By the numbers: Women in STEM 
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
Report: Consolidation and the Changing Fintech Landscape
Shearman & Sterling, Rise by Barclays and S&P Global Markets Intelligence | Jul 21, 2021
The FinTech sector is going through a period of rapid consolidation that will shift the landscape for financial services in the US and around the world. We are excited to share with you a new report on M&A activity in the US FinTech sector that our FinTech Foundry team produced in partnership with Rise, created by Barclays and S&P Global Markets Intelligence. The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of FinTech deal activity, discuss its drivers and offer insights into how financial institutions, FinTechs and investors can prepare for transactions in the remainder of 2021 and 2022.
Some of the report highlights include:
- Data and analysis showing sustained growth and momentum in FinTech M&A, driven by changing consumer preferences that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic
- A review of the top 10 legal and regulatory issues for FinTech M&A transactions
- Highlights and trends from key vertical categories
- A closer look at the deal players who are driving M&A in the FinTech space
- A spotlight on the role of SPACs in the current wave of consolidation and acquisitions
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Download the 41 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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Influential economist Daron Acemoglu: Forward Thinking on technology and political economy
McKinsey Global Institute | Michael Chui and Anna Bernasek | Jul 14, 2021
The influential economist connects the dots between artificial intelligence, productivity, wages, and inequality, and how to counterbalance the impacts of automation.
In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, hosts Michael Chui and Anna Bernasek speak with Daron Acemoglu. Daron is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a coauthor (with James A. Robinson) of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, and the author of many influential academic papers. His research covers a range of topics, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics, and economics of networks.
Michael Chui: Can you state simply what was wrong about the way that economists thought about technology?
Daron Acemoglu: There are three interrelated things about it. One is actually its descriptive realism. And a good, rich model has to have close connection with the data. And if you look at the way that economists think about technology, it’s this latent variable that makes you just more productive. But very few technologies actually do that. Electricity didn’t make workers more productive. It made some functions in factories more feasible, and some few items more productive. A hammer doesn’t make you more productive in everything. It makes you just more productive in one single, simple task—hammering a nail.
See: Getting tangible about intangibles: The future of growth and productivity?
But the second is that it may well be that computers augment educated workers more than high school dropouts, so inequality can increase. But at the end you shouldn’t see the high school dropouts lose out. Their real wages shouldn’t decline. And the real wages of workers shouldn’t decline. But, in fact, one of the striking but very robust features of the last 40 years of economic development in the US and the UK has been that many groups, especially low-education or middle-education men, have actually seen their earnings fall, some groups by as much as 25 percent, in real terms, since 1980. Phenomenal. This isn’t the American dream. You can have productivity improvements—capital benefits, firms benefit, but workers, especially some types of workers, all workers overall can lose out in real terms.
And then third, it’s not just whether we’re going to increase the productivity of skilled workers versus unskilled workers, both of which benefit all of them since they are complementary. It’s more like, are we going to completely give up on unskilled workers? Are we going to try to replace them? Are we going to try to replace humans? Are we going to create new tasks for humans? How are you going to use the AI platform? All of these questions about the direction of technology become much more alive, and then also the productivity implications become much more interesting.
Michael Chui: It comes in different forms, but in 20 years, 60 percent of the jobs that will exist will be ones you’ve never heard of. And we’ve tried to uncover that, and it seems that that rate of change in occupations, and even tasks and activities, is quite a bit slower than that. What is your research saying?
Daron Acemoglu: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We haven’t done enough of that. We don’t have the same detailed data, but at a more ocular, statistics level, at high level in the 1920s and ’30s, it’s much faster. We do have many new tasks. It’s not like we don’t have any, but they are not enough, exactly. That is the imbalance that I’m talking about.
See: AI Will Transform 500 Million White-Collar Jobs In 5 Years; Silicon Valley Must Help
Michael Chui: Are we just not inventive enough to come up with new tasks? Or do we need universal basic income, because we’ve come up to such a pace?
Daron Acemoglu: That brings me to my second explanation. It’s not that we have this imbalance because we have suddenly found much better ways of doing automation, doing machines, doing algorithms. Perhaps it is that we are inefficiently biasing our direction of technology. You can think that perhaps the possibilities offered to us haven’t changed, but because of who’s making the decisions, incentives, institutions, aspirations, we have gone more and more in an inefficient direction of doing too much automation and not enough of the other things.
Let me give you one example. I don’t think it’s the most important example, but let me give you one example to explain what I mean. Our tax system, if you look at today, if a company buys a machine to displace workers, it will pay about a 5 percent tax on the spending on that machine. If instead you hire the workers, you’ll pay something like 25 percent to 30 percent tax.
The US tax system provides an enormous subsidy to firms to buy the machines and replace the workers. Did this subsidy exist before? Yes. But much, much smaller. In the 1990s, the difference was 25 percent to 15 percent to 20 percent. So we are increasingly subsidizing firms to automate. If you have many incentives like this—and we can talk about what the other ones are, which are softer perhaps, but are no less important in my opinion—then you’re going to go more in the direction of automation. You’re going to leave lots of low-hanging fruit. And those low-hanging fruit might have been very important for that productivity improvement.
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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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Worldwide gender gap has increased by a generation from 99.5 to 135.6 years
WEF | Natalie Marchant | Jul 14, 2021
By the numbers: Women in STEM
Women made up a third (33%) of researchers in 2018 and have achieved parity when it comes to numbers in life sciences in many countries, the report says.
But women make up just 28% of graduates in engineering and 40% of those in computer sciences – skills vital for the jobs of the future, it added.
Female workers also account for just 22% of people working in artificial intelligence (AI) worldwide, although there are regional differences, according to UNESCO.
Countries such as Singapore, Italy and South Africa were leading the way with each having women make up about 28% of professionals with AI skills, compared to just 14% in Brazil, 15% in Mexico, and 16% in both Germany and Poland.
Gender gap at top tech companies
Women are also under-represented at the top of multinational tech companies, despite efforts to close the gender gap in technical and leadership roles, the UNESCO report warns.
Facebook leads the way with women accounting for 23% of technical roles, and 33% of leadership positions.
See: Women In Fintech Will Play A Crucial Part In The Covid-19 Recovery Plan
Apple has been implementing measures to hire more women and under-represented minorities since 2014, but women still only make up 23% of technical roles and 29% of leadership ones.
Meanwhile, Amazon has been working to correct the gender imbalance since 2018, when it realised that its AI system was not ranking women candidates for software developer and other technical roles.
The online retail giant has since committed $50m to supporting science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programmes for under-represented communities, but still only 27% of its managers around the world are women.
Women less likely to access funding
Women in science and tech are also less likely than men to access funding.
Start-ups led by women received just 2.3% of venture capital in 2020, according to a report from Harvard Business Review, citing data from Crunchbase.
Women in academia were also found to receive less grant funding despite being twice as productive.
And though women account for four in 10 academics globally, they often face an impenetrable glass ceiling, says UNESCO.
Women ‘must not be left behind’ with jobs for the future
In a digitally driven future, advances in technologies such as AI will blur the boundaries between male and female that form the basis of the gender gap, says UNESCO.
See: Why venture capital firms need more women partners and entrepreneurs
COVID-19 prompted changes in work-life balance and these need to be translated into policies that ensure women do not spend a disproportionate amount of time as unpaid carers, educators and home-makers, it adds.
Women must be given equal access to education and information that will enable them to compete equally with men for the jobs of the future, says UNESCO.
The time it will take to close the worldwide gender gap has increased by a generation from 99.5 to 135.6 years.
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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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ISED: Cyber Security and Policy Statements
Government of Canada ISED | Jul 12, 2021
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on our country and the world. This uncertain environment is ripe for exploitation by threat actors seeking to advance their own interests. Canada's security and intelligence organizations, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and its Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (the Cyber Centre), and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), recognize these unique conditions and have developed a complementary approach to mitigate these threats.
In fall 2020, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) released a policy statement highlighting the importance that the Government of Canada places on safeguarding Canadian research. This is especially relevant given the increased targeting of COVID-19 related research during the pandemic. The policy statement – that can be found here – was accompanied by letters sent to the granting councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) emphasizing the shared responsibility to protect Canada’s research.
See: FFCON21 On-demand video: Fireside: Building blocks of a security program cloud applications
In spring 2021, ISED followed this COVID-19 policy statement with a similar statement, reaffirming the roles that researchers, research organizations and government all have to play in safeguarding Canada’s research ecosysem. The statement – which can be found here – also asked members of the Government of Canada-Universities Working Group to develop specific risk guidelines to integrate national security considerations into the research partnerships process. These guidelines can be found here, and will better position Canadian researchers, research institutions, and government funders to undertakes due diligence to protect against research security threats.
CSIS and CSE are working in line with their respective mandates to ensure that Canadian businesses, research entities, and different levels of government are aware of the threat environment and that they have the tools and information they need to protect themselves. Read their joint statement here.
Cyber security resources
- Cyber Security Advice and Guidance for Research and Development Organizations During Covid-19
- Don’t take the bait: Recognize and avoid phishing attacks
- Security Tips for Organizations With Remote Workers
- Cyber Hygiene for COVID-19
- Focused Cyber Security Advice and Guidance During COVID-19
Protecting intellectual property from foreign interference and espionage
CSIS has observed an increased risk of foreign interference and espionage due to the extraordinary effort of our businesses and research centres. As a result, CSIS is working with these organizations to ensure that their work and proprietary information remains safely in their control. Its focus is on protecting Canadian intellectual property from these threats - and jobs and economic interests with it. See National security guidelines for research partnerships.
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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OpenSea best month ever, NFT Avatars trend continuation, and Web 3.0 tipping point
Messari | Mason Nystrom | Jul 8, 2021
If someone walked up to me and said at the beginning of the year, NFTs will easily surpass $1 billion in sales, GaryVee will launch an NFT project, and Axie Infinity becomes one of the top five NFT marketplaces, I would have replied, “I’ll believe one of three”. But, the past quarter (Q2’21’) witnessed over $750 million across the top five collectibles, Axie’s Marketplace generated $7.7 million in fees, and GaryVee has already earned over one million in royalties from his NFT project. Let’s break it down.
NFT Bubbles It’s Bubble
The media narrative that the NFT market is dead or that the bubble has popped is objectively mistaken. The media largely focused on crypto art and collectibles (e.g. NBA Top Shot), but the broad NFT ecosystem continues to grow. In fact, OpenSea recorded its best month ever in June in terms of NFT sales volume. Rarible’s poor performance (relative to OpenSea) can largely be attributed to the marketplace not providing access to some NFT categories that boomed over the past few months including NFT avatars, Art Blocks, sports collectibles, and virtual worlds.
See: 10 Highlights From Goldman Sachs’ June 2021 Digital Asset Thought Piece
OpenSea is telling a canary in the coalmine for NFT growth. In June, OpenSea facilitated over 211,000 NFT sales across nearly 40,000 active traders.
Overall, June marked OpenSea’s best month ever for NFT volume, a record number of NFT sales, and its second-best month of active traders.
While OpenSea remains the overall marketplace leader, Axie Infinity surged throughout the quarter becoming the four largest NFT marketplace. Notably, Atomic Market – the go-to marketplace for NFTs on WAX – now ranks 8th in NFT marketplaces.
Avatars: Not The Last NFTs
Perhaps one of the most significant trends throughout the past quarter was the continuation of NFT avatar projects. NFT Avatars – collectibles specifically designed for individuals to represent themselves across the internet (e.g. CryptoPunks) – continued to grow in popularity as the emerging sector generated nearly $350 million in secondary sales throughout Q2’21 and nearly $600 million in the first half of 2021.
Web3 Adoption Hits Tipping Point
The proliferation of Web3 has been long awaited, but failed to manifest fully because of a need for infrastructure across computation, indexing, data management, hosting, storage, and other vital services. However, after many years of building and continued growth, many Web3 protocols are starting to hit their stride.
Middleware layers that have been continuously building for years are now experiencing the on-set of product-market fit. Livepeer a marketplace for video infrastructure providers and streaming applications is processing millions of videos per week and generating several thousands in protocol fee revenue.
Ocean Protocol’s data marketplace – which lets individuals issue data sets as balancer liquidity pools – possesses a TVL of over $3.3 million across 419 data set pools.
File and data storage networks also continue to gain adoption:
- Data stored on Arweave grew another 1.8 terabytes (1,800 gigabytes)
- Storage capacity utilized on Sia has reached an all-time high of 1.09 PB (1 petabyte = 1,000 terabytes) with a capacity of 3.25 PB.
- The total data stored on Filecoin now exceeds 23 petabytes.
Elsewhere, Web3 protocols like Handshake are experiencing increased usage with nearly 1.5 million registered Namebase domains and over 100,000 Handshake domains in use today. Helium’s network adds thousands of nodes per week, resulting in 147 billion data credits spent (equivalent to ~3,500 GBs) for total net revenue of just over $1.4 million (mostly used to add new hotspots).
FFCON21 On-demand Video: The Future of Web 3 0: Decentralized, Open Source and Peer to Peer Technologies
Still, while many individual components of Web3 are poised for their breakout moments, the full stack has yet to find a way to interoperate with DeFi, NFTs, or other Web3 protocols. Web3 is no longer a star in the distant future. The stack is coming together and the stars are quickly aligning.
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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Open Finance data adoption varies by country (but one thing is certain)
McKinsey & Company | By Chandana Asif, Tunde Olanrewaju, Hiro Sayama, and Ahalya Vijayasrinivasan | Jul 11, 2021
If open finance continues to accelerate, it could reshape the global financial services ecosystem, change the very idea of banking, and increase pressure on incumbents.
Banks hold a record of much of what we spend, save, and borrow—from electricity bills and mortgage payments to our weekly spend on fuel and coffee. Now, some of that customer data is being shared with third parties in a global movement known as “open financial data” (sometimes referred to as “open banking.”) Roughly half a decade in the making, it’s unlocking a wave of digital financial innovation—and likely disruption.
Brought on by a combination of government regulation and market forces, open financial data allows an expanding universe of players—both financial and non-financial—to access customer accounts and data in order to offer new products and services (all contingent on customer consent) (Exhibit 1).
See: WEF: Decentralized Finance: (DeFi) Policy-Maker Toolkit
For customers, open financial data affords greater flexibility in how their money is managed, allowing, for instance, better visibility of accounts and more convenient access to payments. (This paper focuses primarily on benefits for consumers; for more detail on benefits for all participants, including financial institutions, see our recent related report, “Financial data unbound: The value of open data for individuals and institutions.”) Still in its infancy, the movement has the potential to reshape everything from bank accounts, credit cards, payments, mortgages, small business loans, and even insurance policies.
Around the world, this trend is evolving in different ways. In the European Union, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Australia, and India, governments have mandated large banks to open up their vast troves of customer accounts to other companies, in a bid to stimulate competition (Exhibit 2). In the United States and China, it is a market-led movement, with companies establishing open-banking relationships among themselves. Singapore is using a blend of the two models.
The adoption of new digital habits and a dramatic movement toward online channels during the pandemic appears to have accelerated open banking. With so much more of their lives spent online, both consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) became much more open to fintech apps and other non-traditional financial products and services. They also habituated to greater levels of convenience, choice, and flexibility in their financial relationships. In just the first six months of 2020, the number of users of open banking–enabled apps or products in the UK doubled from one million to two million and grew to over three million as of February 2021. In the US, almost one in two consumers now use a fintech solution, primarily peer-to-peer payment solutions and non-bank money transfers.
See: Financial data unbound: The value of open data for individuals and institutions
We believe that if open finance continues to accelerate it could reshape the global financial services ecosystem, change the very idea of banking, and increase pressure on incumbent banks. According to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, a significant share of customers who are dissatisfied with their current accounts, earn uncompetitive interest rates on savings accounts, or pay higher mortgage rates do not change providers due to the hassle of switching or lack of visibility into better options. The ability for customers to better understand their full financial picture—one of open banking’s promises—could result in margin compression, as pricing and charges become more transparent. Banks may also have to contend with margin sharing, as payouts to digital platforms could play a far greater role in customer acquisition.
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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Canadian securities regulators release interim progress report on the CSA 2019-2022 Business Plan
CSA | Release | Jul 6, 2021
Montreal – The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) today released its second interim report summarizing progress on initiatives published in its CSA 2019-2022 Business Plan, highlighting notable accomplishments outside of the current Business Plan, and outlining upcoming priority policy work for the next year.
“Throughout the pandemic, the CSA maintained a steady pace of activity to meet the priorities set in its Business Plan, while also addressing new and unexpected challenges posed by changing capital market conditions,” remarked Louis Morisset, Chair of the CSA and President and CEO of the Autorité des marchés financiers. “In these uncertain times, our accomplishments show the value of the CSA model, which is based on collaboration, transparency and a proactive approach.”
Key initiatives carried out in the second year of the Business Plan include:
- Publication of three FAQs addressing industry questions regarding the implementation of the Client Focused Reforms coming into effect starting June 30, 2021 through December 31, 2021.
- Upcoming final amendments to enhance the protection of older and vulnerable investors by providing registrants with tools and guidance to address situations involving potential financial exploitation or diminished mental capacity.
- Adoption of a nationally harmonized start-up crowdfunding regime to expand the ability of small businesses and start-ups to use securities crowdfunding to gain access to capital.
- External engagement with industry associations and investor advocates in the context of a joint project with insurance regulators to introduce a consistent approach to disclosure to investors of all relevant information related to costs and performance by investment funds and segregated funds.
- Outline of regulatory requirements that apply to crypto asset trading platforms and steps platform operators must take to comply with securities legislation as they prepare to fully integrate into the Canadian regulatory structure.
See: CSA Responds to Ontario Capital Markets Modernization Taskforce Report: NCFA – The present system is simply not good enough
While the initiatives of the Business Plan remain fundamental to CSA members’ work, the CSA is always ready to address new issues and challenges presented by evolving capital market conditions. In 2021, the CSA has undertaken several additional initiatives outside its Business Plan. Some significant accomplishments include:
- Ongoing work to review the regulatory framework of two self-regulatory organizations overseen by the CSA members, the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) and Mutual Funds Dealers Association (MFDA). The CSA will be releasing a position paper with specific recommendations this summer.
- Comments provided by CSA members, except the Ontario Securities Commission, to the Ontario Capital Markets Modernization Taskforce on its recommendations and final report emphasizing the importance of harmonization and the adoption of the passport rule by Ontario.
- Guidance on disclosure to assist issuers with reporting on the impacts of COVID-19 to their business and operations based on findings resulting from compliance reviews of issuers’ COVID-19 disclosure.
The report also outlines the policy initiatives for the next year to give market participants additional time to prepare for upcoming regulatory changes and consultations.
CSA members continue to work cooperatively on these strategic initiatives and other issues that affect Canada’s capital markets, while maintaining and allowing for regional flexibility and innovation. This approach seeks to deliver a thoughtful and favourable outcome for all Canadians that ultimately results in harmonized recommendations
Download the 18 page PDF 2021 CSA interim progress 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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