Fast food giant 
Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Fintech Opinions
Ipsos Survey: Most Canadians Say (88%) We Need More Competition
Ipsos | Feb 8, 2022
Toronto, ON, February 8, 2021 – Most (88%) Canadians agree (39% strongly/49% somewhat) that we need more competition in Canada because it’s too easy for big business to take advantage of Canadians, according to a new Ipsos poll. Moreover, nine in ten (90%) agree (38% strongly/52% somewhat) that we need to take steps so that small and medium-sized businesses can compete with the larger players.
Canadians perceive clearly what the benefits of increased competition could be:
- Eight in ten (88%) agree (34% strongly/55% somewhat) that more competition between businesses means more choice for consumers and lower prices
- A majority (85%) agrees (29% strongly/56% somewhat) that more competition between businesses will lead to better quality products and more innovation in Canada.
See:
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Canada’s Competition Problem: 7 Reasons
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FCA review finds evidence of growing competition in retail banking
Some might argue that Canadian companies need domestic protection from too much competition in order to enable them to compete internationally.
Canadians are not sold on this point. Half (48%) agree (9% strongly/39% somewhat) that less competition within Canada means that Canadian companies are more protected so that they can compete with larger companies from other countries.
Canadians were asked whether they believe that certain sectors of the economy need more competition, or whether there is enough competition.
A strong majority of Canadians (72%) believe that the telephone and cable industry needs more competition, while fewer believe that big-box retail (51%), airline (51%), insurance (49%), grocery (40%) and banking sectors need more competition. Conversely, two in three (67%) believe that there is enough competition from banks, while fewer say the same about the grocery (60%), insurance (51%), airlines (49%), big-box retail (49%) and telecommunications/cable (28%) sectors.
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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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What Due Diligence Are VCs Looking For and Will You Pass?
Sifted | Julius Bachmann | Feb 7, 2022
Source: Unsplash
If you’re a founder pitching to a VC, chances are that investors are going to do due diligence not just on your company, but you and your founding team too. We call this “founder diligence”.
In part one of this series I wrote about how this process is failing investors and founders. Too often, evaluation processes are built on personality tests and frameworks that don’t capture founders’ potential to develop.
Elena Pantazi, talent partner at Northzone, says the VC looks for six dimensions in a founder; while the first three are considered on a “more the merrier” scale, the latter three have to balance out advantages and risks.
See: 7 Types of Investors to Avoid Like The Plague When Trying To Raise Capital For Your Startup
According to the firm, they look for founders with (1) a deep drive and personal motivation to be an entrepreneur, paired with (2) a growth mindset and openness for self-development. This in turn, enables them to (3) attract talented people around them when scaling the business. Similarly they view (4) having a healthy dose of self-confidence as a positive attribute that enables founders to go through the rough patches while staying humble. Finally, in terms of skill-sets, they (5) encourage founders to identify their own superpower and evolve into a thought partner across other business functions without (6) needing to exert too much control across all areas.
Digital+ Partners evaluates founders throughout a range of interactions, including the founder’s participation in deal meetings and pitches, and throughout the entire due diligence process. The assessments inform the investment decision, but also what support to provide post-investment, and are based on five dimensions: leading self, leading others, leading by results, leading as a founder and leading with knowledge.
“In the diligence process, I participate in most of the meetings and observe teams and individuals: how do they act? How do they respond to questions? How do they interact with each other? Sometimes, I also provoke and push founders on their answers, to see how they react,” she says.
See: Are you a Pig, Gazelle or Bear? Beyond Unicorns, Zoology of startups
Entrepreneur First looks at five criteria in determining founder ability but emphasises that founders rarely score highly on all of these. These abilities also don’t necessarily have to have been demonstrated in work or study, but in hobbies, side projects or sports.
“We don’t believe past experience or knowledge is relevant to your future success. We don’t select or put in our first money based on ideas at all,” says founder Alice Bentinck. “What we are interested in is the behaviour and abilities that you have relative to your peer group.”
They are:
- Challenges convention: individuals who have taken surprising paths or decisions or challenged the status quo, compared to their peers.
- Drive to achieve: individuals with a bias to action, who are driven to build and create.
- Followership: individuals who have had people follow their decisions and actions in the past and can unite people around a common goal.
- Smart, with clarity of thought: individuals with problem-solving skills to tackle the macro and the micro. They can develop and communicate complex ideas to a range of stakeholders.
- Technical knowledge, and applicability or commerciality: EF looks for technical knowledge from potential future chief technology officers (CTOs) and specifically, individuals with the ability to apply this knowledge to solve problems, or “applicability”. And with CEO candidates, EF looks for an understanding of technology as it can be applied across industries and how that relates to the customer, or their “commerciality”.
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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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Jim Balsillie: Canada needs a revived Economic Council to thrive in the 21st century
The Globe and Mail | | Feb 5, 2022
It’s been 30 years since Ottawa disbanded the body that helped it set a clear economic agenda. It needs a new one to help Canada adapt to a competitive high-tech world
In a thoughtful essay published last summer, the writer Lauren Dobson-Hughes made a compelling argument that recent crises – including COVID-19 and Canada’s retreat from Afghanistan – have not only exposed the country’s deeply dysfunctional institutions, but also revealed our bureaucracy’s profound limitations on performing even its most basic duties, such as implementing a payroll system for public sector employees, updating privacy legislation or designing a shipbuilding program.
“We are ill-equipped, floundering, and as the Brits would say, not fit for purpose,” she wrote. “We built our systems, structures and cultures for a different time. They are now failing us, and fast.”
The same can be said for institutions and structures responsible for designing Canada’s contemporary economic strategies. Politicians of all stripes worship at the altar of innovation, with visits to Silicon Valley and photo ops with entrepreneurs, but the devotion is a facade. Public-sector departmental structures and policy-makers are proving incapable of dealing with the opportunities and challenges afforded by the Information Age.
See: New North Star III: Case for a Canada Advanced Project Research Agency
If the past two decades of various economic growth councils, blue-ribbon commissions, and “non-innovation innovation” strategies have proven anything, it is that inside Ottawa there is a dearth of expertise on the issues that accompany our transition to a knowledge-based and data-driven economy.
This step begins with rebuilding the Economic Council, an institution the government disbanded in 1992. This new, restructured council would provide the federal government with the research required to establish a long-term policy agenda designed to advance our country’s competitiveness.
As a country, we are falling behind. All signs point to our failure to design strategies that would allow us to prosper in a new, knowledge-based economy. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has dire projections for the Canadian economy, while the average salary is dropping, weakening an already endangered middle class.
Canada is still navigating with outdated maps - Select Quotes
Rather than investing in public sector institutional capacity to keep up with changes in the global economy, the Canadian government became dependent on a rotting practice of outsourcing its own work to costly, controversial and unaccountable consultants and in the process giving birth to the so-called “shadow public service.”
Despite a highly educated population and public investments in R&D, Canada has consistently been a large net importer of intellectual property, or what economists call the “innovation trade” balance.
“For most of the past 40 years Canada has been in a ‘bad equilibrium,’ wherein real wages have essentially stopped growing” states a recent research paper by Public Policy Forum fellow Don Wright. “Government policy, consciously or unconsciously, has sustained the resulting low-wage-low-productivity model of competitiveness, hence keeping Canada in the bad equilibrium.”
The World Bank’s 2020 report says Canada is losing ground in terms of GDP per capita, directly affecting purchasing power of the average Canadian, with the current average salary of US$43,242 down from the peak US$52,635 in 2013. Canada faces a shrinking share of that income and wealth.
See: Canada’s Competition Problem: 7 Reasons
But the gaps in our government’s capacity to understand the contemporary economy are much wider. It is long past time to acknowledge that we don’t have a critical mass of expertise and analytical muscle inside our civil service.
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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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Elon Musk Asks McDonald’s to Accept Dogecoin
U.Today | Alex Dovbnya | Jan 26, 2022
Fast food giant McDonald’s is facing backlash after botching its response to Tesla CEO Elon Musk
As reported by U.Today, the centibillionaire asked the Chicago-headquartered corporation to accept Dogecoin. In return, he promised to eat its Happy Meal on television.
McDonald’s has seemingly backed away from the offer by tweeting that it will accept Dogecoin if Tesla accepts “Grimacecoin.”
The name of the made-up cryptocurrency was inspired by Grimace, a purple anthropomorphic creature that started appearing in McDonald’s commercials in the early 1970s. It was originally supposed to be a mean-looking character with four arms that would steal kids’ milkshakes. However, Roy Bergold, McDonald's creative officer, told QSR Magazine that “Evil Grimace” had turned out to be a failure because it was too scary for kids.
See: Elon Musk Just Tweeted a Life-Changing Decision, and Almost Nobody Even Noticed
Just minutes after the McDonald’s tweet, someone created an actual token called “Grimacecoin” on Binance Smart Chain that pumped more than 261,000% within hours before erasing the lion’s share of its gains.
A missed opportunity
The Dogecoin community was largely dissatisfied with the response. Many pointed to the fact that it took the company’s marketing team over 10 hours to come up with such an offer.
Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus commented that:
The Grimacecoin tweet was a textbook example of how to make something fun unfunny.
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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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In the face of wreckage, DeFi’s self-policing shines
Arca | Jeff Dorman | Jan 31, 2022
The Chief Financial Officer of popular decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Wonderland was revealed as a convicted scammer and former executive of Quadriga. Michael Patryn, who went by the pseudonymous handle “Sifu” and worked directly with prominent DeFi founder Dani Sestagalli, had oversight over a treasury of nearly $1 billion. Though this story is about one individual and one DAO, the ripple effects were felt across DeFi because of the interconnectedness of DeFi applications and the immense influence of a handful of really successful DeFi developers and founders (like Sesta).In a very abridged summary, MIM, the asset-backed stablecoin of the Abracadabra protocol, has a massive MIM-UST pool on Curve—the decentralized exchange that focuses on stablecoin trading. These incentivized Curve pools accounted for most of the minting of UST (the stablecoin of the Terra Luna/Anchor protocol ecosystem), whose rapid growth ($11 bn outstanding) helped drive the price of LUNA higher over the last several months. As LPs pulled assets out, TVL across Terra Luna dropped, as did the price of LUNA, and Curve’s TVL dropped as well, while all of the tokens in the Abacadabra/Sesta ecosystem (SPELL, TIME, ICE) fell 30-70%. Meanwhile, prediction markets popped up, betting that UST will lose its peg.
See: Gerry Cotten’s widow speaks out over his death and millions of missing crypto
Dealers were inundated with UST put buyers, and FTX even spun up a UST perpetual future market so traders could short UST. SUSHI, a completely unrelated DEX that was in the process of integrating Sesta and his team (but had not yet begun), also became part of the collateral damage. A historical chain of events that led to billions in losses started with the doxing of an individual. He indeed committed terrible crimes, but as of this writing, he has not been accused of any wrongdoing concerning all of the assets/projects mentioned above.
But here’s where it gets positive. Bad things occasionally happen in digital assets, just like corporate fraud in traditional markets (Madoff, Enron, Worldcom, Theranos, etc.) The difference is that corporate scams are usually elaborate and go on for years before being uncovered. By contrast, in digital assets, most of these events rise and fall within weeks, and any wrongdoings are discovered immediately by amazing DeFi onchain detectives (like those that identified SiFu’s misdeeds). That cannot be understated: the onchain detectives of DeFi are doing exceedingly more positive and real-time self-policing of this industry than any regulator will be able to do.
See: NASAA: Crypto scams are the leading threat to investors in 2022
As a result, most of the issues within DeFi are either very easy to avoid with even a shred of due diligence or discovered immediately due to the public records of blockchain. Thus, simple rules of thumb can be:
- Don't buy things you don't understand
- Understand who the founding teams are and their motivations
- Be careful engaging with super early-stage products without a long track record
- Listen when someone uncovers some important data
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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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Innovation 360 Webcast: Driving financial inclusion in the U.S.
Fast Company | Innovation 360 Webcast | Jan 20, 2022
Living paycheck to paycheck is one of the biggest sources of economic stress for Americans today—and these anxieties weigh on mental and physical health too. Two-thirds of the U.S. population struggles with one or more aspects of their finances, including spending, saving, borrowing, and planning.
See: So what is financial exclusion in the era of Open Finance?
These individuals have massive unmet needs because traditional banking just doesn’t work for them. Fintech innovations, such as a new offering to be introduced at this event by H&R Block, are changing the landscape and creating financial inclusivity for those who need it most.
Watch the 'on demand' webcast --> 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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On-chain capital is the future of startup funding
TechCrunch | Parker McCurley | Jan 25, 2022
Web3 is owned by the VCs, Jack Dorsey says. Well, I’d argue that web3 is whatever we make it – and the VCs only own it if we allow them to. We are building web3 right now and we have the power to control where it goes and how it is funded on the way there.
If we take decentralization and autonomy seriously, there is no good reason we must follow outmoded venture capital standards. Other means exist, such as smart contract-controlled, on-chain funding, which is more intuitive for projects to utilize, more equitable, completely transparent, and more adaptable for investors and developers alike.
See: Kickstarter plans to move its crowdfunding platform to the blockchain
This is why I consider entirely on-chain methods to be the future (or at least the next great evolution) of fundraising.
Conscientious creation: the future is ours to write
How exactly does this disruption occur? The starting point is entirely on-chain. The majority of developers currently building the protocols and DApps of web3 are a new generation of creators who come to their work with a philosophical bone to pick.
Blockchain technology already provides us with open source, immutable ledgers that we can use to facilitate all our funding needs in a way that directly aligns with the ethos that has driven web3 from its inception. Utilizing self-executing smart contracts, we can control the open and closing points of a raise and make every investment and their terms open and verifiable to everyone.
On-chain funding models also offer a more equitable approach to developers, allowing them to circumvent certain socio-economic barriers like education, employment, credit, connections, etc. These models let developers get their projects off the ground even if all they have is the project they are building. The entire framework offers a more meritocratic way of functioning, where all that matters is the project and its potential.
See: Alternative forms of capital will be key to develop sustainable economic systems
Smaller projects can save resources and time by eliminating the need for building a pitch deck, opening a bank account, and actively seeking out investors in the traditional sense.
On-chain raises are not meant to kill the traditional VC model altogether, because after all, working with sophisticated investors offers builders valuable perspectives. VCs are experts at analyzing business and financial models, planning for scaling, and evaluating execution risk and where companies stand in a market. VCs who prioritize these traits will remain as valuable as they are today. Every project wants and needs people who have a proven track record of helping companies grow and succeed.
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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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