Voice of FinTech: Recent Episodes
Rudolf Falat
Aiming to inspire entrepreneurs around the world to launch their new ventures. Connect FinTech enthusiasts with start-ups, incubators, accelerators, investors and incumbents.
Marcus New, CEO at InvestX Capital, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about providing access to growth companies (later stage PE / pre-IPO) to a wider range of investors and investing in growth companies.
Here is what they covered:
- Marcus' serial entrepreneurship journey
- InvestX Capital - what does it do?
- Are you US-focused or global? How much money have you facilitated since inception, and for how many growth companies? How many investors?
- What kind of growth companies have you invested in - success stories of the growth companies that appeared on your platform
- What are your best tips for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses?
- How do you overcome a cold start problem and start a two-sided marketplace platform?
- Any lessons learned? What would you have done differently as an entrepreneur? Is the platform suitable for later-stage PE deals?
- How do you find investment opportunities and investors? What are your selection criteria?
- Favorite business book: The 6 Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team
- What is the best way to reach out? Reach out through the website here.
Sherry Jiang, a co-founder of Bluejay Finance, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about bringing private asset investment opportunities to more investors, leveraging technology to transform investment management.
Here is what they covered in more detail:
- Introduction: How did you get to do what you do today?
- What is the problem you are focusing on?
- You focus on Private Credit, Staking, and Tokenization - why these products?
- Private assets are a much larger asset pool than public ones, yet, it is difficult for a retail investor to invest in them. Why should they?
- How do you enable the democratization of investments? What is your technology angle?
- What are the minimum tickets and onboarding requirements?
- What is your business model - how do you make money?
- What challenges did you need to overcome as a female founder? What advantages does it bring, if any?
- What non-fiction book would you take with you on vacation? Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant
- What´s the best way to reach out and learn more about Bluejay? Sherry Jiang on LinkedIn.
Lisa Nestor, Chief Strategy Officer at Airtm, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how her company leverages stablecoin USDC (AirUSD) - digital dollar in Airtm wallet to facilitate small cross-border payments faster and cheaper, supporting online workers everywhere.
Here is what they covered in more detail:
- Lisa's journey to Airtm
- What is the problem you are focusing on? Why is it worth solving?
- What is your digital dollar, and how does it differ from the 'green' dollar? Or from Tether?
- What is your technology angle? Do you use existing rails or blockchain, and how do you exceed current payment networks?
- You support 400 different ways to pay with digital dollars – can you tell us some examples?
- How do you make money?
- Tell us about your growth journey. How did you expand to new countries? What were the successes and challenges?
- What next? What major goals do you want to achieve within, say next 12 months?
- What non-fiction book would you take with you on vacation?
- What's the best way to reach out and learn more about AirTM? Lisa Nestor on LinkedIn or website: Airtm
Darshita Mehta Gillies, founder and CEO of Maanch, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about helping asset managers to engage better with their clients and follow through on their ESG promises.
Here is what they talked about:
- Darshita – what is your backstory? How did you get to do what you do today?
- What problem are you solving, and why is it worth solving?
- Can you provide insights into your platform's (data and analytics) capabilities that enable asset managers to make informed stewardship decisions?
- What is your unique selling point?
- What’s your business model? How do you make money?
- Who are your key clients?
- What are the best stewardship practices/recommendations that you’d give to asset managers?
- What wakes you up every morning and motivates you for work?
- What would it be if you could have a superpower, and how would you use it to benefit the industry?
- What’s your favorite business book? Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business and Principles
- What’s the best way to reach out: Darshita Mehta Gillies on LinkedIn
Emmanuel Daniel, the founder of the Asian Banker and the Wealth and Society, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how banks face disintermediation as decentralized Finance or personalization is taking hold.
Here is what they covered:
- Emmanuel – what is your backstory? How did you get to what you do today?
- Are we experiencing another banking crisis?
- Banks have been complaining about low-interest rates for a long time (they enjoy better margins when interest rates are higher,) and now some are struggling with rate hikes. How come?
- Why is it easier to have a run on the bank in the digital age? How can banks and regulators manage this risk better?
- Your books cover the transition from platforms to personalization. Tell us more about that.
- How can you personalize your services profitably and at scale?
- There has been a discussion about using cryptocurrencies more widely as payment. However, regulations (or the lack of), scalability, lack of speed, volatility, and more hampered more widespread adoption. CBDCs seemed to offer more promise, but the progress could be faster. Why?
- Nowadays, you hear a lot about embedded Finance and the financialization of everything. What’s your take on it?
- What’s your favorite business book? The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
- The best way to reach out: https://www.emmanueldaniel.com
Paul Resch, co-founder, and CEO of Valutico, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about leveraging technology to make the valuation process more efficient.
Here is what they discussed:
- Paul – what is your backstory? How did you get to what you do today?
- What problem are you solving at Valutico, and why is it worth solving? What’s your focus?
- Many bankers want to simplify valuation models – they start with templates, and in the end, they go back and start from scratch. How do you see the standardization of valuation models?
- How interactive is your solution?
- Is there an audit trail? How do you test your solution for bugs?
- How does your solution work?
- What is your unique selling point?
- Who are your key clients?
- What’s your business model? How do you make money?
- What’s your favorite business book? Thinking, Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman and Amp it Up
- The best way to reach out: Paul Resch on LinkedIn
Rosalia Gitau, co-founder and CEO of Bixie, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about why women don't invest enough and how her platform helps to change that.
Here is what they discussed:
- Rosalia – what is your own personal finance journey and family background?
- How has your background working in Fintech and blockchain inspired you to create Bixie?
- What problem are you solving, and why is it worth solving?
- What is your unique selling point? How does your platform help women, and how is it distinct from other platforms?
- Who are your key clients?
- What’s your technology angle?
- What’s your business model? How do you make money?
- A brief background on the Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards (MAIAs), its mission, and why winning this year’s award is significant.
- What’s your favorite business book? How to Win Friends and Influence People
- What’s the best way to reach out: Bixie website and all their social media channels
Elliot Kallen, the owner of Prosperity Financial Group, a wealth advisor to entrepreneurs, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the importance of financial planning for entrepreneurs and his charity helping tackle depression and thoughts of suicide.
Here is what they covered in more detail:
- Elliot's background
- Prosperity Financial Group's mission
- The importance of financial planning for entrepreneurs
- What common mistakes do entrepreneurs make when gaining wealth, and why staying the course to achieve financial goals can be the biggest challenge today?
- What are your tips on how to get your business in top shape and ready for a sale? You have sold three companies, so you have a wealth of knowledge to share on how to do it successfully.
- What are the biggest financial lessons you have learned over his long financial advisor and entrepreneur career?
- Let’s focus on resilience for entrepreneurs: Strategies to overcome adversity. Despite great hardship, you were still able to run your companies and launch a charity that is today a well-known national organization after the death of your son
- Recommended reading: Think and Grow Rich and The Greatest Salesman in the World
- Wrap up: the best way to reach out: +1 (5 1 0) 2 0 6 1 1 0 3 or elliot@prosperityfinancialgroup.com or Prosperity Financial Group website
Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO and Board member at BlueSnap spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about providing various businesses with efficient payment capabilities so they can focus on growing their businesses.
Here are the questions they covered:
- Ralph's backstory
- What problem are you solving at BlueSnap, and why is it worth solving? What’s your focus?
- Payment orchestration – are we discussing hardware, software solutions, or both?
- What is your unique selling point? Accepting payments is just one piece of the puzzle in commerce – how far in the value chain do you extend?
- Who are your key clients? Which industries?
- What’s your technology angle, or do you have more brilliant engineers than other players?
- Do you have any success stories of how you helped your clients grow their businesses thanks to your solutions?
- What’s your business model? How do you make money?
- Favorite business book: Good to Great by Jim Collins
- Best way to reach out: through LinkedIn - Ralph Dangelmaier.
Meeri Savolainen, the CEO, and co-founder of INZMO, Berlin-headquartered InsurTech, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about creative solutions for tenants being asked to pay a rental deposit and house contents insurance which is not only easy when a client is being onboarded, but also when they make a claim.
Here is what they covered:
- Meeri's background - why become an entrepreneur in InsurTech?
- Inzmo and a previous foray into insurance with Bike ID – why pivot?
- What is INZMO, and what problems are you solving?
- Why is there much demand for InsurTechs’solutions – i.e., why are traditional insurance offerings losing traction with millennials /gen Z?
- Who are your key clients? Many companies these days talk about customer centricity. What does it mean for you?
- Where are you based? How does the Berlin startup scene compare to that of Tallinn?
- How do you make money? What is your business model?
- 2022 has been a tough year, and many countries face a cost-of-living crisis. Why rental deposit alternatives are needed, and where do you fit in?
- It’s unfortunately still evident that even in 2022, we have a gender funding gap, and there is a gender imbalance worldwide. How has it shaped the way you run your startup?
- What are plans for your business going forward, scaling ambitions?
- Favorite book: From Start-up to Grown-up: Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business and books by Marty Cagan on product development
- Wrap up: the best way to reach out: Meeri on LinkedIn
Karl Alomar, the Managing Partner at M13, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the value add that serial entrepreneurs turned investors provide to their portfolio companies.
Here is what they talked about:
- Karl's entrepreneurial journey and then investing
- M13's profile
- M13's investment track record
- M13's investment approach
- Best tips for aspiring founders to start and grow their companies
- Where are we regarding start-up and FinTech valuations, given the macro environment turning for the worse?
- Success stories of the start-ups for which you raised funds
- Deal sourcing tips
- Appeal to inspiring entrepreneurs to learn more about M13 - Karl Alomar on LinkedIn
Philipp Povel and Malte Huffmann, co-founders of Mondu, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about serial entrepreneurship, the need to focus on sizable opportunity, and helping SMBs thrive.
Here is what they talked about:
- Philipp and Malte – what are your backstories? How did you get to what you do today, and how did you get together?
- What’s the problem you are solving at Mondu, and why is it worth solving? What’s your focus?
- Some commentators have started saying that FinTechs have gone too far with unbundling and Finance has become too complicated for no good reason. How do you see the pendulum? Have we gone too far? See FT article here: https://on.ft.com/3yzm2AR
- What is your solution/services?
- Why focus on B2B clients?
- Why B2B BNPL is different from B2C?
- Are B2B marketplaces maturing from nice to have to mainstream?
- Many FinTech founders are young and haven’t experienced a recession yet. How do you keep on growing your business in a downturn?
- What’s your technology angle, or do you have more brilliant engineers than other players?
- Your favorite business books? Good to Great, Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great, Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
- The best way to reach out: philipp@mondu.ai or malte@mondu.ai, or LinkedIn
In the second episode of the MENA (the Middle East & North Africa) Series, Dorra Mahbouli, VP of Corporate Strategy at Zitouna Finance, spoke to Firas Rhaeim, CEO and co-founder of Relatic, Tunisian Venture Builder, Fundraiser & Tech Enthusiast, about crowdfunding enabling the Tunisian and African economy and scaling start-ups in the region through Diaspora investments.
Here is what they talked about:
• Initially, Dorra started the conversation with some insights and background from Firas’s experiences and why building a bridge between Europe and Africa through crowdfunding can be a great opportunity fr startups in the region
• Among other topics, Dorra and Firas discussed the opportunities that Relatic platform: afrikwity.com is suggesting to start-ups, VCs, and corporate partners in Tunisia and abroad
• Firas argues that Diaspora is an essential enabler of the Tunisian economy and would play a big role for investing in other fields such as Medtech, fintech, edtech, to create jobs and opportunities for local talents
• Finally, they discussed the difference between the legal framework in France and Tunisia, what are the main challenges and concluded the conversation with some insights into the future of Relatic & afrikwity.com as a platform and how they would be scaling it for a sustainable impact on the region
Jess Houlgrave, Crypto Strategy and GTM Lead at Checkout.com, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the future of crypto in the payments space.
Here is what they covered in more detail:
- Jess' background: from arts to Checkout.com
- What’s the problem Checkout.com is solving? What’s Jess's focus as a Crypto strategist?
- Will we pay with crypto more widely, or will most cryptocurrencies play the role of digital gold?
- How would the use of stablecoins fit into the traditional economy?
- The current status quo of CBDCs from the perspective of end users (individuals)
- Key clients for Checkout.com
- Why Jess believes their solutions are better than competitors'
- Crypto markets this year: why have we seen such a correlation with traditional public markets this year?
- How would you judge the market temperature after you attended the Merge FinTech Nexus conference? Are we entering a crypto winter?
- What’s your technology angle, or do you have more brilliant engineers than other players?
- News and education sources: Blockworks. Ari Redbord, Lynn Alden and Ryan Selkis
- Best way to reach out: Jess Houlgrave on Twitter or Checkout.com website
Michele Tucci, MD Americas and Chief Strategy Officer at credolab, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the importance of credit scoring and the need to improve credit assessment through alternative approaches.
Here is what they discussed:
- Michele – what’s your background? How did you get to what you do today? Why join a start-up/scale-up?
- The link between payments, credit score, and lending
- Why do we need alternative credit scoring?
- credolab's performance in predicting bad debt vs. traditional methods
- Privacy and security and your credit score
- Key clients
- Technology angle
- Plans for scaling up
- High-level overview of the business model
- The best way to reach out is mtucchi@credolab.com or the credolab website.
Alistair Cotton and Daniel Cronin, co-founders of Integrated Finance, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about helping FinTechs focus on their primary missions and taking the back-end challenges off their hands.
Here is what they talked about:
- Alistair, Daniel – backstory, why they got together and started a business
- Integrating FinTech's back-end - why is it a problem worth solving?
- How does one measure the success of an infrastructure provider?
- Who are key clients of Integrated Finance
- What’s your technology angle, or do you have more brilliant engineers than anyone else?
- What are their plans for scaling up their business
- How does Integrated Finance make money?
- How big is your team, and where are you based?
- What’s your favorite business book or another resource? Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger's publications and Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, creator of Nike
- What’s the best way to reach out: LinkedIn - Alistair Cotton and Daniel Cronin's profiles
Patrick Awori, Founder and CEO at Imaginarium, a Kenyan-based FinTech behind the Circle, a virtual savings platform, hosted another episode of Voice of FinTech: Africa Series. Patrick spoke to Andrew Barden, Director of Insights at Dedalus Global | Lead Organizer and Content Director at Africa Fintech Summit about the state of play on the African FinTech scene and the upcoming Africa Fintech Summit in South Africa.
See more background here:
Despite global tech media coverage being awash with stories of falling start-up valuations and sell-offs witnessed in once-vibrant sectors, Africa is largely defying global trends in VC funding. African start-ups are expected to raise about US$ 7 billion by the end of 2022, representing an almost 60% increase in start-up funding from the previous year, which would be raised by a diverse mix of local and global investors. Fintech continues to dominate, raising about 54% of all venture funding in the continent in 2021. Many reasons have been given for the continued growth witnessed in Africa’s fintech sector, including the fact that these start-ups are solving big problems such as access. Others given include the base effect, and st revenue traction and so on. Whatever the case, Africa continues to attract interest and how long the boom will last is anybody’s guess. To discuss what he calls “the Africanisation of global fintech,” we interview Andrew Barden, Director of Insights at Dedalus Global, and the Lead Organizer and Content Director at the Africa Fintech Summit. In the episode, Andrew shares his outlook on the state of the sector, tips on how business leaders can build resilience in the face of global economic hardship, and what the general factors that make African markets attractive for investment are, from his perspective as a Strategy Consultant and Lead Organizer of the African Fintech Summit, the continent’s leading fintech-focused conference. Finally, we discuss in detail what to expect at the 8th edition of the Africa Fintech Summit, which is coming up in November to be held in Capetown, South Africa, and how to participate in the conference and associated events. He describes why the AFTS is a unique space where ideas are explored, investments are mobilized, and collaborations are formed across sectors and geographies.
Alexia Theodorou, Kraken Futures Product Lead, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the role of derivatives in the crypto markets and futures in particular.
Here is what they covered:
- Why join Kraken Futures?
- What’s the problem you are solving at Kraken Futures, and why is it worth solving? What’s your focus?
- Who are your key clients?
- How secure is trading at Kraken Futures?
- Why are derivatives traded so much? Why are they so important to the centralized market and why are they relevant/used to crypto?
- How big is the crypto derivatives market vs. underlying and how it compares to traditional markets
- Who are the key crypto derivates players? Do you need ‘market makers’ or their equivalent?
- You launched MCFs (multi-collateral futures) – what’s their benefit vs. other derivatives on crypto?
- How do you see the crypto markets this year? Why we have seen such a correlation with traditional public markets this year?
- What’s your technology angle, or do you have more brilliant engineers than other players?
- Recommended reading list: see below
- The best way to reach out and find out more about Kraken Futures
Alexia's reading list:
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin
- https://twitter.com/cobie
- https://twitter.com/hsakatrades
- https://twitter.com/jespow
- https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx
- https://twitter.com/AlamedaTrabucco
- https://twitter.com/barrysilbert
and a few good internet articles/videos:
- Why Decentralization Matters
- The Meaning of Decentralization
- But how does bitcoin actually work?
- An Introduction to Crypto
- Decrypting Crypto: From Bitcoin and Blockchain to ICOs
Emilie Raffo, founding Partner and Head of Sales at ChainSecurity and Niko Torgin Mackinga, blockchain security engineer spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about smart contracts, its pros and cons and how to make them useful and secure.
- Emilie, Torgin - why did they become entrepreneurs
- What is a smart contract, and how does it differ from an escrow or automating contract steps that you could do say with a macro?
- Smart contracts audits – sound like the next level of difficulty in the blockchain game. So why do we need them?
- What are the sort of issues you found regarding smart contracts? Did the code not do what was promised? Anything malicious?
- ChainSecurity is a PwC spin-off – will audit firms venture into auditing smart contracts at some point?
- What’s different between Chainsecurity and other smart contract auditors?
- What’s ChainSecurity's technology angle, or is it that they have more brilliant engineers than anyone else?
- Key clients for their services
- How does ChainSecurity deals with potential liability for its work
- Plans for scaling up
- Business model
- Team and locations
- Further reading: Le futur des espèces, Emilie Raffo's book on crypto (in French), DeFi News from Defiant, an article about Torgin's paper on oracle manipulation https://chainsecurity.com/oracle-manipulation-after-merge/ and the full paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/445, Andreas Antonopoulos Youtube channel
- Reach out here: contact@chainsecurity.com
Yves Eonnet, Chairman of Skaleet, a core banking platform provider, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the importance of getting banks ready for the 21st century by upgrading their core banking infrastructure.
Here is what they talked about:
- Yves' journey to entrepreneurship
- What does Skaleet provide? What's the problem you are solving? Does your core banking solution leverage the cloud?
- Skaleet's key clients - incumbents or neobanks who grow into fully licensed banks?
- Why should the CEO of a major European bank hire Skaleet?
- The technology angle
- Plans for scaling up
- The macro outlook for FinTechs and banks in France and Europe this year
- Implementing core banking solutions can require enormous resources. How big is your team, and where are you based?
- How do you make money?
- What's in store for you before the end of the year and beyond?
- The best way to reach out: Skaleet website
Daniëlle Keeven, VP Finance at Paddle, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about leveraging technology to turn your Finance function into a trusted advisor to the business.
Here is what they talked about:
- Why Danielle joined a start-up/scale-up?
- What does Paddle provide? What's the problem Paddle is solving?
- What makes Paddle different from many payment or Finance infrastructure providers?
- In addition to payment flows, what else can be automated and how?
- How do you see the impact of automation on jobs in Financ Aren't most of Finance jobs routine and therefore destined for extinction?
- What's your technology angle?
- Tell us about your scale-up journey so far – how do you deal with going international?
- How do you make money?
- How big is your team, and where are you based?
- Recommended book on leadership: It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy
- What's the best way to reach out: Daniëlle Keeven (Linkedin)
Roland Whyte, CEO of Nokkel, a property platform backed by ANZ, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the importance of managing your property just like any other asset that you own. Also, how does Nokkel leverage technology to gather all the information that drives your property value and can lead to a deal if need be?
Here is what they covered:
- Roland's journey from an accountant to a banker to an entrepreneur
- For many people, the property is their most significant asset, yet they don't spend much time managing it like other assets (financial ones). So do the financial and property worlds adequately serve consumers, and what could be done better?
- How can one create wealth through property, and how does data play a role?
- How does and should property feature in retirement planning?
- What is Nokkel, and how does this play an in all of this?
- What's your technology angle?
- What are Nokkel's plans for scaling up?
- A high-level overview of the business model
- What's in store for Nokkel before the end of the year and beyond?
- What's your favorite business book? How to create tech products customers love
- What's the best way to reach out: Nokkel and all other social media. Download the app here.
Tamara Kostova, CEO of Velexa, an investment services as a service platform, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about supporting new investment platforms with ready-to-go infrastructure.
Here is what they covered:
- Tamara's entrepreneurship journey
- Why help others launch their embedded investing solutions?
- What's different between Velexa and other embedded finance technology providers?
- Technology angle
- Plans for scaling up
- Macro outlook for the start-ups in the UK this year
- Key clients
- Business model
- Team size and locations
- Where are you on your journey, and what's in store for you before the end of the year and beyond?
- What's your favorite business book? Flash Boys
- The best way to reach out: is through LinkedIn here
In the first episode of the MENA (the Middle East & North Africa) Series, Dorra Mahbouli, VP of Corporate Strategy at Zitouna Finance, spoke to Amel Saidane, CEO and co-founder of BetaCube, Tunisian Tech venture builder, about FinTechs enabling the economy and scaling start-ups in the region.
Here is what they talked about:
- Initially, Dorra started the conversation with some insights and background from Amel's experiences and why Tunisia specifically is a potential hub of talents and an excellent bridge for the African market
- Among other topics, Dorra and Amel discussed the opportunities that BetaCube venture building hub is suggesting to start-ups, VCs, and corporate partners in Tunisia and abroad
- Amel argues that FinTech is an essential enabler of the economy in general and would be a starter for investing in other fields such as mobility, logistics, and education to create jobs and opportunities
- Finally, they concluded the conversation with some insights into the future of Betcube and how they would be scaling it for a sustainable impact on the region
- Further reading on the Tunisian FinTech scene
Rajeev Dham, Managing Director at Sapphire Ventures, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about investing in enterprise software companies with a positive impact on communities such as Wise, formerly TransferWise.
Here is what they talked about:
- Rajeev's background
- Sapphire Ventures introduction
- Why focus on the enterprise software
- What kind of start-ups Sapphire invests in
- Investment approach
- Tips for aspiring founders to start and grow their company, especially B2B
- Funding status quo this year
- Success stories: e.g., Wise, formerly TransferWise
- Sourcing
- Favorite business-related book: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
- Best way to reach out: rajeev@sapphireventures.com
Indus Khaitan, the CEO and founder of Quolum, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about helping businesses manage their many subscriptions to software services and save money!
Here is what they talked about:
- Indus' background and entrepreneurial journey
- What does Quorum Quolum provide? What's the problem you are solving? Why SaaS?
- What's different between Quolum and other Saas companies out there?
- What's Quolum's technology angle?
- What is the secret recipe to growth at a company?
- How does one transition from a small startup to a big corp?
- What is the experience of being an immigrant founder in the US?
- How does Quolum make money?
- Favorite business books: 3Com: The unsung saga of the Silicon Valley startup that helped give birth to the Internet—and then fumbled the ball and Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company
- What's the best way to reach out: Indus Khaitan (LinkedIn)
Dan Raju, founder, Chairman, and CEO at Tradier, a trading infrastructure provider, leading embedded Finance growth, spoke to spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about why he believes financial services have been unbundled and why it's essential to enable traders to trade where they get inspiration to trade.
Here is what they talked about:
- Dan – what's your background? How did you get to what you do today? Why become an entrepreneur?
- What does Tradier provide? What's the problem you are solving? Why do you believe in embedded finance?
- What's different between Tradier and other infrastructure players in the embedded Finance space?
- What's Tradier's technology angle?
- What are Dan's plans for scaling up and perhaps expanding the product range?
- Thoughts on the social media companies offering investment products
- How does Tradier make money?
- Favorite business book: Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne
- The best way to reach out: sales@trader.com or LinkedIn
Bente Krogmann, CEO of mTek Services, based in Nairobi, Kenya, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about disrupting the insurance industry in Africa with her insurance brokerage platform.
Here is what they talked about:
- Bente – what’s your background? How did you get to what you do today in Kenya? Why become an entrepreneur?
- What is mTek? What is the problem you are solving?
- What’s different between mTek and other InsurTech platforms in Africa?
- How did you get going and acquire the first customers when you first started?
- What’s your technology angle?
- What are your plans for scaling up and perhaps expanding the product range?
- How do you make money?
- How big is your team, and where are you based?
- What’s your favorite business book? Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg
- What’s the best way to reach out: LinkedIn
James Hickson, founder and CEO of Bloom, Europe's leading provider of capital to digital businesses, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about revenue-based financing for e-commerce and retail businesses.
- James's entrepreneurship journey
- What does Bloom provide? What's the problem you are solving?
- What's different between Bloom and other providers of revenue financing?
- What's Bloom's technology angle?
- What are your plans for scaling up?
- What's the outlook for the rest of this year for SMEs that Bloom serves, given the challenging global economic environment?
- How does Bloom make money?
- Clients and Bloom's locations
- Favorite business books: Steve Jobs and Good to Great
- Reach out through LinkedIn or the website
Louis Carbonnier, co-CEO, and co-founder of Hokodo, a B2B BNPL or trade finance solution, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about innovative digital approaches in trade financing, supporting SMEs, and commerce overall.
Here is what they talked about:
- Louis' background: why become an entrepreneur?
- What does Hokodo provide? What’s the problem you are solving? Why trade financing?
- What’s different between Hokodo and other trade financing providers? You also call yourself a BNPL for SMEs – do you work like BNPLs in the consumer space?
- What’s your technology angle?
- What are your plans for scaling up and perhaps expanding the product range?
- You serve SMEs – what sectors do you focus on, and what’s your outlook for the rest of this year, given the challenging global economic environment?
- Where are your clients?
- How do you make money?
- How big is your team, and where are you based?
- How did you get going and acquire the first customers when you first started?
- What’s your favorite business book? The hard thing about hard things (of course!) by Ben Horowitz and Empowered by Marty Cagan
- What’s the best way to reach out: louis@hokodo.co or LinkedIn
Drew Glover, GP of Fiat Ventures and Founding Partner of Fiat Growth, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about what it takes to grow start-ups, especially FinTechs, and how insights from growth consultancy can lead to a unique edge as a VC investor.
Here is what they covered:
- Drew's background
- Fiat Growth and Fiat Ventures - what do they do? Growth consultancy and VC fund. No relation to Fiat, a car company:)
- What kind of start-ups have you invested in, and what sort of FinTechs have you invested in?
- What's your investment approach?
- Tips for aspiring founders to start and grow their company
- Where are we regarding start-up and FinTech valuations, given the macro environment turning for the worse?
- Success story example: Teen-focused FinTech Copper, raising USD 29m in April 2022, led by Fiat Ventures
- Growth consultancy and deal sourcing and insights
- Best way to reach out: Check out Fiat Growth
Uldis Tēraudkalns, CEO of Nexpay, Latvian FinTech supporting digital businesses and their payment needs, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about specific needs of digital businesses not addressed by incumbent banks and more.
Nexpay overview: We are supporting digital companies so they are no longer required to have a bank account at a legacy financial institution to do their business. You can build your digital business using the Nexpay dedicated IBANs and our seamless payments solutions. Integrate into your business flow via API, and shape your business with the ultimate digital infrastructure. Join Nexpay, the ultimate payments infrastructure provider.
Here is what they covered:
- Uldis' background
- What does Nexpay provide? What's the problem they are solving
- What's different about Nexpay vs. other neobanks
- Technology angle
- Plans for scaling up and perhaps expanding the product range
- Crypto or digital assets outlook this year
- Your clients are based worldwide - compliance and regulatory aspects
- Business model
- Team size and location: from Riga, Latvia, to the world
- How did you get going and acquire the first customers when you first started
- Recommended books: Bitcoin Billionaires and The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- The best way to reach out: find Uldis on LinkedIn here.
Brigitta Gyoerfi, Innovation Strategist and CEO of Creablin´ spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about innovation strategies for banking incumbents, e.g., design thinking, metaverse, DeFi or sustainability and more.
Here is what they talked about in more detail:
- Brigitta – what’s your background? How did you get to what you do today?
- I know you are also an expert on Design Thinking – how would you assess the customer-centricity among incumbent banks in Switzerland and, say, a few years back?
- What are some of the best resources (books, courses, studios) where can someone start with Design Thinking? Check out Sparkacademy or Ideo, for example.
- DeFi and metaverse are hot topics – are these topics that banks can work on now or are they Horizon 3 kinds of problems?
- Examples of where you worked with corporate clients on metaverse applications
- Isn’t DeFi going against the incumbents by definition?
- Does corporate innovation work or is it an innovation theater?
- What would advise start-ups trying to work with incumbents? What’s the best way to talk to the right people, and who are they?
- Sustainability entered mainstream investing a while ago as well, yes, we still have issues with ESG investing, sustainability reporting and greenwashing. What are some initiatives in Switzerland that address these issues? What can we do as individuals to progress these topics more?
- Contacts: Creablin´ website or Brigitta Gyoerfi LinkedIn profile
Andrej Gregus and Richard Guga, co-founders of Nettle, a Slovak-based AI start-up, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about their holographic, smart, retail banker and leveraging AI and holograms in Financial Services and elsewhere.
Here is what they talked about:
- Andrej, Richard – what are your backgrounds? How did you get to what you do today, and how did you meet?
- You are co-founders of Nettle – what is Nettle about?
- You built a holographic banker for SLSP – how did this come about?
- Your holographic banker is called Vesna – why Vesna, and can a customer change the name and appearance as they prefer, like voices on your iPhone?
- What were customer reactions to Vesna?
- What can Vesna do in addition to greeting customers at the branch?
- What kind of technology do you use to make Vesna appear natural and intelligent?
- Where do you see other potential use cases for holographic?
- Will we be able to use holograms at home soon - just like video calls today?
- What are your growth plans?
- What’s your favorite business book? Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Y. N. Hariri and William Ury - Getting to Yes
- What’s the best way to reach out (and what kind of parties would be most relevant for you)?
Ian Lynch, Chief Commercial Officer at Intertrust Group, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about using technology (in-house or through partnering with start-ups) to serve private capital (PE and VC) and corporate, capital markets or wealth managers.
Here is what they covered:
- Ian – what’s your background? How did you get to what you do today?
- What does Intertrust provide? Corporate Client Services, Private Capital & Hedge Fund Services, Capital Markets and Private Wealth
- Your services include many smaller tasks, so I guess leveraging technology is the only way to do it at scale. What’s the technology behind your solution?
- What’s your view on open innovation, or do you prefer to develop what you can in-house and the rest from well-established technology vendors? Can FinTechs help you?
- Overall, how do you distinguish yourself from your competitors?
- You work a lot with Private Capital players – I bet you have seen a steady increase in private capital vs. public over the years. Do you think this trend will also continue in the world of rising interest rates?
- Your clients are based all over the world - how do you deal with tax and other regulations?
- How do you make money?
- How big is your team, and where are you based?
- What’s your favorite business book? Legacy - All Blacks, Michael O'Leary: A Life in Full Flight, Jim Collins's Good to Great. Related check out the micro-course inspired by Jim Collins's Built to Last on Emeritus Insights, presented by Rudolf Falat.
- Test way to reach out: LinkedIn - Ian Lynch.
Julian Liniger, CEO and co-founder of Relai, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about all things bitcoin, rationale, outlook, holding and trading bitcoin.
Here is what they covered:
- Julian's entrepreneurial journey
- Should people invest in bitcoin, and why?
- What's the outlook for bitcoin this year?
- What does Relai provide?
- Overall, how does Relai differ from competitors?
- What's Relai's technology angle - it is run on the blockchain?
- Your clients are based worldwide - how do you deal with compliance?
- How do you make money?
- How big is your team, and where are you based?
- What's the best way to reach out? Julian's LinkedIn profile: Julian Liniger, and chat within the Relai app.
Cameron Peake, Partner at Financial Venture Studio spoke to Wani Baumgartner, Finance and Life Sciences recruiter and Voice of FinTech host, about building and leading FinTech businesses including attracting the right and diverse talent, getting ready for the opportunities in FinTech including Web 3 and more.
Cameron is an entrepreneurial leader who has launched, built and scaled FinTech companies around the world. Previously, she was the CEO and Co-Founder of Azlo, a leading digital banking platform for small businesses in the US. There, she grew the company to 150 employees, $1B in deposits, supported the financial and business needs of hundreds of thousands of small entrepreneurs, and was recognized as one of Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40 for her work to deliver financial services to businesses impacted by COVID.
Topics discussed:
- Bridging the gap between founders and investors
- Experience and learnings having built a FinTech
- Challenges as a female founder and investor
- How to find the leadership style authentic to you
- Is Web 3 truly the next big thing?
- How will the FinTech space change in the next few years?
Lauren Martin, VP Legal at Dwolla, USA, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about improving America's payments infrastructure, privacy, regulations in this space, and more!
Here is what they talked about in more detail:
- Lauren's background and journey to FinTech
- What does Dwolla provide?
- Are APIs on the back of the old payments infrastructure the final solution to America's payments pain points?
- How does people's desire for privacy come into play regarding payments?
- How does Dwolla distinguish itself from competitors?
- Who are Dwolla's clients? Domestic or international payments?
- What's the technology behind Dwolla's solution?
- How do you make money?
- The female/male ratio in law school vs. FinTech world - how does Lauren handle it?
- Team and locations
- What's your favorite business book: Amp it Up by Frank Slootman, Think Again by Adam Grant
- The best way to reach out: Lauren (Gannon) Martin on LinkedIn
Kavita Ganesan, an AI strategist, advisor, and educator, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about successfully implementing AI in business.
Here is what they covered:
- Kavita's background and her journey to AI
- How companies can get started with the adoption of AI, including concrete strategies with real-world examples
- Steps to recognize AI opportunities that are most suitable for businesses
- The Five Pillars for AI Preparation: Data Readiness, Cultural Readiness, Skills Readiness, Infrastructure Readiness, Budget Readiness
- How to effectively implement AI solutions without hiring a team of data scientists, etc.
- What is and isn't appropriate to expect from AI
- The differences between software automation, robotic process automation (RPA), and AI
- Why the success of AI is a combination of model success, business success, and user success
- Examples of "Vanity AI" and why such pursuits are pointless
- Why Machine Learning (ML) is the core driver of business AI applications
- What a successful AI initiative looks like and how to ensure that AI models see more success than failure
- Why companies are slow to adopt AI even though the need and desire to do so is there
- The best way to reach out and find out more: kavita@opinosis.ai
Stephen Flood, CEO of GoldCore, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the importance of diversification of your assets and the benefits of owning gold and other precious metals compared to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
In more detail, they covered:
- Stephen's background - from banking to gold
- Why should everyone own gold and silver, according to Stephen?
- Are you a blockchain fan? Is Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme?
- What does GoldCore provide?
- Overall, how does GoldCore distinguishes itself from competitors?
- What’s the key technology behind GoldCore?
- International clients and precious metals - how does GoldCore deal with compliance?
- Business model
- Size of the team and locations
- Critical elements of a successful entrepreneurship journey
- Favorite business books: The ABCs of Gold Investing and Nonviolent communication
- The best way to reach out: GoldCore
Elizabeth A. Tuleja, the founder of the Intercultural Leader Institute, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the importance of intercultural management, leadership and communication skills essential for start-ups scaling up out of their home market.
In more detail, they covered:
- Elizabeth's journey in intercultural management and leadership
- As defined by Jim Collins in the book Built to last, visionary companies are the ones that outperformed their peers over decades. The key to their success was reliance on the core company ideology, balancing continuity and progress over decades. One of the features is a cult-like culture. Most of these companies are US-headquartered multinationals. So how do American companies handle working with different cultures when they have expanded worldwide?
- Start-ups often struggle to survive and perhaps don't think about company culture until they grow up. Can you concisely and purposely create a company culture that you want? If yes, what's better and worse, company culture?
- How do you do business in a world that seems to be in permanent crisis for at least the last two years?
- Gender diversity: what can companies' leaders do to improve it further?
- You wrote a post on LinkedIn recently that acceptance doesn't mean agreement. What does it mean and how do you make that clear across different cultures?
- Where do you agree with Prof. Gert Hofstede regarding his views on intercultural management, and where do you differ?
- Recommended further reading: Intercultural Communication for Global Business - How Leaders Communicate Success. 20 % OFF with SMA10 code
- What's the best way to reach out and find out more? Follow Elizabeth on Linkedin or check out her website, the Intercultural Leader Institute.
Michael Brooks, founder and CEO of goLance, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the goLance freelance platform helping clients hire the best talent worldwide.
Specifically, they covered:
- Michael's background - how did he get to what he does today
- The future of work in terms of % of work done by freelancers and full-time jobs? Remote and onsite?
- What does goLance provide? Why is goLance what freelancers need?
- How are freelancers taken advantage of through typical payment methods? How can a digital currency or smart contract help?
- goLance is a platform business, a two-sided marketplace. How did Michael overcome a cold start problem? Which side of the platform did he prioritize?
- How goLance distinguishes itself from its competitors
- The technology behind the goLance solution? Automation or more?
- goLance's business model: fees and who pays them
- How big is your team, and where are you based?
- Favorite business book: On Wings of Eagles
- The best way to reach out: goLance
We all exist to serve our community and not the other way around.
In this episode of the Americas Series, David Yakobovitch speaks to Haseeb Awan, Founder & CEO of Efani Secure Mobile about how to fight SIM-related fraud and protect your hard-earned money.
Here is what they covered:
- Efani story: from family to friends to finance community - crypto and fiat
- What is a SIM swap and why should crypto investors, high profile and high net worth individuals and organizations care about this?
- What are other methods for hacking?
- Why is the current solution not working?
- What can investors and other high profile and high net worth individuals and organizations do to increase their security?
- How is Efani doing it differently and better?
Conclusion: Protect your assets, crypto and intellectual property by going to Efani.com and subscribing to receive secure mobile services.
Marc Hauser, Head F10 Incubator and Accelerator Europe and Stefan Kaemper, co-founder of Cow Level, a FinTech for gaming company spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about latest push by F10 into gaming and metaverse and Cow Level's efforts to build a marketplace for gaming assets.
Here is what they covered:
- Marc's motivation to change ships from a large incumbent to an ecosystem hub
- Current key FinTech verticals F10 wants to focus on
- Stefan's background and entrepreneurial journey that led to co-founding of Cow Level
- F10 recently announced a concentrated push to metaverse and gaming. Marc explains why it is relevant for a FinTech hub
- Key opportunities for FinTech to cross over with the world of gaming and eSports?
- What’s the difference between gaming and eSports
- Cow Level key services: The first project brought to life and are committed to is the First international Play Money Exchange (FiPME). FiPME produces marketplace software for virtual goods, similar to Nasdaq – an Exchange for stocks.
- The technology behind their solution
- The target addressable market and business model of Cow Level
- Cow Level’s endgame plan and how can F10 help companies like Cow Level
- Recommended games: Chain, Out Run, Axie Infinity, Farming Simulator
- What’s the best way to reach out: marc.hauser@f10.global and sk@cowlevel.ch or LinkedIn
In this episode, Margarita Chli, Swiss National Science Professor in Computer Vision for Robotics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about improving drone vision and building autonomous drones and their use cases in Insurance.
Specifically, here is what they covered:
- How did Margarita become a professor at ETH in Zurich in drones and robots' vision? See Margarita's profile at ETH website.
- Many people talk about self-driving cars, but less attention is paid to autonomous drones. What are the use cases for intelligent drones that can fly by themselves, and what are their challenges vs. self-driving cars?
- The critical focus of Margarita's research is improving the vision of drones and robots. So what technology are we talking about? How does it compare to mainstream hobby drones like DJI?
- Many people are concerned with safety and privacy when it comes to drones. Yet, Margarita is helping drones to see even better! So, how would Margarita alleviate these concerns?
- Insurance companies in many countries have already eliminated many claims adjustor roles – they use humans to survey the damage, but data is sent to HQ for assessment and processing. With autonomous drones, can these roles be replaced too? For example, the staff in HQ can use drones for a survey and then use the pictures or videos for the assessment?
- What are the differences between using drones for surveying damage indoors (say, a building near collapse) and a substantial flooded area? Do you need a different drone size? Undoubtedly, but what about its navigation abilities?
- What about urban use (e.g., for assessing car accidents) – would you be comfortable using autonomous drones there
- How does one deal with challenges like battery life or accidents when the drone works independently?
- Further resources: Margarita's TEDx Talk on Computer Vision. You can also subscribe to the Vision for Robotics Youtube channel.
- The best way to reach out - e-mail: chlim@ethz.ch
In this episode of the Americas Series, David Yakobovitch speaks to Gil Akos, CEO of Astra, about disrupting and upgrading the archaic payments system in America.
Here is what they covered:
Background:
- Gil’s background and what led him to found Astra
- What do you see driving the recent boom of the financial transfer market? How has Astra grown as a company in conjunction with this boom?
- Who are some of Astra’s customers?
- What types of companies can benefit from Astra’s technology?
- How does Astra differentiate itself from others in the crowded fintech space?
The current state of the payments system:
- What are the current issues you see with the payment system and what can be done to solve these challenges? Specifically, how does Astra solve these challenges?
- How do you expect the payments space to change over the next couple of years?
- How do you see real-time payments (RTP) affecting the ACH network and the payments system as a whole?
- How can banks and financial institutions effectively and safely handle ACH transfers?
Account-to-account and instant transfers:
- How does Astra enable account-to-account (A2A) transfers? How are you able to simplify A2A transfers for both developers and consumers?
- Why have A2A transfers historically been difficult for banks and financial institutions to execute effectively?
- What is Astra’s role in the instant payment space?
Bridging the gap between fiat money and cryptocurrency:
- What are the inherent challenges for all Web3 infrastructure?
- What steps need to be taken in order to bridge the gap between these two dramatically opposed ecosystems?
- How does Astra handle risk mitigation within fiat-crypto transactions to help prevent fraud losses?
- How will the rapid growth of crypto/DeFi/Web3 impact the evolution of the payments systems?
Follow Astra on LinkedIn, Twitter, and visit their website for more information.
In this podcast episode, Alexandra Levis, President of Arro Financial Communications, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the unique nuances and challenges of Marketing in Financial Services.
Here is what they covered:
- Alex's background and journey to Marketing in Financial Services
- Challenges Alex had to face running a company that's at the intersection of marketing and traditional finance
- Best marketing tools to focus on? Digital marketing, SEO, PR?
- Does one still need a website to promote their business?
- Key clients - large companies vs. FinTechs; how do they differ?
- How can FinTechs create a robust marketing plan on a budget? Should FinTechs try to build a B2C brand, or are they better off going through the B2B route?
- Many entrepreneurs would love to build another platform. How do you overcome a cold start problem, though?
- The most significant changes in financial marketing over the last few years?
- Recommended for to aspiring FinTech entrepreneurs, related to Marketing: Hegarty on Advertising
- Best way to reach out: alevis@arrocomm.com
Shamir Karkal, co-founder and CEO of Sila, a US-headquartered FinTech software platform spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about ways how to program your money to do what you want with it.
Specifically, here is what they covered:
- Shamir's background and journey to Sila
- Why are we only in the early stages of FinTech, and what it's exciting about the future?
- Sila seeks to provide the next generation of financial services – why and how?
- What is programmable money?
- What's your unfair competitive advantage?
- What's the technology behind your solution?
- How do you make money?
- What will Web3 mean in terms of financial services, and how blockchain and crypto integrate into it?
- How big is your team, and where are you based?
- Shamir's favorite business book: Debt: The First 5000 Years
- What's the best way to reach out: Sila Money
Scott Sanborn, CEO of Lending Club, a listed US FinTech unicorn, Lendit FinTech's Executive of the Year, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about building a successful neobank in the US.
More specifically, they covered:
- Scott's journey from marketing to FinTech
- What's right and wrong with traditional banking, and how can a neobank like Lending Club fix it
- How does Lending Club help its clients to stay or become financially healthy?
- How Lending Club works
- Thoughts on the rise of BNPL
- Business model
- Technology angle
- Key clients
- How did LendingClub cope with the pandemic?
- You are Lendit's Executive of the Year – how do you feel about it?
- Additional recommended resources for entrepreneurs: How I built this (podcast) and Antifragile
- The best way to reach out: sanborn@lendingclub.com
In this episode of Voice of Fintech, we spotlight the revolution that is underway in India's most significant asset class - property or real estate. Our guest today is Atul Monga, Co-Founder & CEO of BASIC Home Loan. This FinTech company is working to digitize home loans, especially for middle and low-income households in India.
Here is what Taneia Bhardwaj, our APAC Series host, based in Mumbai, asked Atul:
- You are a mechanical engineer by training who has spent a fair bit of time in investment banking. What led you to start your own business, that too, during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020?
- Talk to us a bit of the business you have built - BASIC home loan - as someone who has taken a home loan herself - what's shocking and frustrating in equal measure is the complete lack of digitization in the entire process -there's never-ending paperwork, complicated math, and stress! So how are you solving this? How are you delighting customers? Reinventing the process?
- What are some of India's trends that support and drive protection - on the search, supervise, and sell-side?
- How did you nail your go-to-market strategy? How did you validate your value proposition and ensure that you were developing a product that people wanted instead of creating something based on your intuition?
- Is winning clients a lengthy process because real estate is traditionally a conservative brick-and-mortar business in more ways than one?
- Scale-up plans?
- When will we see the one-click mortgage, the embedded finance component of PropTech, take off in India?
Creative solutions to drive gamers' engagement through play to earn and give back to the community are emerging at the cross-over of the metaverse, FinTech, and gaming. Listen to Brendan Wong, CEO and co-founder of Avocado Guild based in Singapore, which enables players to participate in games like Axie Infinity or Cyball to earn money and support their community, the largest one now in the Philippines speaking to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how it all works.
- Brendan's background - how he got to what he does today
- Avocado Guild: a community, building and shaping the future of GameFi via onboarding and educating new Web3 users.
- What does it mean, pay to play?
- How does Avocado Guild work? Financing players so they can buy digital Axies within Axie Infinity (for example) and start playing to earn
- Bridging metaverse and real-world - how is Avocado Guild building community outside of games
- When one wants to start a network, or a community, you face a cold start problem. How did Avocado start?
- Avocado Guild just raised USD 18 million - how big are its growth ambitions?
- What’s the technology behind Avocado Guild
- How does guild make money?
- How big is your team, and where are you based? Hint: geographical focus now and the ambition to scale up
- Brendan's favorite game at the moment: Cyball, CyBall is a football-themed, NFT-based blockchain game with a play-to-earn model that allows you to test your might against players from around the world
- What’s the best way to reach out: @BrendinoAG (Telegram) or e-mail: brendan@avocadoguild.com
Start-up funding in Africa is growing tremendously, from less than USD $2 billion reported in 2019, to well over USD $4 billion in 2021 (USD $1 million raised every two hours), and over $1 billion in the first two months of 2022 alone according to Briter Bridges. While this is an encouraging trend from a market capitalization standpoint, the fact that the bulk of these inflows are targeted at the FinTech sector alone (over 70%), and raised mostly by foreign-registered start-ups or those whose Founders or CEOs studied abroad raises questions about this capital’s effectiveness in realizing the long-term economic and social impact. This episode investigates these trends from the starting point. We interview Lavanya Anand, Principal at Vested World, a leading early-stage VC with a diversified portfolio covering East and West Africa.
Among other topics, we discuss the kinds of opportunities that VestedWorld is interested in, their various sources of deal-flow, and their expectations of the companies they invest in.
Lavanya argues that while FinTech is an important enabler of the African economy, there is also a need to invest in other areas like logistics, food security, education in order to create jobs and make everything else work. We also explore the critical role of local capital in driving growth in the African ecosystem, especially in the early stages.
Finally, we conclude our conversation with some insights from her experience in investing, and why for the bold and daring, Africa is the future.
Brian Shniderman, US CEO and Global Chief Strategy Officer at Openpay (Opy), spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about building the next generation of BNPL, smart BNPL!
Here is what they covered:
- Brian's background and his journey to Opy
- What's Opy's mission? What's the problem that Opy is solving?
- Level setting: how does BNPL work? How do you assess credit risk?
- What does Opy provide? Financing for larger purchases, e.g. healthcare / dental purchases, auto repairs, education
- How do you differ from other BNPL solutions out there? Carefully selected industry verticals, strategic partnerships with the vendors and financing facility of USD 270m+ from Goldman Sachs
- BNPL has been growing tremendously in some markets, but it's unavailable in some. Where does Brian see the most significant potential
- What's the technology behind Opy's solution
- Business model
- From Australia to the US, UK and New Zealand - key markets and ambitions
- Recommended book: A CEO Only Does Three Things: Finding Your Focus in the C-Suite
- The best way to reach out: Brian Shniderman (Linkedin) or e-mail: bshniderman@opy.com
Guy Kashtan, CEO and co-founder of Rewire, headquartered in Israel, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about innovative ways his company uses to provide financial services to migrants, including refugees all across the EU, UK and Israel.
Here is what they talked about:
- Guy's background, what led him to co-found Rewire
- Rewire’s mission to provide transparent and effortless financial services to migrants
- What type of migrants do you have in mind? Which countries? What about refugees?
- Rewire's financial services for migrants: basic bank account even without an address, ability to send money home cheaply and easily and more
- Rewire recently secured USD 25 million from Migdal Insurance to add insurance products to their portfolio - at the host country and for family back at home
- Size of the opportunity Guy and his team are tackling
- Technology angle behind their solution
- Business model
- Size of the team and where in the world are Rewire's employees and clients based
- Guy's favorite business book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (again on this podcast!)
- The best way to reach out
Antoine Loth and Elie Azzi, co-founders of Valk, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about scaling up their platform for private deals during the pandemic (several billion USD in volume!) and building new DeFi solutions for another exponential growth opportunity.
Here is what they talked about:
- Antoine, Elie – what are your backgrounds?
- The problems that Valk is solving
- More details on a recently launched full suite of DeFi solutions
- What protocols are you integrated with today and what are the next steps?
- How is your DeFi solution linked to your original VDeal solution focused on private markets and tokenization?
- Target clients
- How big is the opportunity that Valk is tackling
- Valk has grown tremendously in the past year. Antoine's advice to other founders on how to grow and scale platforms quickly
- Geographical coverage and international ambitions
- Any good book on DeFi?
- What's the best way to reach out
From this recording of the live event, in cooperation with Emeritus, hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, you will learn:
- DEMYSTIFY key terms and frameworks in Financial Technology (FinTech)
- LEARN how to formulate and communicate key questions that can be addressed through the use of FinTech
- HEAR real-world applications of FinTech through case studies
- DISCOVER opportunities to advance FinTech skills
You can also watch it (including the slides) on Youtube here. Slides are available here.
In this episode of Africa Series, Stacey Japhta, VP Growth at Talent in the cloud, Emerging Markets FinTech executive firm, sat down with Akshay Grover, CEO of Cellulant. Cellulant, a pan African payments platform, connects entrepreneurs and innovators across Africa through seamless digital commerce. Akshay discusses all things FinTech, how funding rounds differ from A-D and seed-investment advice for rookies.
Sheila Kagan, CEO of PayKey, an Israeli Embedded Finance company, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the promise of embedded finance and banking, and especially about why earned wages access is such a hot product right now across the globe!
Here is what they covered in more detail:
- Sheila's background and how she got to do what she does today
- PayKey's mission and the problem it is solving
- PayKey's focus when it comes to Embedded Finance or Banking
- What value Sheila sees in earned wage access solutions
- How can banks respond to the emergence of FinTechs in the embedded banking space
- How does PayKey distinguish itself from other Embedded Finance service providers
- Target clients
- Size of the opportunity
- What's the technology behind PayKey'solution
- Geographic coverage
- What's the best way to reach out
In this live event, co-hosted and supported by Emeritus, leading global EdTech, making world-class education accessible globally, represented by Marie Mize, Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, spoke live to Pahal Patangia, Head of Developer Relations, FinTech at Nvidia about the latest trends in leveraging AI in FinTech, explainable AI, metaverse and FinTech and Nvidia's activities, products, and services supporting FinTechs.
Here is what they discussed (transcript is also available where supported by your podcast app):
- Pahal's background
- Pahal's role at Nvidia
- AI is crucial for the development of FinTech. So what's the role of Nvidia in leveraging AI in Financial Services – from hardware to software, and what's the strategic rationale of Nvidia's involvement in this space?
- Many start-ups perhaps overuse the term AI when describing the technology behind their ventures. Do you agree? What is AI and what is not when it comes to FinTech use cases?
- What would be the most promising use cases for AI in FinTech?
- We've had AI winters in the past – would you say we are past potential AI winters and why?
- AI is sometimes the subject of fierce debate regarding ethics and governance, and sometimes the models' results are below expectations. So what can go wrong with AI?
- Governance and regulatory framework are often behind technology improvements. What do you think is needed now when it comes to AI governance?
- What is explainable AI? (XAI) Why do we need one?
- Can you mention some examples where you have already worked on XAI implementation?
- Given Nvidia's history, where do you see the most significant opportunities for FinTech expanding into metaverse or crossing over with gaming?
- Is metaverse a fad, or is it here to stay? How does it correspond with the future of work?
- What new products or services are you rolling out for FinTechs interested in deploying AI quickly and efficiently as well as expanding into metaverse?
- Where do you see the future of AI? Augmented intelligence or general intelligence?
- Best way to reach out
Riccardo Balsamo, CEO of Delega, a Swiss-based RegTech, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the pain points between banks and corporates when it comes to figuring out who is authorized to sign a contract on behalf of the counterparty and make a payment.
Here is what they covered:
- Why is Riccardo a Treasury enthusiast?
- What's Delega's mission - the problem it is solving
- How does Delega differ from DocuSign or Adobe contract management solutions?
- Target clients
- The size of the opportunity
- The technology behind Delega's solution
- Preventing fraud with Delega's solution
- The most remarkable innovations in Treasury during Riccardo's career, and where is the highest potential for FinTechs to improve this area of Finance
- Size of the team and international reach
- What is the best way to reach out (and what kind of parties would be most relevant for you)?
Rachel Carpenter, founder, and CEO of Intrinio, based in St. Peterburg, Florida, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about providing affordable and high-quality financial data for FinTechs building new products and business in the Capital Markets FinTech space.
Specifically, here is what they covered:
- Rachel's background and why she has become interested in financial data
- What are the most remarkable innovations you have seen in Financial Data Management during your career, and where is the highest potential for FinTechs to improve this area of Finance?
- What's Intrinio's mission? What's the problem Intrinio is solving?
- What sort of data are we talking about? Also, what does it mean, financial supply chain?
- How is Intrinio different from financial data providers like Bloomberg or exchanges?
- Target clients: FinTechs in the Capital Markets space
- How big is the opportunity Intrinio is tackling
- What's the technology behind their solution
- How Intrinio ensures data quality leveraging AI / Machine Learning
- Where is Intrinio's team based and approach to hiring talent
- What's your favorite business book?
- The best way to reach out and find out more about Intrinio and Rachel
David Yakobovitch, our New York-based host, teamed up with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, to discuss what's been shaking in the FinTech world and adjacent sectors in early 2022 live on Fishbowl. Here is the recording if you missed it!
David and Rudolf focused on these key topics:
• Gaming and FinTech: Microsoft's announced acquisition of Activision. Check also news coverage on the FT, Variety,
Microsoft. More broadly, check out these great reports on gaming and Fintech here, including the Goldman Sachs report on gaming and metaverse. See more on the consolidation in the gaming sector.
• X-AI or Explainable AI: What it is and why do we need an explainable approach to AI? See also Nvidia's article on the same here.
• Crypto crash: Why do crypto crashes happen? Check out this great explainer here. How does it impact Coinbase? Should you be worried?
• End of the InsurTech revolution? What happened to Lemonade and its fellow darlings of the InsurTech scene? What happened to InsurTech?
Lars Sommerer, Managing Director of the Swiss PropTech, and Julien Schillewaert, CEO of PriceHubble, spoke to Rudolf Falat, the Voice of FinTech podcast founder, about the Swiss PropTech scene and cross-over with FinTech.
Here is what they talked about:
- Lars, what brought you from traditional real estate to PropTech?
- What are the Swiss PropTech, its goals, and activities?
- Swiss PropTech scene - overview, the most developed verticals
- Julien, you are CEO at PriceHubble. How did you get to do what you do today?
- What is PriceHubble and the problem you are solving?
- Many people make only a handful of real estate investments in their lives. So what’s PriceHubble's competitive edge?
- The most significant opportunities for growth within the real estate industry in Switzerland in the near future
- How has the adoption of PropTech solutions changed during the pandemic? How receptive is Swiss real estate to PropTech vs. before the pandemic? Check out the annual Swiss PropTech study here.
- The best way to reach out
Thank you, the Swiss Finance + Technology Association (SFTA), for making it happen!
In this episode of the Americas Series, David Yakobovitch speaks to Toby Russell, co-CEO of Shift Technologies about disrupting the used car market!
Specifically, they cover:
- In the digital era, convenience is key. Consumers want to browse, shop, and pay for items like coffee, clothes without friction. Toby discusses how Embedded FinTech allows customers to finance their cars, get prequalified for a loan, select and purchase an auto loan, and even buy vehicle protection plans and gap insurance without leaving their app. He'll also dive into how embedded fintech will transform industries and why more brands should take the Embedded FinTech approach.
- One of the largest areas of the consumer sector is a haggle system that actively discriminates. Toby speaks about how incorporating ML and a financial stack into an eCommerce platform is standardizing industry pricing, allowing more people to access real-time crediting decisions, and how embedded payments open up auto purchases to more people.
- As payments become more digital both online and offline, Embedded Finance will become a new business model for sellers. This will accelerate in a Web3 environment.
Conclusion:
As a retailer - evaluate your business model.
As a finance company- evaluate your Tech.
As a consumer - expect better.
Jérôme Kehrli, CTO at Netguardians spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about leveraging AI in anti-fraud prevention and cybersecurity.
Here is what they talked about:
- Jerome's backstory
- Why has Jerome decided to join a start-up (or a scale-up) like Netguardians
- When will we finally have truly intelligent AI working on fraud prevention in banking?
- How good is anti-fraud AI today? What kind of AI are we talking about?
- Who are Netguardians' target customers?
- How do you make money?
- Where are you on your journey in terms of product development, geographic reach, funding, hiring?
- What are the next steps for you next year and beyond? Customers, incumbents as partners, investors?
- Where can interested parties reach you?
Thank you the Swiss Finance + Technology Association (SFTA) for making it happen!
Sabah al-Binali, Partner of OurCrowd Arabia, shared his perspectives on the benefits of investing in start-ups alongside VC and the background on the first Israeli VC expanding to the Middle East with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast.
They also covered:
- Sabah discussed his investing background and experience
- Sabah explained how OurCrowd operates and how he joined forces with OurCrowd's founder and CEO, Jon Medved
- Sabah and Rudolf further discussed the reasons for the company setting up an arm in ADGM
- How much money OurCrowd raised, their geographic focus (Israel and abroad), and success stories
- VC and crowdsourcing - unique appeal of OurCrowd
- OurCrowd's approach to working with start-ups: operational help and advice in addition to money
- Views on FinTech's growth in the Middle East and most promising verticals
- What's the best way to reach out if you are interested to learn more about OurCrowd
Daniel Aghdami, the founder of Board Owl, talks about Board Owl matching senior executives to companies, especially start-ups and SMEs to form boards and advisory boards with an impact with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast.
Below are some insights shared that would interest you:
- Daniel's backstory and entrepreneurial journey
- Reasons behind why he started Board Owl back in March 2020
- How Board Owl matches remarkable people with exceptional organizations for board positions to empower growth and make an impact as well as the current issues Board Owl is currently working on
- Resources provided for first-time board members
- Insights on what constitutes a good board member
- Leveraging a powerful board, and individuals looking to share their expertise and develop through holding board positions help someone in their career.
- Types of companies for boards that Board Owl focuses on
- Differences of board members from these types of companies mentioned
- Lessons learned from board members engagement to clients
- The liability exposure for board members in Switzerland and insurance coverage
- Milestones achieved since the company started that Daniel is proud of
- Knowing the best way to reach out and find out more about Board Owl
Thank you Swiss Finance + Technology Association (SFTA) for making it happen!
Dom Einhorn, founder, and CEO of UNIQORN, the world's largest rural incubator-accelerator and CXSports, a platform that helps amateur sports teams monetize their content, shared his insights with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast.
Among the many exciting subjects Dom shared the following:
- Dom's entrepreneurial journey from e-commerce to digital marketing (in the US and France) to helping others build businesses and helping amateur sports to improve their economics
- How he was able to make these businesses a big success
- Valuable advice to founders in France on fundraising, what to watch out for, and focusing on
- Uniqorn, a start-up ecosystem in Sarlat, rural France, near Bordeaux
- The key themes emerging from this year's edition on Startup Supercup, tech founders and investors matchmaking event
- Dom's passion for sports business, especially given the underappreciated, amateur team sports like rugby in France
- Explained how CXSports evening is the best playing field for amateur sports teams
- How the platform makes money
- Best way to reach and find out about Dom's entrepreneurial activities
In this episode of the Africa Series, Joke Adekunle spoke to Odun Eweniyi, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Piggyvest - an online saving and investment platform founded in 2016 to help Nigerians achieve their financial goals. Today, the startup has over 3 million customers and has recently acquired companies like Abeg - popularly known as the Cashapp for Africa.
Joke and Odun discussed modern finance in West Africa and building a FinTech startup on the continent.
Here is what Joke asked Odun:
- Tell us a bit more about PiggyVest story
- You and your team launched PiggyVest at a time when digital banking wasn't well recognized or trusted. What were the learning curves you had to navigate at the time?
- There's a lot of funding available today - especially for FinTech companies - how do you see that changing things in the African market?
- What - in your opinion- are the most challenging parts of building a fintech company in Africa?
- What lessons have you learned lately about building a fintech business in Nigeria?
- As an investor in several African companies, I'd like you to share your perspective on the idea that "every tech company today is or can be a fintech company" - do you agree?
- Still on the topic - PiggyVest acquired Abeg in 2020 - the startup popularly known as the Cashapp for Africa - what key factors led to that decision, and what are the opportunities for both companies with the acquisition?
- As an investor in several African companies, I'd like you to share your perspective on the idea that "every tech company today is or can be a fintech company" - do you agree?
- There's an emerging trend in the African fintech landscape of startups focused on the informal trade market; what are your thoughts on savings and investments for the informal market?
- Given your experience, what trends do you see emerging in the African tech market that the world should pay attention to?
- PiggyVest has some interesting projects in the pipeline, I believe. So what should our expectations be over the next few months?
Reto Ringger, the Founder & CEO of Globalance Bank, entrepreneur, financial leader, and innovator, had a chat with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech, about his passion for sustainability in financial markets.
Here are the details on what they have talked about:
- First, Reto gave a brief introduction of himself and his professional background
- Reasons behind creating Globalance bank and what problems it is trying to address
- The uniqueness of Globalance vs. other banks despite everyone claiming sustainability as their priority
- Key products that Globalance offers
- Key themes in sustainability that Globalance focuses and believes in: climate change, new mobility or AgTech
- Target clients of Globalance
- How Globalance is funded and regulated
- How Globalance makes money
- Financial services transformation, identifying where they lag vs. other industries.
- Journey of Globalance on product development, geographic reach, funding, and hiring.
- How interested parties can contact Reto and Globalance Bank
David Yakobovitch, our New York-based host, teamed up with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, to discuss worldwide FinTech stories of late 2021 and look at them through a critical lens! Topics included Nubank's IPO, N26's retreat from the US, Peloton's stock price drop due to a death of a fictional character on a TV show, Monzo's and Starling Bank's successes and challenges, Europe catching up with the US in VC funding, NFTs for Christmas and do we finally know who Satoshi Nakamoto is? This is the recording of their live show on Fishbowl.
Myron Mallia-Dare, a Partner - M&A, Venture Capital, Technology and Corporate Finance at Miller Thomson LLP, spoke with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech, about FinTech M&A, doing deals in North America, Canadian RegTech and cybersecurity.
Here is what they discussed in more detail:
- Myron's back story: Technology, Finance and M&A
- Miller Thomson's approach on advising FinTechs, what they focus on, if M&A or business transactions, or if they also advise only scale-ups or established companies
- FinTech M&A specifics, as well as lessons learned
- Funding alternatives for FinTechs nowadays
- Future of FinTech M&A - FinTechs buying Fintechs, consolidation and incumbents acquiring innovative companies
- Key differences identified between Canada and the US in Corporate Finance and VC investing
- Current hottest Reg Techs on the Canadian scene
- Legal framework catching up with the latest cybersecurity issues
- Favorite Business Book or Documentary: Good to Great by Jim Collins (updated)
- How to get in touch
According to recent reports, the number of registered mobile money accounts globally in 2020 stood at 1.2 billion, powered by over 300 live mobile money services, processing $767 billion in global transaction value. The sector has registered an increase of 12% from the previous year, especially due to increased demand during the COVID 19 pandemic. It is a fact that over 55% (more than half) of mobile money services globally are based in Africa, which also registered the highest growth in new users added in 2020, at 43% of all new accounts created. This points to the expanding and trailblazing nature of Africa’s digital payments market.
In this episode, we analyze this explosive growth narrative through the story of Africa’s largest digital payments gateway, MFS Africa. They have been at the forefront of this, connecting over 320 million mobile wallets in over 30 African countries. Daniel Maison, the organization’s Head of Growth, discusses their strategy to maintain their edge in a quickly evolving market, specifically how they meet their customers’ unique payment needs right from an early stage. He also gives his take on why smart money is in Africa and highlights some of the pain points that remain to be solved. Finally, we conclude our discussion with some debate about the role that FinTech can play in driving sustainable social and economic growth, especially as the world grapples with the threats of climate change and widening economic disparities.
In parting, he poses a theoretical question, “What if every drop in the ocean saw itself as special and separate from every other drop?” and challenges us to do the best we can, with what we have, for the greater good.
Yuval Tal, Managing Partner of Team8 Fintech shared his tips on how to pick and do due diligence on a FinTech when you are considering joining one, especially if it means a major career change for you!
Inspiring advice that you can’t miss out:
- How Tal became a godfather of Israeli Fintech
- Team8 investment philosophy
- Deal sourcing approach
- How Team8 works with start-ups
- How to choose the right FinTech for you when you are considering a career change, e.g. from a corporate
- Hottest trends in FinTech that fascinate Yuval
- Learn more about Team8 and how Yuval can be reached
In this episode of the Asia Pacific Series, we speak to John Januszczak, President & CEO of UBX, a FinTech venture studio created by the Unionbank of the Philippines. UBX was initiated to positively impact financial inclusion and business growth through technology. Founded in 2018 by Union Bank of the Philippines, UBX operates in Singapore and the Philippines; recognized as the Fastest Growing Fintech Company in South East Asia 2020 by UK-based Global Brands Magazine and Best Digital Community Impact Initiative in South East Asia 2020 by Capital Finance International (CFI.co). Originally from Canada, his degree in Astrophysics and experience in telecom, commercial software, banking and insurance industries provides a unique and well-rounded perspective on digital platforms. Prior to UBX, John served as the Chief Operating Officer of Manulife Philippines.
We talk about:
- UBX’s partnership with the Cardano Foundation
- The opportunity for building the underlying financial pipes for the Embedded Finance economy
- The opportunity for Venture Building in the Philippines
- Understanding the Crypto opportunity in the Philippines
- Building FinTech in the Philippines
Yaron Morgenstern, CEO of Glassbox, talked about his entrepreneurial journey with his company, how Glassbox improves digital customer journeys for their clients around the globe with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast.
Below are the notable points of the conversation:
- Yaron's backstory
- What is Glassbox? What is experience intelligence
- How Glassbox stands out with improving the digital journey compared to other existing solutions in the market
- How to measure a client's success when it comes to digital customer journey?
- How challenging (or easy) is it to start using Glassbox solutions?
- Key clients of the company like SoFi
- Business strategies that scale the company to its' current level and advice to start-up businesses
- Ways to scale up
- Key milestones ahead of Glassbox
- The best way to reach out and find out more about Glassbox
Marc Penkala, a VC angel investor, entrepreneur, and fund advisor, discussed his highly successful investment journey leading to his current investment vehicle, Minimal VC, with Wani Baumgartner, Finance and Life Sciences recruiter and the Voice of FinTech's guest host.
Here are some of the insights that Marc shared:
- How serendipity plays a role and has led to some of his best investments
- The importance of team-centric when deciding to invest
- How he de-risks despite having a high-risk tolerance
- The need of being intimately aware of your biases
- Why and how to network
- His ten principles on life gained from lessons derived from work
Alokik Advani, the Managing Partner of Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, discussed best practices in corporate venturing with Rudolf Falat, creator of the Voice of FinTech.
Here is what they talked about:
- Alokik shared his story – how he got to where he is now
- Fidelity’s approach to working with start-ups: from partnering to investing
- What is the mandate of Fidelity International Strategic Ventures?
- Alokik shared some of the success stories of the start ups he has helped and identified which start-ups he had invested in
- How Alokik and his team find start-ups, weighing in the pros and cons of inbound and proactive outreach
- Key FinTech themes he wants to follow up as an investor: embedded finance - democratizing access to investment products or sustainability
- Discussed valuations, previous bubbles and bursts, and the record height fundraising for FinTechs
- How do Alokik and Fidelity think about whether to invest or not
- What is it like to work with Fidelity as an investor
- Corporate VC’s bad reputation and suggestions on how to do it right
- How can interested parties reach out to Alokik and Fidelity?
Africa’s FinTech infrastructure companies are radically transforming the technology and financial services industry with the help of APIs that enable virtually any software company to offer financial products directly to their end customers. Unregulated startups offering financial products through APIs and bank partnerships are well-positioned to take advantage of these trends. Thousands of Small Business Enterprises are prevailing as winners, too, as their barriers to entry are eliminated by these companies’ plug-and-play business intelligence and payments solutions.
In this episode, we interview Elizaphan Mouko, Flutterwave’s East Africa Business Head, about their strategy for the region and why supporting Africa’s small businesses is an important pillar for their organization and economic development in general. We spoke in detail about Flutterwave’s comprehensive service offering and their simple onboarding process. We also discuss Africa’s current VC funding boom and why- according to Eli, “We are just getting started.” Finally, we conclude that Africa’s challenges are significant and that we can only tackle them if we work together.
Elizaphan quotes Isaac Newton’s famous saying, “We can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants,” to stress the importance of ecosystem thinking in solving Africa’s fintech challenges.
We can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants, Isaac Newton
Edward Woodford, CEO, and Co-Founder of Zero Hash (VC backed, including Bain Capital Ventures, Point72, NYCA & tastytrade), discussed his serial entrepreneur journey leading to his current venture that enables launching and distributing digital assets easily with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast.
Here are some of the insights that Edward shared:
- Edward's serial entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned
- Why Edward is a believer in digital assets promise
- Zero Hash solution: distribution platform for digital assets globally
- Which types of digital assets Zero Hash supports
- Zero Hash and regulatory framework
- Edward's view on traditional financial services firms' embracement of digital assets
- Advantages of companies moving from Finance 1.0 to Finance 2.0
- His thoughts on the DeFi overlay
- Best way to reach out
Angela Conroy, CEO, and co-founder at Notarum, spoke to Chang Zi Qian, entrepreneur, lawyer and historian, and CEO and co-founder at Intelllex about disrupting legal research by leveraging categorization technology they developed.
Here is what they covered:
- Chang's backstory: from a law firm to government and the world of innovation and entrepreneurship
- How do digitize and automate the legal research
- Thoughts on starting a business in Singapore
- Licenses and regulations, especially when it comes to FinTech and crypto
- How pandemic has impacted legal services, especially for junior lawyers
- How to find the right co-founder
Check out their flagship product here.
Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director & CMO, FIDO Alliance, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how he came to work with FIDO Alliance, an open industry association launched in February 2013 whose mission is to develop and promote authentication standards that help reduce the world's over-reliance on passwords.
Here are some of the insights Andrew shared:
- How Andrew came about leading FIDO
- Discussed what FIDO is and how it works
- A world of passwordless future as an alternative to bypass authentication
- Importance of security and privacy to go passwordless
- The latest development in projects and standards that push towards a passwordless future
- Discussed 2 step verification and if it works in the meantime as we transition to a passwordless world
- Differences between financial services and other industries towards their openness towards a passwordless future
- Other work areas of focus at FIDO: identity verification & binding, and lastly, the Internet of things
- The key themes emerged at the Authenticate 2021 conference, which Andrew hosted recently
- The best way to find out more about FIDO
In this episode of the Africa Series, Stacey Japhta, VP Growth at TalentintheCloud, interviews Elizabeth Rossiello.
Elizabeth is the CEO & Founder of AZA Finance. AZA Finance is an established provider of currency trading solutions that accelerate global access to frontier markets through an innovative infrastructure. This episode discusses AZA Finance acquiring businesses, how they've grown across Africa and advice on growing your business from 0-50 people. In addition, Elizabeth discusses all things FinTech, a fitting formula for acquisition, and why Boards push back on crypto.
Henning Piezunka, an Assistant Professor at INSEAD, shared with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, what led Henning to choose the academic path, his highly successful workshop Venture Capital, Business Angels, and Start-ups, and key learnings from it.
Among the many interesting points, they have highlighted the following:
- How Henning got interested in academia and running a business
- The original idea behind Henning's successful workshop "Venture Capital, Business Angels, and Start-ups"
- What the workshop is about
- How the workshop was scaled up
- The major takeaways that entrepreneurs may take away from his webinar, including the main dos and don'ts of presenting to investors
- Any difference in pitching between VCs and business angels?
- Advice for aspiring business angels
- Further recommended reading: Henning's research on competition and cooperation, Chiara Spina's research on experimentation in entrepreneurial firms and the book Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model
- Best way to reach out and people Henning would love to hear from
Rudolf Falat, the founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast and David Yakobovitch, our New York-based host, took a critical view on the FinTech success stories of the year in their latest live show on Fishbowl. They talked about rapid growth and regulatory backlash of N26, FinTech M&A (e.g., Revolut and HRTech), BNP scale-up strategies of Square and Klarna, quantum computing, CBDCs in Nigeria, incumbents like HSBC getting into BaaS with Oracle and more!
You can now also follow them on Fishbowl, just search for Rudolf Falat or David Yakobovitch so you don't miss the next session, scheduled for November 30!
Andreas von Estorff, a serial entrepreneur, advisor, and CEO of ModelManagement.com, spoke to Rudolf Falat about digitizing the modeling business through smart contracts, AI and more.
The following are just a few of the many fascinating topics they have brought to our attention:
- Andreas's background and how he got to lead ModelManagement.com
- Payment issues in the modeling business
- The role of platform like ModelManagement.com in contracts between models and clients
- Facilitating the adoption of smart contracts in the modeling world and its challenges
- Operational solution for smart contracts / best blockchain protocol for smart contracts
- Leading the digital transformation of the modeling world beyond smart contracts
- Potential for virtual or augmented reality in modeling
- Andreas opinion about 3D modeling and changes to in-person modeling like catwalks, showrooms after the pandemic
- How to reach and find out about ModelManagement.com
In this episode of Voice of FinTech: Asia Pacific Series, Chia Jeng Yang, Principal of Saison Capital based in Singapore, spoke to Neo Liat Beng, founder of Arrow, building one-click check out experience across South East Asia.
Here is what you can learn from their conversation:
- What is it like building payments infrastructure in Southeast Asia
- Neo's experience building start-ups as a Southeast Asia founder and ex-Fintech Executive
- Neo’s journey building the Fast / Bolt of Southeast Asia
Penny Schiffer, CEO and co-founder of Raized.ai, a Swiss-based start-up determined to make early-stage investing smarter using data, AI and analytics, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about the pain points in the early-stage investing for investors and start-ups, how to address them using technology, product development and fundraising approach and more.
Here is the exciting story of Penny and smart VC (or early-stage) investing:
- Penny's journey from Accenture and Swisscom to the startup world
- Pain points in VC investing?
- Every VC firm would like to find the best startups earlier; many rely on their network and inbound ideas. So why is it not enough?
- Startups love to work with efficient partners: how can their communication about potential fundraising with VCs be improved.
- Many investors stay that early-stage investing is more about backing a team rather than an idea. So how does an AI solution can help assess the team?
- Word of advice for startups approaching VCs and pitching to raise funds
- Alternatives to VC funding (clients, angels, grants)
- Raized.ai's solution - a B2B SaaS company
- Where is Raized.ai on its journey in terms of product development and funding
- What are the following milestones ahead of you? I hear that you are hiring?
- Best way to reach out if you are interested in becoming a client, investor or want to join Raized.ai's team
Matthijs de Vries, founder & CTO and Anders Christensen, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Head of Ecosystem at AllianceBlock, shared their insights on growing the blockchain and decentralized Finance community and solutions with Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast.
Below are the salient points of their conversation:
- Matthijs and Anders' intertwined journeys
- Identifying the problem to be solved
- How their solution works
- Traditional Finance vs. DeFi
- Target clients
- Blockchain protocols supported by AllianceBlock
- Leveraging AI technology and Machine Learning
- How can a newcomer break into this space
- AllianceBlock and regulation
- The best response to bankers saying you will always need humans to organize fundraising?
- Upcoming key milestones/product map
- Knowing the best way to reach out and find out more
Petr Kozyakov, co-founder and CEO of Mercuryo spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about bridging traditional Finance (fiat currency) and crypto to enable users to switch seamlessly between fiat and crypto and improve the payments experience.
In more detail, here is what they talked about:
- Petr's journey from traditional payments to crypto
- How does crypto fit into the old world, the legacy world of Finance?
- What’s the problem Mercuryo is solving?
- What are the concrete benefits of crypto over current payment infrastructure or other emerging new payment rails?
- How safe and secure are the interfaces (crypto to fiat, crypto wallet to exchange, etc.)?
- Which cryptocurrencies can Mercuryo support?
- How does Mercuryo support nascent NFT markets?
- Key markets
- Business model
- A recent blog article is called “Mercuryo: The Place To Be For Women in Tech”. Why is it important?
- The next major milestones
- The best way to reach out
Rudolf Falat, the founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast and David Yakobovitch, our New York-based host, took a critical view on the FinTech success stories of the year in their first live show on Fishbowl. They talked about the latest FinTech trends, such as an increased focus on financial literacy, digital payments, autonomous Finance, specialty payroll solutions, and digital-only banks.
Then they dissected the largest FinTech M&A deals, in the US and around the world, including FinTechs being bought by incumbents or FinTechs buying other FinTechs.
They also discussed the latest blockchain and crypto developments, including the rise of NFTs. To sum up, they also talked about the FinTech fundraising volumes, many large rounds and an increasing list of unicorns featured on the Voice of FinTech!
Wojciech Sobczuk, co-founder and CTO at Superbid.io, an NFT experiences and memories auction site, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about the NFTs, Superbid's approach and focus on tennis, movie and gaming personalities, blockchain protocols in the background and more!
In more detail, here is what they talked about:
- Wojtek's back story and entrepreneurial journey to Superbid
- What is Superbid? Auction site for experiences and memories to help tennis, movie, and gaming personalities to engage better with their fans
- What are NFTs? Are they related solely to online memorabilia or also offline experiences?
- How does one know there is only a limited supply of NFTs related to an item?
- How are they stored so they don’t get hacked?
- Which blockchain protocol does Superbid use in the background?
- How can you sell my NFTs?
- Why focusing on tennis?
- Tell us about the recent campaign you had with your Ambassador, Leylah Fernandez. How did you come up with an idea and made it happen? How was it to work with her?
- Can you give us a glimpse of what else you are preparing to auction off on your platform?
- What’s the best way to reach out and find out more about Superbid?
Taneia Bhardwaj, Head of India Consumer Business at Nium, spoke to Priti Rathi Gupta, founder, LXME (financial platform for women). Finance is a feminist issue. And if there's one person who gets it - it is Priti Rathi Gupta - founder of financial planning platform LXME. So much so that she founded LXME intending to bridge that gap between women and Finance. In this episode of Voice of Fintech, we chat with Priti, to understand how she is inspiring a wave of financially fearless women in India.
Here is what Taneia asked Priti:
- Why did you think that there was a need for a gender-based investment platform? What is the problem that LXME is trying to solve?
- Community first, product later approach. You are solving a behavioral issue There's no denying that women's financial lives unfold differently than men. How is LXME designed differently - what is your value proposition?
- LXME is building a community of thousands of like-minded women - how big are it and any learning along the way?
- A lot of people turning to social media for investment advice. In the last two years, new platforms have created a business out of making investments simpler, quicker, and friction-free- we've even seen gamification for motivation - of financial services is touted as the new frontier for millennials
- What is your business model?
- Plans for LXME
Daniel Bookstaber VP of Markets at Blockchain.com, leading global provider of crypto and digital assets services, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about the evolution of blockchain, latest developments, ways to build an institutional business in blockchain, long terms predictions and more!
Specifically, here is what they covered:
- Dan's background and journey to the blockchain / digital assets space
- Blockchain.com’s mission and activities: from blockchain browser to the digital wallet to lending and derivatives today
- Dan's mandate at Blockchain.com: building institutional business
- Blockchain.com's key clients and how their needs differ
- What's different about Blockchain.com's digital wallets?
- Trading and lending services – how is Blockchain.com funded and regulated
- What kind of asset classes can be traded on Blockchain.com?
- Thoughts about NFTs
- Blockchain.com recently acquired AiX - it seemed like a capability play. How does Dan think about organic vs. inorganic growth?
- Blockchain.com's international ambitions
- Dan's long term prediction - will we have only a handful of crypto winners that we already know or a new player will emerge and push everyone to the side?
- The best way to reach out
Nathan Kaiser, General Counsel at SDX (SIX Digital Exchange) in Zurich, Switzerland, spoke to spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about his thoughts on building infrastructure for digital assets, utilizing blockchain, SDX's initiatives internationally and CBDCs.
Here is what they covered in more detail:
- Nathan's background and journey to the digital assets space?
- SDX mission - the problem that SDX is solving. Relationship to SIX.
- Nathan's mandate at SDX
- SDX just got the license from FINMA. What does it mean? What services is SDX providing and when?
- Target clients - SIX members and more
- What kind of asset classes can be traded using SDX infrastructure now and in the future
- SDX entered into a Singapore-based joint exchange venture with SBI Holdings. What are SDX's international ambitions?
- Why do we need CBDCs?
- How is SDX involved in CBDCs development? SNB, BIS and BdF test
- The best way to reach out and find out more about SDX
Thank you Daniel Mika and the Swiss Finance + Technology Association (SFTA) for making it happen!
Donna Griffit, corporate storyteller and pitch alchemist for start-ups, spoke to spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about why it pays off to pay attention to your storyline when you pitch for funding, what to include and what to avoid and a lot more!
Here is what you will learn:
- Donna's backstory: from acting to corporate storytelling
- What is corporate storytelling? How not to be boring in business!
- Why is it important?
- How should a good storyline look like?
- How do you build it?
- How do you deliver it?
- Focusing on the founders, what do investors talk about after the pitch?
- What does it mean, fundraising Silicon Valley-style?
- What are the few biggest mistakes start-ups make in their pitches? What must be in the pitch deck?
- What’s different if you are fundraising as a woman?
- Check out further resources from Donna on her website hereand get a discount for the Voice of FinTech listeners
- What’s the best way to reach out?
In this episode of the Americas Series, David Yakobovitch spoke to Orlando Zayas, CEO of Katapult, about how pandemic has changed the way we shop, Katapult's role in the value chain, alternative credit scoring, and BNPL, and on going public with the SPAC Finserv.
- The pandemic transformed the way we shop forever:
eCommerce rapidly expanded; it would have taken 5-10 years to reach its point today without the pandemic. Online shopping and BOPIS (buy online and pick up in-store) is a purchasing trend expected to become permanent. What people are buying has changed also; people are spending more money on electronics, home goods, and appliances while clothing and apparel decreases.
- Buying power also changed during the pandemic:
Buying power changed overnight, lenders immediately tightened up, and even prime customers were denied financing. Beyond the pandemic, non-prime consumers don’t have the same buying power as prime consumers; they need options. For prime consumers, when lenders tighten up, you need to have other options.
- AI & Machine Learning:
AI & ML are forever changing all of the technology, including fintech. We can gather a massive amount of data, and after analyzing, we continue to optimize our behavior model (Katapult’s proprietary scoring model). Our Katapult score continues to outperform the fraud point score by a third-party-the-shelf model. The ability to now gather data with AI & ML enhances the user experience and allows lenders to assess risk models better.
- BNPL is growing as rapidly as eCommerce:
BNPL has expanded amid the pandemic as people found they needed additional financing options and retailers needed to capture a new segment of customers. Katapult focuses on the nonprime customer, which is one of our differentiating factors from Affirm, Klarna, etc.
- Going public via a merger with SPAC Finserv: The decision to go public now and what the process has been like from a virtual perspective.
- Orlando’s approach to revenue growth:
Orlando joined the company in 2017 when revenue was at 17M and closed 2020 at almost 200M. Hiring the right people, make sure you have a CFO you can trust, keeping the “dumb” list of all the things to stop, having a vision is great, but you need to have a foundation and strategy to achieve your vision.
Stefan Klauser, co-founder and CEO of Aisot, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how to make traders' performance better using new technology.
Here is what they talked about:
- Stefan's interest in entrepreneurship even though he started working as a diplomat at the Swiss Embassy in the US and then a researcher at ETH
- Very first steps of Aisot
- Why do we need predictive analytics for trading
- How good is the technology today
- How does it relate to or differ from algo trading
- Who are Aisot's target customers?
- Business model
- Where are you on your journey in terms of product development, geographic reach, funding, hiring? Any numbers you can share?
- Key milestones ahead of Aisot, Stefan and his team
- The best way to reach out
In this episode of Africa Series, Stacey Japhta, Head of Strategic FinTech Partnerships at Talent in the Cloud, an emerging markets FinTech executive search firm and host of Talking success podcast, spoke to Tim Nuy, founder and CEO at Finclusion Group and Matsi Modise, its Non-Executive Chair about how to improve financial inclusion through using alternative credit score data, Finclusion's mission, Matsi's governance experience and more!
Check out the King Report on Governance in South Africa if you are interested in how boards should be run!
Luba Schoenig and Tonia Zimmermann, co-founders of Umushroom, an interactive investment platform and community, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how community and technology can make your investment process smoother and smarter.
Here is what they talked about:
- What is UMushroom?
- How did you get to do what you do today?
- Umushroom is an interactive investment platform – why is it needed and why now?
- How does it contrast with having a good relationship (or investment advisor) manager at my bank?
- How do you define superior performance from using your platform?
- What’s the technology behind it?
- Who are Umushroom's target customers
- Where is Umushroom on its journey in terms of product development, geographic reach, funding, hiring?
- The best way to reach out
In this episode of the Americas Series, David Yakobovitch spoke to Deep Varma, CTO at Varo Bank about the technology edge of FinTechs vs incumbents and how that translates to customers first approach that works and it's not just a PR slogan.
Here is what they covered:
- How Varo’s technology-centric approach allowed the bank to stay focused on its mission and purpose
- Technology advantage of FinTechs over traditional banks
- Not good vs. bad, but challenges of managing a legacy architecture
- How banks' technology stacks are keeping them from being truly customer-centric
- Compare Varo’s approach and how technology allows it to put customer needs first
- How do you build and scale a tech organization - what kind of people do you need, when is the right time to think about technology implementation, etc.
- How you think about technology differently when you are building from the ground up
- Why it’s so important to stay truthful to your mission and purpose and to focus on customers. How technology can play a role in those efforts
- Key advice to founders: who and why you are serving your customers
Michelle Tran, the adviser to Harness Wealth, founder of NYC FinTech Women and founder member of Dreamers & Doers, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about improving financial advisory for founders and other start-up employees with their new wealth, empowering women on the FinTech and entrepreneurship scene and more!
- Backstory: How did Michelle get to do what she does today
- Harness Wealth - what is it and how does it work? What’s the problem you are solving and why it is worth solving?
- Target clients - entrepreneurs
- Business model
- WealthTech’s adoption vs other FinTech verticals in the US and the near-term growth potential
- NYC FinTech Women – what is it needed and the key activities
- Dreamers & Doers – the mission and activities
- The main issues on the FinTech scene in terms of diversity
- The reasons behind diversity issues and the ways to tackle the
- The book you would take with you on vacation (non-fiction)? Becoming by Michelle Obama
- The best way to reach out
Patrick Awori, Founder and CEO at Imaginarium, a Kenyan-based FinTech behind the Circle, a virtual savings platform, hosted another episode of Voice of FinTech: Africa Series. Patrick spoke to Umar Sebyala, Uganda Ecosystem lead at cLabs, working on Celo, about democratizing access to financial services leveraging blockchain.
- Africa's young and tech-savvy population has already embraced mobile money and is now looking to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to redefine the digital economy. Numerous decentralized finance applications have emerged as possible solutions to unlocking economic health and prosperity across the continent, especially for the 350 million adults who are still excluded from accessing meaningful financial services (about 17% of the global population). As collective sentiment about blockchain technology rises, so does the debate surrounding its evolution from hype to mainstream in Africa.
- In this episode, Umar Sebyala walks us through the Celo Foundation's mission to empower anyone with a smartphone to access financial services on a decentralized platform operated by a community of users. We discuss Celo's Alliance for Prosperity initiative, and how the many stakeholders across the world work together to create a connected and purposeful experience for everyone. We also delve into trends in the adoption of blockchain technology and examine the Celo community's artful ways around some of the challenges such as volatility and awareness. We conclude the episode with a chat about sustainability and pinpoint a few gaps that fintech entrepreneurs, investors and enthusiasts can bridge to consolidate early gains in achieving long-term prosperity for all.
In this episode hosted by Silvan Krähenbühl, a serial entrepreneur and host of the Swisspreneur podcast, Silvan spoke to the co-founder of Neon, a leading Swiss digital bank, Simon Youssef, about the future of banking.
Here are the highlights of what they talked about:
- Leaving your well-paying corporate job
- The business model behind a free product
- Is Revolut a competitor?
- Being on Höhle der Löwen
- Doing a 5M tokenized crowd investment
Simon Youssef's story
Simon Youssef is the co-founder and CTO of neon, a transaction account for everyday finances. Before starting his own company, he was an associate at the management consulting company Strategy&. His educational background is in Physics, and he holds a PhD from the Microsoft Research Lab.
Simon and his co-founder Jörg Sandrock worked together at Strategy&, where they became well acquainted with the Swiss banking market. After a few unfulfilling projects, Simon went on a surfing sabbatical in Indonesia. During this time, Jörg proposed the neon business idea to him, and Simon decided to take the leap.
Whereas typical banking apps cater to the bank's sales interests, merely replicating the organizational structure of a traditional bank, neon offers a client-focused product free of charge, with the lowest fees in Switzerland. Neon manages this because, having a team of around 20 employees, they can live on much slimmer margins. Their revenue comes from card interchange, premium plans like neon Green, and finance fees (from when clients buy partner products on the app).
Revolut and Transferwise don't pose a very big threat, since they're more travel cards than anything else. neon, on the other hand, is a Swiss banking product, meaning they can offer you a Swiss IBAN, e-bills, and so on.
Having been the first of its kind in the small Swiss market, neon has already amassed 70 000 users, in part due to the large amount of press coverage they received. Their participation in Höhle der Löwen, while helpful cash flow-wise, did not bring them as much of a boost as they initially imagined.
Recommended resources: How I Built This and The Happiness Lab.
In this episode of the Asia Pacific Series, Angela Conroy, co-founder and CEO at Notarum, an awesome RegTech based in Singapore, spoke to Mark Hsu, a serial entrepreneur and a tech VC investor based in Taipei, Taiwan - partner at GD1 VC Fund - Global from Day 1 about transforming Taiwan into a leading tech hub in Asia beyond manufacturing.
Here is what they covered:
- Mark's back story - what led him from the US to Taiwan
- Tech scene in Taiwan - development from a manufacturing hub (toys mainly to semiconductors) to a tech hub today - major established players and emerging new players
- Doing business in Taiwan - from the language considerations to culture and history, cost of living and a wide choice of tech talent
- Market entry to Taiwan - success stories
- Global from Day 1 VC fund - supporting start-ups from Taiwan and New Zealand (public-private partnership with respective governments as part LPs)
Lucia Hegenbartova, CCO of Dreams, Swedish neuroscience-FinTech, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about using neuroscience when engaging with your clients in financial services.
Here is what you learn from their conversation:
- Lucia's entrepreneurial journey so far
- What is Dreams? Dreams provides a custom experience layer that enables banks to boost their customer's engagement in financial products.
- What does CCO (Chief Commercial Officer) role mean in day to day life
- Dreams' unique advantage: understanding how the human mind works, especially when it comes to financial products
- Many incumbent banks have become product factories over many years and being client-centric sometimes seems more of a priority for FinTechs. Who are target clients for Dreams?
- Dreams team has recently published an article Why Banks Must Start Caring About Financial Wellbeing, where the HBR article stating that emotionally engaged clients are 35% more valuable than highly satisfied customers was mentioned. How come?
- How do you apply neuroscience in your work on emotional wellbeing and help your clients ultimately make more money?
- How do you help clients increase their clients' financial wellbeing and build higher loyalty and potential for up-/cross-selling additional financial products?
- What are the most common misconceptions that banks have about human decision-making, and how it's reflected in the design of the products they are offering and how to do it better?
- How do you make money? What's your business model?
- Where are you on your journey in terms of geographic reach, hiring or funding?
- A favorite non-fiction book Lucia recommends The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness by John Yates
- Best way to reach out
In this episode of the Americas Series, David Yakobovitch spoke to Patricia Montesi, co-founder and CEO of Qolo, a FinTech for FinTechs.
Here is what they discussed (and more):
- FinTechs have traditionally didn't always like the relationships but had nowhere else to go. Today there are more options, but unhealthy relationships remain. Now, FinTechs get lured by "quick-to-market" approaches that limit functionality and revenue. Rather than setting them up for growth, they’re more like cell phone contracts which look great to start but lock clients into expensive, long-term deals that don’t really meet their needs. How do you future-proof FinTechs for future growth?
- FinTechs demand omnichannel capabilities and more control over product customization and revenue, leaving the door open for competitors to take advantage. We are in a Fintech Gold Rush right now, and the Fintech industry is getting smart about how it wants to attack the opportunity. It takes a next-generation payments approach to meet the need truly.
- Alongside the FinTech industry’s reputation as forward-thinking and fast-moving lies a parallel universe of notoriously slow players and systems that are still nostalgic for an era gone by. The pandemic has provided revelations and we have also unearthed an undeniable truth - for the payments industry to continue providing essential services, we must be willing to pull back the covers. And there is one dirty secret that’s stopping us from moving forward with a more trustworthy and transparent industry: We’ve Got a Big Risk Management Problem. The payments industry ecosystem includes four major components: infrastructure (like Qolo), program managers/resellers (like Payoneer), middlemen (resellers), and businesses. Program managers sit one level above infrastructure services, but that means they are also one level removed. Middlemen like Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers push their customers back one level more. And with each level is a new link that can be broken, introducing further risk, cost, and loss of efficiency. The industry-accepted this multilevel approach in earlier days, but more recent news has revealed a flaw in that model, and some FinTech companies are still reeling from it.
Conclusion:
- Learn more about how better to assess future needs by careful vetting of your technology
- Demand more from your payments platform
Nikolaus Sühr, CEO and founder of Kasko, a London headquarter InsurTech-as-a-service spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how Kasko helps incumbent insurers reach customers with new offerings and features quicker than on their own.
Here is what they talked about:
- Nick's backstory: How and why has Nick decided to start his own company
- What is embedded insurance and Insurance 3.0
- Why are embedded insurance and Insurance 3.0 exciting?
- What is Kasko? How does it work? What is the problem that Kasko is solving?
- What is Kasko's unique advantage? How is it different from other digital business enablers?
- How do you make money? How do you think about unit economics and scale? What is your business model?
- Kasko's key clients and your value proposition for them:Insurers and brokers / digital businesses
- Key milestones so far and plans ahead
- Key lessons learned for potential entrepreneurs thinking of starting their own business
- Do you have a favorite business book you can recommend? Atomic Habits by James Clear
Grit by Angela Duckworth and Principles by Ray Dalio - The best way to reach out
In this episode of Africa Series, Stacey Japhta, Head of Strategic FinTech Partnerships at Talent in the Cloud, an emerging markets FinTech executive search firm and host of Talking success podcast, sat down with Aneesa Ameer, Head of Innovation at ABSA Life in South Africa.
ABSA Life offers a comprehensive range of life insurance options which include: disability, death, critical illness cover and income protection.
Aneesa discusses all things FinTech, personalizing customer service and encouraging your kids to think outside the box.
Neha Wattas, Executive Director, Innovation & FinTech Partnerships at J.P. Morgan in New York, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about why and how J.P. Morgan likes to partner with FinTechs or invest in them globally.
Here is what they covered:
- J.P. Morgan's approach to working with start-ups: why J.P. Morgan wants to be the partner of choice for start-ups
- Neha's your team’s mandate (Wholesale Payments)? Strategic focus or financial gain?
- FinTech themes in focus: super apps (what are their superpowers?)
- How do your deal sourcing and onboarding work?
- What do you focus on most when considering partnering, investing or acquiring a start-up? Product market fit and cultural fit
- What's the range of potential engagement with start-ups?
- How does JPM collaborate with others in the ecosystem
- How does the monitoring of your collaborations work
- Key piece of advice for the founders
- An example of an investment made by the team: Trovata, an open banking platform helping companies managing their cash flow
- Best way to reach out
In this episode of Voice of FinTech: Asia Pacific Series, Chia Jeng Yang, Principal of Saison Capital based in Singapore, spoke to James Vuong, founder and CEO of Infina Vietnam, about his journey from Vietnam to the US and back, his entrepreneurial journey and his latest venture, Infina, providing investment opportunities to retail investors, similar to Robinhood in other markets.
Here is what Chia asked James:
- Hi James, it is great to have you! You’ve had a long career as an engineer, operator, investor and now founder. Tell us a little about yourself and what makes you passionate.
- You have been in the Vietnamese startup ecosystem for a very long time, as a VC, VP of Investments at IDG Ventures, since 2008, and then CEO of Lana Group until it got acquired. How has the ecosystem changed, what are some of the key milestones, and what has you most excited about the Vietnamese ecosystem? Could you tell us a bit about what investing in Vietnam was like back then?
- Tell us a bit about Infina, what made you pursue this particular opportunity, how you got started, and where you are now.
- The Vietnamese consumer is, of course, very different from other markets. What are some of the nuances you’re discovering about consumer investment patterns, the Vietnamese market and regulations?
- What has been one of the most surprising things you’ve learned while building Infina?
Startups are hard.
Work life balance won’t work.
Startup is a series of tests.* What are the largest gaps in understanding when founders or VCs look at Vietnam? What things would you say are key things to look at that might otherwise be overlooked, as opposed to Singapore, Indonesia or India? What geographies do you look to as the likely or aspirational model for Vietnam?
Olga Shikhantsova, Principal at Speedinvest, focused at FinTech and Forber 30 under 30, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about believing and investing in European FinTech and redefining VC.
- Olga's backstory: FinTechs and VCs, from Russia to Germany
- What is Speedinvest? Globally present, European focused early-stage VCs with FinTech, DeepTech, Industrial Tech, Networks, Health investment teams
- Speedinvest's roots in Vienna, Austria and founder Stefan Klestil
- Speedinvest III - the latest fund's focus
- Any stage preference/sub-vertical preferences when investing?
- Deal sourcing
- Engagement with other ecosystem players
- Investment approach, operational knowledge transfer - Platform +
- Speedinvest select portfolio examples: Wefox or Open and many more
- FinTech’s prospects in Europe post-Covid
- Olga's favorite non-fiction books: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz or The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer, an INSEAD Professor
- Best way to reach out to Olga and Speedinvest
Patrick Awori, Founder and CEO at Imaginarium, a Kenyan-based FinTech behind the Circle, a virtual savings platform, hosted another episode of Voice of FinTech: Africa Series. Patrick spoke to Mary Mwangi, CEO and founder of Data Integrated (DIL) about digitizing payments in the transport sector across Africa.
Here is what they covered:
- For our audience, what is your background in Fintech in general?
- What is Data Integrated’s core business? What other business is DIL engaged in?
- As an organization that is very active in digitizing transport payments in Kenya, what is your outlook on the trends in other African countries, especially in the advent of the COVID 19 pandemic? I.e., Do you predict a significant shift towards digital, or Is it more of the same?
- What is the regulator’s position on the digitization of payments in the transport sector? Have any interventions been supportive of your initiatives, or have the existing regulations hindered your progress?
- What sorts of partnerships is DIL reliant on to deliver on objectives?
- Are you raising any capital? What does your organization look for in investors? How would you quantify your business opportunity?
- As a member of the Board of the newly established Association of FinTechs in Kenya, could you share some of the merits of consolidating at the association level and any strategies that AFiK has in place to mobilize the participation of Kenyan FinTechs?
- How do you propose regulations can improve to foster growth in Africa’s payment space?
- In your view, what gaps or opportunities still exist for other fintech actors in the African payments space in general?
- Beyond just financial inclusion, how else do you suggest that the fast-growing payments industry in Africa continues to be a key pillar of economic development on the continent?
- Any advice for listeners considering a similar career as employees or entrepreneurs
Christoph Baumann, Deputy Head Insurances & Risks at State Secretariat for International Finance SIF (SSIF), spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how Switzerland sees sustainable Finance as a major opportunity for the Swiss financial center.
Here is what they covered:
- Christoph's journey from the banking and start-up world to the government
- Why Green FinTech and Sustainability?
- Christoph is Deputy Head Insurances & Risks at SSIF, Initiator & Secretary, Green Fintech Network, Head of Swiss Delegation, G20 Sustainable Finance Study Group, Co-Chair WG Disclosure, and Swiss Sherpa IPSF and Swiss Sherpa at Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate action, Swiss Rep. workstream on Climate Disclosures at FSB - what are the key elements of Christoph's mandates and how they are linked together?
- Sustainability has generally gained importance in the financial sector. Various financial centers are committed to sustainable finance, which may lead to competitive pressure on the one hand and to further potential regulatory disparities on the other. Which measures are being taken in Switzerland?
- According to a recent study by Swiss Sustainable Finance, the market for sustainable investments has increased by over 30%. What does it mean more in terms of sustainable approaches?
- There is more scrutiny regarding sustainability reporting. Where do you see the role of government in this? There are more and more third-party certifications available, but what about the country or global standards?
- Where are climate change and sustainability disclosures in Switzerland and globally from an accounting perspective?
- Where are the most significant opportunities for innovative technology as an enabler for sustainable finance?
- Recommended further reading on Sustainable Finance: Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know
- What’s the best way to find out more about Switzerland’s activities regarding Sustainable Finance? SSIF, Swiss Financial Center (Finance Swiss), Swiss Sustainable Finance
David Yakobovitch spoke to Rohit Taneja, founder and CEO of Decentro, an automated API platform for banking integrations, based in India and Singapore, backed by United States' Y-Combinator about Banking a service, embedded and decentralized Finance.
How is India shaping up as a FinTech destination?
- What’s exciting about India?
- Are regulators making regulations easy for FinTechs to thrive?
- If yes, how? Or if not, what kind of regulations is the community expecting?
How are banks adapting to these fast-paced changes?
- How has opening up their APIs changed things for banks?
- Why Is BaaS as revolutionary as it promises?
Decentralizing FinTech & making it great, again - Decentro
- How did Decentro come into being?
- What were the pain points faced which inspired the solution?
- What do Decentro’s offerings mean, especially in BaaS?
- Product suite & offerings
- Case studies and clientele
- Prominent customers & solving their use-cases
- What’s new!
Conclusion
- Any FinTech or Neobank in the US or beyond hoping to widen their horizon to India can reach out to us. We’ll help them to overcome the key cross-border challenges and launch here. If you know someone in your network who could benefit from this, send them along our way! We’d be happy to chat. Also, if there's any particular Financial Institution that we could partner up with and take on a burning use-case, we’re all ears!
Gerti Dervishi, Chief Growth Officer at Flybits, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about why contextual banking is the future of banking and how to get it right.
Here is what they talked about:
- Gerti's background and motivation to join a start-up
- What is Flybits and the problem they are solving: helping banks to build better connections with their clients using context, improving their mobile experience
- There is a lot of buzz around contextual banking. Yet, people are also more and more aware of how their data is used by companies and maybe vary of their data used for banking services proposals. How does Flybits resolve the tension between relevance and privacy?
- Target customers: B2BC business
- Business model, unit economics, and scale
- Canada and internal presence
- A critical piece of advice to Gerti's your younger self
- Favorite non-fiction books: The Undoing Project, Shoe Dog, The Hard Thing about Hard Things or The Zero Marginal Cost Society
- What are trendy hobbies on the Toronto start-up scene?
- Status check of Flybits' entrepreneurial journey
- Best way to reach out
Prashant Fuloria, CEO at Fundbox, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about leveraging AI to help SMBs with their working capital needs more efficiently. Prashant is also a lecturer at Stanford, Cornell and Berkeley, where he teaches MBAs on building consumer internet businesses.
Here is what they talked about:
- Prashant's backstory: from Google, Yahoo and Facebook to Fundbox
- Why have you decided to start your own company?
- What is Fundbox? What is the problem you are solving?
- Why have you created Fundbox? Many people would agree that incumbents often fail SMBs, but why do we need another SMB financing provider?
- How have you started with your venture? What were your very first steps?
- Target customers
- How does Fundbox make money?
- Geographic coverage
- Tips for SMBs in a cash crunch
- The future of SMB lending
- Fundbox's journey so far and ambitions going forward
- Best way to reach out
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Eva A. Kaili spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about digital transformation in the EU and the policy framework that is being created or adapted to facilitate the adoption of digital technologies. Eva Kaili is MEP from Greece, Chair Science & Technology, Chair Centre for Artificial Intelligence and co-founder of the World Future Foundation - very active in shaping European policy regarding digital transformation, blockchain, AI and more.
Here is what they talked about:
- Eva, you are Chair Science & Technology, Chair Centre for Artificial Intelligence, co-founder of the World Future Foundation, and MEP – how does it tie altogether?
- After your broadcasting career, you entered politics and there you have been focusing on new technologies, science, digitalization and blockchain. What has driven you to this?
- How has your life as a politician and speaker changed during the pandemic – what has kept you busy?
- Many commentators agree that pandemics have accelerated the digital transformation around the world. Where do you think the private sector or the governments grabbed the opportunity and where is more to be done?
- What can the EU do to be more competitive vs. Asia or the US when developing and adopting new technologies?
- Cryptocurrencies have experienced extraordinary times recently. How do you see the potential of cryptocurrencies to be used as currencies?
- Where are with blockchain utilization in Europe more broadly? Lately, it seems the focus has been on tokenization and digital assets, but blockchain adoption has been more selective elsewhere.
- Where do you see the most significant potential for digital assets and tokenization adoption in Europe?
- Many people are (somewhat) worried about the rise of AI. What can we do in terms of governance of nascent technologies to benefit from their strengths while addressing the public's concerns?
- I know you are a fan of Black Mirror. Do you also have a favorite book related to technology (AI, Blockchain or anything else) that you recommend? The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff and Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman
- What is ahead of you this year in the European Parliament and your outside activities?
- What's the best way to find out more about what you do? Follow Eva on Twitter here or European Parliament Research Service (EPRS app for iPhone or Android)
In this episode of the Africa Series, Patrick Awori spoke to Hilda Moraa, founder and CEO of Pezesha; a Kenyan headquartered digital financial marketplace platform that connects quality SMB to working capital from investors on its marketplace.
Hilda is a trailblazer in the Kenyan and African FinTech space. From founding and exiting her FinTech startup in 2015, Weza Tele, she has done it all, rising to both national and international acclaim. She now runs Pezesha, a digital financial ecosystem connecting and empowering the underserved in Africa through financial education, credit assessment and connecting SMB with affordable financing.
Here is what they talked about:
- What Pezesha does and the recent developments at Pezesha
- Partnerships that Pezesha is currently engaged in or looking to develop to deliver services to customers in your markets
- Open banking trends, and environment in Kenya/East Africa, and how is Pezesha positioned to play a leading role in the space
- Hilda's and Pezesha's experience as part of the first cohort inducted into and eventually exiting from the Kenya CMA Regulatory sandbox in 2020. Basis/rationale of regulatory sandboxes in accelerating innovation in Africa’s FinTech industry
- How has COVID 19 impacted how you normally do business at Pezesha? How do you plan to sustain growth in the “new normal”?
- As part of a Kenya Government COVID-19 ICT & Innovations Advisory team appointed in 2020, wider interventions to cushion and support the ICT based economy of Kenya that are currently in play, and what lessons about these efforts so far that other African policymakers could draw from your experience
- Opportunities for FinTech actors to enhance the long-term social development of your domicile markets and African communities in general
- How can the sustainability impact best be measured?
- Key advice for listeners considering a similar career as employees or entrepreneurs: resilience!
- Best way to learn more about Hilda/Pezesha and reach out
Fabian Wesemann, co-founder and Group CFO at Wefox, spoke to Wani Baumgartner, guest co-host and Finance and Life Sciences recruiter and Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about using technology to bring the insurance industry to the new level of customer-centricity.
Here is what they covered in more detail:
- Fabian's road towards entrepreneurship
- What led Fabian to co-found a business? How do Fabian and Julian Teicke complement each other?
- What is Wefox? What is the problem that Wefox is solving?
- What were your very first steps to get going with Wefox?
- Who are the target customers?
- How does Wefox make money? How do they think about unit economics and scale?
- Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Poland - what's next in terms of international expansion?
- What would be the critical piece of advice you would Fabian give to his younger self?
- A favorite non-fiction book for aspiring entrepreneurs: The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance
- What are the trendy hobbies on the Berlin start-up scene?
- Where are you on your entrepreneurial journey after the latest USD 600 m raise (and USD 3bn+ valuation)?
- Best way to reach out
In the end, it will be okay, and if it's not okay, it's not the end.
Fabian Wesemann
David Yakobovitch spoke to Duncan Barrigan, Chief Product and Growth Officer at GoCardless about Open Banking in the US, innovation in payments and the FinTech megatrends.
Here is what they covered:
1) Brief introduction of GoCardless
- A potted history of the last 10 years
- Growth in the US
- GoCardless’ recent open banking feature-Instant Bank Pay, a new open banking feature directly integrated into its global payment platform
2) a) Payments landscape discussion of the US, UK/Europe
- Recurring payments and the subscription-based economy
2) b) Open Banking in the UK and what that means for the US
- Open Banking discussions are heating up in the US-but are we ready?
- What will we need to make it successful?
3) Development of FinTech globally
- UK FinTech as one of the OGs in 'Silicon Roundabout' in London
- How the industry is developing globally
- Who the major players are in the US/UK
4) Upcoming payment trends for this year and beyond: what trends we see in UK/ Europe vs. the US
- Digital payments
- Account-to-account payments
5) The best way to reach out and be part of the open banking future
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review.
Oliver Marchand is Global Head of ESG Research & Models at MSCI and founder of Carbon Delta (now part of MSCI). Oliver spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how to provide portfolio managers with insights to assess climate change impacts on the businesses they invest in.
Here is what they talked about:
- Oliver's backstory: from computer sciences to asset management and meteorology
- Motivation to start his own business
- What is Carbon Delta? What is the problem you are solving?
- What were your very first steps in starting Carbon Delta?
- Why have you created Carbon Delta in particular?
- Target customers
- Business model
- Scaling up
- The rationale for sale: Oliver's role post-sale and the set-up within MSCI
- How can Financial Services help combat climate change?
- Plans and ambitions ahead
- Where can interested parties reach you?
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Jared Lim, the co-founder of Finology, spoke to Wani Baumgartner, guest co-host and Finance and Life Sciences recruiter, and Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about making access to financial products instant and effortless.
Here is what they covered:
- Jared's backstory and serial entrepreneurship journey in Malaysia
- Finology: how does it work? Problem definition.
- What is Finology's unique advantage? How are they different from other digital brokers in Asia?
- Business model
- Target customers
- The journey so far and milestones ahead
- Lessons learned for potential entrepreneurs thinking of starting their own business
- Finology is the Seedstars World Competition 2020/21 winner! What does this award mean to Finology?
- Favorite business book: Built to last by Jim Collins
- Best way to reach out
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review.
Guillaume Descottes, founder and CEO of Vialma, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how a dedicated classical and jazz streaming platform helps clients discover such music and improve artists' economics.
Here is what they covered:
- Guillaume's backstory
- Motivation to start his own business
- What is Vialma? A problem solver or a delight for customers?
- Very first steps to get going
- Why do we need a dedicated classical or jazz music streaming service?
- Target customers - demographics and more
- Business model
- Favorite composer and piece of classical music? Beethoven, for example, Violin concerto.
- Where is Vialma on its journey in terms of product development, geographic reach, funding, hiring?
- Key milestones ahead of Vialma
- Best way to reach out
Thank you, Rebecca Gibergues, Daniel Mika and the Swiss Finance + Technology Association (SFTA) for making it happen!
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Stacey Japhta, Head of Strategic FinTech Partnerships at Talent in the cloud, emerging markets FinTech executive search firm and host of Talking success podcast, talks to Wayne Zwiers, founder of Basalt. Basalt is a global Fintech studio focusing on designing and developing digital banking and insurance solutions for the future, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Basalt co-creates solutions for our clients, turning ideas into profits. Partnering with clients as "one team" to build new products and processes using an ever-changing and improving tech stack that utilizes modern architectures (such as domain-driven design, micro-services patterns) and cloud computing.
Basalt's proficiencies include:
- Core banking technologies
- Integration + now API (open banking)
- Customer Interface Solutions
Wayne discusses all things FinTech, important attributes to look for in your leadership team, and the difference between the traditional model and the new model of VCs in Africa.
Jamie Beaumont is a founder of Playter, creator of hire now, pay later service for SMEs using recruitment agencies. Jamie spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about the need for SME financing focused on hiring through recruitment agencies.
Here is what they talked about:
- Jamie's back story and why he decided to start your own company
- What were your very first steps when starting Playter
- Playter Pay, the world’s first hiring accelerator. What is it?
- Why do SMEs need recruiters? Isn’t using recruitment agencies a question of cost rather than the timing of cash flow?
- Target customers
- Business model
- Geographic focus
- Jamie's views on the key pain points for candidates and employers, its solutions and how has it changed in the last five years?
- Where is Playter on its journey now and plans for the future
- Best way to reach out
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review.
David Yakobovitch spoke to Derek Merrill, CEO of LeaseLock about how to get rid of one of the most painful steps in real estate transactions, paying a security deposit, by using technology. Derek is a product and financial technology-focused entrepreneur with a special interest in building data-driven products that service the enterprise.
As CEO, Derek leads the overall product, marketing, sales and engineering efforts at LeaseLock. Prior to LeaseLock, Derek founded Infreeda, a mobile advertising platform acquired by AT&T. Next, he founded MoVoxx, a pioneering mobile messaging ad network acquired by Motricity. In search of a large industry late to apply technology, Derek launched EverySignal to automate the detection of life events for insurance agents across social networks using natural language processing and machine learning. He later joined ZipRecruiter, the fastest-growing job.
LeaseLock's founding story
- After being denied housing in New York City because he did not earn the requisite 80x the monthly rent to live at a certain building, co-founder Reichen Kuhl set out to solve this problem to help people at all rent levels ease the expensive move-in experience while still providing the financial protection apartment owners need. He joined the Mucker Capital accelerator program in 2014 where he met Derek who had been working with a small engineering and data science team. After meeting, the two joined forces and LeaseLock was founded.
LeaseLock's flagship product
- LeaseLock's flagship product is “Zero Deposit” lease insurance. The company leverages artificial intelligence to eliminate security deposits and deliver the world’s first financial technology platform for enterprise rental housing. Its product seamlessly deploys through native property management systems, allowing properties to:
- Market their communities as Zero Deposit to drive more traffic & leads
- Replace upfront security deposits with a small monthly fee in the online leasing checkout
- Automatically gain $5,000 insurance against rent and damage loss in-system
- Automate the claims process in native receivables processes during move-out
- Automate billing through our integrations with all major property management systems
LeaseLock leads the overdue disruption of the insurance and real estate industries
- The multifamily industry is known to be somewhat hesitant to truly embrace change. Renter’s insurance is a prime example. It was years before operators recognized that requiring renter’s insurance did not negatively impact the ability to lease apartments, but rather, provided positive outcomes for both the resident and community.
- Renter’s insurance is now status quo within the apartment industry. LeaseLock believes that the same will hold true for lease insurance as the leading replacement to security deposits.
Why security deposits and surety bonds are done
- Security deposits are the most common way apartment owners shelter themselves from financial risk associated with residents.
- Security deposits are extremely expensive for the renter and require a significant amount of administration for an owner to manage.
- Surety bonds and other security deposit alternatives have been in the multifamily industry for quite some time. But these don’t always benefit both parties.
- Surety bonds may answer the affordability pain point for renters as they are less expensive than security deposits, but they fail to offer sound risk mitigation for operators. Also, bonding companies run collections on renters for claims paid to the property, resulting in a damaged reputation
- Lease insurance is a seamless replacement for both of these practices that benefits both residents and properties. With LeaseLock’s “Zero Deposit,” renters pay a small monthly deposit waiver fee in place of an upfront security deposit along with their monthly rent and properties gain over $5,000 in coverage per lease on the standard plan
LeaseLock's B2B Model ultimately benefits the consumer
- LeaseLock is NOT insurance for the resident, it’s a deposit waiver program that makes the leasing experience more affordable.
- LeaseLock doesn't deal directly with residents, but residents do benefit from a lower barrier to access rental properties.
- Renters do not need to apply to LeaseLock (unlike deposit alternatives/surety bonds), and LeaseLock does not run collections on renters for claims paid to the property
LeaseLock's mission
- LeaseLock exists to power a faster, simpler, more affordable rental transaction. Ultimately, LeaseLock aims to help people at all rent levels have a smoother and more affordable move-in experience while still providing the financial protection apartment owners need. We help the world find a home
LeaseLock is, at heart, a technology company
- LeaseLock created an entirely new category of insurance powered by AI
- LeaseLock is engineering a financial technology platform that removes friction, cost, and regulatory risk from apartment operators’ operating infrastructure
Conclusion
- Because LeaseLock sells to properties, its lease insurance product does not need to be sold by leasing staff and doesn’t require out-of-workflow application processes
- If you’re an apartment owner/operator, feel free to reach out today to learn more about what LeaseLock can do for you
Abdulla Almoayed, CEO and founder of Tarabut Gateway, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about open banking in MENA, why he set up the business UAE's ADGM (Abu Dhabi Global Market) in particular and his thoughts on data-driven innovation.
Here is what they covered:
- Abdulla's back story
- Reasons to start his own company
- What is Tarabut Gateway? The problem that Tarabut Gateway is solving
- Largest open banking platform in MENA - what is its unique advantage? How is it different from other open banking platforms?
- Team in the UAE and abroad
- Target customers
- How can data-driven innovation break the curse of the oil industry?
- Very first steps of starting the business
- Growth plans after recent fundraising - hiring!
- Best way to reach out
En este episodio de Voice of FinTech Americas Series, conducido por Clementina Giraldo, fundadora y CEO de Dots & Tech, con sede en Colombia, Clementina habla con FIRA, criptoartista colombiana y una de las líderes del criptoarte en América Latina y con Mario Valle Reyes, cofundador y managing partner de Altered Ventures, con sede en San Francisco, Estados Unidos, inversionista en videojuegos, realidad aumentada, realidad virtual, criptoarte y creador de Altered Gallery. Para ver las imágenes citadas en el episodio visitar http://alteredgallery.art/.
América Latina hace parte de la tendencia global de criptoarte. Conoce el proceso que le permitió a FIRA convertirse en la primera criptoartista de Colombia, los avances que ella ha alcanzado y los desafíos de la tecnología. Detalles del lanzamiento de Altered Gallery que reúne a más de 100 criptoartistas y realizará periódicamente convocatorias a artistas. Así como experiencias por parte startups líderes de la región como Platzi y la forma en que han promovido becas en educación por medio del criptoarte.
In this episode of Voice of FinTech Americas Series, hosted by Clementina Giraldo in Spanish, founder and CEO of Dots & Tech, based in Colombia, Clementina speaks with FIRA, a Colombian crypto artist and one of the leaders of crypto art in Latin America and with Mario Valle Reyes , co-founder and managing partner of Altered Ventures, based in San Francisco, United States, an investor in video games, augmented reality, virtual reality, crypto art and creator of Altered Gallery.
Latin America is part of the global trend of crypto art. Learn about the process that allowed FIRA to become Colombia's first crypto artist, the advancements she has made, and the challenges of technology. Details of the launch of the Altered Gallery that brings together more than 100 crypto artists and will periodically call for artists. As well as experiences by leading startups in the region such as Platzi and the way they have promoted scholarships in education through crypto art.
In this episode of the Voice of FinTech: Africa Series, Adejoke Adekunle, CEO of VVM Group and the founder of the African Tech Woman podcast, based in Lagos, Nigeria, spoke to Tobi Oke, Managing Partner at V8 Capital Partners, also based in Lagos, Nigeria.
Here is what they talked about:
- Why does V8 Capital focus largely on early-stage companies?
- V8 Capital portfolio companies
- From all of these start-ups you have mentioned, I see some bits of fintech there; for example, Kobo360, a logistics platform, may at some points provide access financing service to their customers. What are your thoughts on the intersection between FinTech and other sectors in the start-up space?
- What are the things that have helped Tobi get through in his investing career?
- Tobi's views on fundraising in Africa; what has remained constant and what has changed recently
- With the recent exit by Paystack and Flutterwave, which recently raised 170 million and also achieved unicorn status, we are seeing more interest from investors in FinTech companies in Africa - what's your advice on how FinTech start-ups can capitalize on this?
- Fundraising tips for founders
- What do you think are some understated industries where you see some strong potential for exponential growth and how are you preparing V8 Capital for that?
Vedran Pranjic and Benedikt Andreas, co-founders of Helvengo spoke to Wani Baumgartner, guest co-host and Finance and Life Sciences recruiter and Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about how to make insurance for SMEs more efficient and less painful.
Here is what they covered:
- Why Vedran and Benedikt decided to start their own company?
- What is Helvengo? How does it work?
- What is Helvengo's unique advantage? How are you different from other solutions for SMEs out there?
- How does Helvengo make money?
- Why did they choose the B2B path?
- Where are Vedran and Benedikt on their journey now
- Lessons learned for potential entrepreneurs thinking of starting their own business
- Next steps this year and beyond
- Favorite business book: Delivering happiness, by Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos
- Best way to reach out
In this episode of Voice of FinTech: Asia Pacific Series, Chia Jeng Yang, Principal of Saison Capital based in Singapore, speaks to Todd Schweitzer, CEO of Brankas, building Open Banking for Southeast Asia.
Todd Schweitzer is co-founder and CEO at Brankas, the leading Open Finance technology provider in Southeast Asia. Todd founded Brankas in 2016 to address the technology gaps that hindered fintech-bank partnerships. Today Brankas provides Open Finance technology to banks, insurers, mobile wallets, e-commerce platforms, alternative lenders, and other suppliers and users of financial services APIs. The company has since expanded to the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Bangladesh, and its technology has enabled new fintech products and partnerships that serve millions of users around the region. Todd holds degrees in Economics and International Studies from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master in Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Todd currently resides in Manila, Philippines.
Chia and Todd talk about:
- Brankas, the Open Banking platform for Southeast Asia - its journey so far and future roadmap
- Common myths and opportunities for Open Banking
- The state of Open Banking in the context of Southeast Asia as well as in the global fintech ecosystem
- Exciting developments and potentials for Southeast Asia Open Banking
Maximilian Rofagha, the founder of Finimize, leading Finance community worldwide, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how to raise your Finance game efficiently.
Here is what they talked about:
- Max, tell us about how you got where you are today
- You founded Finimize five years ago. Why? What’s your mission?
- You have one million subscribers and you say you are the most engaged community in the world. How did you get started?
- What is your key advice for community builders (online or offline) on how to grow their communities?
- How have you been affected by the pandemic? I know you also organize in-person events – have you turned them to online and how different was it in terms of participation and engagement?
- Finance education – in which areas have you seen the most significant demand? How does it differ among regions (say Europe vs. US or Asia)?
- How do you manage different levels of education among your users?
- How do you manage to keep the engagement level high? How do you learn what users like?
- What’s in store for your this year?
- Your favorite book (or a business-related movie)? Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Who is Michael Ovitz? Memoir -the autobiography of the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, High Output Management by Andrew S. Gore, former Chairman and CEO of Intel
- The best way to find out more about Finimize
David Yakobovitch spoke to Ryan Conway, SVP, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships at Oxygen about how Oxygen improves banking for SMEs.
Here is what they covered:
FinTech evolution
- Fintech industry trends
- Predictions for fintechs and traditional banking
- FinTech 1.0 - unbundling
- FinTech 2.0 - rebundle multiple products
- FinTech 3.0 (smart money/ AI)
- Crypto
SME banking
- Now more than ever, the importance of banking for small businesses
- Banking for small businesses
- Oxygen recently announced a partnership with Fundera (Nerd Wallet) to help small businesses and self-employed people who were largely left out of the 1st PPP round
COVID-19 and banking
- How COVID has changed banking
- Digital banking is here to stay and traditional banks have to be prepared to handle all aspects of their business through digital channels
- COVID-19 has also been the biggest digital acquisition driver and many customers are finally embracing their digital tools, but fintechs have re-examined ways to drive every account process to be more efficient and user friendly
Brand equity
- Creating and maintaining brand equity
- Ex: Robinhood/ GameStop stock situation
Oxygen's journey
- Oxygen’s milestones
- Series A
- Peek of products- segmenting of cards, the elevation of the brand, additional features
Best way to reach out
Miroslav Boublik, Managing Partner at Financial Services Capital spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about how financial services firms held privately may have more appetite for a radical overhaul.
Here is what they covered:
- Miroslav backstory (e.g. former Managing Partner at Home Credit International VC arm)
- Financial Services Capital is "a new generation Private Equity firm". What does it mean?
- Origins of the firm
- What’s your target fund size and where you with the fundraising?
- Example of FinTechs FSC invested in: Nymbus.
- Deal sourcing and investment approach
- Funding availability for early-stage and growth companies in Europe vs. the US or Asia?
- Favorite business book: Benjamin Graham's Intelligent Investor
- Wrap up: appeal to inspiring entrepreneurs to learn more about Financial Services Capital and approach you if they meet your criteria
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review.
Brooke Roberts and the team at Sharesies are aiming to build the most financially empowered generation.
What started as an agreement between 13 friends and family members to deposit $50 a week into a shared investment account laid the foundation stones for Sharesies. Their laser focus on building trust, keeping it real and providing the same access to markets for someone with $5 as someone with $5 million has seen Sharesies go from $0 to $1 billion in assets under management in 4 years.
Listen in to find out how:
- Sharesies is building confident and motivated investors through education
- The team of 6 co-founders uses trust to makes it work every day
- Growing confidence is seeing a change in their customers investing strategies over time
Ulli Spankowski, Chief Digital Officer at Boerse Stuttgart, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about Boerse Stuttgart's commitment to innovation to provide access to more financial products for retail investors.
Here is what they talked about:
- Boerse Stuttgart and its competitive edge
- Boerse Stuttgart’s approach to startups overall
- Ulli's multiple hats
- How do you cooperate with other actors in the ecosystem? Partnership with SBI regarding digital assets example.
- The most promising use cases for digital assets in the near future
- A favorite non-fiction book: Trillion-Dollar Coach
- Best way to reach out
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review.
David Yakobovitch spoke to Kevin Bennett, CEO of MotoRefi, about auto FinTech, its potential and how MotoRefi helps consumers save money on their car loans.
Here is what they covered:
What MotoRefi is and does
- Saves consumers $100/month
- Instant refi on their auto loans
- Origin story
Auto finance as an underlooked area of fintech
- Low awareness among consumers
- Virtually no one was trying to solve this problem
- HUGE market - $1.3 trillion industry in US alone
- Self-service API Ecosystem
FinTech for the loans/finance, in particular, is a movement
- Mortgages
- Students loans / personal loans
- Now auto loans too
- Sofi, Even Financial, and Trellis
Growth thus far & recent news
- Series A1 fundraise
- 2020 - 6x’d revenue, tripled headcount
- New office in DC, added new senior hires
Final thought
“Most people’s cars aren’t doing them any favors when it comes to their finances, we’re on a mission to change this.” - MotoRefi CEO Kevin Bennett on overlooked auto FinTech
Lawrence Lee, Partner in Baker McKenzie's Palo Alto office, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about FinTech M&A and other routes to liquidity.
Here is what they talked about:
- Backstory: How did Lawrence get to do what he does today?
- Baker McKenzie's approach towards advising FinTechs - M&A or other matters? Does it mean B&M advises only scale-ups or incumbents interested in this space?
- What are the specifics of the FinTech M&A and any lessons learned you can share?
- The average time to go public has increased tremendously. As Fintechs grow larger and more mature, what are liquidity and exit options for these companies?
- Payments and lending were probably the first areas where FinTech grew. Are we bound to witness a significant consolidation wave in this FinTech vertical?
- SPACs seem to be the favorite buzzword of the day. What are the examples of SPACs operating in the FinTech space?
- Lawrence also worked as an in-house counsel at Coinbase – what attracted him to switch back to an advisory from a corporate?
- Let's talk about the recent Bitcoin rise – is it due to diversification because investors are worried about inflation due to Covid government support or anything else?
- What’s in store for you this year?
- The most impactful business book for Lawrence is an all-time classic: Barbarians at the Gate. Don't also forget a satirical HBO movie based on this book.
- What’s the best way to reach out
In the first episode of the Voice of FinTech: Africa Series, Adejoke Adekunle, CEO of VVM Group and the founder of the African Tech Woman podcast, based in Lagos, Nigeria, spoke to Olusola Owoyemi, CEO of Infibranches.
Here is what Adejoke asked Olusola:
- What Infibranches does and what's the origin story?
- It’s not clear why under-served communities have remained so for the longest time - common assumptions such as “low spending power and economic activities make it rather unattractive to build a business around consumers in these communities - I’m curious! Infibranches seems to have a different view on that and I’d love for you to expand on your thesis about why you are focused on the underserved communities - what aren’t we seeing?
- What are some of the overlooked opportunities you’ve seen with respect to these communities?
- What are the common misperceptions about rural communities and consumers who need basic financial services?
- What are the most important success factors for servicing the last mile consumer in Nigeria?
- What are the critical challenges in running a business like yours?
- There’s the saying that every company is a FinTech company, what are your views about that looking at it through the Infibranches lens?
- I’d like for you to unpack the intersection between FinTech and energy access from an Africa perspective
- Let’s discuss the big picture for Infibranches, what are the long-term goals you have and where are you today?
- What’s one thing you are most proud of since running InfiBranches?
- Beyond Africa, what are your thoughts around scaling up a platform like Omnibranches, their flagship product, beyond the continent?
Barbod Namini, Partner at HV Capital, an exceptional German-based VC with over a 20-year track record, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about investing in FinTech perhaps longer than the term has been fashionable.
Here is what they covered:
- HV Capital origins
- Barbod's journey to HV Capital from Rocket Internet and Citigroup
- HV Capital investment philosophy
- How much money they have raised since inception and for how many start-ups?
- What kind of start-ups HV Capital focuses on investing?
- What kind of FinTechs HV Capital invests (where in the lifecycle, size, tech, geography, etc.)
- How do scouting and due diligence work? What are Barbod and HV Capital looking for?
- How do they cooperate with other actors in the start-up ecosystem?
- What’s HV Capital's investment approach? E.g., min size of the stake, board seat, time to exit, economics?
- Success stories of the start-ups HV Capital invested in? Scalable Capital, Penta, SumUp, BUX, Yapily or Solaris Bank in FinTech and more broadly Zalando, HelloFresh or Delivery Hero
- Reflections on the FinTech’s growth in Europe and the rest of the world over the past two decades since HV Capital has been operational
- Recommended business book: Essays of Warren Buffett and The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
- The best way to reach out
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Nadir Franca, Senior Sustainable Fellow, and Fabian Ligibel, co-lead at Foraus - Sustainable FinTech, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about Sustainable FinTech or Finance.
Here is what they covered:
- Nadir's and Fabian's backstories
- What is Foraus? What are its mission and objectives?
- What is a think tank industry? What’s the competitive landscape for think tanks and how do you compare each other?
- How do you define Sustainable FinTech or Finance?
- Sustainability and impact investing are intertwined and both become mainstream. What’s the difference, especially when they are FinTech related?
- Most people by now heard about ESGs/SDGs – how can FinTech help humanity in achieving them?
- Examples of FinTechs, which can make a noticeable impact vs. SDGs/ESGs and be financially sustainable as well. Yova, a Swiss sustainable investment platform - also appeared on this podcast earlier here
- Recommended books: People, power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Development as freedom by Amartya Sen or The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths or Value of Everything: Making and taking in the global economy by Mariana Mazzucato and also discussed Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
- Planned publications and events this year
- What’s the best to find out more about Foraus, sustainable FinTech and its research
Thank you Daniel Mika and the Swiss Finance + Technology Association (SFTA) for making it happen!
Foraus is a proud member of the Green Fintech Network Switzerland. Check out the Foraus - Sustainable FinTech for the network's recommendations on how to improve green FinTech in Switzerland.
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In this episode of the Asia Pacific Series, Angela Conroy, co-founder and CEO at Notarum, an awesome RegTech based in Singapore, talks to Oi Yee Choo, Chief Commercial Officer at iSTOX, about enabling access to private markets for investors for whom these opportunities were out of reach previously. iSTOX is the first MAS-licensed integrated issuance, custody and trading platform for digitized securities.
Here is what they talked about:
- How does iSTOX work? Accredited investors (as per Singapore rules) can invest in hedge funds using iSTOX platform, which breaks down large tickets required by hedge funds and the like into smaller tickets
- Growing allocation to alternative assets of private markets among investors and the need to make the process more efficient
- Building a FinTech in Singapore and working with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (sandbox)
- Challenges of ramping up during the pandemic
- Importance of partnerships when building a platform (e.g., SGX as an investor)
- Digitization of capital markets
Eric Leupold, Head of DB1 Ventures and Rebecca Qian Gong, Vice Present DB1 Ventures, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about Deutsche Boerse's investment approach and success stories.
Here is what they covered:
- Deutsche Boerse's current business range
- DB1 Ventures is a corporate venturing arm of Deutsche Boerse
- What kind of start-ups has DB1 invested in?
- How does DB1 see start-ups? As disruptors, competitors or partners?
- How does DB1's deal sourcing work?
- How do they cooperate with other actors in the ecosystem?
- How does the selection process work?
- How does economics work?
- How does the monitoring of the investments work?
- Success stories of the start-ups that DB1 invested in
- What's the best way to learn more about Deutsche Boerse Ventures and reach out
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Daniel Schmidheiny, co-founder and COO of vlot, a Swiss-based InsurTech, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast. vlot is reinventing life insurance policy by helping individuals to become more financially responsible.
Here is what they talked about:
- Daniel's serial entrepreneurial journey
- What is vlot? How does it work? Why now?
- What is vlot's unique advantage? How is it different from other solutions out there?
- How does vlot make money?
- Who are your target customers? Is it B2B or B2BC or B2C?
- Where is vlot on their journey?
- Lessons learned for potential entrepreneurs thinking of starting their own business
- What's in store for vlot this year?
- Daniel's favorite business book
- The best way to reach out
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review.
Thank you Daniel Mika and the Swiss Finance + Technology Association (SFTA) for making it happen!
Lianna Brinded, Head of Yahoo Finance UK, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast. Here is what they covered:
- How did Lianna, at first interested in being a war correspondent, ended up in the business media
- Lianna's role as a Head of Yahoo Finance UK – what does it entail?
- How has the world of business media changed and where is it headed? Lianna reflecting on her experience at Yahoo, CNBC, Business Insider and more
- Is TV dead? If video, on-demand style is the answer, why only a few video first outlets are succeeding?
- Does Lianna prefer live programming or recorded? Why?
- What was the most memorable interview Lianna has ever done?
- I heard that your boss once told you to curb your enthusiasm. How did you deal with that?
- How has FinTech changed in the UK and the world in last few years?
- What will Lianna speak about during FinTech Talents North America on March 24?
- Lianna's favorite business book: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
- What is in store for Yahoo Finance UK and Lianna for the rest of the year?
- What's the best way to reach out and find out more
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In this edition of Voice of FinTech: Live Speaker Series, our outstanding virtual panelists were:
- Lothar Cerjak is Head of Institutional Services & Products at Bitcoin Suisse.
- Lily Fang, Finance Professor at INSEAD. Check out the new INSEAD online FinTech course, led by Lily Fang here.
- Anthony Lamy, Partner at Wecan Group
- Emi Lorincz, Business Development Director at Ledger.
The key topic we discussed:
Switzerland now lets tokenized securities trade on a blockchain with the same legal standing as traditional assets. The new law went into effect recently. Swiss lawmakers decided to adapt the current legislation for specific features of distributed ledger technology. What does it mean for you for DLT and blockchain prospects in Switzerland this year
We also covered the medium and long-term prospects of the whole blockchain ecosystem (including crypto and digital currencies), potential end states and examples of tokenization and other blockchain-related use cases utilized by Bitcoin Suisse, Wecan Group, Ledger and macro views from an academic perspective.
Sign up for Voice of FinTech updates directly on our website or follow us on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook) so you don't miss the next event!
In this episode of the Asia Pacific Series, Taneia Bhardwaj, Nium's SME business lead for India, sits down with Manish Patel, founder and CEO of Mswipe Technologies, one of India's leading POS merchant network providers. The two talk about:
- Manish's entrepreneurial journey that spans across medicine, alcohol distribution and digital payments
- How Manish turned his idea into a business and validated his product-market fit
- How POS-based payments players like Mswipe raised the game in a pandemic year
- Mswipe's industry-first product called Bank Box - an acceptance solution that enables merchants to process all debit and credit card transactions, without incurring any rental or merchant discount rate
- The future of last-mile retail transaction technology in India
Alastair Cairns, Head of Insights and Marketplace at Addepar, based in New York, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast, about managing wealth more efficiently.
Here is what they covered:
- Alastair's journey from being Partner at McKinsey, Head of Strategy at a hedge fund Silver Point Capital, Head of Asset Management Strategy and then Co-Head of Global Products and Solutions at Credit Suisse to Head of Insights and Marketplace at Addepar
- What is the problem Addepar is solving?
- Who are Addepar's key clients? Who are their end clients?
- What is Addepar's unique advantage? Why them and not someone else? Why are in-house solutions for your clients insufficient?
- What is Alastair's view on the long-term prospects of WealthTech?
- Which areas of WealthTech are the hottest right now
- Large banks are focusing on ever-larger clients, RMs are more productive, Loans/AuM are going up, and costs being slashed – but where do innovation and WealthTech fit into all of this?
- Where do you think the US leads the way in wealth management and where things could get better?
- Where is Addepar on their journey (Addepar raised USD 117m in November 2020 and acquired RCI in January 2021)
- Plans for the rest of the year
- Favorite business book? Hard things about hard things by Ben Horrowitz - the most popular book on this podcast!
- Best way to reach out
Patrick Awori, Founder and CEO at Imaginarium, a Kenyan-based FinTech behind the Circle, a virtual savings platform, hosts another episode of Voice of FinTech: Africa Series. Patrick talks to Tatenda Furusa, co-founder of ImaliPay.
A burgeoning gig economy has presented opportunities for the youthful workforce in Africa's fast-growing economies where formal employment has fallen short. Overall, McKinsey estimates that about 63 percent of the total labor force in Africa engages in self-employment. This trend continues as the formal economy grapples to keep up as hundreds of thousands of new entrants join the labor market each year. There is also some evidence that a formal job may not always be the best option for all.
In this episode, we explore this topic through the lens of Tatenda Furusa, co-founder of Imali Pay, a promising Nairobi and Lagos-based start-up offering tailored financial solutions to Africa's informal or self-employed workers. He walks us through his analysis of the gig economy's current market trends, COVID-19 and its impact, the future of work and how Imali Pay leverages financial technology and partnerships to meet informal workers at their point of need and proceeds to carve their share of what is a "billion-dollar" business opportunity.
Ani Petrova, founder of The FinTech Marketing Hub and Araminta Robertson, a FinTech writer at Mint Studios, spoke to Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
Here is what they talked about:
- Araminta and Ani – how did you end up interested and working in FinTech Marketing? Why have you joined forces?
- Tell us about The Fintech Marketing Hub – what’s your mission?
- Specifically, what services you provide for FinTechs?
- Say I am a B2C FinTech early-stage start-up – what would be your advice on building a brand with a limited budget in the shortest possible space of time? Is it possible at all?
- Are online ads worth the money and effort at all? When can they work and when?
- Is traditional marketing (apart from digital) relevant and useful for FinTechs? If yes, how?
- Perhaps slightly less relevant, but what you recommend B2B start-ups? How to impress their enterprise clients?
- Can you mention some success stories of clients you have worked with? And conversely, lessons learned?
- The best book for a FinTech founder? Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine and Fintech Founders: Inspiring Tales from the Entrepreneurs that are Changing Finance
- What’s in store for you this year?
- What’s the best way to reach out and find out more about you?
En este episodio de Voice of FinTech: Americas Series, conducido por Clementina Giraldo, fundadora y CEO de Dots & Tech, con sede en Colombia, Clementina habla con Pierpaolo Barbieri, fundador y CEO de Ualá, líder de la industria FinTech en América Latina, sobre la revolución que impulsa Ualá para incluir a más latinoamericanos a servicios financieros modernos y universales.
Argentina cuenta con más de 260 empresas FinTech y lidera después de Brasil y México el desarrollo de la industria en América Latina. En este episodio Pierpaolo Barbieri, emprendedor argentino, nos cuenta cómo identificó la oportunidad para emprender y fundar Ualá movido por un gran problema en América Latina, región en la que más del 50% de los adultos no han tenido acceso a un método de pago diferente al efectivo, sumado a la exclusión que esto genera. Pier nos compartió cómo fue el proceso de crear empresa al regresar a su país, después de haber vivido varios años fuera de Argentina, cómo conformó su equipo, lanzando un producto o cuenta universal y cómo convenció a los inversionistas de creer en esta revolución contra el efectivo apostándole al éxito en el largo plazo. La energía de Pier es impresionante y eso explica porque Ualá, cuenta hoy con un equipo diverso de 700 personas, con más de 46% mujeres, comprometidos con esta revolución im
Sara Palmbush talks to Radboud Vlaar, co-founder and partner at Finch Capital, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands about how and why Finch Capital backs companies developing great new tech for the financial services sector.
Here is what Sara asked Radboud:
- What is Finch about?
- How much money have you raised since inception and for how many start-ups?
- What kind of start-ups have you invested in?
- What kind of FinTechs have you invested in?
- How do you find them? How do scouting and due diligence work? What are your selection criteria?
- What’s your investment approach? E.g. min size of the stake, board seat, time to exit, economics?
- Can you share success stories of the start-ups for which you raised funds (exited)? How do you view the start-up scene in Europe?
- What are some tips you can give foreign VCs about investing in European (or Dutch) companies? What are the unique differences and challenges posed?
- The best way to reach you if you are a founder looking for investment
Shub Nandi, co-founder and CEO at PiChain explains what is sustainable compliance and RegTech and how to leverage the latest technologies to bring banking to underbanked in India. Hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
Here is what we talked about:
- Shub, you are a serial entrepreneur and thought leader in the blockchain and AI space. What has attracted you to it?
- What’s your latest venture PiChain about? What’s the problem you are solving?
- What does it mean, sustainable compliance? What’s your solution?
- I know you already have many products – why such a wide range already now and how do you distinguish those from “solutions”?
- Who are your target clients?
- What’s deep tech to you and how does it relate to FinTech?
- You have been also an adjunct faculty in the AI field for a number of years – do you think your students are ready for the work-life where AI is commonplace?
- Can you also comment on the Indian FinTech scene? Where do you think it’s strong and where you would like to see further progress?
- Your favorite business book you have read recently?
- What’s in store for you and PiChain this year?
- What’s the best way to reach out and find out more about PiChain?
PiChain: We help you achieve 100% compliance, Zero Penalties and 200% peace of mind
In this episode of the Asia Pacific Series, Angela Conroy, co-founder and CEO at Notarum, an awesome RegTech based in Singapore, talks to Nicki Ramsey. Nicki is the founder and CEO of CardUp, also based in Singapore. CardUp is a credit card enablement platform that enables payment or collection of significant expenses using a credit card in places where cards are not accepted today.
Nicki and Angela talk about:
- The 'great leap of faith' when moving from corporate to star-tup
- The importance of a strong founding team
- How non-tech founders can get comfortable with the tech world
- Why finding the win-win is key to success
Michael Klien, co-founder of Safeside talks to Rudolf Falat, founder of the Voice of FinTech podcast about how to get life insurance more easily and intelligently.
More specifically, here is what they talked about:
- Michael, how and why have you decided to start your own company?
- What is SafeSide? How does it work? Why now?
- What is your unique advantage? How are you different from comparison sites or brokers?
- How do you make money?
- Who are your target customers?
- How have you started with your venture?
- Where are you on your journey in terms of product development, geographic reach, funding, hiring? What’s the ultimate plan?
- What are the next steps for you this year and beyond?
- Michael's favorite business book: Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
- The best way to reach out
Stacey Japhta, Head of Strategic FinTech Partnerships at Talent in the cloud, emerging markets FinTech executive search firm and host of Talking success podcast, talks to Buhle Goslar, Africa CEO at Jumo, a company providing financial services technologies to empower emerging market entrepreneurs, both based in South Africa.
- Buhle learnt about being an entrepreneur at the age of 23 when she built the business division of a Travel Tech company in China from scratch. In this episode, Buhle touches on the steps to take to successfully build something from the ground up.
- Her MBA paper dives into why we do not see the full benefits of financial inclusion in South Africa and how that ties into the emerging markets not creating innovative products. Buhle shares the reason for this and how we can solve the problem.
- Then we chat about a controversial topic - focusing on gender diversity & pay equity. How do we move away from pay secrecy?
James Wallis is Vice President RippleX, Central Bank Engagements and CBDCs at Ripple. Hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast. Here is what they talked about:
- James, you have had a long and distinguished career at IBM. What drove you to the world of blockchain?
- What are your predictions for blockchain and its use cases?
- I know you focus on CBDCs – some countries are more supportive than others. Recently, the Swiss central bank representatives stated that they see no benefits of CBDCs over the currency as we know it today? What would be your answer to that?
- What are the critical success factors that need to be fulfilled, so CBDCs take off?
- What’s the interplay between CBDCs, Ripple and enterprise blockchain? What’s the problem you are solving?
- Has your focus shifted as you have been building Ripple?
- How does the world of blockchain look like now from Ripple’s perspective?
- Who are your key clients?
- What’s in store for you this year?
- Ray Dalio from Bridgewater says governments will kill bitcoin. Is he right?
- Your favorite business book you have read recently?
- What’s the best way to reach out and find out more about Ripple?
In this episode of Voice of FinTech: Asia Pacific Series, Chia Jeng Yang, Principal of Saison Capital based in Singapore, speaks to Vaibhav Garg, Head of Business Strategy for Open, an Indian SME focused neobanking platform. Vaibhav is the Head of Business Strategy at Open and was a founder of multiple companies (Boro, Zopperand IndieHaat), ex-Dalberg Global Advisorsconsultant and an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay graduate.
Open is an SME-focused business banking platform, founded by serial entrepreneurs Anish Achuthan, Mabel Chacko and Ajeesh Achuthan, along with ex TaxiforSure CFO Deena Jacob.
Founded in 2017, Open is one of the world’s fastest-growing SME-focused business banking platforms with over 800,000 SMEs, processing over USD 24 billion in transaction processing volume annually and adding 50,000 new SMEs every month. Open is backed by leading global investors like Tiger Global, Speedinvest, Beenext, raising $37 million in funding, and was recently featured among the top 100 fintech companies globally in the 2019 Fintech 100 Report by KPMG and H2 Ventures.
We talk about:
- Open and its founding story
- Key events and nuances in the Indian fintech scene and how it compares to other FinTech markets
- Opportunities in the SME open banking space
- Regulatory oversight and its role in embedded finance
- Overlooked factors for investing and building in India Fintech
Jana Kovacovska, the founder at Tiny CFO, providing advisory services to start-ups focused on entrepreneurial finance in the tech, consumer, and media space. Ex-VC and McKinsey. An enthusiastic supporter of new-ish entrepreneurs and small businesses. Hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
Here is what we talked about:
- Background on Tiny CFO and Jana
- What made you start Tiny CFO?
- What do you think founders need to focus on with regards to their finances from the start?
- Is there a difference between a startup and a small business? Why does it matter?
- Which issues do you witness in entrepreneurial finance?
- Why not just leave all this to the accountant?
- What do you think the best practice finance function for startups looks like?
- Do you think forecasts still cannot be automated?
- Can the founders do all of this – manage their whole finance function – on their own?
- When should they hire a CFO and what to expect?
- How do you collaborate with others in the ecosystem?
- What's the best way to reach out?
David Yakobovitch discussed with Johnny Ayers, CEO and Founder of Socure, about the rise of identity verification and security for financial transactions in a Digital First Society. This episode featured a conversation on leading FinTech startups that are enabled by technology at Socure and similar exciting Finance ventures such as Public, Stash and Robinhood.
Topics included uncovering the powerful technology that Socure has built for identity fraud, anti-money laundering, and end-to-end predictive analytics. Notable startups discussed on the episode included Brigit, EarnIn, and Dave.com.
- With its focus on binary classification and over 9 billion rows of weekly data, Socure has built three new, industry-changing solutions: Intelligent KYC, DocV and Sigma Synthetic Fraud.
- Socure announced in the second half of 2020 a funding round of $35 million (here), and recently has entered the online gaming industry (here).
- Socure is solving for the first ML model to verify 100% of good IDs and completely eliminate identity fraud on the Internet.
- Johnny Ayers’ 2021 trend predictions on fraud include a part 1 and part 2.
Will Graylin is a former US nuclear submarine officer, a serial entrepreneur with exits to Samsung, Oracle and others, former co-GM of Samsung Pay and Chairman and CEO of OVLoop, Inc., USA, his latest FinTech venture. Hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
We talk about:
- How did Will get to do what he does today?
- What has attracted Will to be an entrepreneur instead of being an employee? What were Will's favorite entrepreneurial moments?
- What are the pros and cons of going more digital and how far can we go?
- OV Loop - what’s the company about? What is the problem you are trying to solve? What does it mean, "everywhere commerce"?
- Who are its key clients?
- Digital payments are already a fairly crowded space. How are you better than your competitors? What’s your edge?
- It seems that COVID loves e-commerce. Have you noticed a spike in demand driven by the pandemic? Where exactly?
- Your favorite business book you have read recently?
- Where can interested parties find out more about you?
In the first episode of the Voice of FinTech: Africa Series, Adejoke Adekunle, CEO of VVM Group and the founder of the African Tech Woman podcast, based in Lagos, Nigeria, spoke to Jehiel Oliver, CEO of Hello Tractor, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Jehiel also served on the US President’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa (Obama administration).
Here is what Adejoke asked Jehiel:
- I think a great way to start our conversation would be to orient our audience about some of the problems/opportunities that inspired HelloTractor before we segue into the FinTech aspect of your business which is what this show largely focuses on. So tell us about the small steps that led to the big decision of founding HelloTractor
- What things have changed over the years - what was shocking/exciting or did you underestimate starting out?
- I read somewhere that Nigeria still needs about 63,000 tractors to match the mechanization requirement to effectively address the food security challenge, it's interesting to hear that it's part of what's influencing some of the decisions and plans at Hello Tractor.
- Unpack the intersection between Agriculture and finance especially within the African context.
- How would you describe the Tractor finance market in Africa? I understand that might differ from country to country within the continent so I'd like you to unpack that for me a bit.
- Walk me through the impacts you've seen since joining the Mastercard Programme with specific examples of how this has helped your customers.
- So about 2 years ago, HelloTractor built an AI-enabled digital wallet for farmers, where does that fit in the big picture of things for Hello Tractor?
- What are some of the setbacks you’ve experienced in trying to spin up fintech solutions within the business? And how are you navigating them?
- How has COVID-19 impacted investments into Agriculture in Africa?
- I’d like to hear your thoughts about how investors and people/institutions looking to be a part of the African Agriculture ecosystem can participate - how can they participate in this economy.
- Looking at 2021 ahead, what are some of the things we should expect from HelloTractor?
- And finally, what’s one interesting thing about you most people don’t know about you?
Cyrus Fazel, CEO and founder of SwissBorg is a seasoned blockchain ecosystem executive, hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
We talk about:
- Cyrus has been an entrepreneur in the blockchain space for quite some time now. What has attracted him to it?
- What’s the SwissBorg about? What’s the problem they are solving?
- What’s the solution? What’s their unfair advantage?
- Who are the target clients?
- What is a cryptocurrency? A currency or an asset or both? Why?
- Zug calls itself a crypto valley and Geneva a blockchain valley – how does SwissBorg (based in Lausanne) work with many crypto, blockchain, digital assets, or DeFi actors of the ecosystem in Switzerland or abroad?
- Which of the blockchain technology applications are the most promising at the moment?
- How would one sell crypto to traditional private banking clients?
- More and more, we hear about TechFin replacing FinTech – why?
- How has the business been developing in the last 12 months, and what’s in store in 2021?
- The best way to reach out and find out more about SwissBorg
In this episode, our guest host Sara Palmbush, American Public Relations and Content Specialist living in the Netherlands, interviews Eva Schram, one of the new book's co-authors, ‘The Secret of Silicon Valley.’ Schram is a Dutch journalist based in San Francisco. Her focus is on start-up culture, tech and innovation. She writes for international media, including the Dutch magazines De Groene Amsterdammer, OneWorld and SamSam and the (Flemish) press agency IPS.
Her co-author, Wibe Wagemans, is a US-based Dutch serial entrepreneur. He started his tech career at Nokia. Since 2006 he has been running and advising startups in Silicon Valley, where he built brands such as Angry Birds and Big Fish. His teams have won the Golden Lion in Cannes and dozens of other awards. He is the founding chairman of the board of Huuuge Games Inc.
Here is what Sara asked Eva:
- What brought you to the Valley?
- Why did you decide to co-write this book?
- What are the key reasons for tech startup success in the Valley?
- Tell me how these compare with the Netherlands?
- Using the learnings you gained from writing this book, how do you see the current economic/political climate affecting innovation and access to capital worldwide?
- Can you speak to the importance and nature of networking in the Valley?
- What can Stanford University teach the Dutch and other European countries about innovation?
- Can you speak to some of the most important ‘lessons from the Valley’ for European entrepreneurs?
- Any other points from the book you want to share?
Listeners can use the code FRIENDSandSHERPAS to get half off the Dutch or English e-book versions: https://www.botuitgevers.nl/product/het-geheim-van-silicon-valley/
We talk to John Vuong, founder and CEO of the Local SEO Search, Inc., a Canadian SEO company, helping SMEs get discovered on the web! Hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
- John explains his roots - born in Canada to an immigrant family from Vietnam
- John had many different jobs as a student – what were his favorites and useful for today's role?
- What was it like to work at Yellow Pages as internet usage has been rising?
- John has been running the Local SEO business in Canada for over seven years now. How did he come up with an idea?
- Let’s start with the SEO basics – what is it and why is it needed?
- Target clients?
- How the SEO tools or focus differ for a local SME with a physical presence and a fully digital business, say software or a FinTech?
- When I started this podcast, someone who had done this before told me that the podcasts are not good for SEO. What’s John's view?
- Has there been a spike in demand for SEO services driven by the pandemic?
- What are the key SEO lessons learned from starting John's own business? How did John optimize your own discoverability?
- What’s in store for John in 2021?
- Best way to reach out
Dennis Gada is SVP and Head for Financial Services, North America at Infosys. Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. Infosys enables clients in 46 countries to navigate their digital transformation. Hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
We talk about:
- How did Dennis find his way to Infosys?
- What is Infosys at large? What's their product range?
- 2020 has been a challenging year for many all around the world. Many governments provided loans to businesses to help them weather lockdowns (or guarantees). Banks sharply increased the provisions (and then sometimes released them). We can't change the macro environment, but how can Infosys help lenders improve their loan process?
- Loan applications: how can we do it smoothly and remotely (look at it from both lenders' and borrowers' perspectives)?
- Who gets a loan or who doesn't? Many practitioners warn that leveraging AI and algorithms may cement banks' biases (e.g., race or gender). How can you prevent that?
- Loan monitoring – AI-powered alert systems – can you compare to traditional, manual ways of monitoring? How much more efficient is it?
- Sometimes, there is nothing you can do, and you end up with a bad loan – how can Infosys help manage it?
- What are additional applications – for example, in the export/trade finance?
- Who are the key clients of Infosys' technology? E.g., Vanguard and Old National Bank.
- Where can interested parties find out more about Infosys and their services for financial services?
Janine Hirt, Innovate Finance, an independent, non-profit membership-based organization and industry body serving the United Kingdom's financial technology community. Hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
We talk about:
- Janine's global citizen's journey to her role as a COO at Innovate Finance. Switzerland, USA, UK all featured!
- Innovate Finance - mission and its objectives
- How Innovate Finance and FinTech in the UK have evolved in the last six + years
- Priority programs and initiatives: for example, FinTech for schools or Women in FinTec
- Key FinTech industry verticals supported (18 altogether)!
- Membership base: FinTech start-ups, incumbents and investors
- What can one expect from Innovate Finance as a FinTech or an incumbent?
- FinTech prospects in 2021
- Janine also hosts the podcast Coffee with Innovate Finance – a few favorite conversations from 2020 include Mike Laven from Currencycloud, Rafa Plantier from Tink, Freddy Kelly from Credit Kudos, Maria Scott from Taina Technology, James Lowry from State Street, Vikesh Patel from SWIFTand Adam French from Scalable Capital and Ross Dalzell, Head of Digital Investment Platforms at Barclays UK
- Success stories of where Innovate Finance, as an industry body, made an impact. Stay tuned for the independent review of the UK FinTech, "Ron Kalifa Review"
- Ecosystem events hosted by Innovate Finance, e.g. its flagship UK FinTech Week
- Best way to reach out and find out more
Christian Ali is Senior Vice President Product at Entersekt, headquartered in South Africa. Christian leads his global team from Toronto, Canada. Hosted by Rudolf Falat, founder of Voice of FinTech podcast.
We talk about:
- Christian's motivation to join a FinTech
- What is Entersekt? How does it work? How did the founders come up with Entersekt’s key idea?
- Some breakthrough innovations that Entersekt brought to the market
- How did the pandemic affect Entersekt's business and the way you work?
- Key trends in the payments space:
- Worldwide adoption of contactless payments
- How peer-to-peer payments will play a larger role than ever
- The increase in banking and payment options for consumers
- Pandemic has also brought us more cyber and phishing attacks. Why this has been happening? What does it mean for authentication solutions and your banking clients?
- What are the next steps in the next 12 months and beyond?
- Christian's favorite business book: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
- The best way to reach out and find out more
Fabio Federici is a serial entrepreneur, based in Zurich, Switzerland. We talk about his latest venture, Base58, an asset management and trading firm specializing in crypto assets and recent events in the crypto or digital assets and the prospects for the future.
More specifically, we talk about:
- What has attracted Fabio to the blockchain or crypto space?
- What’s Base58 about? What’s the problem they are solving?
- Solution?
- Target clients? Retail or institutional?
- What’s a cryptocurrency? A currency or an asset or both?
- This year, the halving of bitcoin happened. What does it mean, and why is it important?
- Cryptocurrencies are very volatile – how can one manage an asset like that?
- Many use cases are being explored with crypto – where are we with scalability and KYC that have been hampering wider adoption?
- Ray Dalio from Bridgewater says governments will kill bitcoin. Is he right?
- When you look at the crypto market cap and Google Search trends, is there a correlation? It seems to me that crypto has lost some steam over the years. Why?
- Fabio's favorite business book: The man who solved the market by Gregory Zuckerman
- What’s the best way to reach out and find out more about Base58
In another episode of the Asia Pacific series with Taneia Bhardwaj, Taneia spoke to the founder and CEO of Niyo – Vinay Bagri, based in Bangalore, India. Niyo was one of the first neobanking platforms to go live in India - 5 years on, Niyo is serving over 1.5 million customers through its digital banking services!
Here is what Taneia asked Vinay:
- FinTech founders are closer to being finance people, than technologists and that rings true for you too. You’ve been a career banker, having worked with some of India’s finest private banks. And I’m guessing that it was your time at these banks that the idea of Niyo came to you? Tell us a bit about how you ended up founding Niyo?
- Let’s talk about Niyo -its offerings and the approach you took to build this company – from what I can tell, you have identified segments that were either unserved or underserved by banks and then built offerings around that. Tell us about some of the products that you have rolled out? And what are you solving for?
- The idea of banking without banks and banks without branches is yet to completely take off in India – compared to, say, the UK where 9% of British adults have a neobank account – here we have close to 10 neobanks and a handful in the pipeline – given your first-mover advantage, what can you tell us about customer adoption?
- How do you generate demand? For instance, how are you reaching out to India’s 100 million blue-collar workers who span the length and breadth of the country?
- Your offering is also anchored in the context of a large and unbanked Indian population. To what extent do you believe Niyo has added value to people’s lives?
- Globally, profitability for neobanks is a huge challenge. Is it any different in India?
- Vinay, neobanks are seen as challengers to the high street banks in India. Yet, because our regulator doesn’t grant a virtual banking/ digital banking license, players like you need to work with a licensed entity – a bank partner. Is this a challenge and do you see it?
Lily Fang is Finance Professor at INSEAD. We discussed Lily's fascination with Finance, innovations in the field like FinTech and the results of our survey among listeners on the impact of remote working in Finance and the opportunities this may present for FinTechs.
We talk about:
- What drove Lily to become an academic after her Ph.D. at Wharton
- Trends in education (MBA, EMBA) since the early 2000s
- Lily's main research interests focus on financial intermediation, financial institutions, asset market, media, financial markets, and China and how the rise of FinTechs fit into all of these
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Our survey we have done in November on the remote work in Finance and opportunities for FinTechs. The make-up of our respondents:
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*Over 40% worked in various Finance functions, another 15 % in FinTech and 15% in VC or PE roles, and 10 % in Investment banking.
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Over 75% of responders have working experience of 10 years and more.*
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They come from a mix of independents and small companies (35%) and large companies (30%) and the rest in between.
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Nearly 60% are in senior roles (Director, MD, or Partner).
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Lastly, nearly 60% are based in Europe, over 20% in Asia, 10 % in the Americas, and the remainder in Africa and Australia.
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We asked the respondents about how remote working, made more commonplace by the pandemic, impacted their work in Finance:
- Were you impacted by remote working a lot or not?
- Do you think it's temporary or permanent?
- Where do you see the biggest impact (e.g., teamwork, leadership, creativity or productivity)?
- Do you prefer a home office or not? Why?
- Then we focused people's attention on how to turn these changes, which seem to have a profound impact on the way we work for the years to come, into opportunities for FinTechs:
- Where do you see the biggest opportunities for FinTechs if remote work for Finance professionals becomes more extensive and permanent than before the pandemic? E.g., client onboarding / KYC or CRM, automation/insights or cloud-native core banking systems/cybersecurity?
- Are these opportunities global, or do they highly depend on the local culture in your view?
- How long will it take for some of these innovations to take hold?
- Would commercialization of the biggest opportunities you see be best achieved by cooperation with incumbents or disruption from outside?
Listen in for the results and Prof. Fang's commentary.
- Research and teaching priorities for 2021 and the best way to reach out
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1 priority: INSEAD's new online FinTech course starting in March 2021!
We recorded this live virtual panel discussion with the Voice of FinTech hosts in the Asia Pacific and the Americas on December 10. Our hosts are outstanding entrepreneurs, investors and start-up community leaders focused on FinTech or related areas such as AI! We talked about what's going on in the FinTech or start-up scene, early-stage investing or open innovation in Singapore, South East Asia, Latin America or the US. More specifically, RegTech in Singapore, VC investing in South East Asia, Data Science and AI in the US and building FinTech community in LatAm. Which are the hottest FinTech verticals? Which countries are FinTech leaders?
👉🏻Angela Conroy, Co-founder and CEO of Notarum, a great RegTech, automating corporate due diligence, in Singapore. Included in the inaugural Singapore 100 Women In Tech List this year!
👉🏻Chia Jeng Yang 谢征阳, Principal at Saison Capital, the VC arm of Credit Saison, one Japan's largest consumer credit companies, based in Singapore.
👉🏻Clementina Giraldo, Founder & CEO of Dots and Tech. Founder of FinTech Latinoamérica community, based in Colombia. Top ten FinTech influencer in LatAm and Spain among Colombians. Voice of FinTech habla español!
👉🏻David Yakobovitch, Education Delivery Specialist at SingleStore, HumAIn Podcast Host, Angel Investor, Start-up Advisor, based in New York.
Andrea Melville is MD Commercialisation & Propositions at Lloyds in London. Andrea is also a board member at Fnality, a network of decentralized Financial Market Infrastructures (dFMIs), where Lloyds invested.
We talk about:
- MD Commercialisation & Propositions at Lloyds in London - what does it mean in real life?
- Andrea previously said, “Why shouldn’t banking be just as simple as booking a hotel or ordering a taxi?” Why it’s sometimes not the case and what can be done about it?
- Lloyds is a systemically important organization, so giving rewards to employees to bring down its systems as a test like some tech companies do, doesn’t work. How does Lloyds then infuse agility into an organization with such constraints?
- Lloyds' approach to innovation and working with start-ups: from investing to partnering
- How do your scouting and outreach at Lloyds work?
- How does the selection process work?
- How does economics work (broadly)? Do you work on pilots and proof of concepts?
- Long-term partnerships. Check out the FinTech Pledge that Lloyds signed up to and how to get onboarded by Lloyds.
- What are the metrics of the partnerships and monitoring
- Can you share success stories of the start-ups with whom you have partnered up? And the lessons learned?
- Favorite book: Guns, Germs and Steel (and some podcasts:)
- Wrap up: appeal to inspiring entrepreneurs to learn more about working with Lloyds and the best way to get in touch
En este episodio de Voice of FinTech: Americas Series, conducido por Clementina Giraldo, fundadora y CEO de Dots & Tech, con sede en Colombia, Clementina habla con Diego Creel, cofundador y CEO de Creze, líder de la industria FinTech en México, sobre las oportunidades que ofrece México en esta imparable industria.
In this episode of Voice of FinTech: Americas Series hosted by Clementina Giraldo, Founder & CEO of Dots & Tech, based in Colombia in Spanish, Clementina speaks to Diego Creel, co-founder and CEO of Creze, a FinTech leader in Mexico, about the incredible opportunities in this industry. English description below.
Diego Creel es emprendedor mexicano, con más de 15 años de experiencia profesional. Ha trabajado en banca de inversión, planificación estratégica y dirección general en México y España, incluyendo empresas como UBS, Cemex, Cash Converters LATAM y Polygon Fintech. Co-fundó Tuyo y lo vendió a EZCorp después de 5 años. Es emprendedor Endeavor y finalista de E&Y en 2012. Miembro de la junta directiva de 6 startups de FinTech. Ingeniero del ITESM y MBA del IE en España.
México cuenta con más de 500 empresas FinTech y lídera después de Brasil, el desarrollo de la industria en América Latina. En este episodio Diego Creel, nos cuenta cómo identificó la oportunidad para emprender y cofundar Creze en 2015, una de las FinTech líderes en el segmento de crédito digital para pequeñas y medianas empresas en México. Nos compartió cómo fue el proceso de levantamiento de capital para el desarrollo de Creze, en medio de la evolución de la industria de fondos de capital emprendedor en su país, enfatizando qué aspectos ha tenido en cuenta, además del capital, para elegir a sus inversionistas y cómo ha sido la relación con ellos.
Adicionalmente presentó algunas cifras de la industria FinTech de México, el contexto y posibles repercusiones de la Ley FinTech en el país, las empresas FinTech que acompañan a Creze en el liderazgo del segmento de crédito digital, sus avances y desafíos. Hablamos sobre el interés de diferentes emprendedores del mundo de conquistar el mercado mexicano y las oportunidades que ofrece México en el contexto latinoamericano.
Diego Creel is a Mexican entrepreneur, with more than 15 years of professional experience. He has worked in investment banking, strategic planning and general management in Mexico and Spain, including companies such as UBS, Cemex, Cash Converters LATAM and Polygon Fintech. He co-founded Tuyo and sold it to EZCorp after 5 years. He is an Endeavor entrepreneur and an E&Y finalist in 2012. Member of the board of 6 FinTech startups. An engineer from ITESM and MBA from IE in Spain.
Mexico has more than 500 FinTech companies and the country is a leader in the region after Brazil in the development of the industry in Latin America. In this episode, Diego tells us how he identified the opportunity to start and co-founded Creze, one of the leading FinTechs in the digital credit segment for SMEs in Mexico. Diego shared with us how was the capital raising process for the development of Creze, in the midst of the evolution of the venture capital funds industry in the country. He emphasized to us what aspects he has taken into account, in addition to capital, to choose his investors and how his relationship with them has been.
Additionally, he presented some figures of the FinTech industry in Mexico, the context and implications of the FinTech law in the country, the companies that accompany Creze in the leadership of the SME loans business, their progress and challenges. We talked about the interest of different entrepreneurs in the world to conquer the Mexican market and the challenges and opportunities that Mexico offers in the Latin American context.
Martins Sulte, an INSEAD MBA alumnus, is CEO and Co-Founder at Mintos, an award-winning global marketplace for investing in loans, headquartered in Riga, Latvia.
We talk about:
- Martins's motivation to start his own business
- Martin's way of picking co-founders to maximize success
- What is Mintos? How does it work?
- Where are the investors on the platform from, and which loans does Mintos finance?
- What's their unique selling point?
- Did the pandemic affect the loan business and how?
- Martins' way of keeping with the ever-larger company
- Did he always believe this will work out, or did he have a moment when you thought you would give up?
- Mintos has raised more than EUR 7m on Crowdcube recently. The biggest crowdfunding round in Europe (excl. the UK) ever! Why the crowdfunding route?
- What will they do with the money?
- Martins' book recommendation: The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
- Where can interested parties reach Martins or Mintos?
Also, we'd love to hear from you! Together with INSEAD's Finance Professor, Lily Fang, we are preparing the podcast about your remote working in Finance and the opportunities this may present for FinTech. If you could spare a couple of minutes contributing to this survey, we will talk about it on the Voice of FinTech podcast very soon: https://bit.ly/2HWcybJ.
Henri Arslanian is PwC Global Crypto Leader, Best Selling Author, Keynote Speaker and University Professor based in Hong Kong.
We talk about:
- What has kept Henri busy during the pandemic?
- Before COVID, there was a wide acknowledgment that FinTech’s more viable route to success is through cooperation rather than a disruption. What’s Henri's view on this today?
- The book “The Future of Finance: The Impact of FinTech, AI, and Crypto on Financial Services” came out last summer – anything that would have changed with a benefit of hindsight in 2020?
- Henri's recommendation for incumbents on how to embrace the digital transformation
- Some incumbents are bracing themselves for further cost-cutting, job cuts and delaying all non-essential investments. Can one delay the innovation investments without repercussions?
- Why Henri believes in crypto and blockchain opportunities for sharing the future of Finance
- Many commentators agree that pandemics has accelerated the digital transformation around the world. Have digital assets, blockchain and crypto players capitalized on the opportunity? Is crypto going mainstream?
- What are the biggest challenges for adopting blockchain or digital assets by large incumbents, and to what extent they can be sorted
- Check out FinTech Capsules and Crypto Capsules on YouTube and follow Henri on LinkedIn
The pace of disruption has been accelerating in the last few years, and in 2020, even more so! Often, organizations realize their organizational design is unsuitable for the business challenges ahead. How do they plan and implement organizational changes? Is there a better, more scientific way of doing it than the current industry practices? This is relevant for banks, FinTechs, and, frankly, any industry. How can AI help?
This is what we talked about in this edition of Voice of FinTech: Live Speaker Series with INSEAD Professor Phanish Puranam.
Check out his free e-book Phanish co-wrote with Julien Clément, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, called Organizational Analytics and related blog post in INSEAD Knowledge.
We also have a homework kind of question from Prof. Puranam to the audience and listeners. Feel free to respond directly to him via LinkedIn here. This year, we have witnessed these trends related to organizational design: First, we all learned we can do lot more work remotely. Consequently, we know have an enormous amount of data from all online meetings and communication gathered in the past 10 months as they happened online.So if lot of managerial work will be taken away by using data driven algorithms, are we bound to see flattening and reduction of hierarchies? Note: delayering doesn't necessarily mean more autonomy.
Jeremy Balkin, Head of Innovation at HSBC Bank USA, leads the Innovation Strategy for the HSBC Retail Banking and Wealth Management business in the US.
We talk about:
- HSBC’s approach to innovation from partnering to start-ups to investing
- Head of Innovation at HSBC Bank USA – what does that mean? What's Jeremy's mandate and goals in this role
- Many commentators agree that the pandemic has accelerated digitalization trends. Where does Jeremy see the most significant impact on HSBC's business?
- What will be Jeremy's keynote at Finovate West about
- Wrap up: the best way for interested parties to learn more about Jeremy, HSBC's innovation efforts and reach out
Rudolf Falat will be moderating one of the panels at FinovateWest Digital on November 23-25. The event will feature first-rate speakers and demos from leading FinTechs! Register here for 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/38XYysW
Also, we'd love to hear from you! Together with INSEAD's Finance Professor, Lily Fang, we are preparing the podcast about your remote working in Finance and the opportunities this may present for FinTech. If you could spare a couple of minutes contributing to this survey, we will talk about it on the Voice of FinTech podcast very soon: https://bit.ly/2HWcybJ. The survey will close by the end of November.
In this episode of Voice of FinTech: Asia Pacific Series, Chia Jeng Yang, Principal of Saison Capital based in Singapore, speaks to Rahul Shinghal, ex-Head of Stripe APAC and ex-Head of SMB Payments International at PayPal and now co-founder of Tazapay, a cross-border payments platform for SMEs, also based in Singapore.
Chia and Rahul talk about:
- Tazapay’s objectives in Southeast Asia - its current progress and future roadmap
- Opportunities in the SME cross-border space
- The opportunities for B2B and B2C fintech in Southeast Asia and the scale of the opportunity
- Exciting developments and trends in Southeast Asia’s fintech scene
- The journey from a senior corporate executive of large companies to a startup founder
Kevin Levitt is Global Industry Business Development Lead, Financial Services at Nvidia, based in San Francisco.
We talk about:
- Nvidia’s approach to start-ups overall, from partnering to investing
- Global Industry Business Development, Financial Services at NVIDIA – what does it mean in real life?
- Within Financial Services, what kind of institutions or start-ups is Nvidia focusing on?
- How does scouting at Nvidia work? How do they bring new business in the times of Covid?
- How does the selection process work? Who is the right partner or a client for Nvidia?
- Nvidia just hosted a GTC conference, where the CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, presented many new products. What kind of products or services are these? What’s new?
- Where is AI in Financial Services is headed in the near term and long term?
- How does Nvidia cooperate with other actors in the ecosystem? E.g., AWS or other cloud companies.
- Success stories of the cooperation with Financial Services firms, especially FinTechs
- Lessons learned from your partnerships
- Kevin's favorite business book: Never split the difference about negotiation
- Best way to reach out and leverage Nvidia's resources
A discussion with Gerrit Sindermann, new head of F10 Zurich, Els Van Eyndhoven and Sabrina Bogaert, co-founders of mobility Goud corp-up with Baloise Belgium and Andreas Bezner, co-founder and Managing Partner of Stableton, a marketplace for alternative investments in Switzerland.
We talk about:
- Gerrit, how did he get to do what he does today
- What’s new at F10 Zurich and what’s in store in the near future?
- Els and Sabrina, co-founders of a corporate start-up at Baloise Belgium, Goud – what led them to Baloise and innovation?
- What is Goud? Mobility for elderly and insurance - how does it tie together? Why is it worth solving? Why now?
- What is their unique advantage? How are they different from other InsurTech or mobility start-ups?
- Andreas – is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Stableton, a marketplace for alternative investments and a serial entrepreneur. How does it feel to found a new business so many times?
- How does a digital marketplace for alternative investments like Stableton work?
- Who are target clients for Stableton and how is it regulated?
- Why did Els, Sabrina and Andreas choose to participate in the F10 program?
- How does F10 and start-up participants measure the success of partnerships, especially with early-stage companies?
- Key innovation areas in financial services and the insurance industry in the next few years - predictions? Any immediate changes post the pandemic?
- Next steps for this year and beyond?
- Best way to reach out to F10, Goud and Stableton
In this episode of Asia Pacific Series, hosted by Angela Conroy, based in Singapore, Angela talks to Varun Mittal, EY Global’s Emerging Markets FinTech Leader.
Varun and Angela talk about:
- How through a combination of good timing and hard work, Varun managed to craft an unconventional but ultimately successful career path for himself
- How public-private partnerships are the foundation of tech development and how Singapore has used this model to become a FinTech powerhouse
- Why emerging market countries are on the cusp of leading a FinTech revolution and the trends, we can already see emerging from this region
- The considerations large corporates make when decided if they should ‘build or buy’ technology and how start-ups can leverage their agility and ability to execute into ‘closing the deal’
- The early days of the Singapore FinTech Association and how a carefully crafted charter ensures start-up voices are heard along with the bigger players in the ecosystem
- His new book, Singapore: The FinTech Nation, covers ‘the liberalization of financial services, the establishment of regional hubs and the embracement of financial services’. His book is available for pre-order here.
Mimi Nguyen is co-founder of Mana Labs R&D and Ph.D. Fellow at Imperial College in London and Lloyd Wahed, is founder, CEO, and investor at Mana Search, a FinTech search firm based in London, UK.
We discuss:
- Mimi's backstory. An academic and entrepreneur: how does it fit together?
- How has life changed during the lockdown/pandemic from the perspective of a founder and a parent?
- Lloyd – backstory: How did Lloyd get to do what he does today?
- Mana Search firm and podcast – What is its' mission and objectives?
- How do Lloyd and Mimi see the FinTech job market this year and next? Where are the pockets of opportunities, and what’s the best way to break into this market, for example, if you had worked at an incumbent before and don’t have a start-up experience?
- Why is striving for diversity in the start-up world is important? What's the state of the women in tech and inclusivity in the UK?
- Where are the opportunities for FinTech companies post-pandemic?
- Based on their discussions with founders, arguably digital transformation ambassadors, what's the future of work? Office work vs. remote or hybrid work (we focus on the nuanced view of the workers with less social capital, i.e., juniors or incoming leaders vs. well-established teams)
- Female guests on Searching for Mana podcast – most popular examples
- Best way to reach out
Este episodio Voice of FinTech conducido por CLementina Giraldo, Founder & CEO of Dots & Tech / FinTech / Blockchain. This episode of Voice of FinTech: Americas Series is hosted by Clementina Giraldo, Founder & CEO of Dots & Tech / FinTech / Blockchain. Founder of FinTech Latinoamérica Community, based in Colombia in Spanish! English description below.
Mariano Biocca, Coordinador Cámara Argentina de FinTech
Licenciado en Administración de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, luego de 2 años al mando de las relaciones institucionales en iBillionaire, fue convocado para encabezar el desarrollo de la Cámara Argentina de FinTech con fuerte foco en la vinculación entre el sector privado, sector público y sector académico.
Erick Rincon Cardenas, Presidente Colombia FinTech
Abogado de la Universidad del Rosario, especialista en Derecho financiero y en Derecho Contractual de la misma casa de estudios, Master en Derecho mercantil de la Universidad Alfonso X El Sabio, Máster en Administración y dirección de empresas y Doctor en Derecho de la Universidad Europea de Madrid. Es Profesor Asociado de la Facultad de Jurisprudencia de la Universidad del Rosario, Presidente de la Asociación de Empresas Fintech en Colombia y de la Alianza Fintech Iberoamérica
América Latina cuenta con más de 2.000 empresas FinTech. Brasil, México, Argentina y Colombia son los países que lideran el desarrollo de la industria en la región. Este episodio presenta un panorama completo de la industria Fintech de Colombia y Argentina. Se presentan cifras en cuanto a número de empresas por país, principales segmentos, números de la actividad y el efecto de COVID 19 en cada caso; se destacan los unicornios y otras empresas líderes y con mayor potencial de crecimiento.
Mariano Biocca y Erick Rincón compartieron los avances de cada país desde el punto de vista regulatorio, el aporte de la industria en materia de inclusión financiera, los desafíos y oportunidades, así como de dónde provienen principalmente los inversionistas y las empresas que están llegando a establecerse para expandir sus operaciones en la región. Nos contaron cuáles son los principales mercados de destino o países foco de las empresas FInTech colombianas y argentinas. Si quiere conocer la evolución de esta industria imparable en la región no se pierda este episodio.
Latin America has more than 2,000 FinTech companies. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia are the countries that lead the development of the industry in the region. This episode presents a complete overview of the Fintech industry in Colombia and Argentina. Figures are presented regarding the number of companies per country, main segments, activity numbers and the effect of COVID 19 in each case; unicorns and other leading companies with the greatest growth potential stand out.
Mariano Biocca and Erick Rincón shared the progress of each country from the regulatory point of view, the contribution of the industry in terms of financial inclusion, the challenges and opportunities, as well as where the investors and companies that are coming to establish themselves mainly come from to expand its operations in the region. They told us which are the main destination markets or focus countries for Colombian and Argentine FInTech companies. If you want to know the evolution of this unstoppable industry in the region, don't miss this episode.
We talk to Ed Lascelles, Partner at Albion and Jessica Bartos, Investment Manager at Albion.
You will find out more about:
- What brought Jessica and Ed to VC investing? Jessica from the White House under Obama's Administration to Rothschild's at Wall Street and the City to Albion and Ed, a VC investor from before it became fashionable
- What is Albion? Who founded Albion? When?
- What’s Albion's investment focus/philosophy? Geographic focus?
- How much money they have raised since inception and for how many start-ups?
- What kind of start-ups do they invest in? Series A, post-product-market fit, writing checks of GBP 0.25 to 10 million
- What kind of FinTechs has Albion invested in? E.g Quantexa or Imandra
- How do you find them? How do scouting and due diligence work? What are your selection criteria?
- What’s your investment approach? E.g. min size of the stake, board seat, time to exit, economics?
- Investment success stories of the start-ups - Booking.com or active.com
- How do you see the prospects of Fintechs vs incumbent banks?
- Assessment of the start-up scene in the UK and Europe vs. the rest of the world
- Wrap up: where and how can inspiring entrepreneurs learn more about Albion
Ken Banta is the founder and principal of the Vanguard Group for Leadership. Ken is a leadership development consultant and executive advisor to both tomorrow’s top leaders and today’s CEOs.
We talk to Ken about:
- Why Ken he become a leadership consultant
- In his article Strategic Side Gig, co-authored with Orlan Boston and published in the HBR recently, Ken argues that executives need to be engaged in the right kind of side work as it can boost their career – why?
- What sort of side activities are productive and helpful for one’s career, apart from the usual, golf, or tennis?
- How was his research conducted?
- How to find time for the outside activities like these? Say most leaders would agree with the argument for a strategic side gig – but would probably put off acting on it. Should they first a book on how to end procrastination?
- How can one find the right opportunities - ones that create the kind of virtuous cycle we described earlier?
- One would need an understanding boss and family – how to justify a commitment to the strategic gig in addition to existing responsibilities?
- What are the long-term benefits?
- Future of work and leadership: Any signs of systemic changes in the way we work due to the pandemic? Will remote working stay for good or not? Will we strive for fully digital processes from end to end? Or will we rush to the old « normal»?
- What are the next steps for you this year and beyond?
- Where can interested parties reach you and find out more about the Vanguard Group for Leadership?
Marwan Forzley, CEO of Veem, a B2B payments platform, operates worldwide, based in San Francisco Bay Area. We talk about:
- Marwan's back story: from Ottawa, Canada to Silicon Valley
- What is Veem? What is the problem they are solving - how does it work?
- How did Marwan and his team build the network needed to effect payments?
- How did they go about acquiring first clients, and how were you able to scale up
- If I am a small business, why should I bank with Veem and not someone else, including some banks who claim they have specific services for SMEs and large corporates? Marwan explains.
- How does Veem make money?
- How are small and medium businesses in the US coping with the pandemic, especially when it comes to payments? Are they willing and able to adapt to be more digital-like some of their larger competitors?
- The impact of the COVID-19 on the payments industry and, more broadly, FinTechs? Are contactless or even contact-free and digital payments here to stay? Opportunities and threats? Short term and long term?
- Veem's journey as of today and the milestones ahead of them
- Where can interested parties find out more about Veem
Frederic Hofmann, Managing Director at ING Ventures, based in London, UK, explains:
- ING's approach to working with start-ups - a range of teams and strategies, from partnering to investing and ING's commitment to digital transformation
- ING Ventures' mandate - do they focus on the strategic alignment with ING or financial gain?
- Deal sourcing - how does ING find new investment opportunities
- What are the minimum criteria to invest, if any?
- Success stories: Eigen Technologies, Flowcast - an early warning system for ING retail to identify when retail clients are likely to be distressed, Cobase, a company built and spun out from ING Labs (now with Nordea and Credit Agricole as investors)
- Lessons learned:
- Lean governance for a corporate VC is key to success in a fast-changing environment
- Working with a large bank takes time, but it can be massively impactful.
- There is no silver bullet when it comes to innovation in a large corporate, so many avenues need to be explored at the same time
- Start-ups should continuously invest time in building a network of potential investors and, more
- The most efficient way to pitch your ideas to the ING Ventures team or ING in general
In this virtual event from Voice of FinTech: Live Speaker Series, we talked to Naina Sethi from Magic FinServ New York, Darko Pilav from Digital Asset Zurich and Emilie Raffo from Geneva about Digital Assets, Blockchain and Crypto: 2020 reality check.
- Pandemic has accelerated digital transformation trends - have digital assets, blockchain and crypto players capitalized on the opportunity?
- Can you keep focused on the customer’s problem first, and technology second?
- Do enterprise blockchain and smart contracts have a future?
- How can blockchain facilitate inclusion and social mobility?
These are just some of the questions we tried to tackle. Join us next time for the full experience. The best way not to miss out is to subscribe to our newsletter here.
You can also watch the video from the event, including entertainment by fantastic violinist, Irina Pak from Tonhalle Zurich and an entrepreneur bringing music to unusual settings, here. Check out here business More than Classic.
Ahead of LendIt FinTech USA, we talk to representatives of companies participating in this virtual event: Keith Grose, Head of UK and International at Plaid, Jillian Cohn, Partner at Mouro Capital (formerly Santander Innoventures), and Sean Hunter, CIO of OakNorth.
With Keith, we talk about:
- Plaid's growth ambitions and plans, including the US
- Recap of the key use cases and target customers for Plaid
- Out of these, key products and services that Plaid focuses on when expanding internationally.
- Plaid's role in driving the evolution from open banking to open finance and how they see that playing out
- The best way to find out what Plaid can do for a prospective client - demos, contacts, etc.
Jillian explains:
- The rationale for the recent spin-off of Santander Innoventures and rebranding as Mouro Capital
- Santander Innoventures and now Mouro Capital's investment philosophy and approach
- What Jilian likes most about her current role as Partner of Mouro Capital and why
- Jillian will be on the jury for the Lendit Awards - find out more how it works. Also, Jillian's colleague, Chris Gottschalk, will interview CEO and co-founder of the US alternative lender Upgrade, Mouro Capital's portfolio company from San Francisco, Renaud Laplanche
- Success stories from their portfolio: iZettle (Swedish payments company for SMEs acquired by PayPal) and Kabbage (being acquired by American Express), for example
- Appeal to interested parties to learn more about Mouro Capital and reach out
and with Sean, we talk about:
- OakNorth focuses on lending to small businesses that are in the scale-up mode - why this particular segment?
- There are OakNorth platform and OakNorth Bank – why it makes sense for OakNorth to license their credit scoring methodology and platform to other banks?
- OakNorth's priorities regarding the home market, UK, Europe, and the United States?
- What do you need to do if you would like to apply for a loan with OakNorth? Conversely, what to do if you would like to save with OakNorth?
- What's the best way to find out about your products and services and reach out?
Register for LendIt FinTech USA here and use the discount code for Voice of FinTech listeners: VOICEOFFINTECH15
In this episode of our Asia Pacific Series, host Taneia Bhardwaj chats with Jitendra Gupta, Founder & CEO of Jupiter, a neo-banking start-up that wants to create mobile-first banking experiences for Indian millennials. Jupiter has raised a total of $26 million, whilst in stealth mode. Bedrock Capital and Hummingbird Ventures are the most recent investors in Jupiter. Jitendra also co-founded Citrus Pay, a leading digital payments company, which was sold to Naspers-backed PayU in 2016 for $130 million; the largest cash exit for a payments company in India.
Taneia and Jitendra talk about:
- Jitendra’s entrepreneurial journey – what led him down the path of payments/fintech
- How he built a tech company ground up despite being a non-tech person
- What Jupiter is solving for: first & only co-created banking experience dedicated to millennials
- Jupiter’s USP – a co-created banking experience that takes a community-first product approach
- What will drive adoption for neobanks in India
- Investment ideas in the Indian fintech sector
- Best way to reach out
Patrick Loepfe is the founder and Chairman of Gentwo, based in Zurich, Switzerland. Gentwo provides securitization of all assets; bankable and non-bankable assets, including digital assets with a Swiss ISIN off-balance sheet.
We talk about:
- What is Gentwo? What do they do? Securitization of what assets? Bankable, non-bankable, and digital assets (Gentwo vs. Gentwo Digital)
- Why Gentwo? What's their unique selling point
- Target clients and key markets
- Regulation and liability: not regulated and not liable for investment performance and why
- How did the pandemic affect Gentwo's business so far?
- Passion projects: financing production of the content for streaming services like Netflix or sustainability
- Gentwo's journey as of today: fundraising, hiring, expansion plans
- Best way to find out more
Kathryn Van Nuys, US Head of Business Development, Start-ups and Venture Capital at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in New York, talks about:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) value proposition - low cost, easy to use, global infrastructure to support start-ups from the early stage to global scale. Many household names like Coinbase, Transferwise and many others use AWS infrastructure
- Strategic partnerships of AWS with VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures or incubators and accelerators like Barclays Techstars, FinTech Sandbox, Venture Center and others to reach and work with their portfolio companies and program participants, respectively
- Go to market and educational services, like:
- AWS Activate program: AWS Activate offers start-ups free tools, resources, and more to quickly get started on AWS, including USD 100k credits. Specifically, check out AWS Active Founders for self-funded and bootstrapped start-ups
- AWS Well-Architected review: helping B2B start-ups to be enterprise-ready, mainly in Financial Services
- AWS Partner Network: webinars and speaking opportunities for lead generation, direct customer intro: Behalf (on-demand purchase financing), Behavox (RegTech automates insider threats and misconduct detection), see specifics for start-ups here.
- Partnerships with other technology companies like Nvidia: check out the joint marketplace here. Joint customers include Upstart, BlueVine and Clinc and others, all leveraging AI to help service customers on their journey
- Connecting enterprises, banks, insurance companies and start-ups partnerships
- Success stories of start-ups, now scale-ups, using ASW solutions:
- Kabbage, a small business lender, just acquired by American Express, facilitating the US government's support program for small businesses through Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)
- Stripe, how did they scale up using AWS solutions
- Events: the transition from in-person to virtual, targeted events on-demand, fostering relationships with the start-up community around the world
- Best way to reach out and learn more about AWS's resources available to start-ups, and FinTechs in particular
Jim Marous is a financial industry publisher, global speaker, podcast host, owner and CEO of Digital Banking Report and co-publisher at The Financial Brand (#2 in the United States and #1 free resource on banking). Jim also hosted Gary Vaynerchuk, Tom Peters or Steve Wozniak on his Banking Transformed podcast.
We talk about:
- Digital Banking Report's recently published Digital Transformation report says the most successful transformation efforts are led by CEO or CDO. How is the pandemic affecting these efforts and management views? Are more of them now finally ready to embrace digitalization, and why?
- Who will the winners in financial services be in the post COVID world? What will be the key success factors?
- What are the most exciting innovations in financial services for Jim, perhaps from the founders featured on the podcast?
- How do you get the insights from the Financial Brand, Banking Transformed and Digital Banking Report most efficiently
Sarika Sangwan, former American Express executive, is Global Head of Strategy & Marketing - Financial Services at Pinterest. In the second segment, we talk to Sarika about:
- Sarika's transition from Amex to Pinterest
- Pinterest is a visual search engine for people who are looking for inspiration for events like parties, weddings and home decorating. That means financial services brands can target consumers who are displaying clear signals around life moments. How does Pinterest work with financial services companies to build partnerships where sometimes Pinterest wasn't their obvious choice?
- How has life at Pinterest changed post IPO - obviously a major step for a successful start-up. How has life within the company changed? Does Pinterest staff like bankers now more than before or the same?
- Where do interested parties from Financial Services or FinTech world can find out more what Pinterest can do for them and what's the best way to get in touch
Jim and Sarika will be speaking at the FinTech Talents Virtual North America on September 9 from New York City alongside many rockstar speakers. Check out the agenda and register for free here.
In this episode of Asia Pacific Series, hosted by Chia Jeng Yang 谢征阳, Principal at Saison Capital, based in Singapore, we speak to Benedicto Haryono, CEO of Koinworks.ID, the largest socially responsible digital lender and the first super financial app in Indonesia, and Adrian Li, Managing Partner of AC Ventures.
We talk about:
- Koinworks’ objectives in Indonesia - its current progress and future roadmap
- The opportunities for consumer finance in Indonesia and the scale of the opportunity
- How to compete in the Indonesian FinTech scene
- The state of financial services in Indonesia in the context of Southeast Asia as well as in the global FinTech ecosystem
- Exciting developments and investment potentials in the Indonesian FinTech scene
In this episode, we speak to Fernando Luis Vázquez Cao, CEO at SBI Digital Assets Holdings and Marc Robinson, COO at SBI Digital Assets Holdings.
You will learn about:
- Fernando's and Marc's journey, which led them to Japan and SBI specifically
- Background: SBI Holdings and SBI Digital Assets and their connection to Softbank
- Why did SBI venture out to Digital Assets?
- Why do they believe in digital assets?
- Status of blockchain, crypto and digital assets scene in Japan. What's the outlook for each?
- SBI Digital Assets vision for the digital assets ecosystem and its role in it
- The key milestones that Fernando and Marc are the proudest of achieving
- The impact of the pandemic on the blockchain or digital assets
- Predictions for blockchain: pure, Bitcoin-like, or permissioned, enterprise blockchain ran by incumbents?
- Important partnerships and acquisitions in Europe and their rationale (e.g., Boerse Stuttgart)
- The key focus of due diligence when looking to acquire tech start-ups
- Best way to reach out and learn more
David M. Brear is Group CEO of 11:FS, Host of the Fintech Insider Breakfast Show and FinTech Insider Host by 11:FS.
We talk about:
- How pandemic exposed organizations that haven't truly embraced digital transformation and what lies ahead of them
- Potential opportunities for FinTechs despite the economic downturn
- David's advice to start-ups attempting partnerships with banks or enterprise sales
- Best way to reach out and get in touch with 11:FS and David
As David points out:
I've seen the good 😎, the bad 😳 and the ugly 😬 side of financial services and now have a deep holistic view of what's broken when it comes to offering truly digital services for customers that are underserved and overcharged. At 11:FS we believe that digital banking is 1% finished and we have established the team and the technology to help financial services fight back.
11:FS builds next-generation propositions for challengers in the financial services industry: existing firms looking to innovate, start-ups looking to scale, and everyone in between. Their services include:
- Transformation and advisory services
- Consumer and Market Research
- Industry benchmarking
- Core banking capabilities
- Industry-leading content and events
Check out also the video with Simon Taylor, Head of Ventures at 11:FS, who explains why FinTech is only 1% finished in this video.
Arianna Elena Maschietto, Corporate Partnerships & Program Manager at Plug and Play Tech Center in Milan, Italy and Gabrielle Inzirillo,
Director, Fintech (EMEA) at Plug And Play Ventures in Paris, France. Plug and Play Tech Center is an early-stage investor, accelerator and corporate innovation platform with global headquarters in Sunnyvale, California in Silicon Valley.
We talk about:
- Gabrielle's and Arianna's journeys to their current roles
- Plug and Play origins - landlords to PayPal:
Plug and Play chief executive Saeed Amidi got his start 15 years ago when he was trying to rent some real estate. Amidi and his brother, Seena, were considering startups to lease space in their Palo Alto, California, office and met a couple of young, promising entrepreneurs behind a then-unprofitable product. The entrepreneurs were Max Levchin and Peter Thiel and the startup was PayPal. After seeing the Amidis’ ambivalence, Thiel pushed an offer they couldn’t refuse. He said he would pay his rent — then, a paltry $10,000 per month in Silicon Valley — upfront, for two years. “We said, ‘sure,’” Saeed told Business Insider at Plug and Play’s first New York demo day. “And then, we took half the money and invested it in their seed round.” Putting more than $100,000 in PayPal’s very first funding round proved to be a wildly successful investment.
- What kind of start-ups Plug and Play supports: alignment with corporate sponsors is crucial
- Their programs feature: no fee, no equity
- The character of the start-up scene in Europe vs. the rest of the world
- FinTech is a key vertical for Plug and Play
- What does successful participation in the program means
- Success stories, e.g. Dreamquark or Honey (sold to PayPal)
- How to get involved
Gregor Braun is Head Sales Switzerland & Europe for Equities and ETFs at SIX, Henrik Husman is President Nasdaq Helsinki, VP, Head of European Cash Equities Nasdaq and Reinier Boeschoten is Board Member at 12H.
In this episode, we cover:
- Gregor explains SIX's services as primarily cash equities exchange - as the third-largest operator of financial market infrastructure in Europe by revenue and his team's mandate
- Henrik outlines activities of Nasdaq in Europe - the only exchange group active in the US and Europe, operating more than 25 markets and its role as a technology provider to over 130 exchanges and financial institutions worldwide
- Reinier describes how microwave or radiofrequency (RF) technology connects markets around Europe. We also dive into the pros and cons of optical fiber technology vs. microwave technology (e.g. across speed, bandwidth, capacity parameters)
- The strategic rationale for SIX acquiring majority stake in 12H earlier this year
- Benefits of a three-way partnership between SIX, Nasdaq and 12H for its partners and customers
- The role of computers in trading - robots and algorithms vs. jobs and safeguards against flash crashes
- What's the best way to find out more about the microwave network of SIX, available routes, etc. for interested parties
You can more about SIX's microwave network here.
This episode of the Financial Markets Series was brought to you by SIX, the Swiss Exchange Group. If you would like to learn more about SIX, please go to www.six-group.com.
The intro and outro messages were kindly narrated by Sara Palmbush, PR, and content specialist.
My Trip to the Start-Up World, aka Voice of FinTech Season 1 book is out! This book is a collection of Voice of FinTech podcast highlights, recaps and additional resources, explained and woven together by Rudolf Falat. You can now get it on Amazon near you as a paperback or an e-book (for Kindle), for example, in Switzerland/Germany, the UK, or the United States and elsewhere on Amazon. See more also here.
David Birch is an author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services, based in the UK.
In this episode, we cover:
- David's activities as a keynote speaker, an author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services
- David's digital finance consulting work
- Big picture views on digital money and digital identity - before and after the pandemic
- E-currencies - developments and prospects. Setbacks and upside
- David's views on Big Tech's move to the financial services sector, as articulated in his latest article in Forbes Bye Fintech. Hello Techfin
- Crypto and blockchain: pure vs. enterprise, which one will have an upper hand?
- Plans for the rest of the year
- Best way to reach out
New type of economy, digital economy, needs a new type of money, i.e. digital currency.
Find his latest book, The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony, on Amazon or your favorite booksellers.
Neal Cross is co-founder and Chairman of PictureWealth, an award-winning innovator and speaker based in Perth, Australia, who is active in FinTech and innovation across the Asia Pacific.
Angela and Neal talk about:
- Why, of all the issues in the current financial services sector, he chose to focus on personal wealth management
- Neal's background in innovation and if an enterprise is ready for a fundamental shift (ex DBS, MasterCard, Microsoft)
- The biggest mistakes corporations and start-ups make when trying to work together and how to fix this
- How do start-ups pick the best partners and avoid those who are part of the "milking" the start-ups
- His commitment to sustainable tourism through hotelorangutan.com and pulauwehparadise.com in Indonesia and how we can support their mission. Hotel Orangutan is a non-profit start-up that seeks to empower villagers economically and to raise awareness of the precarious situation of orangutans, which are being driven out of their natural habitat by wildfires. Pulau Weh Paradise: besides its mission to raise awareness of the plight of the coral reefs, the hotel has also been a source of jobs and education for the local villages
Chiara Spina, a Ph.D. graduate from Bocconi, is joining INSEAD in Singapore in September as Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise.
We talk about:
- How Chiara became interested in becoming an academic in entrepreneurship
- Chiara's goals at INSEAD in her first year as a professor
- Can you teach entrepreneurship? If yes, how? In terms of method, through the case study method or the traditional way?
- Is there anything scientific about decision making in the early-stage ventures? How can you improve your odds of survival and success?
- How can you experiment in a highly regulated industry like Financial Services?
- Strengths and perhaps weaknesses of the start-ups in Italy vs. the rest of the world
- Chiara's research on emerging phenomena in entrepreneurship like crowdfunding, accelerators, and hackathons
- Chiara's involvement with Hackathon Research Center
My Trip to the Start-Up World, aka Voice of FinTech Season 1 book is out! This book is a collection of Voice of FinTech podcast highlights, recaps and additional resources, explained and woven together by Rudolf Falat. You can get now on Amazon near you as a paperback or an e-book (for Kindle), for example in Switzerland/Germany, the UK, or the United States and elsewhere on Amazon. See more also here.
Dimitrios Kavvathas, former Co-Head of Asia Pacific Securities Division Distribution and Partner at Goldman Sachs, is Executive Chairman and CEO of Nomisma. Nomisma is the first company in Europe with the license granted by the Liechtenstein Financial Market Authority for an MTF, which allows trading of tokenized financial instruments, in particular derivatives, on a blockchain.
Francesco Adiliberti is CEO of the SCX - Swiss Crypto Exchange and former MD at Goldman Sachs and HSBC. Nomisma will join forces with the Swiss Crypto Exchange, regulated exchange for institutional and sophisticated retail clients who want to trade digital assets on a blockchain.
We talk about a matching engine that Nomisma has developed, leveraging blockchain to allow trading, especially derivatives of tokenized assets, more efficiently. We also cover the entrepreneurial transition of two senior bankers, the key differentiation factors of their technology and their businesses, why they are joining forces, other critical partnerships in the pipeline, and plans to hit their milestones.
Check out details in this overview of Nomisma's matching engine on Medium.
In this episode, we speak to Neil Thomas, SIX Group's representative in Asia - Head of Sales and Country Head Singapore and Japan and Jonas Thuerig, Head of F10 in Singapore.
We talk about:
- SIX's objectives in Asia
- The state of financial services in Asia and Europe
- Comparison between Singapore's and Japan's economies and implications for financial markets
- Why is SIX the core corporate partner for the F10 incubator/accelerator and supported expansion to Singapore?
- F10 in Singapore: similarities and differences vs. F10 in Zurich
- Which start-ups are best positioned to benefit from the F10 program?
- How does the selection and monitoring process work?
- Financial support, co-working (when safe!) and other terms
- Current trends: acceleration of digitalization in the financial services due to pandemic
- The best way to reach out
This episode of the Financial Markets Series was brought to you by SIX, the Swiss Exchange Group. If you would like to learn more about SIX, please go to www.six-group.com.
The intro and outro messages were kindly narrated by Sara Palmbush, PR, and content specialist.
My Trip to the Start-Up World, aka Voice of FinTech Season 1 book is out! This book is a collection of Voice of FinTech podcast highlights, recaps and additional resources, explained and woven together by Rudolf Falat. You can now get it on Amazon near you as a paperback or an e-book (for Kindle), for example, in Switzerland/Germany, the UK, or the United States and elsewhere on Amazon. See more also here.
Jeff Lynn is Executive Chairman and co-founder at Seedrs, an equity crowdfunding platform headquartered in London, UK.
We talk about:
- Why and how Jeff and his classmate, Carlos Silva, turned their classroom project at Said Business School (University of Oxford) into a very successful business
- How does it work? Seedrs is based in London and Lisbon and around Europe
- Is the same idea as the outset, or did they pivot?
- What kind of start-ups can raise funds at the platform (pre or post-revenue, UK based or pan-European)?
- What sort of due diligence do start-ups go through?
- FinTechs the most significant sector on the platform
- A secondary market for your investments in start-ups, how does it function?
- Start-ups who took a chance on Seedrs when it was an early-stage start-up itself
- How vital were partnerships for the growth of the platform: from Andy Murray to the British PE and VC association
- An impact of the pandemic on Seedrs business and thoughts on the fundraising prospects for start-ups this year
- Money raised and how fees work.
My Trip to the Start-Up World, aka Voice of FinTech Season 1 book is out! This book is a collection of Voice of FinTech podcast highlights, recaps and additional resources, explained and woven together by Rudolf Falat. You can now get it on Amazon near you as a paperback or an e-book (for Kindle), for example, in Switzerland/Germany, the UK, or the United States and elsewhere on Amazon. See more also here.
Husayn Kassai is CEO and co-founder of Onfido and Oxford University alumnus. Onfido is a market-leading digital identity verification provider, based in London and San Francisco. We talk about online document verification and the vision of digital identity in the future.
More specifically, we talk about:
- Co-founders and the need to complement one another
- Interest to digitize document's verification
- Onfido's recent raise of USD 100 million and plans to spend it
- How does Onfido leverage AI to verify documents remotely?
- Is it perfect? Can it be hacked? How does it work in terms of liability?
- Expansion plans to DACH region
- Living on the edge as a part of start-up life
- Digital immunity passports for the post-COVID-19 world
- The vision of digital identity
My Trip to the Start-Up World, aka Voice of FinTech Season 1 book is out! This book is a collection of Voice of FinTech podcast highlights, recaps and additional resources, explained and woven together by Rudolf Falat. You can get now on Amazon near you as a paperback or an e-book (for Kindle), for example in Switzerland/Germany, the UK, or the United States and elsewhere on Amazon. See more also here.
In this episode on the corp-up approach in the insurance sector, we talk to Stefano Bison, Group Head of Business Development & Partnerships at Generali and Board Member of HITS - House of Insurtech Switzerland, and Oliver Werneyer, CEO and Co-founder of IMburse AG, a participant in Generali Innovation Garage, now HITS.
You will find out more about:
- How Stefano's passion for the start-ups outside of work also serves him well in his role at Generali
- Oliver's entrepreneurship roots from the age of 16 when he started buying and selling computer games and his passion for his current venture
- Generali's overall approach to partnerships, especially with start-ups
- How close the connection between Generali's current business and the start up's focus Generali requires to engage and why
- How do both a corporate and a start-up measure success in a corp-up setting
- How IMBurse pivoted to their current B2B instant payment business, a capability that Generali needed
- Why IMBurse picked Generali Innovation Garage (now HITS) as a partner
- Innovation trends in the insurance sector and the acceleration of digital transformation by COVID-19 from the perspective of an incumbent and a start-up
- Next steps for both Generali and IMBurse this year
- How to reach out to Stefano and Oliver most efficiently
This episode of the InsurTech Series was brought to you by HITS - House of InsurTech Switzerland. HITS is the innovation corp-up hub focusing on the InsurTech sector, bringing corporates and start-ups to develop customer-centric solutions. HITS creates the perfect environment to make innovation happen with early-stage investors and partners from the InsurTech sector.
The intro message was kindly narrated by Sara Palmbush, PR and content specialist, and the outro message by Gabriella Trujillo from HITS.
My Trip to the Start-Up World, aka Voice of FinTech Season 1 book is out! This book is a collection of Voice of FinTech podcast highlights, recaps and additional resources, explained and woven together by Rudolf Falat. You can get now on Amazon near you as a paperback or an e-book (for Kindle), for example in Switzerland/Germany, the UK, or the United States and elsewhere on Amazon. See more also here.
Marion Leslie is Head of Financial Information and Executive Board Member at SIX, the Swiss Exchange Group. She is also a trustee at Prostate Cancer UK charity and Non-Executive Director at UK's Hydrographic Office.
In this episode, you will find more about:
- Marion's team mandate and mandate as a Board Member at SIX
- SIX's Whitepaper on Data Transformation
- Focus on data quality
- Use of data for compliance and regulatory purposes
- Leveraging technology in delivering data and ultimately, financial information, to SIX's clients, primarily banks
- Key trends in the data business over the years, especially after the crises
- Alternative data and sustainability (ESG)
- How does the Head of Financial Information keep on learning?
Read more also in the recent interview with Marion here: Data Is the Fuel of Financial Markets.
While SIX takes care of providing well-connected data and valuable insights, our clients can concentrate on their core business.Marion Leslie
This episode of the Financial Markets Series was brought to you by SIX, the Swiss Exchange Group. If you would like to learn more about SIX, please go to www.six-group.com.
The intro and outro messages were kindly narrated by Sara Palmbush, PR, and content specialist.
Brett King is a speaker, author, founder, podcast host, pilot, gamer and a scuba diver, based in New York, NY. Founder and host of #1 FinTech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. Founder and Executive Chairman of Moven, an enterprise-focused challenger bank. Brett has an insightful new booking coming out later this year; you can pre-order it on Amazon: The Rise of Technosocialism. Check out also the episode of Breaking Banks: Sci-Fi Legends talk COVID-19 mentioned in this podcast.
In this Voice of FinTech's One Year Anniversary Special, we talk about:
- Virtual events during the lockdown - are they here to stay? Do traditional conferences have a future?
- Breaking banks podcast and radio show - beginnings, regional spin-offs, focus on the content and high profile guest focus (previous guests included Elon Musk, Boris Johnson or Bill Gates)
- Science-fiction as an inspiration for the future of banking
- His new book, The Rise of Technosocialism: what are the possible scenarios for humans as species. Brett argues the technosocialism, which is a highly automated society, broad quality and prosperity and ubiquitous technology infrastructure which provides for health, education transport is the preferred scenario.
- The founding of a challenger bank Moven, pivoting to enterprise clients to drive the growth and journey to scale worldwide
- Plans for the rest of the year, including hopefully spending more time in Thailand
- How to get noticed - tips for when approaching time-poor influencers
Basic bank account should be something that's helpful to the customers, not a passive thing that stores value and charges you interest on your credit card. Secondly, let's raise our total social consciousness and awareness so we understand that things like climate change disruption on society is a choice, it's not inevitable and we can change the future, if we just set our mind to it and get to work.
Janine Haendel is CEO of Roger Federer Foundation. A lawyer, diplomat and philanthropist. In this podcast, we discuss:
- Origins and mission of Roger Federer Foundation
- Focus on performance in the NGO sector: efficiency and effectiveness
- Difference between charity and philanthropy
- Improving education in Africa: focus on a teacher
- Leveraging technology
- Making an impact on the aid recipient: village banking
I believe in the power of people. They might only need some initial empowerment. We know that a good education empowers children by allowing them to take their future into their own hands and play an active part in shaping it. And we trust in the best will of parents that they want to ensure the best possible opportunities for their children. For 16 years my Foundation has therefore been committed to enable parents and local communities in providing these children with the opportunity for a good education. We have reached one million children by today. Roger Federer
Ute Koenig-Stemmler, Head of Business Development & Sales Non-Traditional Financial Institutions, Central Europe at VISA.
We cover the following topics:
- Ute's Business Development Central Europe mandate
- VISA's activities in the region and in Switzerland in particular
- VISA's investment in the FinTech space (e.g. acquisition of Earthport, a cross-border payments services provider or investment in SolarisBank, Banking-as-a-Platform start-up from Germany)
- VISA's outreach to the FinTech community through VISA Everywhere initiative and their cooperation with Tomorrow, a sustainability-focused bank and Penta, credit cards for SMEs
- Views on partnerships with start-ups and VISA's focus on working with companies looking to scale-up, leveraging their network
- VISA in Switzerland cooperates with Yapeal, first independent Zurich start-up with the FinTech license
- The episode was recorded prior to pandemic lockdowns in Europe
What if money becomes fully electronic, so it would become nothing but electrons and photons moving around the world at the speed of light.
Dee Hock, founder of VISA
Marc Gruber, Vice President Innovation and Professor of Entrepreneurship at EPFL and Sharon Tal, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Technion, co-wrote the book Where to Play, which is an excellent complement to the Lean Start-up toolkit. You can get their book Where to Play on Amazon. You will find out more how to pick the right arena, so pivoting is less likely or less costly! We also talk about implications for InsurTech and FinTech businesses, but also insurers and banks and their innovation projects.
This episode of the InsurTech Series was brought to you by HITS - House of InsurTech Switzerland. HITS is the innovation corp-up hub focusing on the InsurTech sector, bringing corporates and start-ups to develop customer-centric solutions. HITS creates the perfect environment to make innovation happen with early-stage investors and partners from the InsurTech sector.
The intro message was kindly narrated by Sara Palmbush, PR and content specialist, and the outro message by Gabriella Trujillo from HITS.
Sven Siat, Head Connectivity at SIX, the Swiss Exchange Group, talks about Open Banking in Switzerland and solutions his team developed to facilitate the cooperation between FinTechs and banks.
In this episode, you will find more about:
- The state of Open Banking in Switzerland and comparison to the EU
- PSD2 in the EU - is it fostering cooperation between banks and FinTechs in a balanced way, or not?
- Can we have one standard worldwide for connecting FinTechs and banks, or will we end up with the electrical sockets situation?
- How does one develop an enterprise-grade platform in Switzerland with multiple stakeholders? Example: pilot data exchange program involving UBS, Credit Suisse, Klara and Abacus
- b.Link, a platform for standardized interfaces open to the banks, FinTechs and software providers, developed by SIX, enabling them to provide account information or payment services: key clients and onboarding on b.Link
- What's in store regarding the connectivity of the financial institutions in Switzerland for later this year
Find out more about b.Link, the platform connecting banks and FinTechs in Switzerland, here.
In Switzerland, we are in the early days of open banking and we have several players and initiatives, many focus on technical aspects only. Our approach is a bit different, we not only focus on the technical aspects (we do have the technical expertise to run reliable and scalable financial infrastructure), but I think we also understand the challenges that banks have with regard to legal and compliance matters.Sven Siat
This episode of the Financial Markets Series was brought to you by SIX, the Swiss Exchange Group. If you would like to learn more about SIX, please go to www.six-group.com.
The intro and outro messages were kindly narrated by Sara Palmbush, PR and content specialist.
Shruti Van Dyke Gandhi is Partner at Array Ventures in San Francisco and adjunct Professor Computer Sciences at Columbia University in New York.
In this episode, you will learn:
- Back story: About Shruti's transition from an engineer to an investor
- Array's focus area: Enterprise software. Big issues, problems and pain points – for which you raise money early on, even pre-revenue but you need to have relevant prior experience
- Array's investment philosophy: Investing in founders that sell to global customers. Portfolio companies are US incorporated, but in the times of remote working, they may be all over the globe.
- Deal sourcing: the network is vital if you are looking to back early-stage founders. Ideas from accelerators or advisers could be too late! Chemistry with the founders is more important than paperwork
- Success stories/exits: Simility (AI/ML fraud prevention) acquired by PayPal or Passage AI (Conversational AI) acquired by ServiceNow
- Learning: Keep on learning to avoid becoming antiquated
- Is New York better for you if you are a FinTech? Listen inside:)
Key piece of advice for the founders:
There is no playbook for the founder’s life that you can learn in school, so you need to stay agile and prepare for the curveballs to come at you, expect it and find a way to tackle them so you become a big business regardless what comes your way.
Rodney Reis, co-founder and CEO of Avalia Systems. They advise their clients on how to improve the return from their investments in software development. Avalia's clients range from CTOs and CIOs to investors, looking at emerging technologies and trying to assess the value of potential investments into Tech-led companies.
Andri Silberschmidt is an entrepreneur, the youngest member of the Federal Assembly - Swiss Parliament and advisor. Andri is the co-founder of Kaisin, a poke bowl - food start-up in Zurich and also a senior advisor to the family office Marcuard and does some great work with the charities.
Andri explains how all his activities came together and what he as a Co-President of the Start-up Committee in the Swiss Parliament has been doing to help start-ups to succeed. We compare the COVID-19 support measures taken in Switzerland to others and the pros and cons of those as well. We then touch on the vision of the world post-crisis.
This episode of the InsurTech Series was brought to you by HITS - House of InsurTech Switzerland. HITS is the innovation corp-up hub focusing on the InsurTech sector, bringing corporates and start-ups to develop customer-centric solutions. HITS creates the perfect environment to make innovation happen with early-stage investors and partners from the InsurTech sector.
The intro message was kindly narrated by Sara Palmbush, PR and content specialist and the outro message by Gabriella Trujillo from HITS.
Founded in June 2019 in Zurich, Switzerland. Check out the podcast website here and sign up to our newsletter to join other FinTech enthusiasts and receive exclusive tools, tips, and resources directly from us. Of course, you can subscribe to the Voice of FinTech podcast here and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram or Facebook.
Sincerely, your host,
Rudolf Falat
Paul Taylor, CEO and founder of Thought Machine explains his background in the computer sciences, machine learning, serial entrepreneurial experience including having his company acquired by Google. We then talk about cloud infrastructure solutions benefits in general and tailored to banking clients. Thought Machine focuses on providing solutions to retail banks around the world, it is headquartered in London, with a significant presence in Singapore and plans for opening up an office in the Americas.
Maxime Debure is CEO and founder of Wine Funding. We discuss the merits of investing wine bottles vs. wine estates, traditional debt financing vs. equity financing (crowdfunding or larger, private equity style tickets) arranged by Corporate Finance boutiques like his.
Sarel Tal is VP EMEA at Rapyd, London based, FinTech-as-a-Service platform. Rapyd provides APIs that help integrate local payments and FinTech capabilities. With guest co-host Adelle Grisaffe, host and producer of RFi Group's Global Digital Banker. Check out their website and subscribe!
Christine (Mar) Ciriani is Chief Commercial Officer at Finantix, Board member at Barclays Switzerland and Industry Partner at Motive Partners. Christine is Managing Partner and advisor with experience in wealth management, technology and FinTech transformation and Private Equity.
Renu Ann Joseph, founder and CEO of Luminant Analytics, a Swiss-American InsurTech start-up, talks about the "last mile" when it comes to using data science and data analytics in the insurance industry.
We also talk about the benefits of open innovation for both insurers and InsurTechs. Renu also shares some early thoughts on the impact of the COVID-19 on the start-ups and the insurance industry. Proud alumni of F10 2018 acceleration program. Based in Basel, Switzerland and Hartford, CT, United States.
Greg Palmer, is VP at Finovate, Host of Finovate Podcast, Director of Fintech Strategy at Informa Connect and contributor at Banking Technology, based in San Francisco, USA. Check out video demos of the startups presenting in Berlin here, for example, with a leading Swiss RegTech company Apiax, here. You can also check out Voice of FinTech podcast with Apiax here.
Myles Stephenson, CEO of Modulr is an Oxford University alumnus and a seasoned executive in the Payments space based in London, UK. Check out Modulr's developer portal and sandbox on their website.
Oliver Bussmann, CEO and founder of Bussmann Advisory, is a well respected FinTech influencer in the German-speaking world. Oliver explains his advisory services to the corporates:
There is a generational change of the CEOs, who understand that the industry is going through a massive business model, operational model and structural change. Somebody who went through strategy and execution changes and is well connected to the FinTech start-up community is very helpful to guide them.
Further in the podcast, Oliver explains also his advice on digital transformation to Private Equity investors, activities in the blockchain world and his perspectives on the Awards winners as a juror.
Andy Iten, co-founder and member of the Board, F10, Switzerland's only FinTech focused incubator and accelerator. We talk about the start of the incubation program in Singapore, an online version of the F10 Hackathon in Zurich this year, which is used to attract and source teams for the next batch of the program of the F10, cooperation with the corporate members. F10 is now also receiving applications for its Scale-Up Program in Zurich.
Daniel Sandmeier, CEO of Instimatch, explains how his platform brings together institutions that have excess cash deposits or need cash, replacing the traditional voice or chatroom markets.
David Bloch, CEO and co-founder of Legartis, is a lawyer. David makes life easier for lawyers and corporate clients by taking out the routine work from the contract review by leveraging the AI and allowing humans to focus on more value-added tasks.
Mark Beeston is the founder and Managing Partner of Illuminate Financial, based in London and New York, with a global mandate. Illuminate is a VC firm backing technology companies solving problems in the Capital Markets, Wealth Management and Asset Management.
Invisage's slogan is "from research complexity to investment clarity" - helping investors find out which research is worth paying attention and today, also pay for. Harsh Dadhich is their COO, explains the importance of research in the active asset management and Invisage's solution for the buy-side.
Astorre Modena is General Partner at Terra Venture Partners, based in Israel, on the side of Startup Funding - VC Talks in Zurich, organized by the FinTech Connector. He explains the Terra Venture Partners investment approach, the Israeli government's support of innovation, his views on the art of startup valuation and fundraising and Israeli-Swiss VC and start-up connectivity.
Matt Lashmar, is the Managing Director of MassChallenge Switzerland. MassChallenge is a no-equity & not-for-profit startup-friendly accelerator that helps entrepreneurs across any industry. Founded in Boston, MA, the United States in 2008 and active around the world, with Switzerland as its European center. We talk about the benefits of joining this accelerator and how to get in!
Clara Durodie, Chair of the Cognitive Finance Group talks about Artificial Intelligence for Financial Services and her book on the same. You can get it on Amazon here.
Ian O'Sullivan, European Lead of Mastercard Start Path explains how Mastercard works with start-ups, helping them to get to market and gain scale, providing services to Mastercard customers and their support of female entrepreneurship.
Susanne Chishti CEO of FINTECH Circle & FINTECH Circle Institute, London describes their business angel, education and digital transformation acceleration programs. Check out Paytech, the latest book from FinTech Circle on Amazon.
Emmalyn Shaw, Managing Partner from Flourish Ventures, San Francisco, USD 500m VC fund, shares her insights on the global scalability, financial inclusiveness and the search for mission-based entrepreneurs.
Matej Ftacnik is the CXO & co-founder of Vacuumlabs, a team of 200+ experts in building products & services with modern tech stacks. They also organize regular meetups, workshops, hackathons and conferences about advanced front-end technologies. Besides that, he loves to travel and see the world, enjoy good food and whiskey, spend time with his great family and meet new people with the wildest personal stories.
Ghassen Benhadjsalah, CEO and co-founder of Acredius. Ghassen is already a serial entrepreneur, based in Switzerland. We talk about direct lending (or P2P lending) in general and then we focus on Swiss SMEs and Acredius' competitive edge vs. other platforms or banks.
In this bonus episode, we talk about a few of the key topics we discussed live with Tanya Koenig, Host of “Out & About” & Digital Producer at CNNMoney Switzerland during Voice of FinTech: Live Speaker Series event Digitalization of the Art Business in Zurich on February 5.
During the live event, we covered the following topics and more:
- Value of art - is the banana taped to the wall worth $120k?
- Are digital art trading platforms viable for all customer segments?
- Can blockchain bring transparency to the art business?
- Scanning paintings like Shazam - will we still need guides?
Followed by a performance by Sina Anastasia, rising star of German pop scene, tapas and drinks prepared by SEVENFRIDAY.
Yves Guillaume A. Messy is Blockchain architect and ecosystem builder at R3, an enterprise blockchain company behind Corda blockchain software. F10 Incubator & Accelerator is also dubbed as the Home of FinTech, based in Zurich, operated by SIX Group and supported by its corporate partners.
Anders Christensen is the Head of Ecosystem at Avaloq.one, based in Zurich, Switzerland. Last year, Avaloq increased its commitment to open innovation and partnerships through startups by establishing avaloq.one's platform.
In this bonus episode, we caught up with Peter Zemsky, Deputy Dean of INSEAD and Dean of Innovation on the side of INSEAD hosted a panel on Artificial Intelligence: Balancing AI productivity and responsibility in the SDG Tent in Davos during WEF 2020. We talk about why is INSEAD in Davos, how the Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society that shapes the conversations about what it means to lead a business today. Lastly, we talk about the rationale for recent INSEAD’s partnerships on innovation with Microsoft, Singularity University, INSEADxBlockchain and a new hub in San Francisco, opening in February 2020.
Christian Meisser is the CEO of LEXR, Zurich-based legal services company, that focuses on Tech, FinTech and digital businesses. In this podcast, we cover the incorporation of the company (when?), intellectual property rights, investor, employee and Board relationships, fundraising and exit (or bankruptcy). This podcast, of course, does not constitute legal advice, but it is a summary of the high impact topics you should think through.
An interview with William Laitinen, Managing Director of Exige International, a UK and Swiss executive search firm specializing in recruitment for global financial services companies and FinTech.
Alexander Verbeck is the Head of Cash Ecosystem at SIX. SIX is a financial service provider that operates the infrastructure of Switzerland's financial center. You can read the summaries or the full white paper in English and German here: the Future of Money. You can find out more about the most likely scenario of the cash usage as well as bold, alternative scenarios as deemed by experts.
Cedric Bollag is a founder and host of the "Startup Show" started in 2016. We talk about his startup and media experience and views on the Swiss and Israeli startup scenes. Subscribe to the Startup Show by Global Tech Box on YouTube! You will find this podcast/vlog on https://youtu.be/ed0VoxpiMnI
We spoke with Thomas Duebendorfer, President of SICTIC about SICTIC's mission, activities and events like Swiss FinTech Investor Day and why he founded SICTIC. We also talked to Theo Lau, founder of Unconventional Ventures from the US about how to make banking better for underrepresented groups and the role of AI in this. Lastly, we spoke to co-founder of eQTiq, Justyna Rydzewska about her venture's mission to get rid of paper receipts!
We spoke with Etienne Delhaye, Executive Director of Sophia Club Enterprises and organizer of Soph.IA Summit and Michele Bezzi, Research Manager at SAP Security Research. Etienne explains how Sophia Antipolis, a technology park in the south of France (celebrating 50 years anniversary this year) operates. Michele describes how SAP leverages AI to combine the power of open source and the need to manage potential vulnerabilities in the open-source code. See their tool here on Github.
An interview with Rune Bentien, Managing Partner EMEA at Xoogler.co in London. Find more about this unique global Googler and Googler alumni community, you can also reach out if you are not a Googler: https://xoogler.co/
The Xoogler.co community consists of startup founders, early team members, angel investors, VCs, and mentors.
An interview with Florian Bucher, TEDx Zurich about TEDx activities in Switzerland and their various formats of events. It is TEDx Zurich 10 year anniversary this year! Check out their website for the next events.
JP Verwey is CEO of Check6, a well-established FinTech company that provides data consolidation for wealth management reporting for high net worth individuals, wealth managers and banks. The goal is to provide clients with a total overview of their wealth.
UPDATE AS OF MARCH 2021: Please note that Check6 was acquired by Private Client Resources (PCR) in December 2020. See the press release here.
Eric Sarasin is a former deputy CEO of J. Safra Sarasin Bank and currently Chairman of Singularity Group. We spoke briefly on the side of the Exponential Finance Summit that took place in Zurich on November 14-15.
What has attracted you to the Singularity theme? What's your message to startup founders and early-stage investors in Europe?
An interview with Alisee de Tonnac, CEO and co-founder of Seedstars World. Seedstars is an incubator, accelerator and investor in startups in active in over 85 countries! 10 entrepreneur hubs around the world, EUR 250m+ raised, 12k+ applications to Seedstars World competitions.
Lisa Schroeder is Head of Startup Program Management at F10 and recently spent considerable time in Singapore, preparing the Hackathon and F10's expansion there. More information on how to apply to their P2 Program in Singapore is here: F10 Singapore.
In an interview with Guido Buehler, we talk about the pros and cons of digital assets, a need for a universal bank for a digital economy and SEBA's ambitions going forward. https://www.seba.swiss/
Voice of FinTech: Live Speaker Series are interactive discussions with engaging leaders on the topics related to FinTech, Tech, Investing or Entrepreneurship.
Lionstep combines the power of algorithms with traditional headhunting. Lionstep customers include Die Post, Linde, Telefonica, Husqvarna and many others.
We also showcased a selection of contemporary art by Susanne Di Martino, an outstanding Swiss artist. Tapas and wines and music by DJ Candela. Venue: https://sevenfriday-space-zurich.business.site/.
This event took place on November 13: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/recruitment-algorithms-or-networking-tickets-76424825711
Anne-Katrin Maser, Lead Partnerships and Ecosystems at Generali Switzerland explains Generali's approach to open innovation, broad sector focus of Generali and also activities of Generali in the startup ecosystem. https://www.generali.ch/en/allgemein/innovation
Geoff Ralston, an INSEAD alumnus, is the president of Y Combinator. Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator launched in March 2005 and was used to launch over 2,000 companies, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, and many others. Y Combinator has been interviewing European startup applications for its Winter 2020 batch.
https://www.ycombinator.com/
Christina Kehl and her team organize a yearly Swiss FinTech Fair (this year with 700 participants) in Zurich. We talk about the Swiss Finance Startups association goals, the need to "bring Bern to Zurich" to provide the best possible conditions for Swiss startups.
At the Swiss Fintech Fair, in one question segments, we also talk to Julia Holzgreve, from Keen Innovation, innovation ecosystem builder for Bank Cler and Basler why she is a believer in open innovation. keen-innovation.ch/en/home/
We also chat with Matthias Kribbel, from Tradeplus 24, about what providing credit to SMEs using receivables as security. www.tradeplus24.ch/en/
Finally, we also talk with Christina Reuther about the network of fintechnews websites and what you can expect to find there. https://fintechnews.ch/
https://www.voiceoffintech.com/ in cooperation with https://fintechnews.ch/
An interview with Stefan Muehlemann, founder and CEO of Loanboox, about the problem his venture is trying to solve, why and how they locked in their first sale. Loanboox is an independent debt capital market platform, based in Zurich, Switzerland. It offers an alternative to conventional brokering by making financing and investing simple, transparent, safe and low cost. https://www.loanboox.com/
You can find more details and an amazing content from the SwissCognitive - The Global AI Hub here: https://swisscognitive.ch/. Similarly, check out https://weshape.tech/ for more information and very useful, skill-building events. As mentioned, we caught up at https://www.businessinnovation.ch/de/, which took place in Zurich in October, a business innovation conference.
Evelyne Pflugi, co-founder and Managing Partner at Singularity Group in Zurich, Switzerland, talks about what exponential technologies are, her company's cooperation with the Singularity University. Evelyne also explains the investment thesis for her fund, where investors should be able to monetize their exposure to exponential technologies already now. https://www.singularity-group.com/
We also talk about the Exponential Finance Summit, taking place in Zurich on November 14-15. https://www.exponentialfinancesummit.com/
Pascal Allot is heading Innovation Ecosystem efforts at IBM Switzerland. IBM offers credits to startups using their software such as IBM Watson, Design Thinking workshops and runs Data Sciences and other related meet-ups. https://developer.ibm.com/startups/
Futurae Technologies was founded by ETH Zurich security researchers and offers a strong suite of multi-factor authentication tools that provide a high degree of security and improve the customer experience while protecting the user’s privacy. https://futurae.com/
In an interview with Tillmann Lang, CEO and co-founder of Yova, explains why he is passionate about sustainable and socially responsible investing. He describes how clients using Yova can invest in line with their values, causes, or even religion. https://yova.ch/en/
Co-founders Ravina Mutha and Pranay Jain graduated from the F10 program in Zurich and turned their venture into a profitable business already, with many well known large companies as their clients. They explained their first ventures and how they locked their first sale! https://enterprisebot.ai/
Voice of FinTech Live Speaker Series events are in-person discussions with start-up and scale-up founders, early-stage investors, incumbents partnering up with start-ups and ecosystem initiatives. For future events near you, follow us on Eventbrite: http://bit.ly/2kuefl6 or subscribe to Voice of FinTech podcast newsletter on this website.
Squirro is an award-winning Swiss Scale-up, providing Augmented Intelligence solutions to transform enterprise data into AI-driven insights. Check out https://squirro.com/.
The Future is Asian is an excellent book by a well known Indian-American economist, based in Singapore, Dr. Parag Khanna. You can get the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/32QnpZI (through the Amazon Associates program). We caught up on the side of the Asia Society's event in Zurich, where Parag shared his views about Asianization in front of a sold-out audience. https://www.paragkhanna.com/
An interview with Jatin Rajput, Partner at Union Park Ventures in New York, about investing in B2B and financial inclusion focused FinTechs and his views on digital transformation and FinTech buzz words and megatrends. Jatin also shares an investment thesis for his DLT / Blockchain fund, based in New York, and looking at opportunities globally. https://unionparkventures.com/
Mona Zoet shares her views on the status of FinTech and RegTech's scene in Singapore and comparison to Europe. Mona also talks about F10's (Zurich based FinTech Incubator and accelerator) Hackathon concept and program for its second edition in Singapore. https://www.regpac.com/
digitalswitzerland is a multi-stakeholder initiative of over 150 members to strengthen Switzerland’s position as a leading innovation hub. It aims to engage the government, business, academia, and the public to move Switzerland forward. https://digitalswitzerland.com/
An interview with Annie Guo, CEO and founder of Silkpay, a Paris based start-up offering European merchants mobile payment solutions so that Chinese tourists can seamlessly pay using Alipay and WeChat Pay on their travels. Annie talks about why she enjoys running her own company after many years in banking and Silkpay's solutions for merchants in France and other major European tourist destinations. https://www.silkpay.eu/
Monito is an award-winning FinTech start-up, based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Monito's mission is to save retail clients and corporates on excessive foreign exchange fees and unfavorable exchange rates by increasing transparency and showing its clients the best deal among banks and money transfer companies. https://www.monito.com/
Marwan El-Hakim, Partner at London based Veridian Ventures is a technology investor with a strong background in the financial services. Veridian Ventures is a sector-agnostic business angel syndicate, investing in technology-led businesses in the UK and Europe (including FinTech). https://veridianventures.co.uk/home
Harald Nieder shares the VC investor's perspective on the start-ups in Europe and the DACH region in particular. Redalpine is a European seed and early-stage venture investor in disruptive technologies with a focus on highly-scalable technology and Health Tech businesses including FinTech. https://www.redalpine.com/
Toquity, is a recent participant of INSEAD LaunchPad program at Station F in Paris, France. Toquity simplifies managing cap tables for founders and investors, leveraging blockchain. https://www.toquity.io/
Founders Factory is a global technology incubator and accelerator uniquely backed by industry-leading corporates, providing all start-ups with the advantage of early access to partnership opportunities as well as support from a full-time team of 70 specialists, based in London and Paris.
Started by Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox, Founders Factory has received investments from L’Oreal, easyJet, Guardian Media Group, Aviva, Holtzbrinck, CSC and Marks & Spencer and partnered with Wunderman and Vodafone.
An interview with David Sidler, Head of Investor Relations at Investiere. Investiere offers private and institutional investors direct and professional access to startup investments. With over 70 investments, Investiere is one of the most active startup investors in Switzerland. https://www.investiere.ch/
An interview with Franz Hoerhager, Wharton alumnus, co-founder of the home equity diversification platform Bambus, active in Germany and Austria. Bambus is a recent graduate of the F10 Accelerator Program in Zurich. Bambus wants to bring professional investing to homeowners. They provide homeowners with a platform that allows them to take out a loan secured by their real estate and invest the amount in other asset classes.
Minh Q. Tran, Managing Partner at Odysseus Partners, former GP of AXA Ventures and INSEAD MBA alumnus, explains why he founded an asset builder company after decades in VC in Media, Telecom and Insurance (Bertelsmann Ventures, Nokia Ventures, Truffle Capital and AXA Ventures) and how Odysseus Partners differs from a traditional VC or an alternative fund. https://www.odysseuspartners.com/ (Updated in February 2020 for organizational changes)
Ralf Huber, the co-founder of Apiax, an award winning Swiss RegTech company, explains how Apiax helps banks and other financial institutions to upgrade their compliance processes for the digital age. Apiax provides a digital rules engine. https://www.apiax.com/
Claudia Bienentreu, Head Open Innovation AXA Switzerland, also known as AXAnauten, explains why AXA works with start-ups, explains how AXA does it and shares cooperation success stories. Claudia also explains what AXAnauten means and how can start-ups connect with them. https://axa.ch/en/about-axa.html
Andy Iten, co-founder of F10, talking to Rudolf Falat about how F10 in Zurich got started, what it does for its stakeholders (start-ups, corporates and investors) and its plans for the future. Lisa Schroder talks about its program in more detail and F10 events. F10 also runs hackatons in Zurich, Singapore and Vienna. It is also close to SIX FinTech Ventures and operated by SIX Group in Zurich. https://www.f10.ch/