Tag: venture capital

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.

 

The Fintech 5 with Frazer Anderson — Principal at Vestigo Ventures

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.

Frazer Anderson is a Principal at Boston-based, fintech-focused venture firm Vestigo Ventures. Vestigo targets initial investment in seed and series A companies. Frazer has a particular interest in how machine learning and SaaS are transforming financial services.

Frazer Anderson
Frazer Anderson

Question #1: Frazer, what fintech problem has your attention right now?

Problems abound! I’m not focused on any one specifically — looking to find excellent founders who want to automate and build analytics on top of existing workflows. If there is one area I would look though it would be platform plays in private markets.

#2: What trends in fintech are you most excited about?

It’s all about AI-driven automation and infrastructure or the API-ification of financial services.

#3: What are some of the biggest learnings from your career journey in fintech and/or entrepreneurship?

Early-stage investing is 100% about the team. Everything else you do as part of diligence ultimately gets back to information about how perceptive, relentless, networked, etc. the team you’re investing in is.

#4: Which fintech companies are you keeping an eye on right now?

SaaSWorks is automating the customer data file and bringing superpowers to the office of the CFO.

#5: Hot take! What are your thoughts on AI in the fintech industry?

Visibility and accuracy are the biggest things holding back the adoption curve. The stakes in financial services are too high to have hallucinations for a lot of tasks and enterprises are going to require visibility into how decisions are made. That’s why there is still plenty of room to build good old-fashioned infrastructure or lean in to super high-value tech-enabled services.

Bonus Question! If you could have coffee with any entrepreneur, who would it be?

Warren Buffet.

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!