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Episode 1

The first episode of “Casual and very sporadic FinTech talks”.

Speakers

Carl-Johan Larsson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/carljohanl/): A veteran in the FinTech industry since 2012 and an advisor specializing in scaling businesses, partner selection, and navigating legislation and technology.

Julia Prus (https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliaprus/): A marketing strategist with experience in crypto and FinTech, assisting companies with legal advice, technical development, and funding strategies.

Jordan Pasternak (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanpasternak/): Former finance professional turned FinTech business developer and current leader at a data analytics company, AltHub.

Alaine Bernadette Joson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alaine-joson/): Managing the backend operations of the webcast.

Summary

The transcript captures the inaugural episode of “Casual and Very Sporadic Fintech Talks,” a webcast hosted by Carl-Johan Larsson, Julia Prus, and Jordan Pasternak. The episode serves as both an introduction and a tech test for the series. The discussion revolves around current trends in the FinTech space, emphasizing topics such as the rising popularity of neobank apps, embedded finance, and the monetization of consumer data. The speakers also address consumer protection against scams, valuations of FinTech startups, and the increasing role of data analytics in shaping financial decisions. With a light-hearted yet insightful approach, the hosts outline their plans for future episodes, hinting at evolving formats and a lineup of notable guests.

Transcript

Carl: Hmm, that’s a bit weird, hmm, there we go, okay, hang on, so hi everybody, we are now live, but we have a glitch, because I can see me, I can see Jordan, but we can’t see Julia, so bear with me for one second while I see if I can fix that, so, 

Yep, I know what it is, Julia, I’m going to give you a new link, so let’s see, there we go, yeah, no, yeah, I’ll send it in, no, I can’t send it in Teams (https://teams.microsoft.com/), I’m going to send it in Google (https://www.google.com/) thingy, let me just see, so log out there and you’ll get a new one, there we go, and let’s see when Julia is back, there we go, hey, so

Julia: fancy, we are on air, huh

Carl: yep, we’re on air, and now I can see you on air as well, so perfect, now we are all here, so let’s get cracking, first technical glitch, great, and what are we doing here, let me give a summary, so this is kind of the first episode, it’s also a tech test of a webcast series, we call it casual and very sporadic fintech talks, we’re going to talk about fintech and a lot of other stuff that’s kind of related to fintech, but we do this because it’s fun and we have so much spare time, kidding aside, we kind of need to do something with all the knowledge we have accumulated over the years, now, these webcasts will change over time, we’re trying one format now, I can imagine that next week there’s going to be a new format, so just bear with us here, we will do these hopefully every Friday 10 eastern time, but since we have a whole lot of guests lined up, things will change, because, well, life is life, but that’s what we’re aiming for, we will publish this of course, websites, social media, blah blah blah, so everybody can find them, I actually think that’s enough when it comes to explaining why we are here, so why don’t we do this, so Alaine, can we have the next slide please, and let’s see if that works, not yet, not yet, okay, that doesn’t work, let me see, I’ll pull up my magic phone, so Alaine, do you hear me, cool, can we get slide two, let’s see if the tech works, yay, it does, so who are you, a generic question, why Julia, 

Julia: I mean, you decide to do that, so tell us like

Carl: okay

Julia:  who are you

Carl: I’ll start, so my name is Carl-Johan Larsson, I’m a software developer, but I don’t do that anymore, because I found that there are people that are way smarter than me, so now I take credit for their work, much easier, I’ve been in FinTech since, I don’t know, you know, 2012, something like that, doing a little bit of each, I have been with Velmie (https://www.velmie.com/) since 2014, and I mean, 2014 with one company, that’s like forever in this, that’s a long way, that’s a long way, that’s why I have gray hair, I do, so I advise people, people who want to either scale their business, or people who want to start their business, I advise them when it comes to, oh, finding partners, legislation, tech, basically everything in FinTech, and let’s break it there, because I have a tendency to do speeches, so let’s break there, and if someone’s interested, give me a call, and I can go on for an hour or so, but that should be enough, so Julia, you, why are you here? 

Julia:  Yeah, me, me, well, it’s, I actually started with Encrypter, and then I switched to the FinTech, now actually it’s all the same, kind of, it’s the same field, probably FinTech, we associate mostly with Fiat, than with Crypto, I’m not sure if my connection is, is clear, but anyways, so I started with Crypto, and I was doing marketing strategies for ICOs, so I was a marketing advisor, and then I joined Velmie (https://www.velmie.com/), and actually we’re doing the same for, for, for the companies, trying to figure what they need, if they need legal advice, if they need to build a tag, etc, so my expertise is pretty, let’s say, wide, so I understand how it works, what you need in order to start the FinTech, and what you do not need, how much money you need to raise, and how to make things happen, so that’s basically, I think, how I’m in the field, and in the FinTech area, and what I do, so.

Carl: Cool, thanks, oh, and you mentioned how much it costs, that’s actually next week’s talk, but we’re going to write that up and publish, so people know, that’s going to be fun.

Julia: That’s going to be fun  and yeah, I think this is the first question, usually, you know, when people come, like how much money they need in order to build whatever they want to build. 

Carl: Yep

Julia:  and yeah, so I think this is the key, and it’s pretty important. 

Carl: Cool, then we have Jordan. Jordan, why are you here? Who are you? 

Jordan: Hello, nice to see everyone. Yeah, similar to Carl, I’ve been in the FinTech space for, since 2014. Before that, I actually was a finance guy at a movie studio in New York, and before that, I actually studied classical music pretty seriously, so I have an eclectic.

Julia:  That’s a switch, Jordan, that’s a really, like, interesting switch from one to another. 

Jordan: Yeah, but in 2014, I took a business development role at an equity crowdfunding platform, so essentially, I was in charge of talking to startups and explaining these new regulations related to actually retail investors being able to invest in startups, and so this was the beginning of kind of what turned out to be platforms like AngelList (https://www.angellist.com/) and Republic (https://republic.com/), and then I started working for a software development job that actually focused on FinTech and all in the business development space, so I really gained exposure with the startup environment in New York and started networking around and met a lot of really interesting entrepreneurs, and so, yeah, here I am, and right now, I’m part of the leadership team of a data analytics and FinTech company called AltHub (https://althub.com/), and I’m looking forward to talking about that and also how data is related to the FinTech space and how it all comes together, so that’s me. 

Carl: Okay, cool. We also have Alaine, but she’s on mute, and you can’t see her. I’ve tried to convince her to have Alaine in here as well, but no luck so far. Let’s see next week. She’s managing the stream in the back end, so she’s with us as well. Now, today, we’re going to do two things. We have one segment that we call the news, then we have one segment that we call the hot topic. I actually think we’re going to shift moving forward for a number of reasons, but moving forward, it’s going to kind of be those two things, so we go through the news of the week and then one topic, guest, or whatever that might be, and I think then we can keep it kind of short, interesting, stuff like that. So, for now, we’re going to have the segment news, and bear with me, because now we’re going to do something here. Hang on, let’s see. 

News

U.S. Treasuries ticked higher as equity investors scurried for the sidelines after several tech companies slashed their outlooks and revived worries about a stalled economy at close of business yesterday. 

Carl: Hey, that was cool. I thought you were talking about the music or something. That was weird. Alaine, could you hear the marvelous news flash music? Let’s see. I don’t think we did that. Ah, no. Yeah, it was there. Perfect. Okay, cool. We’re back. So, Alaine, can we have the next slide, please? And to the audience, yes, we will have better graphics moving forward, but it is what it is. 

Okay, cool. Next slide again. What’s happening in the news? Well, so we have collected a couple of things here that we feel is interesting. It will be better structure moving forward, but for now, just, you know, kind of deal with it. Can we have the next slide again, Alaine? There we go. 

Okay, cool.

So, news from the U.K. For the first time, neobank apps have more downloads than the

traditional. Wow. When I saw that, very surprising. Why didn’t that happen eight years ago? 

Jordan: I mean..

Carl: Julia, could you believe that this is actually

Julia:  happening right now? 

Carl: Yeah, I thought that happened a long time ago, which shows maybe that 

Julia: it depends on where the data is coming from U.K., so it explains.

Carl: Yeah, I mean, but that’s kind of like a fancy way of calling people in the U.K. shit kickers. 

Julia: No, no, no. I remember, like, I wanted it was two years ago, they just talk about actually introducing the talking and digitalizing in general the system. Like, you know, it’s been two years, and everyone has already stepped into that direction, so that’s why it’s not that I’m trying to insult them. So, that’s why, like, this is just the idea that probably it’s kind of a little bit late. 

Jordan: That’s not surprising. I think probably U.S. data would be interesting to look at, too. But I also, you know, it’s probably a shift in demographics. Like, I know, you know, our parents probably wouldn’t trust a Challenger bank or Neo bank as much as a really, you know, embedded traditional organization. So, it’s just new generation coming to light and wanting a better experience, a technology experience, I think. And, yeah, we’re going to see that trend continue, for sure.

Carl: I think it’s very late.

Julia: It is late. It’s true. It is late. Yeah. So, that’s why I was thinking, like, from where the data is coming and, like, what they actually took as the key. So, probably if it’s coming from U.K., they are into traditional banking. Anyways, yeah, it is late. It’s surprisingly late. But it’s good, right? For us.

Carl: Yeah, yeah. I mean, good. I mean, sooner or later. Cool. Alaine, if we can have the next slide. Sorry, bear with me. I’m going to change something here. Why did I? There we go.

There we go. Now, it’s easier. So, Morgan Stanley (https://www.morganstanley.com/), they are starting this year using Wise as their, basically, remittance service for their business users when it comes to, I think it was cash flow management or whatever. It’s a sub-division of Morgan Stanley (https://www.morganstanley.com/). It doesn’t matter. I find this extremely interesting because it shows that more and more we’re talking about embedded finance, kind of. But we’ve seen this over the years that five, six years ago, all fintechs tried to do everything. But now everybody is specializing. And we see this more and more. And my take is, I think we will end up with an ecosystem of pinpoint services, very narrow, where different companies do them like really, really well, but few things. What do you think?

Jordan: Yeah, I’m kind of curious why Morgan Stanley (https://www.morganstanley.com/), why don’t they have the capabilities to do this type of thing, given their just humongous size? And it’s just interesting, these type of partnerships that are popping up. And I guess, yeah, to your point, companies that specialize in things like, I guess this is cross-border payments and do it really well, will win versus these generalized institutions. So yeah, I agree with you.

Carl: I think in this case, Wise (https://wise.com/) can probably do it much more cheaper. So Morgan Stanley (https://www.morganstanley.com/), which is old, tired, their internal structure makes the cost so high that it just makes sense to outsource. Julia, what do you think?

Julia: I mean, yeah, like as you just mentioned, outsourcing probably is just… It’s always coming from the financial part, right? If it’s cheaper to outsource, so they do that. 

Carl: That’s actually going to be fun because I’m pretty sure that Wise (https://wise.com/) can do it faster, cheaper, better in any way. But let’s see. Cool. Alaine, next one. There we go. And this is kind of tying in to the previous one. So this year, everyone in India who’s using WhatsApp (https://www.whatsapp.com/) can do WhatsApp payments. That’s a bit north of 500 million users. Now, I thought a year ago that when it comes to apps, and I’m talking apps like this now, that we were going to have more like, what do you call it? X apps, apps with everything, like in China.

And I know that when Elon bought Twitter (https://x.com/), that was the idea. It was going to be the blah, blah, blah. But considering that embedded everything is going well, maybe we’re not going to get that. Maybe we’re going to get like in other apps that you have WhatsApp payments. So if I create another social media app, that will have WhatsApp payments in there. So I rely on their rails. Thoughts?

Jordan: Yeah, I mean, my question is, why did it take so long for WhatsApp (https://www.whatsapp.com/) to integrate this for such a, I guess, the biggest market in the world now, surpassing China, right? The other, I guess, strategic idea is that obviously, you know, Meta (https://www.meta.com/) slash WhatsApp (https://www.whatsapp.com/), they just have a, an ecosystem that they can monetize. And so it just makes sense to keep including different services that, you know, they could leverage based on having so many users, especially in the emerging markets like India. So it makes sense.

Carl: I agree. But here’s the thing. So in Europe now, for what we call Facebook marketplace, something like that, now they’re letting eBay (https://www.ebay.com/) in because the European Union, their antitrust, blah, blah, blah, are basically telling Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/) that they’re a monopoly. And I think the fine was it 19 billion euro or something, if they didn’t break that up. So then we have the problem. Will WhatsApp payment be only WhatsApp payment? So that should you be able to add WhatsApp (https://www.whatsapp.com/) and whoever else is out there? Or will it be like it was in the past that you have, you know, you can have your car in any color as long as it’s black, like Ford said? I have no idea.

Jordan: Yeah, great question. Yeah, I’m trying to think of a kind of a use case that’s similar, where, like, Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/) uses their own services embedded. And then they offer other services that are not Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/), or Meta (https://www.meta.com/). Because they’re ordered to do so because otherwise, they just have a monopoly on on the services. But yeah, super interesting.

Carl: Yeah, well.

Julia: You’re getting coffee. Wow. Yeah, I have an order coffee button here. Sorry, just check one thing. Yeah. Okay, cool. Alaine, can we have the second slide, please? Sorry, not the second, the next one. Okay, this is one of my favorites. So do you know, how much Chime (https://www.chime.com/) was valued to, what, three years ago?

Julia: Tell us.

Carl: 25 billion. 25 billion smackaronis. Now, I think they’re going to IPO this year, if I’m not

Mistaken. You know what, how much they’re worth? 

Julia: Tell us.

Jordan: 60 billion.

Carl: Five.

Julia: We can’t see you clearly right now.

Jordan: Oh, there you go. Yeah.

Carl: Okay. Oh, yeah, right. Hang on. Let me. No, it’s, let me see. Hang on. Is it better now? 

Julia: Yeah, I think because you moved.

Carl: I don’t have autofocus. Yeah, I have to fire the person who bought my camera. That’s me, by the way. Okay. Second example, you know, Solaris (https://www.solarisgroup.com/), European, smaller company, but pinpoint value to 1.6 billion a couple of years ago. Today, zero. Now, I love that because I think a lot of things are very overvalued. And like the evaluation for Chime (https://www.chime.com/) was never, oh, we make so much money. It’s always, we hope we’re going to make so much money. So do you think that we’ll see more, let’s call them realistic evaluations or what do you think is going to happen? 

Julia: Jordan, you know the data. Come on.

Jordan: Yeah. I mean. What do you think? I guess Chime (https://www.chime.com/) has a lot of a boatload of users, right? And so investors are betting on that a capital injection like an IPO will turn on like revenue, a revenue game plan for Chime (https://www.chime.com/). And what that includes that could be a data monetization strategy, or it could be heavy marketing to take, like we were saying, taking customers away from entrenched players like the Morgan Stanley’s (https://www.morganstanley.com/) of the world. But yeah, I guess evaluations are always a bet on the future, not necessarily a evaluation of how it should be today. Although, you know, it depends on how bullish the market is a lot of the time.

Carl: So the thing is the way I, so, I mean, everyone have 2020 in hindsight, but if you look, if you go back in time and you’re trying to be a bit realistic, a lot of the FinTechs and other companies as well, of course, they were valued to the amounts were ridiculous and you could then do the calculation. Okay. So they’re going to have X amount of users and every user is worth blah, blah, blah.

The thing is what people don’t really realize is that it may be took Chime (https://www.chime.com/) great knowledge. They had a great team building out the tech, blah, blah, blah. But over the years that becomes easier and easier. There’s no thresholds for new players. So what cost you 2 billion to break into the market a couple of years ago is a hundred million today. And what took, you know, IQ a gazillion, then it’s easier now, like always. And that’s kind of missing. I think in all the evaluations that we see, which is also of course, why bigger companies tend to partner up with the governments to create their own regulations to keep startups out. But that’s more of an anarchist conversation. We can have had a couple of beers. 

Okay, cool. Alaine, can we have the next one please? Oh, now I have to do this because of the thingy there. There we go. Yeah, this is kind of interesting. So I, a lot of more consent orders are being issued in the U S and I think this is, of course, because of evolve synapse so that authorities are trying to be proactive, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now let’s take that. And Alaine, if we can have the next one here. So Zelle (https://www.zellepay.com/) of course owned by, well, all the big banks, they were, they’re getting sued because they feel sorry, the USFSBP or whatever it’s called consumer something, something feel that it’s too easy for users of sell to get ripped off.

Let’s tie that into the third news that came this week, Barclays (https://home.barclays). So Barclays (https://home.barclays) says that 20% of financial consumers last year, this is UK numbers. Of course we’re ripped off 20%. That tells me two things. Number one, a lot of people are getting ripped off and number two, it’s extremely easy. So, and this is one of the weird things. How come no FinTech have, let’s say a lock because it’s easy to construct this, but of course the consumers don’t want it. And we have the same thing in, you know, in, in Sweden where I’m sitting, of course, that every time, every day, there’s something in the news, you know, all got 89 years old, lost 2 million because somebody called her and asked for a pin code and she gave it to them. So why really my question, why do people want to be scammed? Because that’s the real question here, because we can actually prevent this, but. 

Julia: I think it’s just, it’s about the fear, like, sorry for cutting you, but it’s coming from there. Like, you know, they are actually, so that’s why they switched to digital banking is so late as well. Considering the data that you just shared from the very beginning, it’s about the fear, you

know, people are always kind of concerned about their funds. So if they got a call that something is wrong, they are trying to fix it as soon as possible. So probably it’s just, it’s just a fear.

Carl: But how difficult can it be to, so let’s say that I use bank A and then I have bank A implement business rules for different accounts. And I set up my business rules to be that every transfer of more than, let’s say thousands macaronis, there’s a seven day wait. That’s easy to do. And of course the big banks, the fintechs has, of course, asked the users what they want and apparently they don’t want that. So why don’t we want that? I mean, we as users, are we so addicted to being able to make major purchases just because we feel like them spur of the moment? I mean, if I want to go buy a new car, I can’t wait three days.

Jordan: Yeah. I mean, yes, I think the answer is yes, we are. We expect that if we want to make a decision, we’re allowed to do that, I guess, in a free market and buyer beware. And that you should be savvy, a savvy consumer and understand the pitfalls of what scams are. That being said, I mean, I do, you know, I talked earlier about our parents generation. You know, you could see how it would be easy to trick someone who isn’t as digitally native because they’re used to different ways of doing business. I mean, my parents, they pick up the phone and talk to the bank and talk to their financial advisor on the phone. I would never do that. I would log in. I would understand, you know, my assets and log out and I don’t need to talk to anyone about it. So this older generation of needing to talk to humans then opens up these opportunities for scammers to trick them.

Carl: So is it possible? So let’s say we start a new company and this company is called, I don’t know, financial lock. A user can log in, create a profile and that profile says, if I do, I don’t know, X, Y, Z, do this and then we can force sell and everybody else to buy that service. Otherwise we sue them.

I mean, of course from a legal point of view, you can’t do that, but could we do that with up the

masses? I see before me, pitchforks, you know, people standing out of the offices and say, we want protection. Buy this service from Julia, Jordan and Carl. It’s really cheap. It’s really amazing that nothing like that exists. 

Julia: Well, there is a room for that, right? 

Carl: Well, I mean, that goes into embedded as well. Just like I think soon we will have like embedded KYC that we have one KYC in the world. All of these are the same. I mean, people have been talking about that for a decade now. A lot here will be, but you know, could be for rules as well. Kind of off track there. Okay, cool. Hey, that’s the end of the news segment. And I think we have about a gazillion ideas how to make that one flow better. Now over to the next segment, and that is the hot topic slash guests, blah, blah, blah. So Alaine, if we can have the next slide.

Cool. There we go. Jordan, you’re up.

Jordan: Yes. So yeah, our discussion today around FinTech and around companies that do payments, that take in consumer information and supply you with services, that all comes with the ability for these companies to extract and understand who that consumer is. And, you know, these companies are, they have their core business, for sure, like Chime (https://www.chime.com/). But they also have a business where they’re able to understand their user base, understand their behavior, and sell those insights, whether or not they’re selling it internally, to then make their marketing channels more effective. Or if they’re selling that insight to other brands or marketing, you know, agencies, for them to understand how to get people to buy things more effectively. Or are they selling them to investors, such as hedge funds, professional investors, that want to understand how people are interacting with technology, want to understand how people are adopting different companies and different services, in order for them to bet on the future.

So all of this FinTech stuff, there’s a industry that’s percolating around the data that’s being accumulated through these companies. So Zelle (https://www.zellepay.com/), Venmo (https://venmo.com/), Robinhood(https://robinhood.com/), they all have consumer data, they all have transaction data. And that transaction data can give you insight on, you know, are people buying more from Walmart (https://www.walmart.com/) than Target (https://www.target.com/)? How is the holiday season going? How is, you know, all these sales going on Black Friday, compared to last year? Can we predict whether or not Walmart’s (https://www.walmart.com/) revenue is going to hit targets, investor targets, because we have this data from these firms that are essentially transaction data from these companies. So there’s a huge industry that’s percolating, that is really adjacent to the FinTech space. And that’s what alternative data is. It’s what we call exhaust data, from how companies do their businesses, and how do they operate.

And some examples are, you know, I talked about big, you know, transaction and FinTech companies like Zelle (https://www.zellepay.com/), and Robinhood (https://robinhood.com/), Venmo (https://venmo.com/), but also companies that focus on understanding consumer behavior, like SimilarWeb (https://www.similarweb.com/), they track website visits and interactions. So, you know, if you see that Walmart (https://www.walmart.com/) is getting more ecommerce traffic than Target, that could be an early indicator of whether or not Walmart’s doing better than Target (https://www.target.com/), or other types of indicators. So these things are percolating where it’s a race for better information. And with that information, you can monetize. And it’s super interesting. 

Carl: Data is, data is always interesting. What, let’s try to unwrap this from, like from a FinTech point of view. So there’s a crap load of data about everything out there. What I’m missing is this.

So I have, I have accounts in, what now, five or six, like, you know, Revolut (https://www.revolut.com/), Wise (https://wise.com/), Mercury (https://mercury.com/), blah, blah, blah. I go in there, I pay a bill, and I have never had a pop-up saying that, hey, this looks like an, I don’t know, auto insurance, whatever. And you’re overpaying, buy this instead. And to me, that’s like a no-brainer. Because they can measure that, they know who I am, they can buy more data from, you know, Google (https://www.google.com/) and all the other data brokers so that they can narrow that down. Nobody is capitalizing on it.

Julia: They really don’t care about that because it’s not like, I mean, it’s not the goal of just, you know, running this type of business, that’s why.

Carl: But so much money. I mean, if you have, I don’t know how many customers like Revolut (https://www.revolut.com/) have today, it’s like a billion or whatever. If they can sell insurance to one out of, you know, 100,000, and the only thing they need to do is add an iframe, it’s like, I don’t get it.

Jordan: They could be doing it without you knowing, where they actually sell your data to someone else, like an insurance company that then serves you either an email or an ad.

Carl: Yes.

Jordan: But I agree that there are smart ways for these companies to try to sell you services. I have to believe that’s on the roadmap for them.

Carl: I mean, I sure hope so. Because so for the past at least five years, I have been telling all the companies that I work with, when they say, okay, should we keep the data? Because that’s always the question in FinTech, when you rely on a third party, should we take that data, store that with us? Because there’s always problem depending on, you know, where do you store the data, legislation, blah, blah, blah. I always tell people, it’s going to cost you a bit more to do it, but store it because you might not use it today, but in the future, you will definitely use the data and it’s going to be valuable. So always store as much data as possible and try to, you know, make some sense of it.

But what kind of data points do you think Jordan is the most common one? So let’s say that I have a FinTech in that I of course have data about my users. And let’s say that I don’t know anything about data. They sign up. I know where they live. Maybe, I mean, they do KYC. So I kind of know some more. They of course have to say how much money they earn, blah, blah. I kind of know the basics. Where do I go to buy more data so that I can enhance my knowledge about my customers? And how can I then prove to, for example, a third party that I want to invite and sell for? How do I prove that I know this about my clients?

Jordan: Yeah. I mean, there are firms that focus on people data. So that could be like a ZoomInfo(https://www.zoominfo.com/) that has your professional history, your contact information, things about your demographics and income level that a lot of firms buy to what you were saying is enhance their database. But then there’s firms actually that focus on basically scraping LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/) to understand trends around how people are moving to different companies. And if you start to understand whether a company is growing based on their hiring patterns and their LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/) growth versus other companies that are shrinking, you could then make a informed decision around this company looks like they’re in trouble versus this company looks like they’re doing well. So there’s a lot of ways that you can enhance your data and then try to make sense of it and then try to have a business case around it. 

Carl: Hmm. I don’t know enough about data, but is there any way to, I mean, if you imagine all the data that Google (https://www.google.com/) collects, is there any way to use that and connect that somehow so that my system would know, for example, when any of my users are Googling for insurance company something like that? 

Jordan: That’s a tough one because there’s privacy regulations around PII or personal information that, but if someone opts in, like there’s certain things that people do and maybe we don’t know that we do is opt in to then be tracked like the cookie situation. 

Carl: Yeah, we do it all the time. 

Jordan: Where then you can understand people’s behavior that are your customers and then make an informed marketing decision around it.

Carl: So the best thing would be to, for a company like Wise (https://wise.com/), when I log in, I get a question, please install this bot on your phone, your laptop, have it activated always, and we can give you a better, I don’t know, price on insurance. No, but I get it, but there’s got to be an easier way to get that data so that we can enrich the data in each fintech. The big data that exists today, is that more focused on high income people or is it low income people?

Jordan: I think it skews high income because that’s where you can monetize better. But there’s also this trend around the average user, like the Robinhood (https://robinhood.com/) user or retail user. So people are trying to get different demographics, but I think the understanding how people are spending their money, if they have means, is probably more valuable at this point. Sure, but less people. So of course with automation, I don’t know which one’s more valuable.

Carl: Cool. Do you all feel like we’re done today?

Julia: Yeah. I mean, I think 45 minutes is more than enough for the session.

Carl: Yeah, it’s way too long. We have to cut that, of course. Yeah. Okay. A couple of lessons learned from today. We need to work on the designs a bit better because they suck, but we’ll do that. Otherwise, the tech seemed to work. 

Julia: Okay.

Carl: Kind of. It can always be better. I have to check the bit rate and packet losses, all of those things that I love to look at, but I’m sure that’s fine.

Julia: Yeah, because you started as software engineers then. You can’t really get rid of that. It’s there.

Carl: I remember the day when I quit. So I was working at, this is a long time ago, one of the biggest, they were bought by CGI (https://www.cgi.com/), the Canadian company later. So huge IT consultants. I was hired to solve defense back then. And I’m sitting there looking at my screen. Back then we had one screen. And I’m looking at the code and I go like, this is the most complex code I’ve ever seen. And I thought, man, I’m really doing great. We had an intern. He was like 19. He sat next to me. He looked at my screen and he said, oh, so you do blah, blah, blah. And I go like, like automatically, like, yeah, exactly. Then he left and I felt, fuck, I’m stupid. Like he saw it instantly and it was nothing to him. And he left. Then I decided I have to do something else because I’m just too dumb. 

Now I’m going to switch the scene to thank you for watching.

Julia: Let’s see.

Carl: Let’s see if I can’t remember if we added music. Okay. Julia, Jordan and Alaine, we don’t see you Alaine, but hi. Thank you so much, everybody. See you Monday again and let’s see what we do then to improve. And then next Friday, topic, what it was to start at FinTech. And to everyone listening who’s saying now, you can’t say that we know, but it’s going to be an interest. 

Julia: You don’t, guys, you don’t.

Carl: But that’s going to be fun. And, oh, we have a lot of cool guests lined up. Mark your calendar for February 7th. That’s a personal favorite of mine. The guests we’ll have there. Can’t say who it is yet, but we will. Yeah, that’s it. 

Jordan: Thank you, everyone. Have a great weekend.

Carl: Thanks, everyone. Have a good one. Bye-bye.

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