Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about the technology? Did you build all that?

Todd Schwartz: I do not believe in going out and blowing a bunch of equity to build this beautiful shiny technology system. In four years, it’s probably not going to be the best system with the rate of change. I used off-the-shelf solutions and did API integrations into them. I spent little on technology. I didn’t have a CTO for the first five years. They were all variable costs. I didn’t have to outlay a lot of equity. I was able to grow with a variable cost model.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Diversyfund CEO Craig Cecilio (Part 4)

Craig Cecilio: There are little things out there that are meant to protect people, but we’ve to figure out a way to be able to push that out there so people understand what they’re doing. It’s hard for us to tell people exactly, “Don’t invest here. That’s too much money.” That has to be in place.

People need to be educated. That’s the whole thing with crypto. Everyone wants to put money in thinking they can be a millionaire overnight. It’s really the educational component.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Diversyfund CEO Craig Cecilio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: As they’re getting educated, are they also getting investment recommendations that they can go and click on and sign up for?

Craig Cecilio: No investment advice. It’s a compliance thing. We can’t give investment advice. That’s another challenge. What can we say and what can’t we say from a compliance point of view? There has been a lot of oversight in the last year or two. As we move from this great bull run over the last 10-plus years to this bear market, the pendulum swings in oversight.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Diversyfund CEO Craig Cecilio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is there a level of financial wealth at which you are finding people? Are these people beginning to build wealth?

Craig Cecilio: That’s a great question. We’re talking about this. We overlapped the statistics on the population and how many are accredited and considered sophisticated. We dove into our community and saw what that is. It was almost identical. There are about 10% to 12% considered accredited. We overlap that with our percentage and it matches. I found that fascinating.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Diversyfund CEO Craig Cecilio (Part 1)

The Jobs Act has introduced the notion of democratization in investing. The issue is not as simple as it sounds. There are lots of gaps in doing this safely.

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

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Evgen Verzun, CEO of Kaizen Finance (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You work through incubators and accelerators.

Evgen Verzun: Yes. They come to us through the network. Somehow, they reach investors, right? These investors already have a successful experience with Kaizen. Investors refer us. Investors use us as crisis managers. It’s like, “We have a great project, but they have a huge problem.” We jump in and solve it. It’s tough, but we can do it very fast. It’s small pieces of the puzzle that we can put together.

Sramana Mitra: How many such customers do you have?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Evgen Verzun, CEO of Kaizen Finance (Part 1)

Ukrainian serial entrepreneur Evgen Verzun discusses the cesspool of Cyber Security problems within the Crypto space.

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

Thought Leader in Financial Technology: DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think this is a valuable discussion for people trying to understand equity crowdfunding. There need to be guard rails to protect consumers. I have seen what happened in the dot com crash. A lot of people got completely creamed out.

Rebecca Kacaba: Those were public stocks, generally en masse.

Sramana Mitra: Everything. There were public stocks and there were these friends and family investors. This is still happening. It’s not like it’s not happening still. People have dreams of making money off of startups.