Kenscoff 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: fintech
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 […]
Innovation Teams and Innovation Culture
In a sense, life is simpler in a startup — you have an idea, you select a team, you get some money to start, build the product, launch, and try to make money from customers that love your product. If you fail at any of those steps, you learn and start over. The innovation culture […]
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. […]
The Bicycle Test
I am at Money2020 this week, meeting in person with hundreds of colleagues from all over the world, out of the 6000 attendees. We all use phones and Skype and GoToMeeting and so on, and still, there is no comparison with face-to-face encounters. Meeting and talking with everyone through scheduled Skype calls would have taken […]