Fintech Impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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