FinAi Podcast

If you're not sure what an ICO is, well, join the club -- but you're in the right place. Margaux Avedisian of Transform Group explains it all for you. She is in the business of getting attention to initial coin offerings and token sales, and has been steeped in bitcoin longer than the Winklevii. Avedisian discusses the pitfalls many companies face in the ICO world, which can even include going to jail for securities fraud (yikes!) But she also discusses the transformative potential ICOs have to deliver value to companies that might otherwise have a hard time even securing a bank account. She also talks about a new opportunity called a pre-ICO pool for accredited investors and select ICOs. How do you get in on that? If you're in this space at all and you don't know Margaux yet, c'mon, man. (Ok, she gives her email address at the end.)

How does a global payments company view startups, the various mobile payment platforms, and blockchain? Debbie Barta, Mastercard’s senior vice president of innovation, intrapreneurship, and partnerships, takes on these questions in the latest episode of INV Unfiltered. Barta is responsible for managing Mastercard Labs’s global network of startup competitions, as well as its developer portal and APIs. In this episode, she also describes the challenges in securing customer payment data in the post-Equifax-breach world, and in the emerging Internet of Things. Barta has been at Mastercard since 2007 in a variety of capacities including fraud management and startup engagement, and has degrees from Washington University, Webster University, and Stanford.

Two distinct streams have surfaced in fintech: passive and active investment. Betterment is the posterchild for passive investment, just recently booking $70 million of venture funding and has continued to enhance its services bankinnovation.net/2017/07/betterm…he-human-touch/. But the active investment strategy for investors is long from dead in fintech. We talked with Pierce Crosby of StockTwits, which is firmly in the active camp, about trends in investment fintech, as well as StockTwits’s future plans. Crosby has been with StockTwits since 2014, where he runs partnerships and business development. He is also an INV Fintech mentor. Previously, he was the Head of Research for Reuters.

On this episode JJ chats with Benjamin Savage the co-founder of Clocktower Technology Ventures and Managing Director at Drobny Capital. At Drobny Ben spearheads new business initiatives across the firm and is responsible for private market activities, including leadership of Clocktower’s investments. Ben was previously Director, Investment Associate Program for Bridgewater Associates, where he worked with the firm’s CIOs on strategic priorities, talent development and research. Ben began his career as a venture capital and private equity investor with Wasserstein Perella, and also co-founded Artivest and Waterfall Mobile. Ben holds a BA in philosophy from Yale University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

APIS and open banking – however that term is defined – are set to transform financial services by empowering consumers to share data with third parties. This means new businesses will develop that will orbit banks, and the consumer experience may be forever changed. Furthermore, APIs allow banks a measure of control and security screen-scraping did not – so why aren’t more banks embracing this new reality? Silicon Valley Bank is, and Head of APIs and Open Banking, Dan Kimerling explains how his bank is doing things today. Kimerling founded two startups, and now works at a bank and co-runs a venture capital firm, so it’s not an exaggeration to see he’s done it all and seen just about everything there is to see in fintech. He also shared some views on blockchain and mobile payments in this episode.

Talk about financial innovation has centered around millennials for years now -- so much so that Ron Shevlin, the industry consultant, recently called Baby Boomers the "emerging" sector in fintech. That sector of people older than 50 now numbers 111 million -- and rapidly growing -- in America today. Older people have different, more-complex digital needs than millennials. Additionally, often those needs touch on their children, as well. To what degree is fintech addressing these needs? Which startups are targeting this untapped fintech market? Does fintech need to adjust to serve older people, just as banking needs to adjust to serve millennials? These are some of the questions we pose to Theodora Lau, Director, Market Innovation at AARP, the giant not-for-profit for older Americans. In this engaging episode, Lau offers a fascinating tour of the “other” fintech.

How does a super-regional bank go about its innovation? In this episode of INV Unfiltered, Fazir Ali, Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy & Innovation at KeyBank, shares his bank’s “journey” to digital-first orientation. KeyBank, which has nearly 19,000 employees, has reconstituted its digital operations since 2013, when Ali joined the bank, and continues to push hard on innovation to help Key become “the nation’s best super-regional bank.” That push has led to some tough decisions, such as killing its PFM service in favor of other technology deliverables. Ali explains why Key did so, as well as offers a peek at what innovation is to come at the $137 billion-asset bank.

Finding customers quickly has become an overwhelming challenge for fintech startups. At the start of the fintech revolution, startups could mine social media to create customer relationships with an ever-expanding group of disaffected banking consumers. But competition -- from banks, as well -- has made that strategy more challenging. The new method of securing a customer base, ever-important in the fundraising game, is to find large corporates that offer large swaths of potential customers, without the hand-to-hand marketing combat of direct-to-consumer retail.

In this podcast, we explore the B2B2C model of customer acquisition with Mark Zmarzly, founder of startup Hip Pocket, who is using B2B2C to catapult the company’s newly launched Hip Money app.

This inaugural episode of INV Unfiltered features Leo Cherman, head of Banco Sofisa Direto, the direct bank of Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Banco Sofisa, which is a FI partner to INV Fintech. Leo brings a unique perspective to us today, because he is both enmeshed in the Brazilian market, but also keenly in tune with global fintech.