Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Research
SaaS eCommerce – A Comprehensive Guide & Best Platforms for Business
Jul 13, 2022
Ecommerce businesses have been around for so many years now, and ever since the pandemic hit the world, it has become more active and in demand. Even eCommerce platforms have evolved and are still developing with more advanced and high-tech strategies.
But with the increasing attention on eCommerce platforms, it is getting hard for some companies to handle the massive traffic they receive from consumers. And to solve that problem, they started to seek and utilize the software-as-a-service or also known as SaaS platforms.
What is SaaS in eCommerce?
An example of a cloud-based software licensing model known as SaaS eCommerce is one in which a service provider is responsible for managing the backend operations. Because of this, firms can reduce costs, shorten the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market, and effectively scale their operations.
Benefits of SaaS eCommerce
Here are some of the benefits that you can get using SaaS platforms for your eCommerce Business;
- It has infinite scalability. With Saas eCommerce platforms, it will allow the expansion storage of adopters and will add new functions that are on-demand.
- SaaS eCommerce is cost-efficient. It will help the platform companies to reduce their expenses on development, deployment, and even maintenance
- The maintenance will be much easier to handle. SaaS eCommerce platforms will take care of all the maintenance needed like software updates, fixing bugs, servers, and so on.
- It is universally compatible with other business systems. Most SaaS eCommerce platforms are compatible with business systems such as ERP, POS, and even 3PL.
- It is secured and PCI-compliant. All the big SaaS eCommerce platforms ensure the protection and security of the customers’ financial information.
When is it time to Switch to an eCommerce SaaS?
While software as a service (SaaS) eCommerce systems offer several benefits, this does not mean that every type of company can benefit from using them. SaaS is typically more popular among small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and startup companies because these types of businesses typically do neither have an established IT infrastructure nor a huge budget to construct the platform from the ground up.
In addition, startups and small to medium-sized businesses frequently need to rapidly scale up their data storage to accommodate growing traffic or capitalize on new business prospects. This is something that is much more difficult to accomplish using open-source or on-premise solutions.
SaaS platforms offer a limited level of customizability in comparison to other available options; nevertheless, many suppliers include many pre-built features as well as templates that can be quickly customized to meet a variety of corporate requirements.
Additionally, when retailers first begin their journey into e-commerce, they tend to experiment with the functionality of their web stores by either adding new features or changing the store's interface. This is something that can be accomplished much more easily when a SaaS platform is in place.
The Best Platforms for Business
Out of the total 4659 E-Commerce SaaS firms in the world, the following five are the most well-known;
1. Shopify
A company that helps businesses set up their online storefronts by providing them with cloud-based software solutions. It is a commerce platform that supports several channels that are tailored specifically for use by small and midsize enterprises.
It provides a high-quality online storefront, a payment solution that allows for the acceptance of credit cards, and an application called Shopify POS that powers retail sales. Its service offerings include tools for consumer involvement as well as payments, marketing, and shipping, among other things. The solution is made available to customers by the company on a subscription-only basis.
2. ShipRocket
AI and web-based automated solutions for e-commerce fulfillment are offered by this company. Its platform has a hardware data engine that helps a business choose a courier service, print shipping labels, and track orders from a single panel.
It makes it easy for businesses to handle shipping and returns. It has more features like managing orders, a shipment rate calculator, tracking orders, and more. It can be connected to online stores like Amazon and OpenCart. The company has solutions for policies that are based on subscriptions.
3. BigCommerce
SMB eCommerce builder. The complete SaaS for e-commerce management. The company helps SMBs develop an online storefront, including search, inventory, online payments, marketing, and SaaS Search Engine Optimization. Multi-channel selling, inventory control, and automated email marketing are included.
It monetizes through subscriptions. The company services over 60,000 stores in 100+ countries with 100+ app connections. The solution is for clothes & fashion, health & beauty, food & beverage, and more stores.
4. Ecwid
Ecwid is an e-commerce platform that allows users to add a fully-functional store to any existing website while maintaining the site's original layout. This functionality is useful for both individuals and businesses. It is possible to include it on any website, mobile site, or social network that is accessible online. Creating an online store with Ecwid is made easier because it is a freemium software as a service (SaaS) platform.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in 175 countries utilize Ecwid, which is available in 45 languages. It has exceeded 500,000 registered merchants in every region of the world.
See: Understanding The New V2P and P2V Metaverse Commerce Models
Any content management system (such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal), site builder (such as Yola, Wix, 1&1, or GoDaddy), social media site, or blog can be integrated with Ecwid. With over 300,000 monthly active users, Ecwid has established itself as the most popular store builder software available on Facebook.
5. Riskified
Riskified is an eCommerce solution for stopping payment fraud that is based on AI. It uses big data tools to track algorithms to give businesses information about payments that helps them decide whether or not to accept a transaction. It also uses techniques like behavior analytics, IP location data, proxy detection, linking orders, social media, devices, and more.
What’s the Best Platform?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of what is the best eCommerce platform. All SaaS eCommerce platforms and platforms that you host yourself have their pros and cons. If you can't decide between two options, you should look at your financial plan, timeframe, and technical resources.
More relevantly, you need to think about which solution will get you from A to B and give you a way to get to Z. Define your short-term and long-term goals to find a platform that should come in handy and that you won't quickly outgrow.
Conclusion
Developing a physical location for a business was traditionally considered to be equivalent to starting an online store. On-premises e-commerce store owners must not only contend with the ever-increasingly cutthroat nature of the industry they operate in but also keep up with the ever-increasingly complex nature of the upkeep and enhancement work that must be done.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Why RegTech is Essential to Regulate Innovation and What It Means for Policymakers?
WEF | Roslyn Doktor, Robb Henzi, Landry Signé | Jun 21, 2022
As a broader culture of innovation sweeps across business, culture and society, regulators with an eye on the future are harnessing the power of Regulatory Technology (RegTech) - a market projected to grow from $7.6bn in 2021 to $19.5bn by 2026 - to create the best possible regulatory outcomes for society.
So, what is RegTech exactly?
In our new report, Regulatory Technology for the 21st Century, with the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Agile Governance, we define RegTech as the “application of various new technological solutions that assist highly regulated industry stakeholders, including regulators, in setting, effectuating and meeting regulatory governance, reporting, compliance, and risk management obligation.”
See: RegTech: Powering the future of regulation
RegTech can help both the regulator and the highly regulated to minimize risk, improve outcomes, and lower costs. It helps connect “the dots” more quickly and automates tasks. It can also translate complex regulation into code. Applying technologies, like AI, blockchain, and cloud, responsibly to augment the ability of compliance teams can help both the regulated and regulator to do their job more effectively and collaboratively.
For the regulated, it strengthens compliance while enabling agility to anticipate and dynamically respond to changing regulatory needs. For the regulator, it enables more transparency as well as agility in modifying requirements to meet new risks more timely. The nature of the relationship changes from “set-and-forget” to iterative and user-centred regulation design.
Embrace new engagement models
First and foremost, regulators must be aware of and embrace new engagement models to power more innovative and agile regulatory processes and outcomes. This means a reinvention of how the private and public sectors engage around regulatory matters, evolving from a producer/consumer dynamic to one grounded in partnership, co-learning and multi-stakeholder consideration - similar to Suade Labs’ support from the EU and successful collaboration with the UK government.
Increasing data-driven decisions and creating new design models
A second set of mechanisms poised to power the future of RegTech are new design models that offer transformative toolkits for regulatory bodies. Embracing the idea of radical user centricity, a practice area most frequently applied to product and service design, can help align regulation development with more agile, iterative processes akin to those that enable new software development.
See: The FCA Hosted CryptoSprints in May and June 2022: Here are The Outputs
This means embracing a dynamic approach that welcomes experimentation and iteration, seen in certain regulatory sandboxes over the last few years, and one that embraces an “adapt-and-learn” mindset over “set it and forget it”.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Kraken Jun 2022 Report: Uphill Battle
Kraken Blog | Jul 7, 2022
Crypto markets remained bearish in June after May’s broad market sell off. All crypto sectors reported negative returns month-over-month; even the best performers posted losses exceeding -18%. Meme and metaverse coins performed only slightly better than ETH (-47%), privacy coins (-43%) and BTC (-40%).
Have the tides turned or will the uphill battle continue? In Kraken Intelligence’s latest Market Outlook Report, Uphill Battle, the team recaps June’s market action and looks ahead.
Losing ground
Historically speaking, June has tended to deliver positive returns for BTC. However, the leading cryptocurrency’s price fell by -38% this June to a 10-month low. Meanwhile, ETH’s price fell by -46% in June, as annualized volatility peaked to 122%, an 8-month high. Whale activity in BTC and ETH was relatively quiet as both the number of whales and their holdings decreased slightly.
See: EU agrees on landmark MiCA rules putting pressure on UK and US to regulation crypto assets too
DeFi’s top tokens reported major losses ranging between -5% and -47% month-over-month, as AAVE (-47%) and CRV (-47%) led to the downside. NFT market activity slowed down over the same period: average daily users, average transactions and average volumes fell by -4.8%, -0.1% and -68.7%, respectively.
Red candles piled up across most cryptoassets in June amid macroeconomic uncertainty and industry challenges. Early in the month, the World Bank slashed its global growth forecast to 2.9% against a backdrop of rising inflation, falling equity markets and sinking crypto prices. Crypto lender Celsius paused all withdrawals, swaps and transfers between accounts, citing “extreme market conditions.” Three Arrows Capital, a Singapore-based hedge fund, was subject to $400M in liquidations triggered by margin calls in the wake of cryptoassets’ steep decline.
Continue to the full article --> here
View the 13 page report --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Report: Targeted Update on Implementation of FATF’s Standards on Virtual Assets and VASPs
FATF | Jun 30, 2022
Paris, 30 June 2022 – FATF has produced a targeted update on implementation of its Standards on virtual assets (VAs) and virtual asset service providers (VASPs), with a focus on FATF’s Travel Rule. This report comes three years after FATF extended its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) measures to VAs and VASPs to prevent criminal and terrorist misuse of the sector.
See: Coinbase Implements KYC Travel Rule in the Netherlands
The report builds on the FATF’s previous two reviews on implementation by providing a short update on the latest country compliance with FATF’s Recommendation 15 and its Interpretative Note (R.15/INR.15). The report places a specific focus on FATF’s Travel Rule to respond to FATF’s June 2021 findings that countries and private sector face particular challenges in this area. Further, the report includes relevant emerging risks and market developments, including on Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and unhosted wallets.
The report finds a continued need for many countries to strengthen understanding of ML/TF risks of the VA and VASP sector, and to rapidly implement FATF’s R.15/INR.15 to mitigate such risks. In particular, FATF’s Travel Rule requires VASPs and other financial institutions to share relevant originator and beneficiary information alongside virtual asset transactions, therefore helping to prevent criminal and terrorist misuse. The report finds that jurisdictions have made only limited progress over the last year in implementing this requirement. Of the 98 jurisdictions that responded to FATF’s March 2022 survey, only 29 jurisdictions have passed relevant Travel Rule laws, and a small subset of these jurisdictions have started enforcement. This demonstrates an urgent need for jurisdictions to accelerate implementation and enforcement to mitigate criminal and terrorist misuse of virtual assets.
See: Updated FATF Virtual Asset and VASP Guidance includes DeFi for crypto service providers
FATF’s report highlights that there are now technological solutions available to facilitate Travel Rule compliance in practice, but private sector need to continue to increase interoperability between solutions and across jurisdictions, and to work towards full compliance.
On market developments and emerging ML/TF threats, the report highlights the continued need for the FATF to monitor the growth of, and illicit financing risks associated with, DeFi and NFTs markets and unhosted wallets.
Continue to the full article --> here
Download the 28 page PDF report --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Report: More Than Half of the World’s Unbanked Adults Live in Seven Economies
World Bank Group | Jul 5, 2022
The benefits of financial inclusion have spurred efforts to expand account ownership and productive usage. Since 2011, the Global Findex survey has documented growth—at times incremental and at times dramatic—in account ownership across more than 140 economies. The Global Findex 2021 survey was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic—a crisis that further mobilized financial inclusion efforts across the world. This and other factors have contributed to the following key findings:
- Worldwide, account ownership has reached 76 percent of adults—and 71 percent of adults in developing economies.
- Receiving payments into an account is a catalyst for using other financial services, such as relying on an account to save, borrow, and store money for cash management.
- Mobile money has become an important enabler of financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa—especially for women—as a driver of account ownership and of account usage through mobile payments, saving, and borrowing.
See: Board Diversity and Inclusion: 50-30 Challenge
- COVID-19 catalyzed growth in the use of digital payments.
- Despite promising growth in account ownership and use, only about half of adults in developing economies could access extra funds within 30 days if faced with an unexpected expense, and about half of adults were very worried about at least one area of financial stress.
- Governments, private employers, and financial service providers—including fintechs—could help expand financial access and usage among the unbanked by lowering barriers and improving infrastructure.
- Financially inexperienced users may not be able to benefit from account ownership if they do not understand how to use financial services in a way that optimizes benefits and avoids consumer protection risks.
Continue to the full article and visual charts --> here
Download the 225 page PDF report on financial inclusion and 2021 Global Findex Database --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Where Did Convoy Support Come From?
The Tyee | Christopher Cheung | Mar 15, 2022
Where did support for the Canada’s convoy protests come from?
Thanks to a data leak, we have a rough idea.
- The so-called “Freedom Convoy” began in B.C.’s Lower Mainland and traversed the country before converging in Ottawa on Jan. 29.
- The protests attracted people with a broad mix of views, including anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown and anti-government sentiments.
- At first, convoy organizers used the crowdfunding website GoFundMe to collect donations. But after police reports of violence by protesters in Ottawa, the website decided to stop hosting the cause.
- Organizers then migrated fundraising efforts to GiveSendGo, which describes itself as “The No. 1 Free Christian Fundraising Site.”
See: NCFA Response to FINTRAC’s ‘Knee Jerk’ Regulations Requiring Donation Crowdfunding Platforms to Register and Comply with AML/ATF Legislation
Leaked Data
GiveSendGo accepted donations from Feb. 1 to 10 before hackers illegally targeted the site and leaked donor data online. The hackers did not steal any donations.
- The leaked data contains donors’ full names, email addresses, postal codes, donation amounts, methods of payment and personal comments. It does not contain credit card information.
- Based on the postal codes, we are able to map where convoy donations came from and how much they gave. This analysis gives us a sense of where support for the convoy clustered in Canada and beyond.
Was there foreign interference?
- Almost $10 million was raised during the GiveSendGo campaign.
- While 51,666 Americans donated compared to 36,202 Canadians, Canadians donated more money.
See: Freedom Convoy Continues, Fundraiser Raises $542K in Bitcoin
Which province or territory gave the most?
- Populous Ontario garnered the most donations, with about 14,000 donors giving $1.6 million.
- In second place is B.C. Over 7,200 British Columbians gave about $909,000.
- Next is Alberta, where over 6,600 residents gave about $866,000.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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AI Learns in New Ways When it Explores Virtual Worlds
Quanta Magazine | Allison Whitten | Jun 24, 2022
Stephan Schmitz for Quanta Magazine
Smart beings learn by interacting with the world.... artificial intelligence researchers have adopted a similar strategy to teach their virtual agents new skills.
In 2009, a computer scientist then at Princeton University named Fei-Fei Li invented a data set that would change the history of artificial intelligence. Known as ImageNet, the data set included millions of labeled images that could train sophisticated machine-learning models to recognize something in a picture. The machines surpassed human recognition abilities in 2015. Soon after, Li began looking for what she called another of the “North Stars” that would give AI a different push toward true intelligence.
See: RBC Research: Preparing for Hyperdrive – Themes that will define our new future
She found inspiration by looking back in time over 530 million years to the Cambrian explosion, when numerous land-dwelling animal species appeared for the first time. An influential theory posits that the burst of new species was driven in part by the emergence of eyes that could see the world around them for the first time. Li realized that vision in animals never occurs by itself but instead is “deeply embedded in a holistic body that needs to move, navigate, survive, manipulate and change in the rapidly changing environment,” she said. “That’s why it was very natural for me to pivot towards a more active vision [for AI].”
Today, Li’s work focuses on AI agents that don’t simply accept static images from a data set but can move around and interact with their environments in simulations of three-dimensional virtual worlds.
This is the broad goal of a new field known as embodied AI, and Li’s not the only one embracing it. It overlaps with robotics, since robots can be the physical equivalent of embodied AI agents in the real world, and reinforcement learning — which has always trained an interactive agent to learn using long-term rewards as incentive. But Li and others think embodied AI could power a major shift from machines learning straightforward abilities, like recognizing images, to learning how to perform complex humanlike tasks with multiple steps, such as making an omelet.
Work in embodied AI today includes any agent that can probe and change its own environment.
“The meaning of embodiment is not the body itself, it is the holistic need and functionality of interacting and doing things with your environment,” said Li.
Watch: FFCON21 keynote: SophiaDAO
This interactivity gives agents a whole new — and in many cases, better — way of learning about the world. It’s the difference between observing a possible relationship between two objects and being the one to experiment and cause the relationship to happen yourself. Armed with this new understanding, the thinking goes, greater intelligence will follow. And with a suite of new virtual worlds up and running, embodied AI agents have already begun to deliver on this potential, making significant progress in their new environments.
The New Robotic Frontier
Robots are, inherently, embodied intelligence agents. By inhabiting some type of physical body in the real world, they represent the most extreme form of embodied AI agents. But many researchers are now finding that even these agents can benefit from training in virtual worlds.
“State-of-the-art algorithms [in robotics], like reinforcement learning and those types of things, usually require millions of iterations to learn something meaningful,” said Mottaghi. As a result, training real robots on difficult tasks can take years.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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