1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Nicholas Fok, General Partner, Erez Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Nick, let’s do another use case or another company that you’ve invested in.

Nicholas Fok: Sure. Another one is a FinTech with not really that much of an AI angle. It’s more to do with earned wage access.

Sramana Mitra: Your firm specialization is to a large extent on FinTech? You have very good FinTech case studies.

Nicholas Fok: We do have a specialization for FinTech. We’ve energy, real estate, and Med, and my background has been in finance as well. I’ve been in various roles for quant finance and managing portfolio.

Sramana Mitra: The one that you’re talking about earned wages, this competes with EarnIn and those kinds of companies. Is that what you’re talking about?

Nicholas Fok: Yes, it does. The angle is that they look for more of a community-based or credit union angle. If you look at the credit unions and the community, they don’t have IT support and big resources, right? So, they’re looking to build a solution.

Sramana Mitra: So, this is a build solution service offered by the credit unions to their members.

Nicholas Fok: Yes, that’s our angle. It’s a buy versus build solution, right? It’s called Clockout. They offer earned wage access to these institutions where they don’t have the budget to create these solutions. If you have went to a credit union or a community bank, they’re quite outdated. It’s 2025, but the user interface is horribly out of date, right? A lot of the times, the portal is just not nice. It’s not fully integrated, you don’t have a lot of payments. You can’t set up automated payments. Sometimes you can but then the credit cards are not interconnected with your bank, your account, and your credit union.

Clockout enables earned wage access for the customers of these local, regional banks and credit unions. These are also the types of customers that may need this and it can also reduce the dependency on payday loans or things that are much more expensive.

Sramana Mitra: Much more expensive and kind of shark like, right?

Nicholas Fok: While there’s not like a huge AI angle here, we like it.

Sramana Mitra: But it’s a great FinTech story.

Nicholas Fok: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Well, the way I look at it is – not everything has to be AI. AI is kind of built into how companies are being built right now. Software is being developed with AI copilots, and that’s kind of becoming a given. There’s a lot of AI utilization in marketing and sales in all kinds of functions and in customer support for sure.

The core value propositions of FinTech are still really interesting core value propositions, whether the ones that you’ve just discussed, whether it’s payments, cross-border payments on WhatsApp or payday access to earned wage. These are excellent FinTech value propositions.

AI first is not the only way to pitch a company because that may not be the core value proposition that you are bringing to the table.

All these other categories, whether it’s PropTech or FinTech or HealthTech, they all exist, they all are open still, and there are lots of unsolved problems in all of those areas.

Nicholas Fok: Yes. I totally agree. I think whether that’s AI native or AI, what’s key is what is the pain point. It’s to get at the real problem and why the company should be AI native in the first place. Does AI do better than other solutions at whatever pain point you’re trying to solve. That’s key. A lot of times there might already be solutions that are pretty good. So, what is that next level that AI can really enhance that other solutions can’t? I think that’s a challenge too.

Sramana Mitra: That’s been a great conversation. Let’s look at some of the companies that are here and see what they are doing and what can we learn from them.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Nicholas Fok, General Partner, Erez Capital
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