[Music] Welcome to mentoring mindset featuring mass fintech hub. Mass fintech hub brings the fintech ecosystem together to make magic happen. Let's get started. [Music] In this video, I'm going to give you a overview of fintech and give you some the opportunities that are happening in the Massachusetts ecosystem right now. Okay. So, I love Willy Wonka. I'm a big big Willy Wonka fan. You know, we have such so much time and so little to see. And I really mean this, you know, reverse that because we got a lot we're going to cover very quickly. So, take your time, listen and learn. So, I'll give a little introduction to myself, not not too deep, but uh more of an overview. We'll get into radio like what is fintech and I'll explain that and then we'll go into an overview of what matt what's happening at mass fintech hub. So let's see here. So hey I'm a professor. I taught at WPI. I I I'm an adjunct in other schools too. I I talked to a lot of uh schools helping with their fintech programs. And so you're going to get a perspective of Professor Sonnie aka Rob. Next, I worked in industry for 31 years. So you're I'm going to give you that real world experience, things I've experienced um working in the industry and then also um outside of academia, but I'm going to hit it real world. I'm a basketball referee. I love the rules, right? So, you know, watch watch yourself. I might call a travel on you, right? And and so I'll give you that perspective, too, so you know the rules of the game. So you can really understand fintech. I love my ball. I play ball. I still play ball. You know, this old bones of mine still work. So I'm I'm still shooting. I got the best mid-range jumper you'll probably ever see. Uh three, I'm good. Don't get me wrong. I'm good, but much better at the mid-range. I'm old school 80s shooter, but I'm a baller and I'm a big Boston sports fan. So, uh, you might see a little of that in there, too. And last but not least, I'm a Disney freak. I love my Disney. I have an annual pass. I've had it for about six years now. I actually have a pass to Universal, also. So, I love getting to my Disney. And my my kids and and especially my wife and I, now that my kids are out of the house and off the payroll, we go to Disney all the time. I think in this last year, we've been eight times. So, we're having a blast. So, I'm going to bring that all together. You're going to get all these different perspectives and to talk about fintech. Hopefully, it helps. The first question, you know, that I uh I I I always ask like what is fintech? And I get all different views. Even professors from different disciplines really don't know what fintech is. Some people have a very narrow view. You might be like the cat on the on the left and you're like, "Of course I know what it is. What do you Yeah, of course I know what it is. So, don't bother me with that question. You get, you know, you get the dog in the middle like, uh, what do you mean, fintech? I'm not sure. And then you get the dog on the right. Yeah, I I know what that is. Let me tell you. Excited to do it. So, let's go into that right now. So, there's all different levels of understanding of fintech. So, why is fintech so hard to define? Well, here's my take on that. A lot of it has to understanding financial terms and maybe even instruments and how the stuff is moves and everything and that's people get confused, right? A lot of people don't really understand finance or or accounting, right? The basis of all of it, right? The accounting of the books and the balance sheet and the income statement. So, and I think this cartoon does a great job and we're in good shape. No one understands our financial statement, right? So, no one really understands finance except the finance people, right? And even there, they probably just know their their own specific area. Next, you put the tech in there. You got the Fin, you got the tech. Now, the technical, there's so many technical terms that get people frustrated, right? So, you got spam, you have, you know, blockchain, you have all sorts of terms that, you know, what's people hear the word AI, but do they really understand what it means and what's the capabilities? Right? So, there's so many tech terms. You put all these finance terms that people don't understand, then you smash them together with all the tech terms and no one really understands it fully. So, that's what we're going to go through a little bit, trying to help you and give you a a great view. So, what is fintech? Hey, let's let's ask our great buddy JG GPT. Let's see what Let's see what JBT it's it's a nice overview. It hits some good really good points, but it's so much broader than this, right? It's not just blockchain and crypto solutions and and revolutionizing the fintech industry. It's so much more than that. Now, let's ask our buddy Rob Sonnie. That's me if you didn't know. This is one of my takes. I got two takes. This my first one, right? Fintech is creating frictionless finance. You want it to be smooth and frictionless. Think of all the challenges people have understanding finance, seeing finance, predicting finance, getting the data for finance, transacting payments or whatever it is, movement of currencies, uh understanding what currencies are in different countries, international, how does the economics fit into it? Right? You want to make so that's easy for the lay person to really understand. in in a fint tech world making it frictionless obviously with technology to do that. So that's a really fundamental. You want to take the friction out of moving or understanding or presenting or or whatever it is about finance. And my last one, and I and I think it's the most important one, fintech is fin. It's in every single industry whether they like it or not. Everyone works in a fintech company. There's either a little or a lot going on with fintech depending on where you are. Of course, it's in the finance industry. Of course, it's in other areas, too. But it's in all industries. And I and I go through this little spin of some of the examples of fintech to get you thinking broader. Fintech has been life. It's in every single industry and and can impact every single discipline because it's not just multiddiscipline, it's transdisipline. So, I know this is an eye chart. I just put this up here to show you that, you know, there are phases that have happened and they've and fintech has been going on since 1950, right? They've been moving money digitally, right? They've been, you know, showing money digitally. You can see grew up. I mean, I I I was born in 19, you know, 65, but you could see in the 80s I started to see some fintech, right? And it was early, you know, uh, kind of clunky fintech, but it was fintech and it was the best we had at that time. and all we knew. We thought it was amazing. You can see the steady progression right for fintech 10, 20, 30, and now we're into another level, especially when web 3 comes onto the internet where the whole internet is riding on blockchain. So everything is trustless and and all that goodness, right? and and with the metaverse and and moving money and just having really frictionless finance where it knows via AI what we want to buy when we want to buy it and we don't even have to tell whatever app or uh or robot or whatever it is they just know because they know our preferences they know how we like it they know how much money we have we they know we can afford it right all secure so you know fintech 40 is coming in your lifetime and you're going to love So first, right, I mean when you say fintech, the typical first reaction is Bitcoin, blockchain, FTX, all that's, you know, in the papers, you know, it's the evil empire. Oh, everyone's so up in arms in it. Some people love it, some people hate it. But that's what people go first when they hear fintech. It's all about the cryptocurrencies. Now, don't get me wrong, cryptocurrencies are involved in fintech. It absolutely is. And blockchain is different than the actual currency should it rides on it. Blockchain is just a distributed ledger that is all encrypted that you can trust and it's immutable and auditable and to to make sure you know where things are happening, right? So that's a broad description of it. It's much cheaper than that. So but fintech is so much more than that. But everyone goes that way that they they think that's all you're working on. If you say if you're a fintech major or you're working in fintech, they'll jump right to that one first. Most people will, but we know it's much more, right? So, I'm going to go fintech and personal finance. So, I taught personal finance. I think it's a great example to show fintech at its best, right? Because with with personal finance, it's personal to you. So, you need data on you to make the right decisions from a personal finance standpoint. It depends how old you are. Depends on what your goals are in life. What do you want to do with your money? What do you want to save for? If you have children, what do your children want to do? How do you save for that? Where do you live? What part of the country? What part of the world? Everything costs differently. There's different taxes. All that. That's so much data and experts you have to talk with to figure that out. So, I'm just highlight a few applications, right? So you got things you've seen on TV. You got a rocket mortgage, right? To really make it frictionless so you can get a mortgage really fast and easy so you can buy a house, right? So that's a great way of frictionless finance, right? Prosper on. That's to help people learn and understand how to save and budget and also to help them um do that too. Not just training, but give them connections to it. So Prosperon's a fintech startup. Chime has to do with um you know saving money and and and transacting money too and and and helping you track all that for yourself too. You probably heard of those. Now Croy is a startup that came from a WPI um student. So and and I think it's great and it stands for college return on investment. So Croy, so that is there and and the and the and the concept was why is it so hard for people when they try to go to college to know the true value and payback of of that school? It depends on what major you're in, depends on what school you go to, depends how long you're going to be there, depends so what's that payback and what's the best economical choice for you. It pulls all that data together and then displays it to probably the parents or it could be financial advisors so you have the best college education for so you minimize your debt and how you fund and invest in yourself the most efficient way. So that really takes in accounts a lot of the pieces we just talked about, but also looking across all universities, all that data and are there scholarship opportunities for that that you might not know about. It's so hard to talk to so many people, figure out what scholarships this will help you with your fingertips to make figuring out what college is the best investment for a your your son or daughter, but also for yourself. So to make it frictionless, so you don't have to do all the running around. So I thought that was a great example of frictionless finance also in the personal finance space. Okay, fintech and trading and investing. I um I I was at Fidelity for 20 23 years, right? So I worked in it and so they do fintech all day long, right? To help people in all areas of life, right? Especially in trading and investing to make that frictionless. And then after you trade it, what's the value of it? What are your earnings? What kind of taxes are you going to pay this year on the earnings that you just had? All right? And and what's deferred, what's not to help you plan for all that from a retirement standpoint so you're doing the right investing because investing, you might have short-term investments, you might have medium-term investments, you have long-term investments, right? So Fidelity can help you do that with the Fidelity tool, right? And that's the robo advising, right? So things can happen automatically for you too. It knowing your preference knows know know your risk levels. It can do the trading for you all for you automatically based on pre-risk levels and what you have told it that you're willing to do and how you want to do it and it will do that for you based on should you buy or sell. So very so robo advising is is big and Robin Hood of course I bet you all know about Robin Hood that really changed the landscape to offer robo advising and to democratize you know fractional shares so you don't have to spend so much you can you could buy a fractional share of a stock that maybe you couldn't afford if you in the old school to to buy a a whole share of something if it's a really expensive share. You can do fractional shares. So that helped easy trading for everybody. So that really changed the field which also impacted um in a great way all the big companies like Fidelity and Putinham and Franklin Templeton and and all that too to help to bring that to everybody. So fintech and trading investing of course that's a that's a big one. Okay, fintech and insurance. So here a couple startups here. We have Insurify helps you pick the right um uh the right insurance for you and knowing the pricing and they they they really make it easy to make that frictionless for everybody too. Roots automation is about robotic processing automation and using bots to help insurance company with insurance claims to make that frictionless. And the reason why I have in the in the in the lefth hand side, right, the cars today is a perfect example of where insure techch is going, right? Your car has cameras. It will have sensors. It will know if you're driving. Well, it already can. You know, there's already self-driving car. It's not, you know, totally out there everywhere, but it's going to be there. So, you'll be in your car and if you get in an accident in the future, once all the cars are like that, it knows who you are cuz you started the car up, you authenticated to the car, it knows it's your car, no one can start it unless you start it, right? Um, and so it also knows what insurance you have. And if you get in an accident, there's so many cameras on that on that camera on that car. And then when you hit, it will know who hit first, what angles they were coming. It will figureate figure out and triangulate and the other car has all the cameras. It will know if the driver where it got impacted, where it got hurt. It will already figure out what the insurance claim could be and very quickly even before the police come because it was an accident, if it was just a fender banner or what it was. And it will know if if you will know you if you're going to the hospital, it will already know all your medical information. It gets sent over to the hospital. So it knows you because if you're unconscious or you're impacted and because it's car accident, it will already have that that health data. So it knows you might have had a couple concussions already and you have another one or whatever medicine you're on. So that all friction. Everything's going to be done frictionlessly. So the claim could get done processed immediately even before the police comes. And and if you're injured, it'll probably know how bad you were injured. if you broke an arm or a leg or you hit your head because it has the cameras inside the car and it will send that information for the doctor so they can actually see what happened and what might have got hurt to make that more efficient too. So insure techch big part of fintech too and by the way I've uh collaborated with insurfy and roots automation and other insurance uh companies for insure techch type stuff. So it's always it's very cool area in my opinion. Okay, fintech and payments. This is probably the one that you all know really, really well. So, you got, you know, PayPal, right? It's been around for a while. Venmo, right? Venmo and payments, right? The that moving toast when you when you're at a restaurant and you're having a great time, you know, they have that frictionless, too. So, you don't have to even take out your credit card. You just, you know, you you uh if you have the Toast app, right, it it knows you get you get the uh the receipt. You just pay it. uh pick what um tip you want to do and boom, it's done, right? Awesome. And Flywire, that's more about payments for international students that are overseas, too, to make that easy from a movement standpoint. So, fintech and payments is huge. So, that's a big area of fintech. Now, fintech and sports, I mean, I think that's the best, right? So, you know, think about it, right? And um when I was at WPI, we did projects with the Woooxs and to make Polar Park frictionless from a finance standpoint. So Dr. Steinberg would talk to us and say what his vision is. His vision is that before when you buy that ticket to go to the Woo Soxs that it already knows and get you can get your parking. You can when you get there, it knows when you're going to get there at your seat. You have your favorite food already waiting for you. would already charge you. Make sure that you can stay in your seats so you can watch the game cuz that's what you're there for, right? And have a good time. And if you want to get up and take a walk and go see what it is, well, where's the easiest place to get an ice cream? So, it could tell you frictionlessly, okay, the the one with the lowest line over here. If you want soft serve, if you want hard ice cream, whatever it is, if you want a hot dog, here's what the lines are doing. So, you can time things correctly, too. Or have it delivered right to your seat, too. They don't even have to get up. And then you have the autonomous checkout that can happen too, right? Kiosk or checkout automatically just by all the cameras in there. It knows it's you because you have their app or it just knows it's you because of your facial face recognition. You go pick up a a hat, a jersey, a beer, um maybe not a beer, depends how old you are, right? A soda, some chips, whatever it is, whatever kind of food. and it'll you just walk out and it already knows who you are and it charge you your credit card properly. So fintech in sports is my nana and I want to even get bigger into that into the stats of of the players, right? If they're injured and and then they come back, how much money how does that impact uh the concession stands when someone comes back? What what's the impact of that? If is is that person uh a quarter second slower going to their right or going to the left? What is that? Right. So all that analysis could be done via AI with with all the video on on with AI on top of that too. So and monetizing that because th those are all all those players are big-time investments for that um for that sports franchise, right? So they want to make sure they maximize that to make it as efficient and frictionless as possible so they can get the most from their investment. Same thing on the other side too of of the player so they have the most lucrative income coming in, right? So there's there's so many ways that they could be helped from a sports standpoint with injuries and what can they do, what kind of contracts, it gets complicated fast. So I I think sports is awesome with fintech. That's like a marriage made in heaven in my opinion. I love I always love that. any analytics, how do you look at it? Could be the weather, you want to have that part of the sportsgate, whatever it is, right? So, and who the referees are, there's so many opportunities there from a fintech to monetize all that information. Okay, another great one is, you know, fintech and the biosciences, too. So, as an example, I think there should be so much more in this space. So, at WPI, they did projects with Mass General Brigham, right? And so M and some of the projects that they worked on, one was on efficiency of when people come into the emergency room to maximize nurses to maximize the weight for the patient also maximize the the queueing and the efficiency of the doctors, right? Because they get they they they're doing work to save people lives. So you want to make that as efficient as possible. Also, that saves money for the for the hospitals, which in turn will help people's insurance bills that they have to pay if they make it. And they maximize the uh queuing of it all, the cost of it all. And when you get in that accident, you you don't know what um like we talked about in the cars, you don't know what that's going to cost me, what's my deductible, right? All that data should be just flowing through. So, and I have 3x Genetics in it. That's a uh a startup that I invest in. And actually, it's a WPI graduate that um created this and it's all about understanding your genetics. Well, kind of goes back to the personal finance area. If you know that you had a a generic, you know, a genetics disease, wouldn't you want to know that? Some people say, "No, I don't want to know that." but from a cost efficiency and knowing what your how long you're going to live, which is a key thing to figure out your your personal finance. Am I going to live to be 20? Am I going to live to be, you know, 120? So, they they the the technology that they're doing is to pick out the the the one piece of DNA, this long string. They pick it out to see if you have a propensity for a certain type of disease. One, they can help with a medicine standpoint, too. So then they can come up with cures and do synthetic um uh uh tests on that once they know what it is too. That's another level of biosciences and fintech because that's all that's big money, right? And and efficiency and get drugs better and quicker. But if you know your own genetics, you can make much more higher quality decisions knowing where you're going to go in your life and preventatively what you need to do, what kind of money you need to spend to do that happen, what type of services do you need so you can plan appropriately. If you don't know if that's going to hit you until you're 50, but you're 18 right now, you might want to know that so you can plan appropriately, save appropriately, invest appropriately, whatever it is. bringing that together and understanding all that and understanding your family history from a biosciences standpoint. So then you can help with the planning of your life. The more data the better. So you can see how I think fintech in the biosciences is a match made in heaven. I think it's a great match because everybody needs it because insurance costs are so high and it's getting higher every day. Fintech and social inclusion, right? So that kind of wraps everything we just talked about too. But people look at fintech is to just make money, right? Let's just make let's make the wealthy wealthier, right? But no, it all it's also it helps you saw from Robin Hood, right? You can do you can buy fractional shares. You can do fractional loans. You can do fractional investments and give out loans and you get the the interest instead of the bank, right? So, it's all about making it democracizing fintech, understanding it, learning it, making decisions instead of people that went to college that that that know finance, right? Everyone gets to know it and it helps you via AI or other tools to help educate you. And think about what the social inclusion part of that from a business standpoint, I think it's outstanding. You can make, you know, you can have one customer that that gives you revenue of a million dollars or you could have a million customers that give you $1, right? And if you have it frictionless, the costs will be so low it won't make a difference. So I know that's pie in the sky, but but it's it's big, right? So an example at WPI, we we stood up the Fab Lab, fintech, AI, and blockchain lab for social good. And it wasn't crypto blockchain. It was for supply chain. It was for so had to be for social good, right? And help that. So you can track all that. If you have lettuce coming off the and and it has ecoli coming off the farm into what truck into the the um into the supermarket into your house, so they can quickly know, okay, you're going to be impacted. Aion is a venture capital firm that is making a lot of money by investing in social inclusion fintech only around the world because it's so much needed right is a startup here in Massachusetts too and that's all about helping underprivileged communities the African-American community to help from an investing and education and a mentoring standpoint to all come together to help each And um so that's why it's so so always think of what's the social inclusion, what's the sustainability uh huge opportunities for fintech. No matter what type of fintech you're doing, keep that in mind because everybody plus it changes the game. Everyone thinks it's about making the wealthy wealthier and it's not. Sure, it does that, but it also helps the everybody have to help get better loans so you're not doing payday loaning and underprivileged communities. So, it there's a huge opportunity here. So, here's something that I like to call corporate fintech. So, as an example, you're in a business and I live this at Fidelity, you know, with their with their balancing income statement. And so, you got a general ledger. Great. Right. There's cost centers, accounts, income statement, right? Balance sheet, right? It's all part of the general ledger. All the accounts, the ins and outs, the debits and credits are happening every single second in a in a business, right? Then you have hierarchy data. So you have hierarchies. Fidelity, we had thousands of hierarchies, right? That could be what what are the funds? What are the business units? cost center rolls up to a subdivision to a division to a um to a business unit up to the higher level company, right? It c it could be funds of funds that roll up to it. It could be all sorts of things, but there are thousands of hierarchies. It also could be on the systems side where you have an application will roll into a product, a product will roll into a product line, product line will roll into a business unit, a business unit, you know, rolls into, you know, the the the general ledger too. So having all those hierarchies in place, if you get cost down to that base level, good things can happen. And hierarchies are huge from a data standpoint, that reporting consistency, so people don't roll up the data incorrectly. So they're the reporting on the base level stuff correctly, but then when they roll it up, everyone's get this different numbers. Hierarchies are the answer for that. So corporate data, it's in the general ledger sits there. No one really sees it except for finance and accounting people um and maybe some senior managers once in a while on a on a PowerPoint presentation. So but that data is there and it's rich and there's and there's a lot of activity happening that creates that in a business. So we got that. So that's the foundation of what I'm talking about for corporate fintech. So now let's talk about let's talk about NIT right as an example. So you have projects, you have programs, another type of roll up, right? Projects roll into programs. A project could roll into multiple programs also. So you have all that attribution with the name and the who's the sponsoring of this project or program. What applications are being used there partially or or or 100%. What how do they roll into it? And again, you have cost center and account. You have that tie back to the general ledger, right? It all comes back costs in a company all come back to the general ledger whether you'll understand it or not it does. So then you have IT services right you have desktops network phones right video usage storage right and again all those costs are getting captured as they happen from a cost center and account standpoint and of course there's many more fields on every single one of these too. So then you have time card entry, right? Like an IT at Fidelity, we enter the times, what projects are we working on, right? So we can get that cost, right? So you have the hours, you know, who worked on it. They know the activity I was doing. Was I doing development or was I doing management or was I um doing design or architecture or whatever it is. So it knows that because I they know who I am. They know what activity I said I'm doing for this project. I could do very different activities depending on where I work in the firm, but it has that all captured. cost center and accounts there too. Like it's always Kai's back, right? Because it's real money happening for everything that happens there. And you got your vendor, you get your purchase orders, you get your accounts payable. Those are all happening too to also support um projects and support and maintenance and break fix and all that goodness, right? So that's just a some of the stuff that's going on there. So you have all those costs. Awesome. So now you take all those costs and you do activity based costing and drive those costs with drivers to get it down to a cost object. So then you can report on what your company wants to report on and you know it ties to your to your income statement because it's all ties because it's a cost center and account. So you can tie it right back to the the formal statements that are going for your taxes and what they're showing all the shareholders to what is happening in the field and in this case it right so you it goes into central costing there's daily weekly monthly processing that happens many allocations project driven costs some not some driven by because of space you're in that should be charged too especially if it's in an IT space you're using uh whiteboards whatever it is right the cleaning of carpet, the the lighting, the heating, the air conditioning, all that cost. Everything should be driven that to cost. So then you actionable. So you have direct cost and you have indirect cost and you have fixed and you have variable costs, but they're all getting driven properly to a cost object that operationally people doing the work can understand this costs this and this is what's happening directly and indirectly all around that the cost that we're consuming doing this application or this product line or whatever it is. So great. So that all happens. Awesome. So that's the activity based costing part. So then here's where it gets really good too. So now you start having all this other data, non-financial data that gets tied to this, right? You have where's your application sitting? What servers on? Is it in the cloud? Is it on premises? Right? That that that grows up into the hierarchy of of application to product to product line, right? So who's the product manager? Who owns it from the business side? Who owns it from the tech side? Right? Are there are there modules in that like a workday? Do do different business units actually own the business functionality of that? So there could be multiple ones based on sub um applications within that large application. What server where are they? Where are they sitting? What do we you know there's costs getting collected for that for the general ledger but it's more about the functional what what things are getting moved and how is it all tie the HR we talked about people. People have a title. They have a level. They have a pay, right? You don't use your the actual pay for activity based costing. You roll it up by a group so people can't tell what you're getting paid. But you bring it together from a division or business unit standpoint of what the standard labor rate is based on all the salaries that are happening there. What function do they work for or that they they got hired for? Um and and all that from an HR perspective, right? Workforce details. That's a job that hasn't been filled yet, right? So, people come and go into jobs all the time, but a role is a role until it gets eliminated and you may not need it anymore for some reason. But that workforce, you can plan um and know what work what jobs are open and what costs you're not spending, but what also what what opportunities you missing because that role is not filled for whatever projects that they need that role for or whatever it is. It all ties and then you know from a person standpoint what building they knew what building I was in. I check in with my badge. They know where I am. This camera is at fidelity everywhere. They know where I'm going, right? They have all that building location data they have. They know where I sit. They know how much it costs in my office. They can allocate those costs of the projects I'm working on. So, it all comes together. And there's much more data, too. This is just a small smattering to show the power of non-financial data with financial data. You put those hooks together and then you get magic. And I'm going to give you one example here. I remember um from a uh a CIO asks because we do so much agile development and you want to be working closely together and and getting things done. How he he actually asked how fragmented fragmented are our all our product teams? So then you get into a mix. I they said okay let's go ask all the product managers and we'll find that out and we'll come back to you. I said whoa whoa we got all that data. I go, I can pull that together. I'll pull that together for not just this business unit, but I can do it for the whole company because I was in corporate IT and I had access to all that. And I worked at HR systems and I worked in strategy and planning and I was in the finance systems supporting the system that I'm about to talk about. Right? So it was non- finance systems coupled with finance systems. So then I could go through and ripple through with certain rules. Some things are shared services. So those aren't really directly part of a product because they work on all products like architecture or something like that, right? Um so then um so and and so we had different rules of what what time is coming in. we could do the cost where they are where they sit where's the customer of that product sit and where does the it sit and is there fragmentation there and they use that still to today and they could take a look at because then they made a rule okay if you have if you're in more than four different locations like that could be Ireland or India um Westlake uh Boston right if you're in more I think it was three then we're fragmented and we got to do something better so we're not have our people all over the place. Some have six, seven locations, which that cuts down from an efficiency standpoint. And you can see what the costs are cuz all the costs roll into this. So it just shows the power. Every company has data flowing through their system, operational data and financial data. And if you tag that properly and then drive the data that can't be tagged properly with the right drivers, it could be square footage, could be hours, right? that carry come along with you so you can charge the right cost so you can get a different view of your business not from a legal standpoint but from an operational efficiency standpoint and every company should be doing this and I can actually tell if a company or an academic university understands their cost just because of the deep knowledge that I got to go through and create at Fidelity. So there you go. That's corporate that's fintech corporate I data and there's fintech tools that help that right Oracle financial snowflake from getting datas and data lakes and all the all the great um um capabilities of that for especially with AI and everything fin core that's for smaller companies so they can get um into their data to understand how to increase customers or decrease costs or where where the where the op the opportunities are for that company. So fin goes in standard feed and then they they they have all the analytics ready for you. So that's a fintech startup too and an plan has to also look at from a planning perspective from a and um um to to to look at the cost and the planning and and how you going to you know project out and all those types of things. So Anoplan's a fintech tool to help that that finance people love. So there you go. So that's a picture of corporate fintech. And just to also show you how deep and wide fintech is and this is really just purely define fintech. Every company is a fintech company. Either a little or a lot. And because if you don't know your finances and you don't know your tech, you're dead. I don't care if you're a landscaping company. There's always a little bit of fintech. and or you should use be using fintech so you can optimize your customer satisfaction, increase revenue, decrease cost, all that goodness. So, you need that data. It's all about data. Okay, let's go into mass hub a little bit. So, I got a QR code that'll bring you right to the site, you know. So, take a look at that. Pause this. Take a picture of it. Jump on there and look at all the great things. Hey, there's a lot going on in Mass Fentech Hub. Now the real uniqueness of master techhub is that about six years ago it actually was u a little more than five almost almost six years it was in January of uh 2019 right before covid hit and it was about bringing together the full ecosystem and it was 20 institutions and there were four academic institutions it was MIT UMass Amherst um uh Brandeise and WPI. So those were the four and I got to represent WPI. So I was on the ground floor. The other 16 were big financial firms. Fidelity was there, Patnham was there. Um other ones were there. Um we had uh government was there. Mass tech collaborative was there. The the secret the economic secretary was one of our chairs. Mass Mutual was there. uh uh uh CEO um of United States for Mass Mutual was um there Mike Fanning and we also had startups and venture capital. So we had the whole ecosystem there. So it was great great learning, great collaboration and we and then so we were focused on making Massachusetts the fintech capital of the world and that was back when Governor Baker was the governor of Massachusetts. He had the idea that uh along with the economic secretary at that time even before who was running this was Jay Ash. He was the housing and economic secretary. They had the idea why aren't we number one in the world for fintech. We're number three in the United States number five in the world. And for um for internationally you have London and Singapore. They they're they're up there in the top five. and then California, Silicon Valley area um beats us right now and also New York and then us right in Massachusetts. So why aren't we number one? We have the best academic in the world. We have the the best um financial institutions in the world. We have the best professors and students in the world. We have great venture capital in in the world. Why aren't we right number one in the world in fintech? So that's the goal and we're doing it in a collaborative way that no one else is doing the way we're doing it along with government and and public and private institutions coming together to make this all happen. So very unique and very fun in my opinion because I get to to uh to help in all this. So let's talk about a little bit. So I mean it's really about bringing that ecosystem together. Industry startups, you know, the public sector students, right? Here's some quotes. I'm actually in one of the quotes on this one. I didn't make this slide by the way. Um investors like how do bringing this together? Why is it so powerful and and to get people excited about it? And so that's what this is all about. And that's what Mass Tech Hub will do for you. And I'm going to take it another notch deeper right now. So there's three main work streams. the work stream that I get to work with with great people. I'm actually um I right currently I'm the lead of the talent and culture and diversity work stream and it's all about you know how are we going to do this well it's about the students it's about academia right so we have and we have to get them deeply connected into the into the industry side of it all so that's what my big focus has always been because I came from industry I worked for 31 years and then a professor for 5 years and now I'm still I'm still in the mix helping universities be be able to create this stuff and create and and and build it for students so they can get be ready for industry and be ready to really make it happen in fintech. So we have fintech career fair. We we're reimagining that now. We're making it more networking. You get jobs and you get to talk to professionals and um um you and we'll have a panel and we'll have workshops. So, it's more of a we're calling it a uh career advisory and networking summit, not just about jobs, but jobs is a big part. That's why you'd want to go as a student, right? So, we're doing career fairs too across um uh in New England. We're doing AC we um with because we we partner with URI um and and other schools too. We do boot camps too to also that's pure education. We'll bring in industry. We'll bring in government. We'll do panels. We'll have guest speakers. We'll do workshops there at different universities and all universities can come. So, it's great learning for the students. They get to team up with um WPI students can team up with UMass Amherst and MIT and Harvard and all these school. We get about 25 different schools, our events. And then we also have a mentoring program. We keep that pretty tight. We just we do that in the fall. And we have uh um our our biggest one yet we just did it um last fall was we had 50 pairs of professionals. Could be startups, could be IT people, could be finance people. Depends on what your goals are as as a mentee. And we had freshman to PhD students in as a mentee working with mentors. So very very great learning, great um um experience. uh uh for all everyone involved, mentors and mentees, right? So, there's a lot going on here and use that go to that QR code I showed before. Go register, get on the newsletter. We have events happening all the time. Boston Fintech Week is big. Um they usually do it at the Boston Fed in the fall. Um and then we'll have events there like the one that's happening just coming up in this fall. We're going to do a mass fintech hub career summit then that one at the Boston Fed um and it'll be uh about three hours all the networking and learning and connecting and loading up your LinkedIn on both sides on the industry loading up with the students and students loading up with industry. So it's just really about great networking and learning if you really want to learn about fintech and and across the other work streams too because they have work streams for um for startups and getting startups connected to investors and also getting startups and venture capital uh connected with uh financial institutions. So you can see this is kind of an eye chart but you can see this is just a point in time it's growing every single day. how many mentoring programs we've done, how many uh fintech forums, how many angel and education groups, and you can all do this if you're a student. It's free for all students. And if you're a company's a member, um then you can do it. But it's a great learning experience at all levels across Massachusetts. That's what's going to make us great is bringing us all together, collaborating together, figuring this out together because it takes a village to make fintech happen cuz it's not just multi-disipline, it's transdisipline in every single discipline. So, here's a little plug for a podcast I have now. It's called What the Heck Fintech? And so, you can you can get it on Spotify, Apple, YouTube. This QR code will bring to the YouTube side of it. And it's about something you're never going to read in the textbook, something you're not going to probably read in the paper. Um, it's a conversation I'm having with government people, deans of business schools that are focused on fintech, students, um, CEOs, IT people. It's I'm hitting the full gamut because my network is so deep. And I always say it's my fantastic fintech friends. So, if you want to learn more or if you're a professor and you want your class to learn more, put this into your syllabus. I think it's going to help you. I'm doing it from a pure learning perspective. So people that don't understand um an industry, don't understand fintech can see and open their eyes that fintech is fin life and have students really understand that the opportunities for for you in fintech are endless and it just keep growing. And then from I created a bunch of videos, things that I've talked about when I was in industry that I talked about when I was a professor and I shared it with the mentoring program that I talked about at the Mass Fent hub. So these are there's a bunch of videos there. It'll help you with your resume and what industry is looking for. It's not the typical view of it all. Has a lot of it has to do with networking too and how to show your personal brand. I have a personal branding video, an entrepreneurial mindset video, a teamwork video. How do you how do you be a great teammate and a great leader in diversified teams? And um yeah, so uh there's a lot of mentoring stuff too and I'll be adding to that as it goes along. But that's QR code and that's unlisted. You can't search and find that. So the only way you can get it is if you have um the the link which is from that QR code to get to it. So enjoy those too and have some fun and you'll see uh and uh um I'll probably be adding this video on to that from a fintech overview standpoint. Yeah. So that's it. That's I know it was a lot. I apologize for that. But you can you can hopefully you played it at at one and a half times speed. If you're playing me at two times speed is I'm I talk kind of fast so that might be a little too much. connect with if you want to learn more, talk about more, help you get connected with more either from an industry standpoint or an academic standpoint or if you're a dean of a business school and you want to start getting deep into fintech, reach out to me. I can help with that. Um, so and that's the QR code to my LinkedIn. Let's get connected. Let's have some Finn fun. And uh, remember fintech is Finn life. So, thanks everybody. Talk to you later. [Music] Thank you for listening to mentoring mindset featuring mass fintech hub. Massechhub brings the full fintech ecosystem to your fingertips. And to get connected with the fintech leaders of the world, go to massfinthub.com and look at the events and all the great people you can meet so you can have fintech fun. [Music]