Joe Phoenix, Co- Founder and CEO of Givinga had a long and vibrant career in a leadership position at Putnam Investments, one of the world's largest asset management firms, before he decided wanted to make a different type of impact on the world.
Manu Smadja, Founder and CEO of MPOWER Financing shares why he decided to leave a partner track career as a management consultant to start a FinTech company focused on helping international students finance their college education here in the United States.
Brendan Lee Young, CEO and Co-Founder of Passiv shares the company's origin story and also explains how an active community of DIY investors on a Reddit forum helped the company get off the ground.
Dov Marmor, COO of Railsbank North America joined Mike Langford to share a new frontier for embedded finance... credit cards. As Dov explains, the solution offers businesses and their customers an array of exciting opportunities to greatly enhance their relationships.
If you would like to help make financial services better with the Railsbank community make sure you reach out to Dov on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email.
Runik Mehrotra and Samir Vasavada, Co-Founders of Vise have become quite famous in the FinTech world for the innovative, A.I. powered, portfolio management solution they developed as teenagers. In this episode of The SoFin Podcast they share how they managed to convince an industry dominated by folks old enough to be their grandparents to adopt Vise in their business.
Runik and Samir also joined me on an episode of The Modern Financial Advisor Podcast that we produce for Truelytics in 2020 to provide a detailed overview of how financial advisors can use Vise to create custom portfolios for their clients with as much ease as model portfolios.
If you would like to follow up with Runik and Samir simply click here to shoot them an email.
Gopi Rangan, Founding Partner at Sure Ventures and host of The Sure Shot Entrepreneur podcast explains why he invests in startups where he feels the founders are on a mission. Hint... it has to do with resilience.
As you’ll hear, Gopi is on a bit of a mission himself with Sure Ventures and his podcast. He wants to make the world of venture capital more accessible and pull the lid off the black box.
Fun Fact: Sure Ventures is an investor in Rocket Dollar. Henry Yoshida, Co-Founder and CEO of Rocket Dollar has appeared on The SoFin Podcast and The Modern Financial Advisor Podcast.
If you have questions for Gopi about Sure Ventures or his podcast, feel free to reach out via email.
Rashad Kurbanov and Hamid Gayibov, founders of IOWNIT share how they created a digital marketplace for trading and investing in private securities. There are over 1.8 million private companies in the United States with 50 or more employees. Yet, it's hard to invest in their stock or sell their stock if you own it. IOWNIT was created to solve that problem.
If you have questions for Rashad or Hamid or want to learn more about IOWNIT feel free to reach out to Yosef Levenstein.
Tax planning can be a very labor-intensive process for financial advisors who offer it to their clients. There is just so much data entry required!
Roger Pine discovered this firsthand in his career as a financial advisor. That was the inspiration of Holistiplan! Their solution makes it super easy for advisors to import their client's tax information and get to work.
As Roger mentions, tax planning is one of the areas where a financial planner can bring the most value to his or her clients. So, making the process more efficient for advisors means they will be able to bring more value to their clients.
Holistiplan is nominated for a 2020 Global FinTech Award so if you have a moment show your support.
If you would like to reach out to Roger to explore Holistiplan simply shoot him an email.
Others People and Companies Mentioned In This Episode:
George MacAllister of The Next Level Solution on the Modern Financial Advisor Podcast by Truelytics
Nick Arellano - Your Legacy Partners on The Advisor Financing Forum podcast by SkyView Partners
It used to be that large banks and financial firms had an edge in delivering high-tech solutions to their customers. The technology was expensive and required a big team to implement and maintain.
Richard Steggall and the team at Urban FT changed all that by creating a FinTech core that allows financial firms of any size to deliver solutions like mobile banking, payments, identity verification, and much more.
Richard also invites listeners to reach out with their vision of the bank of the future. He’s particularly interested to talk to you if you are building a FinTech startup and would like to explore leveraging the new Urban FT FX-35 FinTech Core.
Shoot him an email to share your wish list for the future of banking or run your startup idea by him.
Ivan Barretto of RIA Compliance Concepts is the first to admit that compliance is not the sexiest topic for a podcast. However, that didn’t stop him and the team from launching their own show, The RIA Compliance Collective. I’ve had the honor of being a guest on the show. Twice!
Here’s the thing, compliance is the hidden superpower for the financial services ecosystem, and for any FinTech startup hoping to succeed they need to lean on compliance heavily. In an early episode of the Modern Financial Advisor podcast by Truelytics, Ivan joined me to explore how RIAs and wealth management firms could use compliance for a strategic advantage.
As you’ll hear Ivan and I discuss, working with your compliance team can help you move faster than your competitors and you might just discover new opportunities in the process.
Please feel free to email Ivan with questions or to explore how he and the RIA Compliance Concepts team can help your FinTech company move faster.
Matt Reiner, CEO of Benjamin started his career as a financial advisor working in his family’s wealth management business. Along the way he decided to leverage technology to make the business more efficient.
Over time he realized his was on to something that could possible transform the whole industry... and Benjamin was born. The first virtual assistant for financial advisors powered by artificial intelligence.
Matt shares the benefits of using his financial advisory firm as a test case for the Benjamin MVP. It allowed him to test his hypothesis and iterate quickly. Matt also relates how having deep experience in the industry helped him solve problems he knew firsthand. However, he also ran into some serious hurdles along the way as he entered the new world (to him) of tech startups.
If you want to reach out to Matt to learn more about Benjamin send him an email.
RIABase by Truelytics. There are thousands of RIAs in the United States. Some are solo advisory businesses and some manage billions of dollars and have thousands of clients. Truelytics has pulled in every SEC Registered Investment Advisor’s public data and benchmarked it across dozens of categories.
If you want to understand how an RIA stacks up against others in its peer group, visit RIABase today.
Henry Yoshida, CEO of Rocket Dollar is on a mission to help mass affluent and middle-class investors gain access to the same types of investments that were previously only available to the high-net-worth segment. How? By making it easy to use your IRA to invest in startups, real estate, small businesses, and even cryptocurrencies.
Very few Americans know that they can use their retirement accounts to invest in anything beyond stock, bonds, and mutual funds. But the ultrarich like Mitt Romney and Peter Thiel have IRAs that contain over $100 million in assets. They certainly didn’t accumulate that much by contributing $5,500 each year and investing it in an index fund.
Henry and his co-founders saw this as a huge opportunity. What if they could take the same process used by these mega-wealthy folks and make it easy to implement for your average investor? And they’ve done just that with Rocket Dollar.
If you would like to follow up with Henry to learn more simply shoot him a quick email.
Jason Raznick, CEO and Chief Zinger at Benzinga joined Mike Langford for a free-flowing conversation that ranged from how Jason overcame some early hurdles in his life to his “MacGyvering” an early DVR concept so he could watch “MacGyver" when he was a teenager and some incredible wisdom on building a modern financial media company in his hometown of Detroit.
The big topic for this episode, however, was “The Power of FinTech Events” as Jason and Mike’s relationship began and has flourished, in part, from their meeting at and then hosting FinTech focused events. The Benzinga Global FinTech Awards has grown into one of the most influential events for our space. Jason shares some of the interesting success stories from the event and why he echoes Mike’s belief that good things happen when you get smart people interested in similar things into the same room.
Speaking of the BZ Awards… make sure you used the discount code “SOFINVIP” when registering.
If you have questions about the event or Benzinga or just want to chat it up with Jason click here to reach out.
Travis Schwab, CEO of Eventus Systems shares how he and his team have doubled their revenue every year while navigating the painfully slow enterprise sales environment of large trading firms. As you might imagine, the process isn’t easy…. especially because as a provider of a RegTech SaaS solution for the capital markets industry the number of customers is relatively limited as are the number of investors who understand the space well enough to fund Eventus.
Travis and the Eventus team have successfully made it through some of the biggest challenges an early-stage enterprise startup faces and now they are expanding rapidly both in terms of employees and on the product side of the business.
Travis’s Ask for You - If your business is required to perform anti-money laundering (AML) checks he would love to talk to you. Eventus is working on a new AML solution and he’d love to vet the idea with you.
Also, Eventus is hiring and scaling rapidly so if you have advice and guidance on bringing people up to speed quickly while maintaining your corporate culture…. let Travis know.
Joust was acquired by ZenBusiness after this episode was recorded. To learn more about the acquisition click here.
Lamine Zarrad, Co-Founder and CEO of Joust is a special kind of FinTech entrepreneur. He likes to tackle big, complex financial problems that require the nimble navigation of a lot of regulatory hurdles. Why? Well... he was a bank examiner once upon a time so he's the rare founder he isn't afraid of regulations.
Unlike most regulators, Lamine believes FinTech founders should break some rules if they want to gain market traction. No… don’t be shady… just be aware that innovation usually leads the pace of regulation.
If you have a question for Lamine feel free to shoot him an email.
Shane Walker, Co-Founder of Qube Money explains how an age-old system for managing household spending, called the "cash envelope method" can lead to greater financial health in the 21st century. Qube Money is launching a digital version that allows families to get control of their spending and live more fruitful lives as a result.
According to Shane, it is not uncommon for families to save hundreds or thousands of dollars each month by using the digital cash envelope methodology that serves as the foundation of Qube Money.
Reach out to Shane via email to learn more.
Ari Palmer, CEO and Co-founder of TaxTaxer joins Mike Langford to share how the Austin-based startup is helping other startups get money from the United States government in the form of R&D tax credits. That’s right, if your company spent money on developing new products or services last year you could get thousands of dollars from Uncle Sam as a thank you for innovating.
According to Ari, the average credit received is over $40,000!!! What are you waiting for?! Email Ari today to see how TaxTaker can help your startup.
C. Eric Smith of AppBrilliance joins Mike Langford on the SoFin Podcast to share how the new Money SDK for iOS and Android allows retailers, SaaS providers, restaurants, and other merchants to eliminate the 3% fee they pay for credit card processing. In addition, this innovative new FinTech solution also allows vendors to dramatically improve their cashflow by depositing funds from sales directly into their bank accounts instantly.
You can reach out to Eric to learn more about the Money SDK via email or LinkedIn
Mike Langford announces the launch on the new SoFin Podcast. The show is inspired by the annual SoFin @ SXSW event. The goal for the show is to shine a light on innovative new FinTech startups, interesting entrepreneurs, and share conversations about industry trends with leaders from the financial services industry.
