Name: Zac Sheffer of Elsen on data analysis and Boston's thriving fintech scene by BankNXT Fintech Podcast in tech
Duration: 23 min 39 s
Description: Shaun Weston talks to Zac Sheffer from Elsen about data analysis, machine learning, engineering, financial services and the startup scene in Boston.

tech

I'm joined this week by Lex Sokolin. He's a self-described futurist and entrepreneur focused on the next generation of financial services. He currently directs Fintech Strategy at Autonomous Research, a research firm for the financial sector. Previously, he led product design and corporate development as COO at Vanare, a wealth management platform built on roboadvisor DNA. He was founder and CEO of NestEgg, a roboadvisor that pioneered online wealth management in partnership with financial advisors,

We talk about the changes happening in the financial services space and the types of opportunities for incumbent and upstart financial firms willing to do the hard work. Lex's entrepreneurial story takes us through his four wave framework for the evolution of roboadvisors. Pay attention to what he says about the next stage for the industry and what it says about the ETF industry, as well.

Autonomous Research's Lex Sokolin on the 4 waves of roboadvisors

Umpqua Bank is the West Coast’s largest independent community bank, headquartered in Portland, Oregon. The bank calls its branches stores and designed them as inviting spaces for people to come in, read the paper, surf the Internet, and enjoy a cup of coffee. That approach of using the bank branch as a community hub has been incredibly successful. Umpqua Bank has grown from 5 locations and $140 million in assets in 1994, when it moved to this community design, to more than 330 stores and $24 billion in assets today.

Umpqua’s approach to banking is in many ways an answer to a simple question: what does it take to have a conversation about money? The bank is doing just that with a highly acclaimed podcast called Open Account. Hosted by Sunchin Pak, the podcast tackles tough issues like how divorced couples handle finances or, my personal favorite, an interview with Neil Gabler about the secret shame of the middle class.

Lani Hayward on Umpqua Bank's acclaimed podcast, Open Account

Christophe Williams (MBA '18) chats with Andy Rachleff, co-founder and CEO of Wealthfront. Andy discusses a wide range of topics in FinTech, investing, and how to grow tech companies. He goes in-depth on Wealthfront's competitive advantages in automated investing and how he approaches product/marketing strategy to grow sustainably. Also covered are Andy's background in venture capital, the process of founding Wealthfront, and how he sees disruptive innovation affecting financial service incumbents.

As a bonus, we have a special Wealthfront sign-up link for our listeners. To get your first 15,000 dollars managed for free, sign up using:
http://www.wealthfront.com/whartonfintech

Andy Rachleff is Wealthfront's co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. He serves as a member of the board of trustees and vice chairman of the endowment investment committee for University of Pennsylvania and as a member of the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on technology entrepreneurship. Prior to Wealthfront, Andy co-founded and was general partner of Benchmark Capital, where he was responsible for investing in a number of successful companies including Equinix, Juniper Networks, and Opsware. He also spent ten years as a general partner with Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre (MPAE). Andy earned his BS from University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Andy Rachleff, Co-founder and CEO, Wealthfront

This week's guest on the podcast is Nako Mbelle, who runs global recruitment boutique, Fintech Recruiters (www.fintechrecruiters.com), serving the financial technology market. She works with FinTech 100 clients in the US, Canada, France, Germany, the UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

I invited Nako on to the show to talk about how top companies are identifying and hiring top talent in the fintech, and even more specific, the cryptocurrency market. We discuss what motivates employees in the space and the type of packages firms are putting together to lure in recruits.

You can get this episode of the podcast, as well as 150 previous episodes in our archive, at our website, Tearsheet.co. If you get value out of these episodes, please take a minute to rate us on iTunes. Doing so, helps other people find us. We're also available on SoundCloud.

Also, if you're not signed up for our newsletter, subscribe now. 10,000 industry professionals read our Tearsheet newsletter every week to explore the impact technology is having on the financial services industry.

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller. If you want to drill deeper into the topics we discuss weekly here on the show, you're going to want to attend our upcoming event, Tearsheet Money. We'll be convening June 5th in New York City to hear about the state of the art in fintech and read some of the industry tea leaves with talks from senior executives at firms like JP Morgan, BlackRock, Silicon Valley Bank, Umpqua Bank, HSBC, Citizens and American Express. I'm excited — I hope you'll join us. 

Go to www.tearsheet.co/events (http://www.tearsheet.co/events) to learn more and register.

Fintech recruiter Nako Mbelle: 'Fintech skillsets in demand right now are pretty exotic'

Shaun Weston talks to Zac Sheffer from Elsen about data analysis, machine learning, engineering, financial services and the startup scene in Boston.

Zac Sheffer of Elsen on data analysis and Boston's thriving fintech scene

This episode of the Data Show marks our 100th episode. This podcast stemmed out of video interviews conducted at O’Reilly’s 2014 Foo Camp. We had a collection of friends who were key members of the data science and big data communities on hand and we decided to record short conversations with them. We originally conceived of using those initial conversations to be the basis of a regular series of video interviews. The logistics of studio interviews proved too complicated, but those Foo Camp conversations got us thinking about starting a podcast, and the Data Show was born.

To mark this milestone, my colleague Paco Nathan, co-chair of Jupytercon, turned the tables on me and asked me questions about previous Data Show episodes. In particular, we examined the evolution of key topics covered in this podcast: data science and machine learning, data engineering and architecture, AI, and the impact of each of these areas on businesses and companies. I’m proud of how this show has reached so many people across the world, and I’m looking forward to sharing more conversations in the future.

The Evolution of Data Science, Data Engineering, and AI

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Francesca Lazzeri, an AI and machine learning scientist at Microsoft, and her colleague Jaya Mathew, a senior data scientist at Microsoft. We conducted a couple of surveys this year—“How Companies Are Putting AI to Work Through Deep Learning” and “The State of Machine Learning Adoption in the Enterprise”—and we found that while many companies are still in the early stages of machine learning adoption, there’s considerable interest in moving forward with projects in the near future. Lazzeri and Mathew spend a considerable amount of time interacting with companies that are beginning to use machine learning and have experiences that span many different industries and applications. I wanted to learn some of the processes and tools they use when they assist companies in beginning their machine learning journeys.

Lessons Learned While Helping Enterprises Adopt Machine Learning

Welcome to our podcast! The BankNXT mission is to provide insight and thought leadership to people working in or around financial technology and financial services, otherwise know as fintech and finserv.

Zac Sheffer of Elsen on data analysis and Boston's thriving fintech scene

BankNXT Fintech Podcast

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