Almost two in five of the bosses of global companies fear their businesses will be unviable within a decade because of the 
Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Voices
Technology Is Transforming the Economy and Making It Harder for Innovators to Compete
OECD Forum Network | James Bessen | Jan 24, 2023
Image: Unsplash/Braden Collum
For all the talk of disruptive innovation, start-ups have become less likely to displace dominant industry leaders because the new technology has become much more proprietary
- Large firms across many industries are hiring to build a new generation of systems to meet heterogeneous customer needs. These systems have made leading firms more dominant in their markets, suppressing the risk of disruption and slowing the growth of innovative rivals. These systems also contributed to the slowdown in productivity growth, to increased social division, and to an increasing inability of government to regulate major firms.
- Walmart systems manage over 100,000 items per store—far more than traditional department stores, they adjust inventory to respond quickly to changing consumer demand, and they use advanced logistics to get these items to the stores quickly and efficiently.
- Amazon, of course, handles an order of magnitude greater selection.
- Big banks use extensive consumer transaction data to tailor offers of credit card and home equity lines to individual borrowers and to target the marketing to them.
- Google and Facebook provide data-driven targeting of Internet advertising.
- Automobiles and airplanes are now built on large software systems that provide unprecedented features and functions, including many subtle changes in performance.
Canada’s Competition Consultation Continues (thanks Senator Colin Deacon)
ISED Launches Competition Act Review: Consultation on the Future of Competition Policy in Canada
- Impact: Across sectors, these top firms within each industry have increased their market shares. Their dominance has also become more persistent, that is, leading firms today are far less likely to be “disrupted”
- And the investment shift is huge. In the United States, firms are now investing a quarter of a trillion dollars a year in software development alone.
- A prominent reason that small productive firms are not growing as quickly is that they lack access to the same technology used by the dominant firms.
- This lack of access limits the growth of new firms, but it also affects workers. These systems require workers in a variety of occupations (not just STEM) to perform new tasks in different ways. A major source of growing wage inequality is rising differences in pay of workers across different firms—those firms with the technology pay substantially more for comparable jobs.
- Some dominant firms have chosen to open up their platforms to the public for a fee.
- Amazon chose to “unbundle” their technology, creating AWS, the first cloud service, and launching the cloud industry. By providing access to advanced technology, the cloud has promoted the growth of productive startups and opened opportunities for diverse workers to gain new skills.
- In conclusion, the rapid advancement of technology has significantly altered the economic landscape, leading to the dominance of major players in each industry. Top-rated IT companies like Andersen recognise that this trend has created barriers to entry for new innovators and smaller firms, which may not have the resources to access the same technology as the industry leaders. This imbalance can hinder overall growth and impact workers' livelihoods. A technology-focused company understands the importance of levelling the playing field and providing access to technology for all. Only by promoting fairness and equality can you unleash the full potential of technology and create a better future for everyone.
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Download 78 page PDF on competition policy in the digital age --> 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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Ask Richard: Advice for Dadpreneurs
Richard Branson's LinkedIn Newsletter | Jan 30, 2023
Image: Unsplash/Tim Mossholder
What advice do you have for ‘dadpreneurs’, and how do you balance being a great dad with building a great business?
- People first: One of the best things about being an entrepreneur is the freedom to work in a way that is best for you. As more people and businesses breakaway from the 9-5 mould, you should be as flexible as possible to find a routine that works for you and your family.
- It sets a good example as a leader, as it demonstrates that it’s OK to be human, and people should always come first.
- Understand yourself and values: Most founders start businesses from a place of passion. They’re motivated to want to be their own boss, to bring something to life or to solve a problem they see in the world. Being an entrepreneur is part of who they are and their own personal purpose. Having children can turn that on its head and change your outlook. Be sure to check back in with yourself, relook at your values and purpose and ensure the entrepreneurial journey is right for you.
See: How Entrepreneurs Can Manage Their Mental Health
- Establish limits: One thing that works well for entrepreneurial parents is to list out their non-negotiables. What are those things that you won’t compromise on? Is it that you always want to be there for bath time and bedtime for example. One thing about being your own boss is that you have greater control of what you do and what you don’t, so make sure that it works for you.
- Get your children involved: Family and business don’t have to be two separate things. Growing up in an entrepreneurial family can be amazing - your children will learn so much. There’s no better grounding for the world of work (whatever that might look like) than being involved in running a business, so lean into it.
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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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Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence Governance
Chatham House | Kate Jones | Jan 10, 2023
Image: Unsplash/Markus Spiske
Governments and companies are already deploying AI to assist in making decisions that can have major consequences for the lives of individual citizens and societies.
- AI offers far-reaching benefits for human development but also presents risks. AI, its systems and its processes have the potential to alter the human experience fundamentally. But many sets of AI governance principles produced by companies, governments, civil society and international organizations do not mention human rights at all. This is an error that requires urgent correction.
- These include, among others, further division between the privileged and the unprivileged;
- erosion of individual freedoms through surveillance;
- and the replacement of independent thought and judgement with automated control.
See: Why You Should Review Your Data Governance and Privacy Risks in Canada
- Human rights are central to what it means to be human. They were drafted and agreed, with worldwide popular support, to define freedoms and entitlements that would allow every human being to live a life of liberty and dignity.
- Various myths about human rights have also contributed to their being overlooked: human rights are wrongly perceived as adding little to ethics; as preventing innovation; as being overly complex, vague, old-fashioned or radical; or as only concerning governments.
- As AI begins to reshape the human experience, human rights must be central to its governance. There is nothing to fear, and much to gain, from taking human rights as the baseline for AI governance.
- Failure to take account of human rights means setting aside well-established, widely acknowledged parameters of liberty, fairness and equality, as well as processes and accountability for their implementation.
See: The White House Unveils a New AI Bill of Rights Outlining Five Protections
- If human rights are to be placed at the centre of AI governance, the following practical actions are necessary for companies:
- Continue to promote AI ethics and responsible business agendas, while acknowledging the important complementary role of existing human rights frameworks;
- Champion a holistic commitment to all human rights standards from the top of the organization. Enable a change of corporate mindset, such that human rights are seen as a useful tool in the box rather than as a constraint on innovation;
- Recruit people with human rights expertise to join AI ethics teams to encourage multi-disciplinary thinking and spread awareness of human rights organization-wide. Use human rights as the common language and framework for multi-disciplinary teams addressing aspects of AI governance;
- Conduct human rights due diligence and adopt a human rights-based approach to AI ethics and impact assessment. Create decision-making structures that allow human rights risks to be monitored, flagged and acted upon on an ongoing basis;
- Ensure uses of AI are explainable and transparent, so that people affected can find out how an AI or AI-assisted decision was, or will be, made; and
- Establish a mechanism for individuals to seek remedy if they are dissatisfied with the outcome of a decision made or informed by AI.
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Download the 58 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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Davos: Almost 40% of CEOs ‘Fear Their Multinational Companies will be Unviable within 10 Years
The Guardian | Larry Elliott and Graeme Wearden | Jan 16, 2023
Almost two in five of the bosses of global companies fear their businesses will be unviable within a decade because of the struggle to find talented workers and the need to adapt to technological change.
- As the World Economic Forum got under way in Davos on Monday evening, a survey of chief executives by the consultancy firm PwC was released, showing a downbeat mood about the immediate global outlook and longer-term survival prospects.
- Tech Capabilities: The PwC survey found that 40% of UK CEOs believed their company’s tech capabilities were not good enough to meet their strategic objectives, and thought the problem would get worse without urgent action. As a result, 86% of UK chief executives said they were automating processes and 74% were upgrading skills in key areas of their businesses.
See: Davos: Cooperation in a Fragmented World: In Data We Trust
- Existential: Of the UK CEOs questioned, 21% said they could not see their businesses lasting a decade on their current trajectories, rising to 39% for global CEOs. Almost three-quarters of CEOs (73%) from around the world said global growth would decline over the coming year – the most pessimistic finding since the question was first asked 12 years ago.
- In a separate piece of research, two-thirds of a group of 22 private and public sector chief economists surveyed by the WEF thought there was likely to be a global recession in 2023, with almost one in five saying it is extremely likely to occur.
Kevin Ellis, the chair and senior partner at PwC UK:
Businesses have already undergone massive change this decade, with hybrid working and cloud computing among the big shifts. But this is the tip of the iceberg – many CEOs believe their current business models are unsustainable and this means more change ahead.
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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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BIS Publishes Report on Options to Address Crypto Risks: Ban, Contain, Regulate, Or?
Ledger Insights | Jan 12, 2023
Image: BIS
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a brief paper exploring the options to address the risk of cryptocurrencies, or as it likes to call them, crypto-assets.
- Heightened Risks: It argues that cryptocurrencies feature many of the risks of TradFi, but while similar, the risks tend to be exaggerated. These include the extensive use of leverage, liquidity and maturity mismatches, and significant asymmetries in information.
- The BIS report highlights that DeFi often is not decentralized because founders have significant token stakes or others can acquire major influence.
- It also points to the critical roles of centralized cryptocurrency exchanges as crypto onramps.
- Another observation we have is that decentralized wallets increasingly enable direct onramps using credit cards which over time may partially erode the onramp role of exchanges.
See: BIS Limits Banks to Hold 1% of Reserves in Bitcoin –> “Banks Won’t HOLDL”
- The three direct routes to control crypto risks are to ban, contain, or regulate it.
- The BIS recognizes that banning it may not be acceptable for free societies. Also, bans can be circumvented and it could inhibit innovation.
- By containing crypto the BIS means ringfencing crypto, so the minimal overlap with TradFi is maintained.
- Regulate. A common approach is mapping crypto activities to conventional activities to apply the same risks and rules. But the mapping is not always straight forward. For example, some jurisdictions will regulate stablecoin issuers as banks, some as payment systems and others as banks. A second challenge is identifying the entity in a decentralized world.
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Download the 9 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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Credit Suisse: Statecraft and De-dollarization
AheadoftheHeard | Zoltan Pozsar | Dec 31, 2022
Image: Unsplash/Jason Leung
War cuts new financial channels.
What are G7 policymakers, rates traders, and strategists to do when threats to the unipolar world order are coming from every angle. They should definitely not ignore the threats, but they still do. How could they not?
For two generations, we did not have to discount geopolitical risks. Since the end of WWII, the only Great Power conflict investors really had to deal with was the Cold War, and since the conclusion of the Cold War, the world enjoyed a unipolar “moment” – the U.S. was the undisputed hegemon, globalization was the economic order, and theU.S. dollarwas the currency of choice.
See: China vs the US: The Lose-Lose Tech War
But today, geopolitics has reared its ugly head again: for the first time since WWII, there is a formidable challenger to the existing world order, and for the first time in its young history, the U.S. is facing off against an economically equal or, by somemeasures, superior adversary.
Download the 7 page PDF analysis --> 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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Life’s Purpose is Messaging You. Are You Listening?
LinkedIn | Deepak Chopra MD | Jan 16, 2023
In troubled times the chaos around you need not be reflected inside you. One of the strongest ways to remain on course is to find and know your purpose.
- There are many ways to combat stress, but the most powerful are associated with feeling secure about who you are and why you were put here. Likewise, feeling that you are on course with your purpose is effective in keeping away anxiety and depression. Of all the things that make human beings unique, needing purpose and meaning in our lives is one of the most prominent.
See: Ken Coates OpEd: Canada Lack’s Purpose
- In the Eighties the great scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, invented the phrase “Follow your bliss,” which almost instantly entered into popular usage.
- By following your bliss, he contended, “…the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.” This holds out a vision that is radically different from the notion that hard work, persistence, and keeping your shoulder to the wheel are the keys to success. As Campbell explained, “Follow your bliss, don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
- These factors will bring you closer to your life’s purpose by giving you a purpose today.
- You love your work and feel energized by it.
- You feel that you and the job are a good fit.
- Your surroundings at work are low in stress, pressure, and office politics.
- You contribute something valuable and earn respect for what you do.
- You fulfill some personal ideals, such as being of service, reaching your full potential, or feeling that your work expands your horizons.
- There is an element of creativity in what you do.
- You feel that your co-workers are trustworthy and loyal. The same goes for supervisors and bosses.
See: A Strategy to Revolutionize Your Body
- At this moment many people want suggestions about returning to their purpose after a time of disruption. Here are some tips.
- Don’t try to regain lost progress all at once. Begin with activities that are part of your purpose.
- A good beginning is to find ways to be of service in small ways with people who are in need.
- The key is to feel confident about what you have to give to the world. You can sit down and make a list of your talents and strengths. Then write down one or two ways to use each one in the coming days.
- Remember that your purpose isn’t the same as your career. Keep your sight fixed on that powerful phrase, “the life you ought to be living.” Expand this to include everything that brings you closer to your ideal, and if your career hasn’t returned to its previous levels, you can still give of your time, effort, and emotional support to those around you.
Keep your ideals before you. Believe in a higher vision of life and live accordingly. Raise your expectations as high as your ideals. These have been the hallmarks of dharma for millennia, and they hold true today as much, if not more, than ever.
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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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