Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Luvleen Sidhu, President of BankMobile (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model? Are you acquiring customers on behalf of banks or are you acquiring customers on behalf of yourselves?

Luvleen Sidhu: We are acquiring customers on behalf of ourselves.We have two strategies. The first is a direct to consumer one that is pursued through PR, marketing and word of mouth. The second is a B2B2C strategy, where we collaborate with companies and institutions that have an employee or a customer base that they would like to provide access to financial services to and we become the bank they partner with. We sometimes co-brand. Let me give you an example.

We have partnered with 800 colleges and universities around the country. We are solving a pain point for them. These

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Luvleen Sidhu, President of BankMobile (Part 1)

This interview is an interesting window into how financial technology is addressing specific niches within the banking sector.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and BankMobile.

Luvleen Sidhu: I’m the Co-Founder and President of BankMobile. BankMobile is the largest and fastest-growing digital bank that serves the underserved and low middle income Americans and has a strong overlap with millennials as well.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of lending are we talking about? Is it peer-to-peer? >>>

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: Yossi Peretz, CEO of Stox (Part 1)

We’re seeing a plethora of blockchain applications and in the TLFT series, will be bringing you more case studies to show you how entrepreneurs are thinking about the technology. Stox is one such that mediates crowdsourced predictions.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Stox.

Yossi Peretz: I’m the CEO of Stox. For the last 15 years, I’ve been in many managerial roles in financial companies. I’m a true technology and cryptocurrency enthusiast. I’ve been working on leading products and services. I have played a role in the FinTech >>>

Roundtable Recap: October 26 – From FinTech to SportsTech

We spoke with three interesting entrepreneurs today across various sectors of tech.

Investable Benchmarks
First, David Kreinces from Thousand Oaks, California, pitched Investable Benchmarks, a FinTech company with specific technology to manage ETF portfolios using proven techniques in use by big firms like Bridgewater and Blackstone. David wants to make this approach affordable.

CricClubs
Then Ganesh Nallapareddy from Ashburn, Virginia, pitched CricClubs, a cricket league management technology company that is already doing ~$100k in revenue.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Hakan Nordfjell, Senior VP of eBanking and eCommerce at Gemalto (Part 1)

In this wide-ranging discussion, perhaps the most thought-provoking question is the one about data and who owns it.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Gemalto to our audience.

Hakan Nordfjell: I’m responsible for the Digital Banking segment within Gemalto. Gemalto is a digital security company based in Amsterdam. >>>