Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeremy Almond, CEO of PayStand (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: My question also is, what is the value proposition versus direct deposit?

Jeremy Almond: In the US, you have effectively three ways to get paid if you’re a business. All three of these are systems that were built before the internet. The first way is paper check. As consumers, we don’t use them anymore.

The second is through direct deposit. That system is also built before the internet. It has many days of delay. It doesn’t connect into the financial system. It’s not automatically connected to ERP or other financial systems. It’s prone to fraud and compliance issues.

The third way is credit cards. Credit cards are probably the most problematic. What we do is we take all of the advantages of a modern >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeremy Almond, CEO of PayStand (Part 1)

The B2B digital payment space is changing. Listen to Jeremy discuss the developments.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as PayStand.

Jeremy Almond: I’m the Founder and CEO of a company called PayStand. PayStand is a B2B digital payment network. What Venmo does for consumers, we do for commercial transactions. We believe that there is a huge transformation that’s going on in the commercial side of financial services. We’re bringing about change in three clear ways. We call it no paper, no fees, and no monopoly.

Sramana Mitra: When you say B2B payment, could you elaborate on how you’ve gone to market. What segments >>>

193rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Alexander Ross, Illuminate Financial

Alexander Ross, Founder at Illuminate Financial, talks about his firm’s FinTech investment thesis.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Yossi Peretz, CEO of Stox (Part 4)

Yossi Peretz: Blockchain is much more secure at the moment, but it has a lot to evolve. Even in the basic tools for developers, the concept itself is very advanced but the tools are just at the beginning. That’s part of the approach of sharing knowledge. Once people continuously share knowledge, this field will definitely keep evolving.

Part of the problem of explaining what Blockchain is that it’s not part of our lives. It’ll be like going back 30 to 40 years and explain what is the internet. If you’re not accustomed to it, it’s very hard to explain but the acceleration today is much faster than the fast. In one or two years, we’ll start seeing applications. It will start being part of day-to-day lives either in finance or >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Yossi Peretz, CEO of Stox (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are you learning? What are people interested in answering?

Yossi Peretz: It depends on the crowd. There’s no definite answer. Each country has its own trend. India is more about cricket. In general, sports is very popular. Since the core of our users are from the crypto community, definitely crypto-economics and crypto companies are very popular.

We learn about various trends and try to cross-reference between different fields. If somebody answers a question about politics, would he also be interested in football? There is no definite answer. For example, people were not interested in answering Oscar-related >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Yossi Peretz, CEO of Stox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The Blockchain is facilitating the transaction for both. The people who are offering the bounty are from the company that is looking for the prediction. The people who are making the predictions are consumers who want to participate in that kind of aprediction situation.

Yossi Peretz: Correct. Blockchain is only the infrastructure. It comes to solve the problem on a conventional prediction market. The prediction market has the problem of the middleman. Somebody has to operate. Once he operates the platform, he usually takes a portion of the fees. He takes a side usually. He has to provide liquidity. That’s why we turn to the Blockchain – to solve the problem of the conventional prediction market. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Gina Taylor Cotter, SVP & GM, Global Commercial Financing, American Express (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are any of the experiments in equity crowd financing for small businesses on your radar or are you exclusively focused on debt?

Gina Taylor Cotter: We’re not watching that too closely. What’s more interesting to me is seeing some of the bigger small business players evolve their model. You mentioned two – Kabbage and OnDeck. How are they evolving from being the lender to being a technology provider for others? I just wanted to make sure I mentioned the trend because I’m interested to see with all of those lenders, how are they thinking about making money over time? >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Gina Taylor Cotter, SVP & GM, Global Commercial Financing, American Express (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The data you draw off is limited to just your ecosystem.

Gina Taylor Cotter: That’s correct. If you want to talk about the merchant financing product that has been in the market since 2011, we do have an application process where were gather some of that additional information. The reason being that we will provide loans up to $2 million. We want to secure more information to validate the optimal loan amount that we should provide that business to help them do what they need to do.

In small business loans, we’re solving a very specific need. We want to be able to provide simple access to low dollar loans because we’ve identified in our research that businesses have a need for that. The process is too cumbersome with the bank >>>