Benzinga Fintech Focus

This week's Fintech Focus podcast takes us across the pond to interview Frederic Nze of digital micro-lending platform Oakam.

Oakam is a digital micro-lender that is expanding credit access for the UK’s 12 million financially-excluded consumers. Oakam has captured the opportunity presented by the rapid democratization of smartphone technology to disrupt micro-lending by making borrowing more affordable and accessible for the working class. Prior to founding Oakam, Frederic spent his career in credit risk management and consumer finance at firms including American Express, Barclays and GE Capital. He first came across the UK’s micro-lending opportunity while working on a pilot project at Barclays to evaluate product offerings for lower-income customers, and realizing the potential of this market, decided to found Oakam in 2006\. Raised in Central Africa, Frederic saw firsthand how informal community lending helped to jumpstart entrepreneurs and fledgling businesses. With global ambitions for Oakam, Frederic’s ultimate goal is to bring the concept back to the developing world. (via Crunchbase)

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**Links:**

Oakam: [https://www.oakam.com/](https://www.oakam.com/)

Benzinga Fintech Focus Newsletter: [https://www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/](https://www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/)

Benzinga Pro: [http://try.benzingapro.com/](http://try.benzingapro.com/)

This episode of the Fintech Focus podcast, we dive into the niche world of research management software with Chris Mackey of MackeyRMS. MackeyRMS is a SaaS-based research management software optimized for investment professionals.

**About the company:**

Mackey Research Management Software was conceived and developed by veterans of the hedge fund, enterprise software and cloud computing industries. Their founders recognized that legacy research management software (RMS) lacked the usability and mobility required by the modern analyst, while the one-size-fits-all approach of consumer applications fell far short of the investment enterprise’s robust functionality and compliance requirements. (via Crunchbase)

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Links:

MackeyRMS: https://mackeyrms.com/

Benzinga Fintech Focus Newsletter: https://www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/

Benzinga Pro: https://pro.benzinga.com/

This week’s Fintech Focus podcast looks at how one New York-based ETF sponsor is bringing the old and the new together, opening up a space where fintech and Wall Street can work in harmony within ETF investing.

It’s safe to assume the majority of people with their eyes on ETF’s know that investing in those babies is changing, especially with the advent of mobile and peer-to-peer payments (i.e. fintech). How is fintech affecting ETF’s? Will there be a crypto exchange-traded fund soon? What makes a good investment?

All those questions and more can be answered by Jay Jacobs who heads up Global X (NASDAQ: FINX), which manages more than 50 products and $8.5 billion in the space.

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Links:

GlobalX: [https://www.globalxfunds.com](https://www.globalxfunds.com)

Benzinga Pro: [www.try.benzingapro.com](www.try.benzingapro.com)

Fintech Focus Newsletters: [www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/](www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/)

This week's Fintech Focus podcast takes a look at how one fintech startup is changing the way we invest in real estate.

Yes, people have always been able to invest in private real estate equity, which has proven to be an attractive venture for most. But it's real estate debt, an asset usually controlled by banks as institutional products, that is now stepping in as an enticing investment.

That's where Brett Crosby of PeerStreet saw an opportunity to bring accredited investors into the octagon of real estate-backed loans.

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**What were some roadblocks people were having in terms of accessing certain assets?**

Until previously, lenders didn't have a secondary market. They were very capital constrained. So, what we realized is that, in the meantime, investors had access to their asset classes, really interesting assets, but were very hard to access; very hard to aggregate enough uproar even institutional investors et cetera. So, it was a space that really needed technology in a marketplace to connect both sides. We put PeerStreet there as a conduit between the world wide capital markets and local private loaners who understand their local real estate market. All of a sudden what's happened is that investors can access an asset class that they couldn't access easily before. They can diversify it in a way never before possible. If something goes wrong in the investment, instead of them having to put together a team of people to try and solve the problem, we already have that team in place, then we work with external professionals in the local markets to handle things....To me it's a very, very positive thing, and something that if we power one borrower to do that, that's great, but now we're powering thousands of borrowers to do that sort of thing. It's starting to have an impact on the housing stock of the nation, so it's getting pretty exciting.

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Links:

PeerStreet: https://www.peerstreet.com/

Benzinga Pro: www.try.benzingapro.com

Fintech Focus Newsletter: www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/

This week's Fintech Focus podcast takes a look at the burgeoning Generation Z market, and how developers and entrepreneurs are finding ways to bring financial education to teens.

With things like a shaky stock market and rising college tuition rates to consider, today's teens have a lot to think about when saving for the future. However, according to reports, today's teens are actually making strides to learn about and plan their savings, more so than Millennials before them.

That's the basis of Current, a debit and credit card app that aims to teach Generation Z the importance of financial education and budgeting for the future.

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**How did research affect your blueprint for this service?**

When we went into this demographic, we had no preconception about what any individual parent may or may not want, and we'd surveyed a bunch of them and had interviewed a bunch, and what we learnt was that pretty much every family is different across America. From large metro to rural, to rich and poor…Most parents, we've found, believe in their kids, believe their teenagers are going to do the right thing, and they would rather them not be stuck swiping away in some random place or merchant when they need the money the most or they can't get cash out in an emergency.

**You're simultaneously building a product for two audiences, right, for the parents and for the kids. How does your product development philosophy fit into that as you serve those two audiences?**

What a teenager wants is probably not what a parent wants for them and vice versa, right? Balancing this conversation has been one of our key challenges, but also key assets and defensibility. Between 13 and 16, the product we have currently is doing extremely well. Sixteen to 18 is an area where the summer jobs start, we're rolling out the routing and account numbers, the remote deposit capture over this quarter, when it will look much more like a traditional bank account in many ways, with some UI tweaks and maybe even some upgraded cards. We have our P2P system as well, which is very common now, as you probably see from other financial products, but also the way we're thinking about data, the way we are thinking about our point system and the share-ability and discoverability of your swipes, holds the keys to the future of Current and how we expect this cohort to grow with us.

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Links:

Current: [www.current.com](www.current.com)

Benzinga Pro: [www.try.benzingapro.com](www.try.benzingapro.com)

Fintech Focus Newsletter: [www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/](https://www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/)

**What This Fintech VC Learned From A Near-Disaster In Brazil**

On this episode of the Fintech Focus Podcast we’re journeying overseas with Monica Brand Engel, co-founder and partner at Quona Capital. Quona is a VC fund focused on emerging markets fintech, and Monica talks to us about the challenges in different fintech markets around the globe, how they compare to the U.S., and what happened when one of their investments was nearly shut down by the Brazilian central bank.

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**Links:**

Quona Capital: https://quona.com/

Fintech Focus Newsletter: https://www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/

Benzinga Pro: https://pro.benzinga.com/

Colin is a managing director within the Consumer and Commercial Banking Division of Goldman Sachs. He works as the chief operating officer of Clarity Money. Prior to Clarity Money, Colin held leadership roles in business development, innovation, and general management at American Express. He managed global partnerships for American Express, producing consistent double-digit growth on $200M global P&L and leading the highest-performing team in consumer business.

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**Links:**

Marcus: https://www.marcus.com

Clarity Money: https://claritymoney.com/

Benzinga Pro: https://pro.benzinga.com/

Fintech Focus Newsletter: https://www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/

**How Long Till Your Bank Goes Open Source?**

This week’s Fintech Focus podcast is booting up Linux and going open-source. We’re chatting with longtime friend of Benzinga and CEO of OpenFin Mazy Dar about the company’s growth and how the startup is changing the way banks deploy new technology.

**How Financial Services Needs To Take A Lesson From Mobile Developers**

“Look at what's happened in the mobile world, and in Silicon Valley most of the really useful innovations of the last you know, five, ten years have come about on our mobile devices, and they've been enabled, principally by two operating systems. One is iOS, and the other one is Android. And so if you are Facebook, or Uber, or Snapchat, or any number of other apps that have been created in the last five, ten years, you have those two operating systems that are modern to build your app on top of.

“Unfortunately, the situation we're in, in financial services is we're primarily using Windows 7, which was released in 2009, and some of us are still on Windows XP, which was released in 2001\. So, these are operating systems that don't provide you the basic capabilities that apps need nowadays, and that's essentially what OpenFin is solving, we're a layer that sits on top of Windows XP, 7, 8, 10, Mac, and Linux, and we modernize the desktop and provide the foundation that's needed by applications in the financial industry to really innovate and provide the end user experience that's required for financial applications.”

**How Open Source Can Actually Ensure Greater Cybersecurity**

“OpenFin comes in and dramatically changes the security paradigm where now you can build an app that looks and feels and behaves just like a native installed application, but in face it is not an installed application. It's a web application. It runs in the security sandbox. It has no access to the local operating system. Has no access to other apps on the desktop and where it needs access, let's say there's a good reason for it to want to read the file system or read the clipboard or something else, IT security can essentially authorize those features and it's only available if apps actually need it and it's understood why they need those features. It's under a completely different paradigm than the one we have today, but one that is critically needed in an environment where the security threats are increasing exponentially, and we just need a much, much better way of ensuring security than the security review process that we have in place.”

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**Links:**

OpenFin: https://openfin.co

Benzinga Pro: https://www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/

**What’s The Next Technological Leap For Financial Advisors?**

The Fintech Focus podcast is taking another look at the changing world of financial planning this week, and how technology is redefining the way advisors work with their clients.

It’s no secret that healthcare costs are a huge burden on American families—multiple studies say medical costs are the number one cause of personal bankruptcies. This week’s episode features an interview with an entrepreneur that asked how financial advisors could help families plan for medical costs.

That’s the thesis of Genevity, the fintech startup that’s working with financial advisors to help their clients plan for long-term and even generational costs of medical complications like hereditary diseases and elder care.

**How Can We Change The Way We Talk About Healthcare Costs?**

“It really hit me that to truly make a difference, what we needed to do is not help educate families around health risks at a hospital setting. We needed to educate them in a technology-based way, and we needed to show the financial impact of those risks. Because even though people know maybe they should eat better, drink less, exercise more if they have different risks, it's really hard to make those changes from a behaviors perspective. But you really care when you realize it from aa financial perspective.

“And so that's what Genevity does, is it looks across your lifestyle, your family risks, your health risks, and your family longevity and several factors. And we'll show you, what does that look like for you across your lifespan in a reference to healthy go-go years, along with some of those slower-go years. And then showing you how if you make these changes, you can improve your longevity, you can reduce those slow-go years and ultimately reduce cost. [We’re] here to help families and their financial planners too with them.”

**How Do You Get Financial Advisors To Talk About Health?**

“An individual is gonna spend way more time over their lifetime with their financial advisor than they are with their doctor. And because health and elder care costs are one of the biggest causes of bankruptcy in retirement, it can decimate a financial plan at any point in time. So if you're not planning for these things, you have this big blind spot in a plan.

“We were just really surprised when we learned from an advisor who had contacted us that there wasn't a good way of personalizing this information for individuals. And you think about it, in this day and age, why are we not personalizing about these sort of risks to a financial plan if you could?”

How Technology Can Start To Undo The Misogyny In The Way We Approach Family Medical Decisions

“What advisors would share with us is that, ‘Look, we tend to have a relationship with one person in the family who's that financial decision-maker, and more often than not, it tends to be the man. Not always. But it can be really hard to engage that other spouse who maybe isn't as interested in the numbers in those conversations.’

“And that's where health is that perfect bridge. Because coming from the healthcare industry, as my co-founder and I both come from, what we've always talked about in healthcare is the CMO of the family, or the Chief Medical Officer of the family, and that tends to be the woman, whether that's the mother, the daughter, or the sister. And so she may or not be the financial decision-maker when it comes to sitting down and doing the really detailed planning with the advisor. But she will almost certainly be the person who is very involved around the health of the loved one and also you know, wave more heavily towards here from the caregiving, whether it's children or elderly parent.

“This is the perfect bridge to her where she may not want to sit down and talk about the numbers or what Halo, our product, does, it sits down and talks about those health concerns and risks within the family, which speaks a different language, and then layers in the financial impact underneath, which translates into the financial planning a totally different way.”

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**Links:**

Fintech Focus Newsletter: [Signup Now](https://www.benzinga.com/fintech-focus/newsletter/)

Genivity: [https://www.genivity.com/](https://www.genivity.com/)

**What Are The Biggest Opportunities In Fintech M&A Right Now?**

We’re back in the capital markets for this week’s Fintech Focus Podcast, and it’s a good one—perennial BZ Awards judge and partner at Marlin & Associates Michael Maxworthy joins us for an assessment of the state of fintech M&A.

Maxworthy’s firm has advised a number of fintech deals this year—most recently when digital banking startup Zenmonics accepted a minority investment from Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (NYSE: FIS).

**On How Fintech Has Changed From The Start Of His Career:**

“In my mind, the fintech space has kinda had its ups and downs over the years, and I can go back all the way to the SIFMA conferences back in the late 90's, when proprietary data analytics and essentially database and content-type companies were all the rage. Well, guess what, they're back. If you can find a very hard-to-find dataset that's incredibly intensive to get a hold of, actually you can command a lotta money when you go out and either raise capital or you know maybe a Thomson Reuters or a Linedata or a SS&C or a Fidessa or somebody is coming to look at acquiring it. The harder it is, the more proprietary it is, the more people think they can get Alpha out of it, the more they're gonna pay for it.”

**On What He Looks For In A Deal:**

“When you do an M&A deal, and a lot of it just doesn't come down to the financials. A lot of it comes down to the strategic vision of the management teams coming together, the personality of the management teams coming together. The three, four, five-year horizon of where each kind of thinks where the combined business could go, that has a huge factor.

“In some of our cases when we do M&A deals, we advise buyer and seller to go out and have dinner, have drinks, without the bankers, without the lawyers involved. Look the guy in the eye, ask him some of the tough questions that you may have thought of during the management presentation and you just didn't get to, or maybe just didn't wanna bring it up in that environment. The bankers and the lawyers, we can sit here and we can financial model all day, and we can legalese as much as we want, but you really just have to have a meeting of the minds of the two businesses, otherwise essentially it's just gonna fail.”

**On What Changes We’ll See In The Next 6-12 Months:**

“Two things I'm probably going to see over the next six months to maybe a year. One is I think some of the bigger acquisitions are gonna start shedding divisions. So you're going to see a lot of divestitures, or the like, where maybe ICE doesn't need a certain division of IDC and they finally realized over the last couple of years that it's just something that they need to get rid of, and I think that there's a huge amount of dry powder in the private equity sector that are just waiting on the sidelines to dig into stuff like that. And that's my second theme, where a lot of these deals I think are gonna be in the lower end of the middle market, probably deal-flow or transaction size under half a billion, maybe under 750\. And I think that there is so many overlooked businesses inside that space that there is a little bit of a feeding frenzy for good companies when they do come to market. So I suspect deal-flow will increase over the next six to nine months.”

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Links:

M&A: www.marlinllc.com/

BZ Pro: https://pro.benzinga.com/

Newsletters: www.benzinga.com/