client holds the asset.Tweetable Quotes“Ami is your crypto friend, and the whole MeetAmi family of products is designed to help and be the co-pilot on the journey into digital assets as we transform into that world.” - Sarah “It is fundamental to enable the advisor to process the trades through a simple interface and then receive that data into their wealth management system or portfolio management system.” – Sarah“I don’t want you to throw your clients under a bus, but I will say the management of broker-dealers is not typically the leading edge of the sphere on innovation.” - Jason Resources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorSarah Morton – Linkedin | Website   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Seth Ross, General Manager for Dayforce Wallet and Consumer Services at Ceridian. Ceridian is one of the powerhouses of payroll worldwide, and Dayforce Wallet is a payroll tide banking and pays as you earn platform.Episode Highlights:0.46: It is an app and a debit card. The app allows you to see how much you have earned at any given point in between your pay cycles, and the debit card will enable you to go and spend it, says Seth. 2.16: Seth talks about the genesis of Dayforce Wallet and the challenge and opportunity that Ceridian saw, and why it stood up to this kind of extension? 3.27: It was always in the mind of David, CEO of Ceridian, that having real-time visibility on payroll would ultimately not just end with making things more convenient for the payroll manager but bringing that to the end-user and allowing them to get paid on demand, explains Seth.7.25: You are potentially the bank for some people, so talk to me about where you guys hope to take it from today, says Jason.9.10: Visibility is an under appreciated benefit. If you never actually take your payment on-demand, just having visibility in a spotless and easy place is helpful for people as well, Seth. 15.01: Five years from now, you won’t be the best employer to work for the list if you are not providing your employees with options and flexibility and how and when they get paid, says Seth.16.37: One thing that Seths wants to be changed in our company is that we would have 100,000 clients instead of 5000 clients so that we could access more workers and bring this to more people. 18.01: Seth hears great stories every day about people saying I will be tight on cash and my kid had a game and needed new pair of basketball shoes, and having this product allowed me to tap a button and buy my kid a new pair of shoes. It is just really motivating, and that is what gets me up in the morning.3 Key PointsWe want to help individuals take control of their financial lives and avoid costly debt traps. We’re going to put a tool in the hands of employees that allows them to access earnings as they already earned at no fee, says Seth.The relationship between earnings volatility and the desire to get paid as you go there has to be a correlation there, says Jason.The payroll industry at its heart is pretty conservative because you have one job to make sure everybody gets paid and no one gets paid the wrong amount, says Seth.Tweetable Quotes“We are all about making any day payday and giving average workers access to their earnings whenever they need it.” – Seth“Looking at data, I am finding that the typical range on payday loans is between 100 to $1000, with the average being somewhere below the hundreds.” - Jason“We see that the adoption skews to the larger companies. Ceridian averages about 1000 employees per company for each client that we work with, and on Dayforce wallet, it is a bit higher.” - SethResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorSeth Ross – Linkedin | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we have Fidelma McGuirk, founder, and CEO of Payslip. Payslip is an Ireland-based payroll company that does work all around the world. She is on the show to discuss the challenges of working with multi jurisdictions and other complexities. Episode Highlights:1.10: Payslip enables a multinational company to integrate all their IT systems and payment providers in different countries into a payslip. All the data flow is secure, structured, and standardized across other countries, says Fidelma.8.49: We want to have one standard way of working worldwide. We want to have useful tools to automate manual work and reduce the risk. And then, we want to have one system of record for our global payroll data so that we know we’re managing it carefully. So, I set the payslip as that central global parallel management technology, says Fidelma.10.16: The traditional services aggregator model is an American model. For example, if you find experienced payroll leaders in the US, 4 out of every five payslips in the US are issued to the ADP platform, says Fidelma.12.29: In Europe, there is a default outward approach to looking at why you are going to build your business, why you are going to have to be ready for it, and what gross efficiency looks like. It means you have to have an agile operational model. 17.15: A multinational employer has different payroll service providers. They don’t want to be logging into different software that each service provider built just for their part of the process of their own country. They wanted to decide how they automate their whole process from the beginning to the very end.24.52: When you are an entrepreneur for five years, and it is pretty established, then your job actually kind of changes. You get to do the piece you are good at, which is like keep finding more spaces to innovate to make it even better, and that’s most exciting, Fidelma.3 Key PointsFidelma founded the payslip in 2016, and her previous life involved the setup and management of operations across 21 countries for a tax company that she was leading.What our technology does is help unify the data model at the global level and help standardize the process at a global level. We have a workflow automation engine standardized across all the different countries but has lots of flexibility, says Fidelma.Payroll is a bit like IT tech support for people. It is challenging to be recognized until something goes wrong, and if you don’t hear anything about it usually means that it’s all running very well.Tweetable Quotes“Payroll is a systematic process. It requires every pay period in every country.”  - Fidelma“More often, most jurisdictions, especially large ones, use engineer solutions solely for their jurisdiction. They don’t necessarily do multi custodial or multijurisdictional.” - Jason“You need to prove the validity of the system, credibility of your company, and the longevity of it, but that’s a bit tricky.” - FidelmaResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorFidelma McGuirk – Linkedin | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason talks to Will Trout from Javelin Strategy and Research. He is the director of Digital Wealth Management. We brought him on the show to talk about some of the bigger trends in the wealth and assessment market and how they are potentially going to transform the industry in the next ten years.Episode Highlights:00.48: Will says that as the name implies, and from a technology standpoint, we focus on strategy for financial services institutions and large fintech providers and look at the intersection of strategy and technology as to how firms can advance their competitive position using tech.09.04: Will says that the friction that inhibited advisor access to private capital investments still largely remains. iCapital and Cais alone will not solve this problem, particularly when it comes to private equity.15.48: To productize direct indexing, you can kind of rule about how it scale and overcomes margins, but the most direct indexing strategies are built around the public equity markets, suggests Will. 16.31: To move towards retirement income focus demographics are pushing, the boomer generation is retiring, yields are low, and that are fueling interest in annuities and marketplace, says Jason.21.16: Industry as a whole needs to figure out ways to pull back and truly look at the complete lifestyle picture of the entire client and consider when it comes time to design whatever portfolio they’re investing in traditional markets, suggests Jason.25.58 Jason asks that the planning industry, with the advent of things like financial therapy and other concepts around financial wellness, is saying we have reached the point where we can be taking care of people’s assets, but now, how do we give them the ultimate version of their lives? 31.16: There is a lot of demand where the firm’s wealth managers fall short on life coaching and addressing the human frailties that define us all, says Will.39.03: More relationship-centric advisors trying to diversify into monetized areas rely on their CRM. But, there is a strong split between CRM at the enterprise level and the sales forces that offer a ton of functionality, says Will3 Key HighlightsThe definition of alternative investment is changing, but the theme is the same: looking for something different and something new. But the question remains, though, how can financial advisors access these new instruments, says Will.The growth of platforms like Simon markets has started offering structured notes and bank issues equities and now offering all sorts of non-securities products for most annuities, says Will.In the Financial therapy association or some specific people in the industry, speak out on the need for personal advice and write about dealing with people in grief, crisis, etc., says Jason.Tweetable Quotes“We can also survey financial advisors on an ongoing basis that serves as the fuel that drives our insights and works in support of our clients.” – Will Trout“We created systems to make it cheaper for the people who can’t afford to pay people who know how to give the advice.” – Jason“The therapist might be more adept at figuring out the real emotional issues, which will only help enhance the advisor’s experience.” – JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Jud Macrill, Co-Founder of Milemarker. Milemarker is a data solution company that helps financial services companies in an IaaS (Integration as a Service) specifically integrate data across many different platforms to get things talking to each other.Episode Highlights:00.36: Milemarker is born out of many years of frustration in the financial services industry. 5.02 Macril says that they find themselves more helping companies achieve a data warehouse experience whether they want to aspire toward a data lake or not. This is because data lakes are fundamentally unstructured data. 6.04: Jud says they see a huge opportunity to take every piece of information in their license data and help a client start to be actionable, experiential, and ultimately automated and efficient. 8.24: Jud says that they provide software which is our API technology, our data cloud, and our ETL processing in which the rules engine says, here is what your data is doing and when and how quickly it refreshes.11.01: Jason asks, with cloud-enabling COBOL, are you giving a solution for a problem that shouldn’t exist first? Because no one in the 1950s thought that this COBOL stuff would be used in the 2020s.13.25: Jason inquires, what kind of case studies do you have to show that you have saved X number of hours or provided X number of abilities for someone to scale larger?14.34: Jud suggested that they should be limiting the liability inside the firm by automating everything possible so that people can be more onward and upward in terms of their day-to-day.24.16: Jason asks what advice would you give to people who maybe don’t qualify the level to work with you or want to get started at taking control of their data and standardizing their digital processes?26.51: Companies in the future will have to be stock 1, stock 2 ISO certified, and understanding what that means today will dramatically improve your long-term value, says Jud.3 Key HighlightsJud is a creative person and has been a marketing officer at multiple firms, and his entire goal is to help financial services companies that are inherently creative to achieve creativity with data and solutions that they need.The future of a financial advisor is made inside a financial services company, and the maximum of time is going to be spent on cloud collaboration than you even realize.If you are unwilling to invest the time to standardize and create a process or recording or something repeatable out of financial service, you are just not solving your solution, suggest Jason.Tweetable Quotes“If you have a node code system that you can integrate APIs into, let’s do it. We will continue making it a more efficient experience for people to use their data.” – Jud“People often have a tough time expressing what they want, and getting into financial tools and understanding them allows them to say, this is what I wanted.” – Jud“You have to have people that have the tenacity to grow and build and prove themselves and are constantly looking for an edge.” - JudResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorJud Macrill – Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Sebastian Skwarek, co-founder of PreciseFP. PreciseFP was a guest way back on episode 26 in the summer of 2018 with Co-Founder Don Whalen. Don talked about their digital onboarding platform or digital data gathering platform for financial advisors.Episode Highlights:1.25: Sebastian explains PreciseFP is the virtual data gathering and client onboarding platform, provides the ability to customize a client journey fully, bring data in-house, and then share that data with the tools that advisors use.2.22: There are many features with PreciseFP, but the key feature is that the advisors who come to PreciseFP are ready to use block finders and personalized and customizable fact-finders ready to use as the box. 10.12: Either CRM or financial planning software if we do not integrate with a given financial software, so either way, you will be able to move the data from a client-facing application, which is PreciseFP, into your CRM and then into financial planning software.12.08: Sebastian says that they wanted to make sure what they were implementing, the features they were released, should be used by advisers. It is not something they came up with because they thought these would be helpful. 14.00: Jason says that the big news with you guys is that you got acquired earlier this year by Docupace. Can you speak to that? 20.53: Sebastian says that they are proud of their customer support because this is where we meet our clients. We will always give you a walk-through the minute you sign up. We are going to reach out to you within 48 hours. We are going to schedule a meeting with you to make sure you understand what you are getting into and how easy it is to navigate through PreciseFP. 24.03: Sebastian says that we can implement everything, but we want to make the system easy to use and manageable at the end of the day. We wanted to bring a difference in a benefit to invite.3 Key HighlightsThe main features of PreciseFP is to build a journey from start to finish and automated components that are the fact-finders, PDF markers; it is a CRM or financial planning software.Sebastian says that they want to make and enable the right tech that they can use within your practice. Data gathering is one thing, and then managing that information once it comes to you elegantly and adequately on a bucket.Sebastian says that they are building a fantastic ecosystem that will become a norm within the wealth industry. There is more to come in the next six months.Tweetable Quotes“Lead generation pieces are built interactive client engagements that you can take out of the box as we give them from a template library or build your own.” – Sebastian“You cannot ever compare Google forms or fillable PDFs because the difference is first impression counts with your clients.” – Sebastian“Everybody requests different things, and balancing what’s right and what will not work is a real challenge.” – SebastianResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorSebastian Skwarek – Linkedin Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today is the 2021 year in review show and Jason brought back his colleague and occasional guest host, Guy Anderson, to interview him on the course of events and what happened in the past year. Episode Highlights:00.42: This is our second year in review, and Jason has done over 200 podcasts now in the fintech space. No one in the country understands the Fintech landscape better than you, says Guy04.08 Jason says that data tells other institutions about who it is you are. That data allows the current bank or financial institution to make decisions regarding services and products and other things that you can offer you. 06.10: We need to think about the ability to create technology that truly is client-centric in its focus, and to do that, we need to be able to access the data securely and effectively. 10.52: Swift data is a platform for securely storing your data. With this, if you have open banking, you can store everything. You could technically leave it in the institution connecting institutions or can extract it and keep it yourself, says Jason.20.38: Jason says Holistiplan came on the scene couple of years ago. It takes up pdfs with a tax return, spits out a user-friendly report, let people know what’s going on with the tax return, and is also a helpful tool for demonstrating value and helping clients.24.51: Microsoft working on HoloLens doesn’t even have monitors anymore. This is where they headsets and have monitors rendered in front of them.28.31: The difference between fractional ownership and blockchain is that blockchain being divisible means that they have to take zero-risk by its nature. 30.08: When you think about your choices as an owner of a real estate property or your own home for accessing the capital within that property, it is minimal borrowing, says Jason.31.22: Diversification can own fractional real estate worldwide, and it’s finally coming to markets and finally coming true, says the guy.3 Key HighlightsGuy asks Jason, you had a podcast with a company called Flinks, who are they, and who are some of the other prominent players in the open banking space? People talk about as mass proliferated Bitcoin is. However, there is still friction and anything that reduces friction access for the common person or investment accounts or whatever it is, gets the rewards, says Jason.NFT, Non-fungible tokens are proof of ownership of something on a blockchain. So, in theory, your house could be NFT, says Jason.Tweetable Quotes“In Swift data technically, the network verifies the data amongst itself and its validity. Theoretically, it is possible for something that we call disclosure list disclosure.” – Jason“Holistiplan technology is now far more accessible and far more accurate than standard things, especially the tax forms.” – Jason“The governments worldwide need to empower consumers, protect them, and encourage competition. The rates to our data should be enshrined into law.” – JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to James Rockwood, founder, and CEO of Capintel. Capintel is an investment analytics company that tells you how your performance looks and does all kinds of proposal building, automation, and team collaboration tools that reduce the heavy lifting and let us go back to focusing more time on what matters that’s the one on one time with our clients. Episode Highlights:00.42: Capintel is an investment comparison proposal platform for financial advisors that help them organize how they present and pitch investment products to their customers. 06.15: Jason says that industry people focus on demonstrating how smart they are to the client instead of speaking their language.09.00: Most advisors deal with tons of different metrics and data. They have complex reasons for recommending fund A versus fund B or portfolio A versus portfolio B, says James. 11.40: One of the bigger things going on around the world is they move towards even greater transparency and regulatory reform around any number of things, says Jason.16.08: Client focus forms will be good for the industry. It will be excellent once we get through the specificity of understanding, like how much information is enough, says James.21.41: It is interesting how in the 80s, the advisors had all the access, and now you could argue that retail clients have slightly more access because they can now access these random securities like NFTs in crypto, says James.26.00: In 2022, Canadian fintech startups will be able to submit a three to five-minute video to pitch their idea. We will provide them with access or select companies with slightly used MacBook Pros and then introductions to some of our Angel investors, says James.3 Key Highlights:Capintel has a product management component where you can build your models. Then, you will organize it the way you want and make that into capital by entering the codes, the fund tickers, and allocations.Financial goals are not met with a single financial product. Instead, it is a combination of financial products like a mixture of investments, insurance, willingness, date planning all over the place, says James.The amount of change required in regulation for financial advisors from a reporting perspective or a record-keeping perspective is massive and shouldn’t be underestimated. In addition, people had to make huge changes to their day-to-day workflow to be able to do it.Tweetable Quotes:“Being able to strike the right balance between informative and easily digestible is hard. Simplicity itself is a beautiful art but difficult.” – Jason“We are excited to be trying to build up more advisors’ abilities to address that holistic wealth problem because it will be a combination of the advisor’s judgment and knowledge of the client.” – James“People will be looking more and more for broader-based advice instead of Hollistic traditional investment management role.” - JamesResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorJames Rockwood – Linkedin Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Deven Hurt about the company Prediction strike of which Deven is the CEO and Co-Founder. Prediction Strike is a sports betting platform that treats athletes like stocks.Episode Highlights:00.45: Deven says, prediction strike is a sports stock market that allows users to buy and sell shares of athletes as if they were stocks. He said that they want people to start feeling like they are investing in players and using their sports knowledge as an investment.08.06: Jason says, based on the market dynamics, you probably always will play the role of the market maker for players with liquidity below a certain level and bench players whom no one knows their first name outside of their city.11.31: Jason affirms, as you guys are creating a market price, there will be some transparency in how you do it and specifically in the earnings. 19.26: Deven says we have started to work on partnering with athletes, and a big thing that we have told all the athletes is we want you to do whatever you want to do. 21.20: Deven explains that they are doing NFL, NBA, UFC right now, which has been exciting, and the next phase is going to be expanding esports. They have baseball and global soccer or global football as the priority.23.05: Academics will be very curious to see how market dynamics play out and the number of papers just being written off to see your behavior in terms of valuation and market clearing, says Jason.25.23: Jason asks, if you had one wish you could change in your company or industry as a whole, what would it be?28.44: Jason says, in Prediction strike, if you are willing to put the money in, you can have whatever draft team you ever want regardless of who else is playing the game, and that’s a key differentiator. 3 Key HighlightsDeven explains how prediction strike works and how it is different from other sports betting options out there.The interesting thing about traditional fantasy is you can’t necessarily get access to players you want. Whereas in prediction strike, you could construct whatever team you want. You just have to be willing to pay the price to get them on your team, says Jason.Athletic lives are short. In most cases, very few convert them into marketable brands that can be carried on after they retire, says Jason.Tweetable Quotes“The fan perception of athletes is so funny in how that matches up with how the players play, and sometimes it doesn’t.” – Deven“The amount of random jets and giants players who get traded is spectacular, and it’s just because they are so dialed into that hometown and hometown effect is real.” - Deven “I learned that it takes almost $200 million to go through the licensing if you want to operate as an online sports bet.” - DevenResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorDeven Hurt – Linkedin | Website Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Steve Boms, executive director of the Financial Data and Technology Association, a.k.a. FDATA. FDATA is a global trade association started in 2013 - 2014 in the UK. Episode Highlights:05.38: Steve says, you don’t need to understand the mechanism of how electricity is traveling from the power plant through the transformer into your house. Similarly, we have to think about open banking. But you need to know what happens if something goes wrong.07.52: Open banking is all about competition, and it is all about a more inclusive, more accessible financial services system that meets you as the consumer where you are rather than it being dictated to you by a large financial institution. 17.45: Steve says you can let the industry figure out the standard and the technology to make it work. And this is how the third-party bank gets approved to play in the sandbox. 18.31: Home automation is nowhere near what it could be because you have to worry about these things, says Jason.19.25: If you talk to the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK, some of the regulators that were part of the implementation of this will be the first to tell you that we didn’t get this all correct, and we knew we weren’t going to get it all correct, says Steve.25.18: The future of any large bank, if they are smart enough, is to adopt the revolution to becoming banking as a service platform as fast as humanly possible to seize that opportunity. But executives aren’t rewarded for that kind of innovative thinking and banking unfortunate traditionally, says Jason.3 Key Points:Open banking is the digitization of financial services. It is a free and competitive marketplace for a consumer to decide which service provider you want to choose and provide you with the product or financial service. That service provider can be a bank, or it can be a nonbank.Steve says that the President of the United States earlier this year put out an executive order on competition, and this was one of the things he called out that even in the US, where you have 10,000 financial institutions and thousands of fintech, there is still not enough competition and we are not meeting the promise of just how innovative, and competitive this marketplace could be. We need to have open banking, and the government will have to mandate it. In Canada, a lot of our group’s conversations with the Department of Finance have been around keeping the Canadian financial services regime competitive against Europe and the UK, as they are catapulting ahead on open banking, and Canada hasn’t.Tweetable Quotes:“In theory, the government only has one concern: what is the best case for our constituents and our economy more broadly, and our view is that data is the best outcome.” – Steve“Never underestimate an institution’s ability to be spiteful if it’s not in their best interest to be cooperative, and this is where legislation matters.” – Jason“When you bring in a set of companies or use cases that are not regulated or supervised to the extent that a large national financial institution’s initial reaction is this is unsafe.” - SteveResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorSteve Boms – Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s episode is a recording of a brief intro that Jason gave to the recent Canadian advisor Tech Expo. It was the first financial advisor technology expo of its type in Canada, and that was put on by the Financial planning association Canada, for which Jason is the President.Episode Highlights:00.56: Digital transformation is about taking your practice and digitizing it, and reaping the benefits of digitization, efficiency, scalability, and hands-on experiences for both you and your consumer.01.12: Which of us doesn’t want to do the less heavy lifting, make more money, and provide clients?02.06 There are always opportunities around the outskirts of core technologies, and you need to treat your business like a business and think about how you can enhance it. 02.35: The dealers are too busy worrying about the mass audience in core technologies. So they are not going to get things like your booking scheduling systems. 03.01: If you don’t know what is out there in the marketplace or what others have done, it is tough to figure out what you are going to do for yourself. 4.00 Technology is meant to support your business strategy. Don’t go looking for the solution to your problem if you haven’t figured out your problem correctly. 5.57: Once you have identified what you do, look for repetitive things that take a lot of time and keep you away from facing clients. Because those are the ones that are the most useful to automate basically, and those are the ones that are most likely to have solutions. 07.07 Most important is to invest the time to learn and onboard the technology. Set aside time to understand the technology and then realize it so much and so well that you can turn around and train your staff on it.11.08: The day tomorrow and the next day are all about you. It’s all about technologies that you can choose and deliver.3 Key Points:The first tip is that you need to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset to start the visual transformation, says Jason.There are tools for the problems that are better handled through technology than by human beings. Human beings are good at figuring out complex relationships between things.Advisors digitized can transfer over all their systems with a couple of usernames, and everything is done at a premium.Tweetable Quotes:“There are so many little solutions out there that cost a couple of dollars per month to solve problems that are taking hours per week away from you.”“Some advisors don’t listen to you, steal you using E signature, don’t have a CRM, and don’t care about innovating any other stuff.”Resources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Gavin Spitzner, President of Wealth Consulting Partners. Gavin is one of the more recognized fintech experts in the US that consults with significant players on the state of their advisor technology and its future development. Episode Highlights:5.58: Gavin says it is not an institutionalized legacy in terms of how we ensure that we are delivering a client-centric and advice-oriented relationship where it always puts client interests first, and we are here to help and guide them. 8.57 Gavin suggests if you look at the research when clients leave, it's not about performance. It's all about the technology and communication you are doing.10.29: Jason inquires, what are the table stakes you think exist now and what are the better implementations over top of that? 11.42: Gavin recommends, "You have to make some of the decisions around what is high up on the value chain that I can uniquely bring value to and what else could I automate to digital engagement." 15.01: Jason suggests that you have to take a client-centric approach when you think of a plan-centric approach. 25.09: Automated intelligence overlays on top of CRM's because it's hard for companies to do many things well, and we can find some of the more specialized firms that are deep diving into it.27.22: Just because the software says do this doesn't mean that it matches the human being, says Jason.30.21: The entire industry is better off by niche development because you can cater to a small group of people incredibly well at a deeper level.33.00: The growth rates for direct indexing come from a smaller base, depending on how it is measured, it will be off the charts.34.52: Gavin says that if you educate your client, you will not focus on your custodial statement. You are going to focus on your performance report, which is about you and your goals.36.23: With the real aspects of COVID and changes in employment, whether voluntary or involuntary, everyone's life is turned upside down to some degree. 38.21: Advisors can guide clients to look at different work arrangements to take advantage of the wealth they have accumulated and permit them to spend more and do things differently when they can still take advantage of it. 3 Key Points Gavin shares how people came to advisors in the old days because it was the only way to access the markets or the information.Gavin points out that we need to have a better digital engagement process, but the traditional portals out there do not shape or make a match.Jason explains how the advisors who tend to focus in concentrated niches are growing at far faster rates than the advisors we need.Tweetable Quotes"The role of technology or data to engage with clients and make a meaningful impact on their lives motivates me." – Gavin"You can't go back to the old premise if you discover what it means going forward." – Jason"You are going to be more knowledgeable if you believe in technology and handle financial issues leading with planning and definition." - GavinResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorGavin Spitzner – LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Kevin Levitt; he is the Director of Industry and Business Development for Financial Services for Nvidia. The company is one of the driving forces behind the technology powering artificial intelligence today.Episode Highlights:00.38: Nvidia is a company that was started about 30 years ago almost, and they have really pioneered the use of graphics processing units. 08.12: What Jason has seen in academic studies is more accurate FICO scores in terms of calculating the probability of default.09.58 Jason asks, “What is the natural type of function for artificial intelligence disturbing the market today like what is the commonality around the things is replacing?10.20: Kevin says in the example of Siri virtual assistant or chatbot. In the context of financial services that are helping us to transfer a balance or to understand what our balance is, or pay a bill, it goes from there to assist the call center agent where we have a more complex problem. With the call center and the agent, the AI is actually complimenting human assistants with information.18.30: Large banks are trying to figure out how to build an enterprise AI capability, AI infrastructure to support the migration from a handful of AI-enabled applications up to 100s.22.10: Jason inquires, “What is the kind of cool use cases you see being drummed up and coming forward going in the future?” 26.30: Kevin talks about the four primary players in terms of big retail, big tech, fintech and big banks, are going to be the primary competitors and if one of them is using AI to deliver a virtual assistant or chatbot and the other one is still using some form of rules-based kind of chat experience, AI one is going to win.28.40 Jason: The technology companies choosing to come out and this is going to make everybody sharper, and everybody really focused on their value proposition and really try to eliminate friction.35.32: NVIDIA is all about innovation and stretching, kind of the boundaries of where people thought. Computing power could go and certainly where artificial intelligence could be of benefit. 3 Key Points:For the past 15 plus years, Kevin has been at the intersection of data technology and financial services.The technology can enable a better customer experience across many dimensions when artificial intelligence and deep learning models that leverage natural language processing are utilized.There are lots of opportunities to continually improve how AI is leveraged within any industry, including within the context of financial services.Tweetable Quotes:“You can think of artificial intelligence, or AI is kind of the Super umbrella if you will, and underneath that falls a category of artificial intelligence which is machine learning.” – Kevin“It is not about job loss it is about job improvement, which is freeing us to do the higher-order capabilities.” – Kevin“There are some of the smartest people in the world that are working on financial services, and they see the power and the opportunity associated with AI.” - KevinResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Denelle Dixon, CEO and executive director of the Stellar Development Foundation. Stellar is one of those coins that has been around for a while and has some very interesting use cases. Episode Highlights:1.08: Dixon says that the stellar development Foundation is a nonprofit, non stock entity whose sole mission and soul focuses on developing the ecosystem around the stellar network and also shepherding the codebase for the stellar network.4.33: There are lots of stable coins that are issued on stellar, and these coins are like USDC, and you can actually send the stable coin so that you don’t actually have to worry about any volatility in the cryptocurrency market itself, says Dixon.8.25: The notion of having stable coins actually creates an opportunity for the stability so that you don’t actually have to worry that when you send a transaction, affirms Dixon.9.03: Dixon says that we think about the financial system from where we sit, wherever that might be but it’s really hard to think about in certain countries.11.34: Leaf global company has created the digital wallet that folks can use when they are crossing borders.14.31: Blockchain is the fastest way to transfer money between countries with the least amount of fees and your vendors on the other side don’t necessarily need to understand that blockchain is how you got it to them because it just goes into their bank account. 23.19: If you have the global network with the partners that create the on and off-ramps and then from there everyone can just build on it, and it can just grow. 28.37: China is developing its centralized cryptocurrency for absolute control of their economy. They do have the great firewall that gives them the more potential than anyone else to actually shut something down.3 Key Points:The global remittance system is enormous. The amount of money crossing borders, whether it be people sending money to support people back home, or even for transactional purposes, is substantial.Back in the old days of the Internet, you had a lot of Silicon Valley building for the world, and that’s actually not the way they should be. It always should be solving local problems with local solutions.The beauty of blockchain is that it allows the local developers to look at the problems they see around them and fix them in ways that make sense for their communities and do so in a global network, says Dixon.Tweetable Quotes:“We have come a long way, and we are now using the likes of a cryptocurrency that can transact the pennies.”- Jason“Blockchain creates the opportunity to truly have a global financial system that doesn’t exist today.” – Dixon“Not everybody does understand all the inner workings of how HTTPS works, and yet we still use the Internet every single day.” - DixonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorDenelle Dixon: LinkedIn | Website Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's episode, Jason will talk to Brandon Chapman, founder of Advisor Flow. It is a tool that helps advisors learn more about their clients in onboarding and acquire vital information to them faster and better. Episode Highlights:01.10: Brandon explains Advisor flow was incorporated last year. He was working on a project three years ago because he was so frustrated with using PDF and word documents to gather facts about his clients in his practice. Then, during the pandemic, it appeared every other advisor realized that pen and paper wasn't sufficient and efficient. 03.40: Jason suggests if you want to see who is ready to work with it, put an obstacle in front of them. 07.18: Brandon says, if a robot is emailing you to do something, it's very easy to ignore it, but if it's a human that you know is going to call you next or see you at the dinner party, there's a much higher chance you're going to do that thing.09.24: Jason asks, how much of the financial industry has been around relying on frictions as a means of keeping people in place?10.46: Brandon said when there was no information online, a few companies could get away with this, but the fact of the matter is that the world has shifted, and the most profitable businesses are the ones that recognize when you put the customer first and you end up doing better. 18.53: Jason asks Brandon, tell us about how your first integration is gone and the feedback you've gotten from users as far.20.18: Brandon shares his wish that we need more people that challenge the status quo out there, and who will own the experience they offer.20.28: Jason asks, what have been the biggest challenges you encountered in getting the company to where it is today? 20.47: Brandon suggests, in the tech business, if you are not making money early enough, you make a deal with the devil, which might impact the decisions that you make afterward. 3 Key Points:The paper chase is the most challenging part of the financial advisory planning process, and if you can make that process seamless, it will encourage the odds that a prospect becomes a client, says Brandon.Brandon explains that any data collected in their system will feed into the advisor's CRM choice and potentially into the onboarding technology of choice, which could lead to account opening on the investment side.The most important thing in a fintech is you could know especially early in life is what you are and what you're not, says Jason.Tweetable Quotes:"There is a certain type of human being who's ok with turning over their entire lives to a machine." – Jason"Friction is not a way to win business. This is a way to get off your client base." – Jason"This industry requires a lot of relationship building, a lot of building trust and a lot of following through on promises." – BrandonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorBrandon – LinkedIn | Website  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason talks to Tom Carpenter and Jason Chomik from the financial data exchange which is an organization that works towards unifying data flow across different financial platforms.Episode Highlights:01.15: Tom explains that FDX is a not-for-profit organization specializing in an open banking or open fintechnical structure. They got an API that is open to use and one can freely use the API to ensure the safe exchange of data between organizations.03.46: The industry could work together that you had a governance structure that levels the playing field among Fintech's, financial institutions, and aggregators so that the market could determine the best way to deliver on consumer demand, says Jason Chomik.05.24: Open finance is probably the camel's nose under the tent of a broader set of use cases and a desire for consumers access, user data across a spectrum of industries, says Jason Chomik.11.50: Tom points out that on boarding many institutions is complex, and it is not a light undertaking, especially when you start thinking about the different security protocols and all of the other pieces that need to go in place to make everything happen. 13.43: You got a lot of adoption that you have to get before you can turn off an old technology to make the other ubiquitous, suggests Jason Chomik.14.31: Jason Chomik says you got to phase a timeline for phased implementation to adopt API standards. They have seen other jurisdictions around the world that put very aggressive timelines in place on API adoption. 19.19 Jason asks, you had one wish for something that could change your company or industry as a whole what could it be? 19.30 Tom says his wish would probably be more data-sharing agreements signed more quickly for us to create scale quickly. 21.39: No matter what type of open banking infrastructure is put in place for the system or in place around the world, the standard API is a function of all of them. 25.08: Jason asks what excites you the most about what you are working on and keeps getting out of bed in the morning to keep on fighting the good fight. 3 Key Points:Jason Chomik shares why they started using available finance. They felt this is broader than banking data, and insurance, investments, and taxes are considered a wide swath of financial information.The more people work with you, the more straightforward it becomes to transact within the network and the more valuable it becomes.Jason Chomik says, from a success standpoint they noticed, how many consumer accounts have been transitioned from credential-based access to the FDX API. Tweetable Quotes:"Tom created a platform for companies with their different systems" – Jason Pereira"It's the biggest challenge to making sure that both the Fintech's and the banks are walking to the same drum because all have the same end goal." - Tom"Open banking is one of the single most important business issues if not data rights issues in the marketplace today." - Jason PereiraResources Mentioned:LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorTom Carpenter – LinkedinJason Chomik – Linkedin  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.