Category: Boston Fintech Week

The Fintech 5 with Dev Worah — Senior Client Partner at Slalom

Posted on by Jim Smith

The Fintech 5 is a series of blog posts consisting of questions and answers designed to help you get to know the people in the Fintech Sandbox community.

Dev Worah is Senior Client Partner & Head, Capital Markets, Asset & Wealth Management at Slalom, a global consulting company. Dev has over 25 years of experience leading strategy and innovation initiatives. He works with both multinational firms and technology startups and is skilled at guiding financial services firms through business transformations.

Slalom is a sponsor of Fintech Sandbox and Boston Fintech Week.

Dev Worah of Slalom

#1. Dev, what can I do at a Slalom Element Lab?

At Slalom Element Lab, we offer a unique environment where our customers and technology partners can quite literally experience the future. It’s a hands-on space designed to push the boundaries of what’s possible with emerging technologies. We curate interactive experiences tailored to specific industry challenges, enabling our customers to explore and experiment with cutting-edge solutions in a tangible way. The Element Lab empowers customers to not just talk about innovation but to actively shape it. It’s where they can test-drive the latest technology in a high-powered environment, unleash their creativity, and build innovative energy into the DNA of their businesses.

For instance, the Slalom Element Lab can help a brokerage company reimagine, firsthand, how it interacts and services its clients, using technologies like agentic AI, extended reality (XR) and digital twins in context of its retail branches, contact centers, and digital service experiences. With just one half-day curated experience inside our lab, businesses can gain a deeper understanding into these emerging technologies, reset perceptions around what’s possible, and leave energized with a clear action plan on how best to start introducing new capabilities into their organizations.

#2. Which fintech problem or solution are you personally most interested in right now?

In wealth management, I’m passionate about scaling and democratizing access to sophisticated financial and estate planning. Traditionally, high-touch, concierge-level financial advice has been reserved for high-net-worth individuals, leaving most people to navigate complex financial decisions on their own. However, this creates a significant advice gap, hindering many people from reaching their financial goals.

The convergence of human-centered AI, open banking, and evolving regulatory frameworks offers a timely opportunity to bridge this gap and empower individuals to achieve their financial aspirations.

Imagine an AI-powered wealth management advisor—similar to a personal CFO—that understands your goals, preferences, and financial history. By analyzing data and interacting with you and your family, it provides personalized advice, proactive financial health monitoring, and goal-driven planning, all while collaborating closely with your trusted team of financial experts (e.g., attorneys, tax consultants). This digital advisor could leverage vertical LLMs trained on financial data and AI-driven platforms, becoming an always-available resource dedicated to your family’s financial well-being.

Both WealthTechs and incumbents are working toward this vision, and I’m excited to see how the space evolves over the next couple of years.

#3. Where are we in terms of AI adoption in financial services?

The financial services industry is undergoing a significant transformation driven by AI, though we are still in the early stages of adoption. As we enter 2025, forward-thinking firms are integrating AI solutions into their operations after seeing successful results from AI pilots. Our financial services customers are increasingly leveraging AI to boost efficiency, compliance, and customer experiences. Key applications include automating customer interactions with chatbots and virtual assistants, providing personalized financial advice, and streamlining processes like claims processing, mortgage approvals, and document analysis. AI also plays a crucial role in fraud detection, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance, ensuring security and adherence to evolving standards. In capital markets, AI is enhancing financial analysis, market insights, and algorithmic trading.

While there are challenges, such as data privacy, fairness in decision-making, and the integration of AI into legacy systems, organizations are overcoming these hurdles with a value-based prioritization approach. As these challenges are addressed, we can expect to see significant progress in AI adoption throughout the industry in 2025, unlocking even greater potential for innovation and growth.

#4. How has participation in Boston Fintech Week been beneficial to Slalom?

Slalom’s involvement over the last three years with Boston Fintech Week has delivered significant advantages, unearthing crucial insights into the latest industry trends, emerging technologies, and disruptive innovations impacting financial services. This frontline exposure not only enhances our understanding of where the industry is headed but also enables us to provide our clients with strategic guidance and innovative solutions that align with the rapidly evolving fintech landscape.

In fact, we have leveraged the Boston Fintech Week platform to invite our customers and key partners into more conversations, providing them with unique opportunities to explore potential solutions, connect with innovative startups, and gain a deeper understanding into the evolving fintech landscape. This has allowed us to continue to “bring more” for our customers, while also building a more vibrant fintech community in New England.

#5. What advice do you have for startups about partnering successfully with incumbent firms?

Startups often underestimate the complexity and priorities of enterprise-scale financial services firms. My advice is to focus on understanding the incumbent’s specific pain points and clearly demonstrate how your solution delivers measurable value. Find opportunities and quick wins to exemplify the value of your solution as early as possible. Adapt to their systems and regulatory environment, while approaching the partnership with flexibility and scalability in mind. Relationship-building is equally critical; take time to engage key stakeholders and align your goals with theirs. Finally, be prepared for a longer sales cycle—quick wins through pilots or proof of concepts can accelerate trust and open doors for deeper collaboration.

Bonus Question! What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read recently?

I’m not someone who usually reads books cover to cover, but here are two I’ve been diving into recently that have really stuck with me:

  1. The Power of Regret by Daniel Pink has been a game-changer for me. It’s given me a fresh way to think about regret and how to respond to it. I’m excited to put Pink’s ideas into practice—learning from regrets and using them as a springboard for personal and professional growth.
  2. Mindset by Carol Dweck is another fantastic read. Dweck does such a great job of explaining the power of a growth mindset and shares practical tips for embracing challenges, pushing through tough times, and turning failures into opportunities to learn. Her ideas are so helpful for work, relationships, leadership, and life in general.

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Fintech VC Trends & Predictions

Posted on by Jim Smith

We may have gotten ahead of ourselves when we named this Boston Fintech Week panel. VC funding for fintech startups isn’t exactly taking off like a rocket just yet, but there are bright spots.

How did we get here? Our all-star panel starts by looking back five years ago, when the zero-interest-rate environment, combined with FOMO, and COVID, and big piles of cash, led investors to miss-price risk. Tourists, without deep fintech experience, piled in.

But then interest rates rose, Silicon Valley Bank fell, Synapse went bankrupt, and we experienced a correction.

Have we returned to pricing risk appropriately? To building high-quality companies?  Is the table set for a recovery? These are just a few of the topics our panelists addressed. Plus:

  • Which fintech sector is harder to finance (even when the companies are doing well).
  • Why deposit stickiness won’t be going forward what it was in the past.
  • What early-stage investors are looking for. (Hint: authenticity and the ability to describe a credible go-to-market strategy.)
  • Why stablecoins are gaining traction.
  • Where investors see shocking levels of performance improvement coming from AI.

 

Don’t Miss Boston Fintech Week October 14 – 18!

Posted on by Jim Smith

It’s almost here!

Since 2017, Fintech Sandbox has organized Boston Fintech Week, putting on stage thought leaders from the world of fintech and financial services. You won’t want to miss the upcoming 7th edition.

More than 100 speakers representing organizations from across the industry will be there to discuss the trends and technologies disrupting finance. At least 2,000 people are expected to take in nearly 50 panels, roundtables, masterclasses, and fireside chats (not to mention the parties) at this annual four-day gathering.

Attendees represent an array of startups, incumbent financial institutions (banks, asset managers & insurance carriers), data providers, venture capitalists, angel investors, regulators, and universities. It’s a great place to get to know the Boston ecosystem. For entrepreneurs, it’s an opportunity to mingle with potential investors, partners, and customers.

The theme this year is Fintech at Full Throttle: The Rapid Advance of Innovation. We’ll be diving into the rapidly accelerating changes in our industry, technology, and world. Join us as we showcase the newest ideas, the latest advances in technology, and the fintech entrepreneurs who are pushing the pace of change.

Here are several sessions we’re particularly looking forward to during the Fintech Sandbox Innovation Forum, the two-day ticketed event October 16 & 17 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

The New Gold: Building Financial Services with the Data of the Future

Featuring:

  • Sears Merritt — Head of Enterprise Technology & Experience (CIO), MassMutual
  • Tim Baker — CEO, Blue-Sky Data Platform
  • Jorge Nario — Head of FCAT (Fidelity Center for Applied Technology), Fidelity Investments
  • Charles Bovaird — Senior Contributor, Forbes

Why I’m Optimistic: What Is on the Horizon for Technology & Innovation in Financial Services

Featuring: 

  • Sunil Sachdev — Head of Embedded Finance, Fiserv
  • Andrew Gallucci — Head of Regulatory Strategy, Circle
  • Kristen Castell — Managing Director, Center for Accelerating Financial Equity (CAFE)

Masters of Disaster – Insurtech in the Age of Rapid Technology Change

Featuring:

  • Tricia Abella — Senior Vice President – Investments Technology Program Leader, Global Atlantic Financial Group
  • Philip Edmundson — Managing Partner, Edmus Ventures
  • Eric Hanselman — Chief Analyst, S&P Global Market Intelligence

The community events are free to attend but you need to register for each event individually. Many sessions will sell out, so don’t delay. Here’s one you won’t want to miss.

The FinTech Palette: The Art of Navigating Innovation at Speed

Featuring:

  • Usama Fayyad — Executive Director, Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University & Chairman, Open Insights
  • Biju Kk — Head of Fintech Solutions, Fidelity Center for Applied Technology
  • Michelle Bonat — Chief AI Officer, AI Squared
  • Brian Clifford — Chief Data Officer, Amica

In addition, there’s a unique masterclass designed to introduce a new, game-changing cloud-based brokerage and financial services infrastructure platform to people who are technical leads, developers in the fintech space, and venture capital partners exploring new tools for portfolio companies. Register here for the The Greens: A Hands-On Workshop with FCAT’s Newest, Cloud-Based Financial Services Infrastructure Platform.

For the full schedule, FAQs, and registration pages look here: https://bostonfintechweek.org.

We hope to see you there!

The Fintech 5 with Abdul Abdirahman — Principal at F-Prime Capital

Posted on by Jim Smith

In an ongoing series of blog posts, we’d like to introduce you to some of the sponsors, partners, advocates, and entrepreneurs who make up the unique Fintech Sandbox community, and without whom our small team could not provide fintech startups with access to critical data and resources, entirely for free.

Next up is Abdul Abdirahman, a Principal with F-Prime Capital and an erstwhile Advocate for Fintech Sandbox. If you were at Boston Fintech Week in October, you may have seen Abdul demo and launch the newly revised F-Prime Fintech Index during a plenary session. His talk was entitled State of Fintech: F-Prime Capital Fintech Index Highlights.

Briefly, the F-Prime Fintech Index tracks the stock market performance of ~50 emerging and publicly traded financial technology companies, and allows for comparisons between individual companies as well as fintech subsectors such as payments, banking wealth management, insurance, and proptech.

Abdul Abdirahman — Investor of F-Prime Capital
Abdul Abdirahman

Question 1. Abdul, can you tell us about the intent behind the Fintech Index?

The F-Prime Fintech Index was launched as a way to track disruptive, publicly-traded fintech companies. The F-Prime Fintech Index serves as a benchmark for the development of this rapidly maturing sector and closely tracks the leading disruptors.

Q 2. Why is F-Prime Capital, a venture capital firm which invests in private companies at the earliest stages, tracking the performance of publicly traded fintech stocks?

At F-Prime Capital, we are thematic investors who spend a lot of time in the fintech space. We have been investing in this growing sector for more than a decade and, alongside our sister funds at Eight Roads, we have been fortunate to back some large and category-defining disruptors including Alibaba, Toast, Quovo/Plaid, Fireblocks, Flywire, and many more. As investors, we closely monitor public markets to inform our thinking across different fintech sub-categories and understand what potential exits might look like. This process often involves pulling revenue multiples, financial metrics, and other non-financial data. These data points — and the insights we compile in our newsletter and State of Fintech reports — can be useful to entrepreneurs, operators, and fellow investors who want a real-time window on the market.

Last year we went a step further and added vertical-specific benchmarks. These benchmarks go a level deeper than top-line metrics (such as revenue, growth rate, and multiples) and capture vital metrics that require digging into public and private reports. For example, if you are building in the payment space, wouldn’t it be great to see how take rates are trending, and which companies are garnering the highest take rates? The F-Prime Fintech Index now lets you do that — and much more.

Q 3. What should we know about the new Fintech Index functionality?

The new functionality on the Fintech Index includes:

  1. Company and sector comparison by revenue, growth, margin, multiple, and more,
  2. Adaptive visual multiples and benchmarks
  3. Head-to-head company comparisons
  4. Adaptive sector- and vertical-specific benchmarks
  5. Time series of historical metrics by sector and revenue growth

To learn more about how to use the new-look F-Prime Fintech Index, check out this brief video overview. Additionally, the October 2023 edition of our Fintech Prime Time newsletter demonstrates how we’re using these new tools in our own industry analysis.

Q. 4. What are the most interesting insights you’ve recently gleaned from the Index?

There are three fintech disruptors with market caps of $50B+, and they have very different revenue profiles. As a result, they garner very different multiples to get to the $50B+ valuation. Vertical SaaS company Shopify has revenues of $6.7B and an LTM revenue multiple of ~14x, whereas payment companies PayPal and Mercado Libre have LTM revenues of $29B and $13B respectively, along with LTM revenue multiples of 2.4x and 6x. Investors love a good SaaS + payments business, and Shopify delivers, 29% and 71%, respectively.

Q 5. Do you have any predictions for the state of fintech in 2024?

The overall climate for fintech in 2023 was “regulation on, risk off” with heightened scrutiny, rule-making, and enforcement by regulators. We will continue to see increased regulatory scrutiny in 2024. However, we also think the fintech correction in private markets will stabilize in the new year. Our full State of Fintech report will be launched soon — sign up for our fintech newsletter to gain access when we release it in February.

Bonus Q 1. Why did you choose to launch the revised Fintech Index during Boston Fintech Week?

As a Boston-based firm with a strong partnership with the Fintech Sandbox, we were happy to launch the new-look F-Prime Fintech Index at Boston Fintech Week. Boston has a great fintech community of founders, operators, investors, and other folks in the financial services ecosystem, and we know the Index has many fans among them. We received a lot of positive feedback on the changes, and always welcome suggestions from our Boston Fintech community.

Bonus Q 2. What impact do you think GenAI will have on wealth management?

Within fintech, one of our key investment areas is wealth and asset management. We think there are many opportunities for GenAI to have an impact in this arena, especially when it comes to how financial advisors work with their clients. In short, we believe GenAI will act more like a co-pilot than a driver for fully autonomous finance in the wealth management sector — at least in the short-to-medium term. If you’re interested, a recent edition of our fintech newsletter delved into this topic.

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If you are a fintech entrepreneur with an early-stage company and you could benefit from free access to data, cloud hosting, and a supportive community, please visit our website to learn more!

Key takeaways from Boston Fintech Week 2023

Posted on by Erin

Wow!

Another Boston Fintech Week is in the books.

Thank you to all who joined us last week, from October 10 -13, for the 6th edition! This year, we had more than 900 registrants from 17 countries and 28 U.S. states. There were 14 conference sessions, 34 community and sponsor events, and 100+ speakers. Attendees used our networking app to arrange more than 170 1:1 meetings in addition to the organic networking that occurred throughout the week.

Here are a few takeaways from our stage:

We’re all AI companies now (or will be shortly).

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There were nine sessions this year with “AI” in the title, and the topic came up in many more. It’s going to have broad impact on fintech, financial services, and society.

There are important issues for the industry to work on, including hallucinations, biases in training data, and the need for our companies to organize for effectiveness and to upskill our teams. 

Clearly, organizations that haven’t begun experimenting, testing, or implementing are behind. Luckily, there’s still time. While the hype cycle seems to be accelerating, we may still be a very long time from seeing generative AI fundamentally change the tech stack. As one long-tenured panel moderator observed, “GenAI in 2023 is what LotusNotes was in 1983.”

The end of the beginning for the downturn in fintech funding?

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We all know that funding is down for fintech startups and more firms are going belly up than we have seen in recent years. But it’s not as bad as it feels. There’s still capital available for companies with strong metrics and investors are competing for those rounds.

Still, the market has clearly changed. Even fast-growing companies aren’t growing as fast as they were two-to-three years ago, because they’ve reined in their spending and — at least of the B2B side — clients have cut back.

The changing landscape affects venture funds, too. Firms that raised funds in 2021 may still have plenty of dry powder. But those that invested the bulk of their funds at peak valuations will have trouble convincing LPs to back them again. This may be particularly tough (as things often are) for emerging managers.

Reducing friction remains a raison d’être for fintech entrepreneurs.

fintech-3

We heard it’s true of regulators, too. It’s one of the keys to creating a fair and inclusive world economy. Using technology to increase financial inclusion saves time, increases efficiency, and improves lives. 

Payments is a vertical that continues to attract attention. It’s no secret that the world’s largest economy is a laggard when it comes to instant payments. But that is beginning to change. The launch of FedNow gives a big push to RTP and the future state of payments in the U.S. We expect payment innovation to continue apace.

Biometrics move beyond Minority Report

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Digital identities are a key to the fast and fair provision of financial services, and indeed, the key to much of what we do on- and off-line. How verifiable credentials get captured, shared, and stored is rapidly evolving. Digital identity will play a critical role in KYC, AML, payments, cybersecurity, and in ensuring data privacy.

From facial recognition software to pay-by-palm, biometric solutions are moving to the forefront. But big questions remain regarding regulation, governance, and what we’re willing to tolerate as businesses — and as societies — in terms of both false negatives and false positives. Where you stand can depend on who you are and what you look like.