buy ivermectin europe We have recently announced our investment in IdentityMind Global, a software-as-a-service company that provides technology solutions for mitigation against financial crimes like identity fraud and money laundering. The problem of fraud and financial crime has always been with us, before computers and the internet. And as the financial system evolved, so has financial crime. In the age of e-commerce, with an […]
Tag: financial services
Why We (Sometimes) Invest
Our job at SBT Venture Capital is to invest in startups. To a novice, it sounds simple, until you realize there are thousands of startups, at various stages, and we need to narrow it down to a manageable list of teams that we can work with. I wrote recently about our filtering process, the “why […]
Why We Don’t Invest…
In our work at STB Venture Capital we see hundreds of financial technology (“fintech”) companies. We ask all companies to submit their startup profile through the Gust web site — our submission page is here. Most of the time, we have to reject a proposal because it does not fit our preferred profile – we […]
The Vanishing Custom Electronics or Why We Invested in Mobeewave
This will be a short blog post, as I have already blogged before about my thinking regarding investing in mobile payments and the concept of “software defined anything“. In summary, I believe that we will have less and less specialised hardware devices for payments, and the ubiquitous mobile phone will become the default form factor […]
Fintech Thoughts
Many years ago, I was working for a large Canadian bank, managing two very different development teams — one using C++ to build a derivatives trading system, and one of Cobol programmers maintaining the bank General Ledger application. While the culture clash was obvious to any observer, nothing reflected it better than the big poster […]
Persuasion and Gamification in Fintech
We don’t like to admit that we are easy manipulation targets — but we are. In his classic book, Prof. Robert Cialdini talks about five ways to influence people. In summary, we can be persuaded through (with some fintech examples): 1. Reciprocity – People tend to return a favor, therefore marketers love to give “free […]
Social Investing, or Why We Invested In eToro
In 1990 I was an academic in Romania, teaching control systems theory. And I was making $50 a month — enough for food and utilities. For a series of political and economic reasons, I left Romania to move to Canada, and things changed dramatically — pretty soon I was earning a lot more than $50/m. […]
Moven Moving Forward
I have said many times that competing with banks, trying to disrupt banking through new technologies and new business models has a small chance of success. My theory is that, while some incumbents may be slow and blind, I don’t think it is possible for all incumbents, all banks, the industry as a whole, to […]
Innotribe, Finovate, or Money2020?
This year I have attended four major FinTech conferences – Money2020, Finovate London and New York, and Sibos Innotribe. I have met with hundreds of startups, talked with maybe a thousand people. Some thoughts: All of them are growing – more companies, larger attendance – all in synch with the overall worldwide “boom” in fintech. […]
Magical Thinking?
Many things in life are quite difficult to understand, a long list that is getting shorter through scientific advances. But after thousands of years of living in a complex world that we mostly did/do not understand, we have developed various coping mechanisms, magical thinking being one of them. From Wikipedia, magical thinking “is the attribution […]