Fintech Impact

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.

Jason is going to talk to cyber security expert, Evgeniy Kharam. They talk about general concerns around cybersecurity and best practices.Episode Highlights:01.07: Evgeniy work full time in the company for Herjavec group, being around almost 20 years and they are a cyber security company that focuses on cybersecurity only, and they have enterprises on a variety of talks. 03.14: Evgeniy explains that ransomware is basically somebody was able to get access to your environment. Your environment could be your service or IoT devices or your gas station tanks. 07.11: Evgeniy points out that they always have different scales of cyber security controls for protection. She asks if you run a small business and this business is acceptable to the public and people walking in back and forth, but you never lock your screen, then what is the point?13.47 Jason says you are able to have different unique complex passwords for every website so, if one thing gets hacked, only the one thing gets hacked, not everything else.15.02: Jason asks, in small medium besides businesses who are users of technology, to talk to me about best practices for protecting themselves. 16.25: Evgeniy says, if you create your own software, you also wanted to have an MFA for the users or in the majority of the cases, if you can pass the authentication to LinkedIn, to Google then people can utilize this way to connect to you and you not going to be saving their credentials. 23.41: Jason points out that making an email look like it comes from another company is very easy. 24.10: Jason says there is no full delegation of your diligence, you have to take responsibility for basically being your first line of protection. 24.59 Jason explains why when you look at a marketing website, the first thing as a sales pitch is not security.25.28: Evgeniy says the biggest challenge in the cyber security industry is definitely the amount of information we have, and we just don’t have enough time to be aware about everything. There is so much going on daily that just impossible for one person to know everything.  3 Key Points:In small scale business, you want to have an antivirus or EDR and protection response or EPP and word protection on all your devices, at least if or when somebody will get into not have such easier time to affect your system, says Evgeniy.The most common form of getting into people’s systems without authorization is human engineering.There are a variety of tools on the market, something called US dynamic access through the channels that will basically validate what can be done with your website, what can be done with the APIs from your website.Tweetable Quotes:“There’s a lot of information support lines for hacker organizations.” – Evgeniy“There are definitely attacks that are based on just hacking through code absolutely.” – Evgeniy“It doesn’t matter what innovation we’re talking about security plays a role in all of it.” - JasonResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorEvgeniy Kharam – LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today’s episode, Jason is going to talk to Maya Pochiraju, VP of product at Payability. Today, Maya will talk about the challenges faced during covid by retailers and themselves in scaling to a giant shift to online business. Episode Highlights:00.56: Maya says, Payability sits at the intersection of e-commerce, financing, and payments. It is the core financial platform for all e-commerce sellers providing both financing and payment solutions to help customers scale and grow their businesses. 02.50: Jason asks when you go to deal a traditional bank, they look at the simpler time-proven, easier, faster things for them, which is limited based on the fact that human being is reviewing that. But when you throw so many points of data, how many points of data do you guys typically consume on an average case?05.10 Maya says their customers are all e-commerce sellers of varying sizes. It could be a seller as new as three months in business all the way up to someone who’s been in business for years. 07.52 Maya explains that they have one of the core payment products, a Payability seller card that allows their customers to spend their funds immediately and on the go.08.31: Jason asks, “Please share just how much your lending volumes increased over that period of time?”09.22: In growing the company, it is hard to continue growing the number of users you support without growing your headcount and talent and team, says Maya.10.34: The instant advances that we provide our capital advances about start customers to invest in inventory or advertising, says Maya.11.32: Jason says the backlog or shipping containers to come out of to get into the harbor in this crisis point is unprecedented in US ports. 12.21: Maya points out that supply chain challenges have caused the increase in kind of time to get inventory from upstream vendors to our customers. 14.00: The technology is what drives the business and what drives our customer experience, says Maya.3 Key Points:Maya explains that they have a lot and a ton of data that they leverage on a daily basis to continue to serve their customers.Maya shares how their financing products are really microgeneration in nature and how they quickly got customers and more money with their daily payment products.The e-commerce marketplaces have done a fantastic job of giving their sellers access to share data so that we don’t have to rely on traditional metrics but instead can lean in on e-commerce specific metrics, says Maya.Tweetable Quotes:“When talking about scaling typically, vendor financing is the biggest issue.” – Jason“We are consuming over 1700 data points on an average customer” -Maya“We have done to date almost four and a half billion dollars worth of financing.” – MayaResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInMaya Pochiraju – LinkedIn  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today’s episode, Jason is going to talk to David Reeve CEO of InvestorCOM. The company is a provider of regulatory compliance software and communications solutions for wealth managers, asset managers, and insurers in the financial services industry.  Episode Highlights:00.34: InvestorCom has been around for over 25 years. For the last decade, we have been working exclusively in the wealth management industry and specifically helping wealth firms deal with new regulations, says David.01.35: David says they managed documents for industries like wealth management and other financial services sectors that are very document heavy. The business really evolved from one of managing physical documents to digital documents and now software. 01.59: The western world of wealth compliance is all about disclosure, typically residing in documents.03.27: There has been a lot of regulatory change in the last couple of years US, Canada, around the world, and Australia for certain, and this has been almost unprecedented to the degree to which we have seen such compliance to wave rollout, Jason says.04.45 David explains what they try and do is work with firms to digitize processes and make some of the cost go away so one can, not just layer on additional people to comply with these new regulatory requirements.05.54: There are a couple things firms are adopting digitization more broadly, and then that is jumping over the fence into the compliance department, says David.08.01: In a practice management standpoint, if you are developing model portfolios and rolling that across your entire firm and then validating those portfolio decisions on a semi-frequent basis, you are ok, says David.09.38: It is a world of increasing complexity, and as per David what the regulators are saying is we need to create some standards around how products and advice are recommended. 10.58 Jason says that when the numbers update, that is all changed next month, and this has been a real challenge. They must have been turning to say, not only how do you help us do this, but what are we supposed to be doing in the first place?12.32: David says as a firm, we were getting some really good feedback on these peer rating concepts, and we are trying to create that standard as a front for the industry.15.32: It is exciting to be able to help clients comply, check the box often, build relationships with their clients by having more informed disclosure in doing all of this in a reasonably economical way, says David.17.12: We will be working on digital platforms that also enable or connect to all kinds of stuff in different sources, says Jason.19.12: According to David, moving some of the diligence up to pre-trade is a pretty big opportunity for the industry. 20.10: Jason asks, “If you were to sum up the overarching trends you see around the world and the bigger challenges in terms of regulation, then, by all means, tell the listeners how you are solving or helping people with this work?22.50: When you get into some of the requirements where you need to have advisors change behavior, that is where regulatory becomes much more challenging, says David.23.45: As a partner to firms, you need to start thinking about elements of making technology as invisible as possible.24.10: The whole area around adoption and encouraging adoption, making technology as light and invisible as possible is vitally important as we move forward, and of course, fortunately, technology is moving in that direction as well. 24.41: Technology is not your strategy; technology needs to enable your strategy, which is what last upon people looking for magic or solar bullet. 3 Key Points:There is a bit of debate in the industry whether compliance should be disclosure-driven or whether it should. Regulators should be looking at other aspects within the sector, but the reality is compliance.The industry matures as data is available as standards are available. It is a tremendous opportunity for the regulators to encourage the industry to adopt some of the standards and leverage technology to comply.Traditional wealth firms are enjoying B2B model, and the user experience is dramatically better and more efficient.Tweetable Quotes:“There is a huge wave of new regulations that add at the retail well space in the last several years, and we really positioned ourselves as providing compliance pain relief with the technology that we provide to our clients.” – David“The industries are starting to recognize the value of technology as being actually a competitive advantage because you don’t need to layer on additional people plus you can meet your compliance requirements without interrupting the workflow of the advisor.” – David“The regulators are a little more focused on the traditional brokerage model where products are being sold, and they are concerned about potential conflicts of interest in that Channel.” – David“If we don’t deliver solutions that provide high

On today’s episode, Jason is going to talk to Trevor Greenway Founder and CEO of InterVal. It is a dual-sided platform that is predicated on the democratization of valuation. The company believes that business owners and their key advisors deserve to have access to key metric and the leading indicators that are driving it at all times. Episode Highlights:01.06: Earlier, Trevor was in consultancy for about 11 years. The entire model is predicated on helping business owners earlier in the process, making any less of an emotional readiness type decision and something where they can be more proactive. 01.39: During the consultancy stint, Trevor found out that the commoditization of advice regarding accounting and banks is driven by when can I bring value at a specific point in time? But that specific point in time was usually too late 02.20: It was just through the manual process as a consultancy that Trevor and his team began developing automated tools. 03.35: At some point, you may be thinking about the exit or how much the business is worth or fill forms that say your business’s worth. Everybody is really operating in this giant black box without constant feedback about the market value. They are most probably the largest asset they have is. 05.13: Trevor talks about the awareness of one’s overall financial health. As result, they thought it was always backwards that the value of one’s business, which first SMEs is typically their largest asset is the black box that no one is aware of, so they are making contributions in the form of growing their business trying to invest in certain elements of it, so they are doing that part. 07.15: Trevor explains what ultimate KPI is? He advises one needs to where they stand today, and then it is that measurement over time, and its implications on all of the other advisory relationships, whether that be tax planning, insurance, wealth advisory, or funding financial planning. They are all integrated, and we have to be able to educate the business owner and their advisors around this key metric. 09.02: For those that have not yet converted to the role of cloud accounting, which allows Trevor and his teams to regularly extract that accounting data upon which to provide regular analysis to update valuation provider evaluation at onset and other key metrics and qualitative. 11.09: Trevor explains how they have numerous KPI metrics and analyses to tell the consumer how they are doing it. Things like current ratio, inventory ratio, inventory turnover, then benchmarking that against like industry. 13.02: Trevor built a proprietary algorithm based on history. They took dozens of due diligence processes and deconstructed them into common areas where prospective purchasers will look at the end regardless of how far you are away from leaving. 15.00: Business owners understand the qualitative factors that, while they may not directly impact the valuation, they impact the risk factors associated with that valuation.16.14: Trevor explains how their job is to create a discovery mechanism for those looking to deliver value.17.01: Your financial statements are not entirely indicative of your free and clear cash flow, so you think the easiest example is you have a business owner who is either overpaying or underpaying themselves relative to what it would cost to replace that skill set, says Trevor.20.00: Trevor explains how they want to help business owners; once they understand that, they talk about that end state. 22.02: Explaining ripple effect Trevor says it doesn’t just impact the business owner. It doesn’t just impact their account, and it has an impact on their legal structure. It has an impact on their tax planning. It has an impact on their financial plan, and their insurance products assessed that they that are necessitated to protect them. 25.23: If you want to deep dive and learn more and learn as much as you want, but in a matter of minutes, you can get what you need, and balance between compact complexity and simplicity in this space is will probably remain a challenge.3 Key Points:Trevor narrates about his corporate journey and how he developed automated tools. They built a tool for their own internal purposes; once they built it, a bunch of people wanted to license it.Trevor explains how they are tapping upon other databases of publicly available information on transactions to come to that based on industry. Jason talks about the two types of investors. The strategic buyers who basically just want to be involved, and then there are investment Buyers who just want to own the business and essentially have no operational need to run the business. Then there are ones who actually want to run the business. Tweetable Quotes:“It is our goal and our mission to help business owners and their advisors create awareness.” - Trevor Greenway“Everybody is working in a giant black-box without constantly knowing the market

On today’s episode, Jason is going to talk to Hans Zandhuis, President of Ally Lending (Acquired Health Credit Services) at Ally. Hans is working on the point-of-sale lending arm of Ally Financial and Ally Bank. The company has been around for four to six years. It started as a credit services court, but they were only lending in the medical environment; later, Ally wired us in October of 2019 and continued growing and standing. Episode Highlights:02.05: Hans Zandhuis and two other founders Matt McKenna and Clark Burget, started the business in June of 2015. They self-funded it and grew through the platform, brought on a number of other institutions to kind of be their balance sheet partners, and then grew the business. 02.31: In October of 2019, Hans’s company was in the medical space; basically, they were in the doctors and office inception of the business; that was how do we help consumers pay for health care? 03.21: Hans’ company was acquired in 2019; they started looking at other markets and moved into home improvement in May 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. In early 2021 they piloted in retail markets. 03.34: Hans shares how long it took him to reach the 400 million in total lending.05.02: Hans explains, when it comes to lending from traditional banks, the reality is we are typically talking much larger numbers than $750. We are talking about mortgages on your house. We are talking about personal lines of credit, several thousand, and at that moment in time, when you have that expense that presents itself to you.06.29: Consumers are really starting to move towards, and because of that you look overall at the general line of credit continuing to grow at 15 to 20% clip per year.07.02: We also saw that consumers kept their credit cards for either emergency; if their dryer goes out, they go for a vacation. So, they don’t want to have no credit facility that limits their ability to vacation.09.01: Hans explains how they make the process so seamless and simple that the consumer just adds in sometimes?11.04: Talking about value props, Hans says it is about how do we integrate into consumers so when investing in the technology, we are investing in our APIs we are investing in, how we integrate into multiple platforms across multiple verticals.12.45: Hans further adds that we will look to develop a better understanding of how we are making decisions around that, so we start talking about where we are investing as a technology. He says, “To me it is all around the B2B predominantly around the B2B but obviously the experience for the consumer as well pricing for consumers.”14.37: Talking about technological advancement, Jason says, “Please tell me why I am authenticating with a squiggle of ink? This makes no sense to me but in fairness, I think it was about three years ago. I think the credit card companies changed their terms of service. That fraud was the responsibility of the weakest point in the chain. So, everybody went around and updated their machines to basically support touchless pay and that kind of helped create the infrastructure to support everything, so you know, fear of lawsuit or fear of being stuck with the fraud is a great motivator.”16.45: Jason asks, “Talk to me about the initial feedback you garnered from the vendors you went to specifically start off with the medical industry, and then we will move over to renovations. But were they skeptical? When they first saw it? What was there was the resistance that you encountered, and then when they adopted it, what was the feedback from there?19.29: Hans talks about their approval process specifically; it has to do something with underwriting. He earlier mentioned risk-based pricing.21.00: Jason says, “I have seen all kinds of academically supported reports where basically these risk ratings are being developed to such a level of proficiency that there, compared to the FICO score, they are far superior lending to people who would never otherwise qualify at a given rate.”23.46: Jason inquires, “Talk to me about the expansion from medical. Why were renovations the next logical place to go? Or what else did you consider? Where do you want to go next?23.49: Hans affirms, “When you look at consumers and where they are spending their money. There is 1.3 trillion spent. You basically have number one in your largest. Then you have home improvement, then medical, and then you have kind of travel, so those are the pockets where consumers are spending their dollars.”30.40: Hans says, “While the market has the speed of change in this space is incredible, and it just feels like in the last two years that we were clipping along and probably a good 50-60 mile per hour rate and now we are sitting at 100. Everyone is running, and so that is great; it offers a ton of opportunity, but you just have to pick up the pace.”3 Key Points:Hans Zandhuis talks about the history of the company and what led to its foundation and eventual merging with All

In today’s episode, Jason is going to talk to Eric Fulwiler - Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer at 11 FS. It is a well-known consultant in the financial services space that specifically helps traditional financial institutions launched digital products. Episode Highlights:1.46: Talking about 11 FS, Eric says, “We are five and a half years old now. We work with traditional financial service institutions to help them essentially navigate digital challenges and opportunities in their industry.” 2.12: Eric explains, “We do a lot on the strategy side and open big banks, insurance companies, payment providers, wealth management businesses, navigate those changes, where the opportunities where the challenge is coming from.” 2.52: Eric explains about the product called PULSE, a library of Fintech user journeys from around the world. 3.50: “We got some really smart people in the company and many smart people in the industry that we know. We try to bring them together and give them a platform to share what they know and hopefully add value to their financial service professionals.” Says Eric.7.40: Jason says in Fintech all came in on an angle that came in with a method of monetization that challenges your model. Because at the end of the day, part of their value proposition had to be on cost. 8.35: 11-FS is really a fintech company, but we work with traditional organizations and financial services, and so it is really interesting to see the different perspectives and approaches that start-up to traditional companies take to everything, explains Eric.8.54 Eric: The start-ups can grow faster in many cases because of the approach they take to marketing and their go-to-market. The more relevant, modern, and current your marketing approach is, the better the result will be able to drive.10.18: Marketing is the function within an organization that should be closest to the customer. It is what connects the products to the customers you’re building it for and trying to reach, and many Fintech do this well.11.50: Good marketing communicates the story of your business in a way that is compelling, relevant, and differentiated, and so that’s what any CMO or any business needs to be focused on. 14.35: Jason affirms, in terms of marketing, companies will not do the extreme things necessarily because they don’t want to alienate the mass market that big cultivated for so long.16.16: Jason points out that some fintech in this world has kind of cornered the mind on market share in certain demographics and functions, and that is unbelievably valuable because now they have become a default. 18.43: Jason asks, “How much do you think the negative hangover of 2008 the global financial crisis kind of impacts the demographic marketing, basically inhibit the willingness of that demographic or eagerness that demographic to work with traditional vendors?”20.05: Eric says that the second-best marketing is people who you know and trust already telling you that you should do something, and you see a lot of these Fintech taking that approach. 23.40: Many banks are just trying to throw everything they do at you in a digital experience in one shot because they think more is better, or that’s their competitive mode, says Jason.24.15 Eric: Technology companies in general, think about how you have the attention and the connection with the customer? When they are building apps, it is not just about delivering, but how you can make the experience one that people enjoy.3 Key Points:11 FS is the layer on top of the technology that delivers the intelligence value-adding experience to the end consumer that will differentiate successful propositions from not successful propositions. What we are trying to build with Foundry is the level on top to really be able to enable those intelligent propositions, which is really what everybody should be going for.Modern marketing within start-ups and Fintech is about adding value, whereas traditional marketing is more about extracting value. It’s about how do you get this customer to do that thing. The business and the brand that delivers more value is going to deliver Better Business results in the long term.Fintech, by the nature of being small, is usually shaving off a piece of the market so they can be more specific in how they communicate and what they say they offer. Fintech is certainly digital-first in the marketing approach that they deliver, and that allows them to be more relevant because they can segment their audiences better.  Tweetable Quotes:“The start-ups can grow faster in many cases because of the approach they take to marketing and their go-to-market.” – Eric“Marketing is the function within an organization that should be closest to the customer.” – Eric“The company that is closest to the customer and has the most trust is the company that will win in the long term.” – Eric“You know having any business is about the people at the end of the day.” -

In today’s show, Jason is going to talk to Vieje Piauwasdy, director of equity strategy for Secfi. It is an online platform that allows employees of private companies to monetize their options and cash out before waiting for an exit from the company.   Episode Highlights:00.52: At Secfi, we help employees with their stock options. The company was started just four years ago. We have worked with hundreds of thousands of employees ranging from start-ups from the seed level to pre-IPO companies, says Vieje.2.45: The education part of Vieje’s mission is to help educate employees, help them understand their equity, and make the best decisions. Second, we do provide financing solutions for these employees as well. 4.10: Jason asks, “In your company if you are getting richly rewarded on in shares, and if you are not publicly traded and the timeline for exit is not known, how old you make the most of that and get out?” 5.29: Equity was a very taboo topic. It is something you don’t talk with co-workers, or it is kind of like talking about your salary, says Vieje.6.41: Private company valuations are very subjective, especially in this day and age where valuation numbers are thrown out.7.30: Most people are at their first or possibly second start-up, and they don’t know what their shares are worth. So here at Secifi, we really operate off, and we obviously add a financing solution to all this, but it all starts with education, says Vieje.9.28: Jason inquires, “We have got some sort of reasonable valuation on stock options, and you want to exercise them. So how do you help facilitate the exercising of this?” 11.12 Vieje explains, “The reason we are able to assume the downside in these positions is that we only work with fast growing start-ups with the reasonable means to exit.” 13.02: When it comes to rates and how we set those rates, that quite greatly depends on a company we work with, says Vieje.15.22 Vieje says that their financing is set up for individuals who want to go on their shares.16.41: If you are in a fast-growing start-up, then single-digit rates of interest are irrelevant compared to the vastly double-digit growth rates of the equity, says Jason.18.39: Vieje explains, the idea behind our rates is financing. We structure it so that individuals will have more cash in their pocket if the company has a pretty good exit. 19.24: Jason asks, “Talk to me about consumer reactions so far, and how is the adoption rate? How is the value reacting this? This is something that’s a welcome change because this is not an uncommon problem in Titan Tech world.” 20.08: Vieje says everyone should have access to something. The regulatory nature of stock options makes it a pretty crappy instrument all around. 23.43: Vieje reiterates, “We take a fiduciary approach to everything that we do. Team Equity strategist work with every individual.”24.14: Jason inquires, “If you had one wish do something get changed in your company or the industry as a whole, what would it be?” 24.20: Vieje wishes he could take out every one of these bad reputations of brokers and people just looking to make a buck off you. 25.17: Jason asks, “What has been the biggest challenge in the company to where it is today?”26.17: As per Vieje, understanding an industry that brings something new out to the world. Financing stock options is a completely new industry.27.13: Jason asks, “What excites you the most about what it is you are working on keeps you getting up every morning to keep on fighting the good fight?” 27.20 As per Vieje the best part about this job is the joy and happiness you can provide to an individual that you can only imagine. 3 Key Points: Vieje says, we provide as much information to service individuals as possible, giving data we have, giving the information on our platform, and let us stop and make a decision for valuation or equity. Vieje explains both liquidity and the option exercise are structured the same way. If we gave $1,000,000 in cash and cured by the shares, this situation wouldn’t be toward exercise options and taxes. Vieje highlights that Secfi is working greatly depending on where you are within the stage to company. We have no idea what the markets will look like, but if they believe in the upside of their company, then the company is going to have a good exit.  Tweetable Quotes:“No matter how much you plan around equity, sometimes your company grows a little too fast.”- Vieje“A lot of people, unfortunately, don’t plan properly and start talking to advisors for equity.” – Vieje“Not all employees are valued the same way just like this salary issue.” – Jason“There is a lot of risk you’re taking out of the table for individuals and putting on yourself what is being taken in return.” – Jason “Sometimes financing does not make sense for everyone.” – ViejeResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Ja

In today’s episode, Jason Pereira talks to Peter Lord - CEO of Codat. It is a platform that is building next-generation products and services for SMEs with easy, real-time data connectivity to their financial software. The company is building smart solutions that save time, money and enhance the customer experience in a matter of hours.Episode Highlights:00.30: Peter explains, “We help our clients who are large financial companies connected to the software used by their small business customers. We connect to accounting software things like Xero, Sage, QuickBooks E-commerce software, payments and marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, etc.” 00.50 Jason affirms, “You are a savior for financial institutions because you built the integration pieces yourself. It’s not a make your integration, but essentially, you’re making it easier for people to access all that through one portal versus multiple different API instances.” 01.50: Peter studied at Southampton University as a software engineer and moved into a product role. Through that personal experience, he saw the need to automate processes.02.10: They built their business where small businesses applying for a loan had to submit financial statements and ledgers in PDF agreements. Peter and his company replaced the manual process of Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage accounting.03.41 Jason inquires,” How many different integrations have you built for different technology?” 04.00 Jason: asks, “Talk to me about some of the challenges of the amount of data you have got to basically make accessible on one platform. Give me one example in accounting software.” 04.18: Peter replies, “We cover everything from high-level financials, digital Ledger, that property loss or balance sheet reports examples right down to the transaction level detail is in the journal.” 07.45 Peter says, “There is a new client finding, new spaces for technology every week.”09.33 Jason inquires, “Codat is just an open API at this point, or are you moving data between different systems; is that something that the end consumer is doing? or is that something that you have actually built; a bunch about the shelf integrations form?”10.35: Peter shares his mission is to make life easier for small businesses, and that’s what drives in right movement.11.54: Jason asks, “Overall, this is not a small piece of work that I am curious about; any statistics on how much data you are actually parsing for people at this point?”12.40 Peter explains they are now introducing elements of lending or capital financing.13.30 Jason reiterates, “You know the value of data, right. I’m sure you thought of the number of ways that you can move it around and basically collected for these people. But small businesses are going to find ways to solve their problems with your solution that you never dreamt of so, that makes a lot of sense.” 17.00 Jason asks Peter, “What’s been the biggest challenge in the company to where it is today?” 17.07: Peter shares the biggest challenge faced by them was to hire the right people.18.05: Peter explains that they are making products, so it’s building something, building our products, continuing to see expanding and budget in the hands of more users and more users for us. 3 Key Points:Peter talks about the creation of Codat. “What leads to its founding, and what problem are they trying to address?” Jason asks Peter, “Talk to me about the different verticals that you are basically involved in. You have over 100 clients at this point around the world. What are the different use cases they have used before?”Peter shares, “What’s the feedback they are getting from the companies that choose to partner with Codat. What are they saying in terms of the amount of time and effort, and development costs? Tweetable Quotes:“For our clients, it’s not just the extraction or pulling of that data, but we also take the push of data back into the software packages to help our clients reconcile what’s going on in their products with business customers and other systems of record.” - Peter Lord“There are all sorts of different ways that small businesses use their accounting software running on.” - Peter Lord“People are so important, and the company is our team, and so we make sure that we have been hiring the best people.” - Peter LordResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInPeter Lord: Website | LinkedIn Podcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today’s episode, Jason Pereira talks to Dr. Stephen Taylor - Assistant Professor of Finance at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has worked in the financial services industry at Bloomberg, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Morgan Stanley, and Tudor Investment Corporation. In this podcast, they will discuss a couple of emerging trends, specifically in fintech and fintech education.Episode Highlights:00.35: Steven is in the line of teaching for the past four years. He is from a bit of an orthodox ethnic background. He has gained a lot of practical experience in the past while working with Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg etc. 1.09 Jason curiously asks Steven, “What led you to teaching?”1.29: Steven talks about his career journey and shares about his knack for academia from a very early stage in life. 1.57: Jason says, “Today we are going to talk about emerging fintech trends.” He asks Steven to share the three big emerging fintech trends.2.11: Steven shares his insightful views of the big trends in the fintech trends. 2.43: He says peer-to-peer insurance is an area that’s just starting to expand; second on his list is asset management. Third, in his list is digital sharing of training strategies through various platforms.3.10: Steven says his views are more from theoretical design aspects; he does not know much about the regulation side. 3.15: While giving an example, Steven says, “Suppose within your immediate family you implicitly insure yourself. You have an accident, and your father might help you out with $200. This approach is a lot more cost-effective rather than going through the claims process where there are half a dozen people involved and overhead costs.” He shares his concern that “How do you formalize the insurance in a way that it is more than just family and friends’ agreement?”4.06: Jason says, “People are often shocked and amazed by the size of the insurance industry in general. When you think about how many people are employed, by how many people specifically on the distribution side is the actual underwriting, and eventually called reinsurance space.” 4.38: Jason further adds, “Reinsurance space isn’t that big really, but this is a distribution onerous.” He says that “I could see there is a tremendous amount of overhead.” 4.40: Jason asks Steven, “In the theoretical context, how does peer to peer software that is just solely through digital distribution and lack of need for sales agents? and how would this product be discovered and basically applied or opted into by both sides of the transaction?”5.00: Steven says he might like ideal visualization because it won’t manifest itself for decades to come or anything remotely close to it is. He says, “I would like to see it go to more of a setting where you get matched with people, you have similar risk profiles as yourself, and this could be done like pulling out a questionnaire survey.”7.48: Talking about the digital investment side, Jason says, “We have the big waves of the Robo advisors coming in, threatening too deep to destroy the traditional models.” 10.14: Steven says, “I would like to see what institutional hedge fund investor is five years ago to the day where there are certain limitations, but now you’re going to have hundreds of different opportunities to get into eventually, and it’s going to be a better space for everyone.”11.13 Jason inquires, “We are talking about a pile of stock because of XYZ and do the short squeeze. But you’re talking about something far more sophisticated, right? You’re talking about like no is sharing the quantitative algorithms, and what not for trading is that the uppercase?”11.34: Steven affirms, “I think the prototype for this right now is a platform called QuantConnect. they provide data infrastructure they provide back testing infrastructure, and you basically just cut up your algorithm in Python, and they’ll give you performance measures.”12.28: Steven shares the challenges and competition faced by students in the Fintech industry. He says, “By the time you finish school, you should be able to code; knowing excel is just not enough.”15.07: While providing an explanation for what programming is, Steven says, “If you learn to program well, you can automate basically all the tedious aspects of your job and then focus on the ones that really require human and electrical thoughts.”17.18: Steven says the biggest challenge in terms of getting a job for a student is to convince your hiring manager that you’re able to take a deeper dive into ideas, and you’re able to take on projects and ownership around them. 3 Key Points:Jason and Steven are going to talk about emerging fintech trends.  While talking about the challenges in the Fintech industry, Jason inquires, “How is educating people in finance changed in light of the proliferation of fintech? Steven talks in detail about the one thing that he would like to change in the Fintech industry; that is simpler regul

Today’s episode is slightly different as Jason is not interviewing a Fintech but an artist - Krista Kim. She made global headlines as being the first artist to sell a virtual home via a non-fungible token (NFT). Krista Kim is a contemporary artist and founder of the Techism movement and a global ambassador for the Superworld and creator of the Mars House, and a talented artist. In today’s podcast, they will discuss “How technology is changing both the distribution and implementation of art?”Episode Highlights:1.10: Krista introduces herself as a digital artist, started creating digital artwork in 2013. While using smartphones, Krista observed how people were completely changing the dynamics of their social interactions because of social media platforms and how social media platforms were inferring cultures.1.18: As an artist, she thought, “We need to ensure that people are free thinkers going forward in the 21st century and beyond, but the big question was how do you do that?2.45: Krista says, “We have to have a daily practice of meditation because we have to strengthen our prefrontal cortex. It’s a muscle that actually keeps us as freethinkers so that we’re not perpetually addicted to our phones.”4.45: Jason refers to the filter bubbles that people have created; they only hear what they want to hear. 06.00 Jason says that they are going to discuss NFTS, digital art, and the metaverse in today’s episode. He says that unlike cryptocurrencies, where the entire idea is to make transactions with them potentially, which is something called fungibility, the ability to spend something in one place versus the other. NFT or non-fungible token is a token that denotes value or ownership of something specific, and in this case one of the biggest use cases has been in the art realm.06.44: Jason inquires, “How did you get into NFT? What was the opportunity you saw that you clearly harvested?”7.10: Krista talks about her journey as a digital artist and her research on the blockchain of art. She became whitelisted as it gave power to the digital artist to sell their art properly as a rare piece of work.7.45: Personally, Krista felt that NFT was giving digital artists the power to sell their art properly as a rare piece of work, one or limited series. But an artist can control its rarity, and that is everything for a work of art.10.11: Jason says, “What we’re seeing is just again another technology and especially Internet technology, basically starting to apply itself through yet another medium or another vertical of an industry which is artwork.”11.06: Krista explains the difference between NFT and a copy of the NFT.11.40 Jason denotes that “People have a hard time wrapping their head around digital currencies.” He gives an example of the games like Diablo or World of Warcraft, where even before there were markets that were built into these things, people were selling armor or weapons on eBay and transacting real currency and then meeting virtually to deliver on the actual product sold. 12.36: Krista affirms Jason’s views and asks him to look at Mars house. She shares why Mars houses became such a global story? It is because it really is a marker, overtime, and it is the harbinger for our augmented reality lifestyle that is coming around the corner. XR lifestyle. The Metaverse NFTs are going into the metaverse, and that is the next generation. 17.00: According to Krista XR experience is essential for brands moving forward in order to really connect with this generation and their communities in an authentic and meaningful way. 17.45 Jason says, “Virtual environments are becoming more and more engaging and more and more desired to be participated in, especially amongst young generations.” 19.58 Krista explains, “We are selling virtual plots of land that are basically mapped geographically onto the real world. Then we also have the actual interface that allows people to upload our digital 3D assets into the room space. So, you could imagine what concerts or Disneyland would be like with 3D digital NFT creating an immersive experience for you and your family like you could literally dance with Mickey Mouse or raise a pet Simba and you could wear the Elsa dress right, and they’re all kinds of incredible projects because the apple, the apple glasses, are coming out in a year.21.08: While talking about big events, Krista says, “Many people were making so many wasteful decisions for these events that can easily be a solvable, beautiful, more amazing experience in AR. 22.03: The fact that you can make friends and have playdates and kids in Egypt and visit the pyramids and learn all about it. That’s the future of education and travel, says Krista.27.15 Krista is glad that she found a collector on Super Rare. She says luckily, “In the community, we have a lot of visionaries and futurists, and art on the Internet is a consortium of collectors, and they are investing in the future.” 30.01: According t

Host Jason Pereira talks to Kevin Lozer - Co-Founder of Holistiplan; it is a financial planning software that focuses specifically on tax planning. It generates a PDF version of your tax return and extracts all the verifiable information and actual data. Episode Highlights:0.52: Kevin explains about Holistiplan – it is tax planning software for advisors built by advisors. It allows an advisor to upload a PDF tax return and get a client deliverable prepopulated scenario and then screen and identify some planning opportunities all again with just uploading a previous year’s tax returns. 1.12: What Holistiplan really does is automate a tax return review. Then all of the work that succeeds that tax return review that advisors do, typically requires a whole lot of data entry. Historically, the company has taken that data entry out of the picture, and now advisors can just spend the time focusing on conversing with the client about their tax situation.1.19: Kevin says the idea to launch the Holistiplan started to percolate years ago. Roger Pine and Kevin had really put pen to paper and came up with the idea of uploading documents, providing an expert system, providing opportunities, and providing observations that many advisors across the country traditionally make.04.43: Jason curiously inquired about the feedback Holistiplan gets from advisors who implemented this type of software, like where they find the most significant benefit.04.52: Kevin shares when it comes to receiving feedback, it really breaks down into two different types of advisors. “One is advisors or firms that haven’t been doing tax planning. Secondly, we see clients wanting more out of the fees they’re paying advisors than investment advice. They are looking for a more robust, comprehensive relationship from advisors.” 05.51: Kevin explains the simple process of Holistiplan, clients can upload their financial data, and within a minute, the software digests all that pulled data, summarizing it in a client deliverable. Tons of firms are using it just for this feature. Upload or return get a client summary that the clients can understand that advisors can review with the clients. The report also provides planning opportunities that the software identified from that tax return. 06.55: Kevin says, “There is a whole other subset of advisors out there that actually do the quantification of planning opportunities like Roth conversion strategies, donor-advised funds, all kinds of different tax planning opportunities that we look at from a planning perspective. 07.05: Holistiplan also provides a forecasting tool - a scenario analysis prepopulated with the previous year’s data. So instead of spending the first 20 to 30 minutes entering data from the tax return into a calculator or tax software, now one can just copy it over from the prior year. Clients can make some edits to the fields and start doing complex strategies like Roth conversions or qualified charitable distributions, all kinds of tens and hundreds of different things that you can do from a tax planning perspective. 10.31: Jason is really impressed with the features of Holistiplan. He says to Kevin that “You are providing information on tax brackets where they are in terms of relative to phaseouts, right? So, because of that, the tools make it so much easier to understand tax planning.”11.11: Kevin says there are 75 to 100 different planning opportunities in the software, and they keep updating the algorithms.11.45: Holistiplan shares a visual report with 8 or 10 or 12 bullet point items based on that specific tax return. With this tool now clients can read through the 100-page document all by themselves12.15: Jason inquires, “What effort did Kevin and Roger put in to launch Holistiplan?”12.30: Kevin explains how friends and advisors in the financial industry helped them with their valuable feedback and improved the end result of the software.13.04: Kevin says, “Our initial prototype was to upload or return and just get the bullet point observations, but all those like visualization things that we talked about earlier, the emoji phaseout and whether they’re over-under or in those phaseouts, all that stuff was from other advisors as we started to roll this out.”13.41: While explaining their roll-out strategy, Kevin says, “We rolled out a product that wasn’t 100% complete; this was intentional. We wanted to get feedback and crowdsource some of the ideas, and now that we’ve got thousands and thousands of advisors using it, the feedback comes in fast and furious.”15.00: One thing that Holistiplan launched early this year was the tax-prepped letter, which is closing the communication loop between advisor, CPA, and client. Kevin shares “Advisors who are doing tax planning with or without holistic plan come up with some good pretty good observations and opportunities and then execute those and get all that work done before December 31st so that it all counts for this tax

Host Jason Pereira talks to Atif Saddiqi - Founder/CEO at Branch. It is a fintech that allows employees to access the money they earned before pay-check. Episode Highlights: 0.30: Atif says Branch is a payment platform that helps businesses accelerate payments to the workers to empower them. 1.27: Jason asks Atif to share about the history of Branch and what brings him to launch it?1.40: Atif has founded the company way back in 2016. This was started from his own experience as an hourly worker. 1.59: While working as an hourly worker, Atif found that a common pain point for workers is always looking for ways to earn more income.2.14: Branch was initially launched as a mobile B2B product. Over time they kept improving the process. 4.22: “A lot of employers we work with still cuts paper cheques; they don’t have a reliable way to deposit money,” says Atif. 4.31: Atif explains how Branch helps employers by providing cost-effective solutions.5.59: People can use Branch as a banking service, affirms Atif06.31: Jason inquiries from an employer’s standpoint how does Branch helps in cash flow?7.54: Atif talks about the Digital Tips, Wallets, Reimbursements, and other user-friendly services that Branch offers. 08.29: As per a recent statistic, Atif has read that there are workers who are still living pay-check to pay-check.08.48: Atif talks about the new business models that are being introduced for the benefit of various classes of workers. 10.19: Atif elaborates on the user feedback that his company has received and how its services are used. 12.32: Currently, Atif and his team are looking for saving solutions that are automated. 13.49: Jason asks about the success rate data of “Branch”.14.20: When discussing revenue strategy, Atif says that the company primarily relies on interchange revenue. 17.00: Atif talks about various target sectors and how employers benefit from Branch’s services. 18.39: Jason talks about the cognitive burden of living pay-check to pay-check. 20.11: Atif talks about the most significant challenge that he has faced so far in Branch. 3 Key Points:Atif talks about his company Branch, the reason behind its launch, and how it is benefitting employees as a modernized employer payments technology.Jason curiously inquiries about the user feedback and success story of “Branch.” When talking about their target sectors, Atif says a large staff is operating in restaurants and hospitals. This helps them to tap into a large employee population.Tweetable Quotes: “Assessing your wages should be free.” - Atif Saddiqi“Employers see Branch is a uniform solution to pay all their contractor.” - Atif Saddiqi“We have to do mental aerobics when opening a bank account.” - Jason Pereira Resources Mentioned:Atif Saddiqi: Website Facebook – 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.

Host Jason Pereira talks to Som Seif – CEO and Founder of Purpose Financial. In today’s episode, Som is going to give his unique perspective on the FinTech industry.  Episode Highlights: 0.50: Som talks about “Purpose” and the idea behind its launch. He adds that they are re-inventing the business in 4 core areas – Asset Management, Retirement, Wealth Management, and Small Business owners.03.04: Jason highlights Som’s venture capital history and success stories. 03.28: Som shares his vision about the FinTech industry. 05.57: Som discusses how he partners with people who have similar visions like him.07.14: “We have a deep understanding of our customers and their journey; this is how we solve their problems,” says Som. 09.17: Som gives detailed insight on how his company solves a customer’s problem. He also discusses the global product that they have created. 11.19: Jason and Som discuss about the regulators. Jason says that the regulators are willing to listen if you are willing to work with them. 13.12: “Innovation is extremely important in the Fintech company,” says Som.14.15: While striving for innovation, Som is constantly searching for an answer to the question – “What is going to be the ETF 2.0?”14.42: At present, Som is learning the Tokenization of things; as per him, this is the next big thing. 17.12: Som talks about a prevalent mindset that “People who have little money, makes no money.” But Som thinks otherwise.18.42: Jason asks the listeners to imagine a universe that has something different. He says one has to come out of past methods of doing business and innovate and chart out new ways.18.59: The problem with the FinTech industry is they think on average economics, says Som.20.57: Jason brings up the topic of non-technology solutions, one that is of monumental importance in the future in the financial ecosystem.23.59: Som talks about the interesting products and processes they have launched. He also talks about the “Mortality Credit” that goes to the beneficiary.26.01: Som talks about his organization’s goal “To create income for an indefinite time period.” 27.01: Som explains how he is a big believer in the advisor’s role. 29.27: The game that big institutions are playing gives advisors the cash flow, says Som.31.01: Jason and Som point out how customers want holistic solutions to their financial problems.32.20: Som advice “If you want to true high-net-worth advisor, you should have a planning mentality to truly engage the entire balance sheet of a customer as opposed to the money that you are managing for them.” 33.23: Som talks about the biggest challenges faced by him.    3 Key Points:Som shares interesting work areas of his business. He also gives insights on his vision and how he likes to connect with like-minded professionals. Jason explains how we are in the early innings of replacing ETFs. Jason and Som discuss the problems that incurred the FinTech industry. They also talk about the wrong assumptions that often circulate regarding small investors.Tweetable Quotes:“Everything looks like an opportunity in retrospect that they are going to bounce back.” - Som Seif “There is a lot to learn if you have a good relationship with the regulators.” - Som Seif“Regulators wants to see innovation and change.” - Jason Pereira“Imagine a universe with something different.” - Jason Pereira“There is a significant amount of people who needs financial advice.” - Som SeifResources Mentioned:Som Seif: Website Facebook – 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.

Host Jason Pereira talks to Nick Catino, Head of Policy and Campaigns with Wise. It is a London-based financial technology company founded in January 2011 by Estonians Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus. In today’s episode, Nick talks about consumer-facing products used by banks and businesses.  Episode Highlights:0.38: Nick says Wise is a global payment technology company giving the best way to move money worldwide used by people who travel, live, and work internationally. 3.08: Jason asks Nick about the origin of the company, how it came to be? Nick points out Wise was founded in 2011 as Transfer wise in London. 3.10: It has two co-founders Kristo Kaamann and Taavet Hinrikus. 4.01: The company’s idea came from the analysis that consumers are getting ripped off to send abroad, and it is so central to our mission today trying the payments more transparent.5.30: Nick says living and leisure is focused on pricing across portal payments. When he travels, he keeps records of his credit card transaction receipts. When he gets back, he calculates how much he has spent, he does this for a living, and it is a complicated calculation.7.17: Jason points out, “If you are running a company and you have to buy from overseas vendors regularly, you will probably speak to your bank about what can be done, and they will graduate you up to the next level.” 8.33: Nick states, “When you are a multinational corporation or large business, you have a finance desk that is negotiating these rates in the wholesale market. 8.40: As per Mckenzie’s study report, hundred or billion dollars in fees consumers pay in small business pay per year.12.53: Jason asks Nick as a consumer, “If I have to send money somewhere in the world how can he utilize your platform?”13.08: Nick says Wise allows to send money to friends and family members on platform using their name or FI. During traveling, you can use your debit card. It is integrated with apple pay. In small businesses, you can use it for goods and services import and exports, paying workers and freelancers internationally, and combined with several accounting platforms to make easy payments.14.48: Jason asks how you enable business and how is that service different?15.14: Nick says we are making it easy for our customers to move money abroad in the business side. Small businesses are joining our services every month, and not only banks some tech companies are launching platforms that users in the US can pay directly in India or Singapore.16.45: Nick says we tried to make it easier for businesses to use our service. We started a consumer-facing brand, and there are end number of features and excited about market growth in the future by integration between business and banks. 18.15: Jason inquires, “What happens if I transact in Euros, but I don’t want Euros? Nick answers then it will automatically transact the lowest cost conversion related to the product.20.10: Nick says payments amortization has been a huge focus in many countries because it benefits consumers, and the ecosystem is very clear.23.00: Jason asks from an end-user perspective, “Why is payment amortization important?” Nick says it’s about the cost. In the UK, on average, fees are 0.4%, and money is moving instantly, but if you are Canadian or American, it is 1% or more, and money can take days to receive on the other side. 24.52: Jason says friction is in two ways one is speed, and two is basically cost, and both are impactful on the economy.26.35: Nick reiterates that a global payment company being new in the market is certainly difficult, and lack of consumer awareness about how much you are being charged while sending money abroad is a challenge we have to overcome.27.49: Jason asks Nick, “What excites him most about every day when he wakes up in the morning and keeps doing what he is doing?”27.55: Nick replies that so many smart, driven diverse people, 2400 wiser from more than 70 countries, still continue to learn about different markets in culture and take ownership with projects they are working on is the best part of working with Wise.  3 Key Points: Nick talks about the consumer-facing products used by banks and businesses to integrate APIs directly with their platforms.Nick says, “We pay fees to transfer money abroad, but we don’t realize how much we are overcharged, and many consumers and small-scale businesses are unaware of exchange rate markups.”Jason mentions like western union, you need a massive global network of fixed locations that will allocate money on one side of the border to move it to the other side of the border. Tweetable Quotes:“Business doesn’t impact revenue on the way it’s all about living methods of transparency” – Nick Catino“In 2021, sending money is like sending email” - Nick Catino“Many smart-driven diverse people, 2400 wiser from more than 70 countries continues to learn about different markets in culture and take ownership wi

In today’s episode, Jason talks to Jon Cowley, founder of Whatifi. It is a visual financial planning software and tool that helps people think through various scenarios in different methodologies than people are accustomed to.   Episode Highlights: 1.00: Jon says Whatifi is a highly visual low code financial scenario builder and projection platform, making it easy for professionals to visually create, calculate, present and share multiple financial scenarios to their clients.1.46: Jon doesn’t come from a Fintech background; instead, he runs a VFX company. He has created some of the coolest movies and also some of the biggest duds. A lot of these are leveraging technology workflows for Jon.3.03: Jason points out that most people think spreadsheets are developed for users, but very few people think about using presentation devices.3.48: Considering the fundamental problems, Jon had built a software that connects all the logics and events. 04.01: Because each step is separate, it is very easy to follow along with the history. Utilizing this simple concept as base, Jon thought, why can’t he apply the same logic in Finance? Whatifi uses the same algorithm and calculates all accounting data. 05.13: So far, Jason has not seen any such concept in the Finance Industry. He says that spreadsheets exist for most financial planning software. He appreciates and says that “What Whatifi has done is very simple and logical.”06.41: Jon shares excellent real-live scenarios where Whatifi’s algorithm can be used. 07.02: No, thing in our system is just a number, they are the whole set of metadata that is wrapped around, that allows downstream things to adjust accordingly.08.00: Jon talks about building a roadmap so that every single day the starting point is accurate. 09.14: Jon points out the importance of planning goals. 09.40: Every day at Whatifi Jon’s team updates the baseline to see how they are progressing.11.52: Jon shares Whatifi’s top 3 value propositions. First is with this framework, you can build scenarios far more quickly than the tools currently available. The second is the ultimate scenario. The third is Visualization.13.23: Jason says it is not the Visualization, but the Causality is very transparent. 14.01: People who are indecisive and analytical are going to love Whatifi’s tool.15.07: Jason says so many tools are niche at this moment.17.19: Whatifi is the most unique decision-making software that Jason has seen so far. He is curious to know about the responses that Jon has received so far. 18.35: Jon says that advisors really like the concept of Whatifi.20.53: Jon shares, “While we have calculation engine, we also have trigger roadmaps.”23.30: Jon would like to see more collaboration between FinTech.25.09: For Jon, the biggest challenge is that they are outsiders who are entering the Fintech world.3 Key Points: Jason asks about Jon’s history and how he came across the idea to launch Whatifi.Listeners learn that nothing in our system is just a number; they are a whole set of metadata.Whatifi is a calculation engine, and we are using it to build scenarios for people, says Jon. Tweetable Quotes:“Metadata gets modified day to day and passed down for calculations.”- Jon Cowley“No, thing in our system is just a number.” - Jon Cowley“There has always been a black box aspect to Financial Planning software.” - Jason Pereira“At the end of the day, it is all math.” - Jason PereiraResources Mentioned:LinkedIn - WhatifiLinkedIn - Jon CowleyWhatifi - WebsiteFacebook – Jason Pereira’s FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorPodcast Editing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Host Jason Pereira talks to Dennis Gada, Senior Vice President and Industry Head for Financial Service for Infosys. It is a global digital services company that offers end-to-end services to its clients from technology to business operations, consulting and helping them in the digital transformation journey, and helping them run in their existing business and technology operations.Episode Highlights:2.40: Jason inquires, “When companies come to Infosys for support, how do you navigate their digital needs?”4.18: Dennis explains, “We work in three different layers; driving efficiency in running business and technology operations, digital transformation of their end-to-end business process, and helping them to grow the business in a new area for consulting services.”5.10: Dennis affirms that the last 12 months post-Covid has seen significant acceleration of client journey, and we can call it a trigger, but it has been a prominent force of transformation. 5:50: Dennis says there is an enhanced expectation from that banking and financial service. Not just traditional banking but also wealth management. He adds that all of that should be much more digital, and it has forced financial services firms to become more digital than it already was.8.38: Dennis justifies that firms have been forced to drive change at such a rapid pace that decision making has been so much quicker and adopting to new technology has been so ramping.9.30: Jason says, “He wants to know the decision-making mechanism how those are going to adapt?”9.55: Dennis explains business and technology have really come much closer together. These days discussions in financial service firms are much more about - What is the next wave of digital transformation? How much you can change the customer experience? How much you can leverage cloud and AI capabilities?11.35: Dennis reiterates with all the advancement in technology that has happened, on-boarding of new clients still tends to be the most complex process, and regulations also drive it.15.30: Dennis says more and more of a partnership between fintech, and larger bank and financial service organization will help to drive the transformation instead of fintech trying to get into all banking services themself.16.10: Jason asks Dennis, “How you see the development in these institutions to continue or had a lot of change in the post covid world?”16.39: Dennis says now 99% to 100% of the workforces are working remotely and delivering great values; this is the trend that is not going to change.17.35: Dennis says the digital transformation journey that had started is not going to stop in any aspect. 20.59: Dennis says firms have realized that while investing in the cloud they have not compromised in security. Cloud is more secure if not at the same level of security, then their existing data center. That’s the mindset shift that has happened in the last year, and more and more investments are going towards the cloud.21.35: Dennis says as firms invest in the new technology of the future, they also need to re-skill their own workforce as they have already done in Infosys.22.06: Jason is curious to know about the biggest post-pandemic challenge that institutions are going to face.24.20: Dennis says there will be some key challenges to sustain the pace of innovation, manage cybersecurity-related threats and risks. He stresses on the importance of motivating the new workforce to continue to work for large bank vs tech company of fintech and deliver the same kind of productivity.24.42: Jason asks Dennis his one wish for something he wants to change in his company or industry as a whole. Dennis wishes to innovate and scale, thus making that a part of DNA that everybody wakes up every day and comes there to see how you can do things more innovatively.25.30: Jason asks Dennis about digital transformation, the biggest roadblock he had encountered while facing clients he already had. 25.37: Dennis says the biggest roadblock is cultural change. There is a mandate at the board level, CXO level. There is also a push from the market, from the client to drive change. There is a lot of democracy and a lot of constrain internally to enable that change.28.12: Dennis says re-skilling of the workforce or right re-skilling of the workforce is an important factor to balance the understanding of business in domain with the understanding of technology.28.56: Jason asks Dennis “What excites him most about every day when he wakes up in the morning and keeps doing what he is doing?”29.40: Denies replies that the exciting thing is the platform we have and the technology we use really. It helps our clients to be successful and helps their end clients manage financial life better.3 Key Points:Dennis talks about his career journey. He has been associated with Infosys for about sixteen years, and Infosys financial business has been growing significantly over the years.Dennis says digitization was not possible unless there was a