Fintech Impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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