Fintech Impact

This is the 19th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, and Jason Pereira interviews Eric Arnold, the Chief Executive Officer at Planswell, an online financial planning software platform that is really targeted at individual consumers, helping customers implement their financial self-planning. Eric shares how Planswell was started, its capabilities, and ways in which it continues to expand.●     01:36 – Eric began his career starting many businesses including tea at shopping      malls, driveway sealing, independent music distribution, children’s birthday parties, and window cleaning.●     03:11 – Eric and his wife moved to Toronto from Aurora for her to attend the University of Toronto and he took on a job as an investment advisor at Wood Gundy.●     06:14 – In 2016, investor dollars went into building up Planswell and have since made over 30,000 financial plans for people—about 20,000 in the last six mon

This is the 18th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, and Jason Pereira interviews Anthony Stich, the Chief Operating Officer of Advicent, the largest provider of financial software in the world. Anthony shares information reguarding Advicent’s product line which includes NaviPlan, the power of their advancements and influence, and the ways in which they are able to service their clients. ●  01:06 – Advicent is the financial software developer that created NaviPlan. They                    are in seven countries and on four continents. They also have client portals, advisor dashboard, and API technology.●     01:31 – They have about 100 enterprise clients, about 60 of which are blue chip clients, and service about 100,000 users.●     02:03 – Advicent’s roots trace back to 1969 by Gus Hansch, a CFP referred to as “The Father of Financial Planning

This 17th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira interviews Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, Founder and CEO at Flinks, a Canadian-based data aggregation software company that pulls data from various financial institutions, allowing third parties to use that data. Over the course of the discussion, Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf explains how Flinks began, what products they are offering, and how the data aggregation world is taking shape.●     01:02: – Flinks began about 16 months ago in Montreal, connecting software with financial institutions as a data mover.●     01:37: – Before Flinks, Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf was a tech consultant for lending companies, working on origination automation.●     05:30: – One of the products that Flinks is launching is called Behavioral Score, analyzing consumers transactional behavior with their consent, and providing risk assessment scores—think of it as Credit Score 2.0.●     07:38: – Flinks does

This is the 16th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, and Jason Pereira interviews Peter Demangos, the Co-Founder of Collage, a human resources benefits technology platform that works in tandem with broker partners. Peter explains how Collage was created, the ways in which it is pushing technology in the financial advisement and human resources spaces, forward, and the ways they plan to scale.●     01:06 – Collage aims to assist mid-sized companies in Canada with 200 employees or less, but the average tends to be 20-100 employees.●     02:28 – Peter’s original passion began with health and wellness at the corporate level that led him to the benefits space.●     03:18 – PDF Employee Benefits that focuses on health and dental is a company that Peter started and which he still runs today.●     08:09 – Collage works with all of the insurance companies across Canada.●     11:21 – The

During the 15th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira interviews Pauline Shum Nolan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Wealthscope, an online tool for accessing portfolios. Pauline shares the creation and opportunities available with Wealthscope, which digs beyond performance, into various parameters like factor-based investing, fees, and long-term projections of income.●  01:09: – Wealthscope is a web application, looking to “open the black box in retail wealth management.”●     02:18: – Pauline began as a professor of finance for the last 25 years, and worked with the university penchant plan for the last 14 years the on the institutional side.●     04:40: – Wealthscope has a free B2C version for students, and investors, but will launch a premium version for investors that are willing to pay for more customized opinions through a subscription.●     08:01: – Wealthscope built in analytics for proof of concept which allowed t

During the 14th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, interviews Paolo Sironi, Fintech thought leader and author who currently works at IBM Watson Financial Services at the IBM Industry Academy. Paolo shares information that he has gained about our relationship with money, how it is changing, and the ways in which Fintech plays a role in that relationship.●01:06: – Paolo Sironi is Italian, splitting his time between Frankfort Germany and Milan Italy.●01:19 – Through his role at the IBM Watson Financial Services at the IBM Industry Academy, he works with a 100-person team worldwide that engaged in conversations with the Fintech industries.●03:35 – Paolo began his career in banking as the head of quantitative business management for financial institutions for about 15 years, then moved to Germany in 2008 pushing towards Fintech, and in 2012 IBM brought his Fintech and brought him into their fold.●10:00 – The global financial crisis demonstrated to a lot of investors that the regulators have to toughen the r

During the 13th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira interviews David Katz, the Executive Vice President of Benecaid, a traditional health benefits platform where he runs a separate division called Honeybee their digital platform for their delivery of benefit solutions for advisors, underwriters, lawyers, and end-to-end users. David shares his journey to the creating of Honeybee, how it has progressed, and the industry problems that it is addressing.●     01:31 – Honeybee is designed to allow employers to set up benefits account for their employees, health and allowance accounts, and the employees can use those account to personalize their benefits.●     01:54 – David started his career as a lawyer practicing corporate commercial law for a little over four years.●     05:39 – He really enjoyed the marketing and customer acquisition side.●     06:01 – David focused on building an online community with P

Summary:During the 3rd episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira interviews Pawel Brzeminski, the founder and CEO of Snap Projections, a new and exciting Canadian software solution to assist financial planners. They discuss the scope of Snap Projections, as well as tools and challenges facing the Canadian market.●     01:31 – Snap Projections is a financial planning software for Canadian financial advisors, investment managers, and financial planners.●     02:12 – Pawel came to Canada over 15 years ago and has a technical background in software engineering,●     03:45 – In late 2014, he started building the product, and launched in May 2015.●     06:34 – There are a lot of complex moving pieces with preparing financial plans for clients that Snap Projections assists with in order to make the progress simpler.●     09:30 – The software was made to be effective, easy to use, easy to commun

Summary: This is the 11th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, and Jason Pereira interviews Clayton Feick, the Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Quandl, a big data company in the financial space that sells data points to vendors. Forbes has names Quandl one of the top 50 Fintech companies to watch. Clayton shares information about what separates Quandl from their competitors, how they are providing value in the fintech space, and what exactly alternative data is. ●     01:41 – Quandl is the leading provider of alternative data in the world. They also                    provide financial and economic data.●     02:04 – Clayton has been involved with Quandl for about two years, and spent a                    decade at Thomson Reuters pr

Summary:In this 10th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, Jason Pereira interviews Aly Dhalla, the CEO and Founder of Finaeo, a platform to help independent advisors make their job easier with digital toolkits connected to a back office to work through their front office needs—from prospect to policy in one workflow. Aly shares what Finaeo’s goals are, who their core audience is, and their technological prospective to financial planning.●     02:01 – Aly Dhalla introduces what Finaeo is.●     02:31 – Aly shares information about his professional background as a financial advisor.●     04:20 – Finaeo began delivering quotes via chat bot to provide them on demand.●     06:00 – Three targets for Finaeo include:                    1.) Early advisors who are 0-2 years in the industry looking for infrastructure. 

Summary:In this 9th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews Rona Birenbaum, a Toronto-based financial planner, and the CEO of Viviplan, a Canadian Robo planner that uses technology to more effectively provide financial planning to clients and a better price point. They chat about how Rona came to create Viviplan, what it aims to do for financial planning, and how it is growing.01:09 – Rona sums up Viviplan.●01:27 –Viviplan came out of Rona’s experience as a fee only financial planner for over 20 years.●02:37 – Viviplan was accepted into the Ryerson DMZ-BMO Fintech Accelerator program in the summer of 2017.●04:27 – Clients go through a rigorous but friendly onboarding process to gather the information to develop a comprehensive, tax-sensitive, goal-driven financial plan●07:03 – The onboarding is all developed in-house.●09:13 –Public relations coverage in The Globe and Mail and MoneySense has helped get the word out

Summary:During the 8th episode, Jason Pereira, interviews a colleague of his by the name of Zaheer Merali. Zaheer is an entrepreneur, investor, and consultant to several start-ups and has worked with many technology companies. Jason talks with Zaheer about the past and present evolution of financial planning solutions.●   01:08 – Zaheer works primarily with venture funds and start-ups in the Fintech space and healthcare.●   03:15 – He studied in school for seven years in the consulting space: strategy consulting across North American in multiple industries like renewable energy, healthcare, mining, media, insurance, and fast food.●   03:40 – Zaheer worked for seven years at Scotia Bank with some time spent in wealth management.●   05:29 – We have gone from one financial platform to tech stack and service stack solutions.●   11:19 – Several new software stacks are built as a backend with an API to a frontend.●   12:2

Summary:In this 7th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews Yon Perullo, the CEO of RiXtrema, a United States-based fintech that specializes in helping financial advisors build their practice and assist with the fiduciary responsibilities that they face in their practice.Show Notes:●01:01 – RiXtrema started in risk-management in the financial advisement space and evolved into many areas of fiduciary risk management.●01:32 –Yon began his career as a Director of Quantitative Analytics at FactSet and moved to managing hedge funds and mutual funds.●03:29 – Yon came to RiXtrema as an early adopter.●04:11 – RiXtrema created the Portfolio Crash Test for advisors to load their portfolios for their clients to get robust scenario testing.●10:48 – One of the tools that was developed out of the Portfolio Crash Test is called the IRA Fiduciary Optimizer.●13:40 –The 401kFiduciary Optimizer is another tool that RiXtrema developed

Summary:In this 6th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews Shawn Brayman, the CEO of PlanPlus, a prominent Canadian source of financial planning software. Jason and Shawn discuss how PlanPlus has grown, their focus on research, and how to evolve financial planning services ethically for their customers.Show Notes:●     01:23 – PlanPlus is Canadian-based company doing financial planning with a                     multi-currency, multi-jurisdictional, and multi-lingual global platform—                     focused on research and best-practices.●     02:48 – PlanPlus spun out from a larger Hewlett Packard ISV back        &

Summary:In this 5th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews Cato Pastoll, the Co-Founder and CEO of Lending Loop – an alternative lending source. Lending Loop mixes peer-to-peer lending with crowdsourcing along with artificial intelligence. Find out the story from Cato Pastoll about how in 15 months Lending Loop has managed to give out over $16 million in loans – and has an average monthly business growth of 20%. Show Notes:●     01:02 – Lending Loop is an online lending marketplace. They connect                    Canadian investors that are looking for more attractive returns on their                    savings with small businesses that are looking for a more affordable source &nbs

Summary:Welcome to the 4th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, where Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews the CEO and Co-founder of Onist Technologies – Brad Kotansky. Onist Technologies is an Arizona-based online platform that allows users to aggregate all of their financial data and to be able to work with multiple professionals. Brad Kotansky breaks down exactly what Onist Technologies is and what they are creating for the financial technologies industry and consumers. Show Notes●     01:32 – Onist connects households and family members with their financial data,                    accounts, and documents and are allowing granular access. They are sort                    of like the company Mint on steroids.● &nbs

Summary:During the 3rd episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews Paul Resnik, Co-founder and Director at FinaMetrica. As a risk assessment company, FinaMetrica provides tools for financial advisors to figure out the risk tolerance of their clients. Paul Resnik shares his history in the industry, the uphill battles that FinaMetrica has faced, and what it will take to turn financial advising into more of a science than an art.Show Notes01:55 – Paul Resnik started FinaMetrica in 1994, but Paul has been in the industry                    for almost 50 years.●     02:17 – Changes in Australia occurred: the ability to consolidate investment                    products onto a single platform and people not being pr

Summary:In this second episode, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews Kevin Kliman, CEO and Founder of Humi – an HR software company. Kevin shares the highlights of his journey, what his company Humi is seeking to accomplish, and Humi’s impact on the financial space.Show Notes00:41 – Humi is a fintech company because in addition to its subscriber model, they                    introduced payroll and becoming the group insurance broker for the                    companies that they deal with.●     01:24 – Humi acknowledges that Zenefits – a SAS company - created their                    business model: give away software and make mon

Summary:Welcome to the very first episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, with Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host of this show that offers expert insight into the Fintech world of financial technology. Today, Jason interviews David Nugent, the CIO and Co-Founder of Wealthsimple, Canada’s largest robo advisor and digital investment solutions for clients. Show Notes:●     01:10 – Wealthsimple is a robo advisor that started in the Fall of 2014, and now                    services about 60,000 clients with offices in Canada, United States, and the                    UK.●     01:34 – Power Financial is the main backer of Wealthsimple thanks to about $165          &n