Digital Finance Toronto 2015 – some notes @dfi2015
Digital Finance conference in Toronto. Two panels today with very different perspectives and fascinating to observe:
- first panel was very focussed on the regulatory environment, and was very focussed on the problems that fintech has with regulators. There was a thread of unbanked and underserved. In general this panel struck me as close to lobbyists
- Sarah Gordon CFSI
- Carol Caruso Accion (funded by Gates Foundation)
- Grant Fondo – Goodwin Proctor (security / cybercrime)
- Jo Lang (ny) R3CV – crytocurrency, org with 9 global banks
- Sarah Martin, Moneythink – economic health of US people one at a time
- the next panel was 4 actual fintech companies, and these are driving real change. What struck me with them, is that they are providing a customer friendly technology front end that is layered on top of old banking technology. They are each driven by partnerships with existing players.
- Patrick Postrehovsky, (Rentmoola)
- Michael Gotkurk – (PayFirma) (ex Versa Pay)
- Daniel Eberhard (Koho)
- Michael Katchen (WealthSimple)
Some points from the Fintech panel:
- brief description
- RentMoola – credit card acquiring and payment to Landlords
- PayFirma – superior card acquiring
- Koho – PFM based online banking with Credit Union providing the underlying banking core technolgy. Primary revenue is Interchange.
- WealthSimple: very experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Offerring investing advice and management open to small and beginning investors with low fees
- Katchen from WealthSimple points out that 50% of his employees are developers with an entrepreneur background.
- Payfirma points out they compete with legacy incumbents. At their core PayFirma is just a card acquirer, but then they just do it so much better than the incumbents.
- passion and working ‘insanely hard’ to provide the best experience for customers.
- “can we make peoples lives better” this is the koho filter for all decisions, and they use it every week for decisioning.
I note the audience is full of lawyers, banks, investment companies. There is clear interest in the space. Thankfully it was not another blockchain discussion.
WealthSimple is a big Canadian winner and rasing $32M in Canada is huge.
Nothing from the CPA discussion yesterday, except to expect more regula
