Often seen as a nice-to-have, workplace learning and professional development are now gaining importance as organisations’ best shot at retaining happy staff and staying competitive
As coronavirus has forced classrooms around the world to move online, kids are getting creative in trying to sabotage lessons
Zapier’s engineering manager points out that unless you’re Gen Z, you’re closer than you think to being old—or you’re already there—and you need to have a plan.
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
Women In Fintech Will Play A Crucial Part In The Covid-19 Recovery Plan
Forbes | | June 1, 2020
The coronavirus has prompted the U.K.’s biggest government bailout of all time. The bill for subsidies and tax breaks for businesses impacted by Covid-19 has already reached more than £100 billion and will continue to increase.
This has prompted concern among some that rescue money is being wasted or exploited by companies that can withstand the pressure of the unprecedented crisis – while the most vulnerable entrepreneurs across the country, especially in highly innovative sectors such as fintech, are not getting an equal level of support.
Of particular concern is the impact on female-led fintech businesses. Women consistently find it harder to access finance than their male peers when trying to scale their companies, encouraging them to become inherently more resilient. However, the coronavirus crisis could also make matters worse, especially for female founders in this predominantly male fintech space.
According to Innovate Finance’s 2019 Venture Capital Investment Report, female founders make up just 17 percent of fintech companies and women receive only three percent of VC fintech funding.
See: Why venture capital firms need more women partners and entrepreneurs
This discrimination is counterproductive. Companies with diverse staff need to be valued even more during times of uncertainty when adjusting processes and implementing a recovery plan and especially when women are known to excel in creativity around change.
According to Harvard Business Review, women are resilient, results driven and better prepared leaders in the face of adversity - so why aren’t we doing more to support them?
How groundbreaking is the fintech industry?
Dr. Ruth Wandhöfer, Partner, Gauss Ventures, recently stated in a Business Cloud article that: “Paradoxically, there is currently a $300 billion annual credit deficit in funding for small businesses owned by women, which is expected to grow due to the economic fallout caused by Covid-19.”
She goes on to say that the fintech industry, “famed for adjective overkill like ‘disruptive’, ‘innovative’ and ‘groundbreaking’, trails behind when it comes to “a) delivering gender equality within the workforce; and b) identifying the business value of female-led entrepreneurship.” Is the fintech industry delivering gender equality and identifying the value of women?
As Dr. Wandhöfer points out, a LendIt survey found that only 37 percent of fintech workers are women, and just 19 percent are at C-suite level. Alongside this, All Raise reported that just seven percent of all VC deals in fintech during 2019 had a female CEO.
See: Fintech is Driving Financial Inclusion
In conversation, Dr. Wandhöfer explores how fintech funding has been challenged since the outbreak with fintech deals having the worst Q1 since 2016 and the worst funding Q1 since 2017.
“Not only has it been difficult to close planned rounds, but also initially established valuations have seen, sometimes significant, downward adjustments. Female-led fintechs are already a rarity that needs protecting. This crisis shows that there is still no equality when it comes to treatment around financing and it is now more urgent than ever to ensure that entrepreneurs in general are treated equally.”
Reiterating that women are underrepresented in the VC community, a significant part of the fintech ecosystem, she adds that “diversity certainly makes this business more creative and versatile, bringing a different perspective to assessing opportunities, including identifying female fintech leadership in the market. It is a virtuous cycle."
Angelica Krystle Donati –an advisory partner at Concrete, a London-based VC firm, also believes that more diversity within the VC community can bring new perspective and understanding about the challenges that women led businesses face, such as juggling family life, especially during a time of crisis.
“Women and minority-led firms are often smaller in size and therefore have less established banking relationships and are therefore less creditworthy. Women, who bear the brunt of childcare responsibilities, have had to compromise.”
Donati remains optimistic and believes that technology has provided the blueprint for how we can promote greater flexibility and support for female entrepreneurs running fintech businesses. Forcing everyone to work from home -and seeing that people can continue to work effectively, is changing perspectives that can be beneficial to founders that would otherwise be overlooked for funding.
See: 4 Digital Transformation Lessons that Banks Need to Learn from Covid-19
“Tech is the clear winner in this pandemic. The pandemic will engender long-term changes to the ways we live and work. Technology is playing an important role in our lives, given that if we didn’t have the option to log in and work remotely, we would be in serious trouble right now. More importantly, it’s allowing us to rethink and digitalize entire processes.”
Women in fintech and the Covid-19 recovery plan
Catherine Wines, Co-Founder of WorldRemit, believes that “there is no doubt that women have had to develop resilience in order to achieve their goals. They generally have to work twice as hard to obtain recognition and often face numerous rejections when trying to get funding for their business. This resilience gives them the added edge needed in time of crisis.”
Whether women excel over men in creativity may be challenged, but a more balanced view is an advantage to business. “Fintech has led the technology revolution and it is certainly true that many businesses have shown resilience in the current climate from moving overnight to working remotely to offering online solutions to both business customers and consumers,” Wines continues.
Resilience was key when shifting from the office to working from home and Liza Russell, CEO of Inbotiqa, says how “as a leader of a small business during Covid-19, I realise how ahead of the curve we were with good remote working practices in place.”
With work-life balance and flexibility now a more outspoken priority, Russell adds that because of the creativity of women “it’s important that we are invited into the board rooms when future strategies are being discussed in the recovery phase.” She goes on to say that the recovery plan will change how we work today, resulting in the commercial property market suffering as companies are able to communicate efficiently remotely.
See: Gender Bias Contributes to Blocking Female Founders Out of Investment & Venture Capital. We Need to Fix This.
“A 9 to 5 working day co-located with several hundred other employees is not necessary to be successful. Women are resilient and more receptive to change, we often multi-skill while managing work, home and families so are well-placed to implement the necessary changes to working practices,” Russell says.
Plumb agrees and says that
“women are key consumers, decision-makers on a majority of household consumption and of course, half the population so they of course are a critical part of the Covid recovery phase.” Carrasco affirms this point further. “Women will play a crucial part during the recovery phase because we make up 50 percent of the U.K. population. That statistic alone should be suffice to understand that women will be part of 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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Why workplace learning matters more than ever
Raconteur | Marylou Costa | May 28, 2020
Often seen as a nice-to-have, workplace learning and professional development are now gaining importance as organisations’ best shot at retaining happy staff and staying competitive
The idea of working from home may conjure up images of dishevelled, tracksuited executives. But the home has actually become the epicentre of a reskilling revolution that may just save businesses from a coronavirus-induced collapse.
Corporate learning providers such as LinkedIn Learning, Circus Street and Hive Learning are all reporting a spike in usage, as an overwhelming array of new business challenges puts pressure on teams to embrace remote training methods and professional development.
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On LinkedIn Learning, more than four million hours of content was consumed globally in March alone.
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Hive Learning has seen a 20 per cent increase in logins since lockdown began
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Circus Street has noted not just a 64 per cent increase in weekday learning, but an unprecedented 500 per cent increase on Saturdays
Skills gaps that the World Economic Forum had already outlined a need to bridge, such as digital and data literacy, have now become unnegotiable. Meanwhile ecommerce and digital marketing tactics like search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising have risen to the fore as traditional sales and marketing channels have become less viable.
See: Edtech’s biggest threat? Kids
But remote-learning patterns are also showing the personal impact of balancing home and work in one place. On LinkedIn Learning, demand for stress management and remote-working content tripled in March, while Hive Learning responded to an unprecedented need for programs on resilience, wellbeing and leadership.
Online learning the new normal for remote workers
Learning and development teams are now fast-tracking multi-year digital program rollouts to meet this unanticipated scenario.
“We’ve found this time an interesting opportunity to make shifts in the organisation that we’ve been wanting to for a while,” says Tanya Bagchi, group talent and people development director at Legal and General (L&G).
“What COVID-19 has done has taken the horizon that we saw being six, twelve, twenty-four months away to now. Suddenly a lot of the barriers have come away.”
Yet companies are all too aware of the reality of screen fatigue caused by an overreliance on remote training methods, potentially pushing professional development off the to-do list.
To keep engagement and motivation up, L&G has introduced offline “missions” to consolidate and complement remote-training methods, as well as team-oriented communities to foster more efficient problem-solving and collaboration.
See: Remote Working Cybersecurity Checklist
This has proven particularly effective among senior leaders, according to L&G’s head of development experiences and innovation Gemma Paterson.
“We have over 300 people in that community now who are collaborating, sharing and accessing resources,” she says. “That’s something we might have got to at the end of 2020, but we’ve been able to do that in a couple of weeks.”
Engaging remote teams through renewed learning
Pharmaceutical multinational Sanofi has brought its learning into the 21st century through innovations such as content targeting powered by artificial intelligence, curated playlists and podcasts developed by both internal and external experts. This culminated in the launch of the Sanofi University in March, accompanied by a company-wide challenge to achieve one million hours’ learning by June. At just one month in, they were already halfway there.
“Like a lot of big organisations, Sanofi previously had a push culture around learning and wasn’t very digital. A lot of the learning solutions available weren’t necessarily visible,” says Jason Hathaway, Sanofi’s global head of learning transformation.
See: The digital transformation of learning: Social, informal, self-service, and enjoyable
Varied content formats may be keeping screen fatigue at bay, but crucially it is leadership that is driving unity and energy across the Sanofi business.
“When our CEO launches a challenge to the organisation saying ‘let’s do this together’, that really creates a sense of togetherness,” Hathaway adds.
Matching training content with business impact
Measuring the business impact of learning has long been a challenge, but the surge in uptake of remote-training methods is now arming teams with a wealth of data.
“The more we do virtually, the simpler measurement becomes because you can use analytics to understand how people are interacting with content,” explains Paterson.
“It’s about measuring how well we are able to solve the problems we have and are going to have. Have we got the right line manager capability? Have we got the capability to work remotely in an agile way? Moving more online makes that simpler.”
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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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Edtech’s biggest threat? Kids
Sifted | Tim Smith | May 26, 2020
As coronavirus has forced classrooms around the world to move online, kids are getting creative in trying to sabotage lessons
Georgina Farnham, a Barcelona-based English literature and language teacher, was just getting used to the transition to online teaching when, one day, she thought the internet trolls had parked their tanks on her lawn.
Farnham was making use of Kahoot!, the Norwegian educational games app, when the sabotage struck.
“We were playing a game and it kept just crashing and not giving kids time to answer the questions, and on the leader board, all of these ridiculous names that hadn’t been entered into the game as players were coming up: ‘gayboy27’, ‘Covid-19’ — offensive names,” she explains.
See: 58 Must-Read Remote Work Resources | 50 Great Remote Working Resources
The kids said it was nothing to do with them, and Farnham got worried: “I thought someone had hacked into our game and was watching us, and I was worried for our cyber security.”
Farnham quickly contacted the Kahoot! customer service team to find out what was going on. But the culprits, as it turned out, were closer to home than she had guessed.
“They replied saying my kids were behind it!”
Farnham’s enterprising students had found an innovative way to cause virtual classroom trouble: Kahoot! bots.
A quick Google search for Kahoot! bots throws up a number of websites that allow the user to enter a Kahoot! game code, summoning an ever-replenishing army of disruptive bots to the class.
“You’re able to remove the bots one by one, but they just keep coming,” Farnham explains.
Kahoot!’s customer service team informed Farnham of the platform’s “two-step join” tool, which was available before the Covid-19 outbreak began. This allows teachers to add an extra layer of security to their classroom, by generating a second unique code for each game, which invalidates after six seconds.
Since using the two-step join tool, Farnham’s classes have been bot-free.
The new “model of misbehaviour”
It’s no surprise that there have been some onboarding issues with teachers using Kahoot!. Sean D’Arcy, head of ‘Kahoot! at School’, told Sifted that, since the coronavirus lockdown began, the startup has seen sign-up rates climb as high as 100,000 new users per-day.
See: Fintech Ideas for College Students
“We did anticipate a surge in usage and some challenges onboarding so many new users at the same time. In light of that, we increased our customer support staff and other resource materials so our users have a smooth experience with Kahoot!,” says D’Arcy.
“We empathise with educators who are trying to create a positive learning environment, especially when that environment is virtual,” he added. “Giving educators tools to control their remote learning experience, like Kahoot!’s two-step join, is essential. That said, students in the class also have an important role to play by not sharing classroom game details on social media.”
Unfortunately for teachers, school kids have never been well known for their commitment to classroom order and, according to Farnham, the virtual classroom provides ample opportunity for mischief.
“The new model of misbehaviour is that if a kid doesn’t want to learn, it’s now much harder to get them to learn,” she says. “Sometimes they leave the call and pretend they were kicked out, sometimes they pretend the microphone isn’t working when I know it is and they’re just miming and moving their mouth without making sounds.”
NSFW
In some ways Farnham has got off lightly in terms of disruption. Like many teachers, she’s been using Zoom video conferencing software to give classes and, to date, her students are yet to discover “Zoom bombing”.
See: What You Should Know About Online Tools During the COVID-19 Crisis
She’s lucky — Zoom bombers tend to be humans, not bots, and can be a whole lot more disruptive.
One popular hub for organising Zoom bombing is chat community app Discord, where a rogue student will post a meeting code in a server, and invite members to jump into the class, often with unsavoury results.
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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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Why AI-driven financial advice is getting regulators’ attention
The Globe and Mail | | May 22, 2020
The emerging use of artificial intelligence (AI) to support or even replace human financial advisors is attracting the attention of regulators – mainly in Britain but also in Canada. While they’re broadly supportive of AI as a cost-efficient tool to broaden the reach of financial advice, they’re also monitoring the potential risks and challenges, trying to ensure that this advice remains both suitable and transparent for clients.
The current crisis is certainly putting the usefulness of the new technology to the test. Tony Vail, chief advice officer at Wealth Wizards, a fwell-known provider of AI-assisted financial advice in Britain, says: “We’re finding increasing demand for our technology solutions [as a result of the crisis]. For example, our digital financial advisor, MyEva, had an unprecedented response to an [online] nudge offering help and guidance with finances related to the impacts of COVID-19.”
See: WealthBar rebrands as CI Direct Investing
Given the increased attention on AI-assisted advice, Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is taking a proactive approach on the matter. Last autumn, the FCA and the Bank of England conducted a survey of more than 100 financial services firms on their experience using AI, resulting in a report published in October 2019. That was to be followed by a forum this spring to solicit more industry feedback, which has been postponed as a result of COVID-19.
Some key areas of concern, FCA documents state, are the practical challenges and barriers to deployment of AI and its potential risks. Industry suggestions for regulatory principles are also being solicited.
In Canada, the use of AI in financial services is beginning to emerge, but at a slower pace. For example, Bank of Montreal introduced BMO Insights in late 2019, which it says “leverages artificial intelligence to deliver personalized, automated, and actionable insights for everyday banking customers.” On the regulatory side, the Ontario Securities Commission says in an e-mail that the topic of AI and financial advice is “an area of interest” and that OSC LaunchPad has worked with “novel” businesses in this area.
Mr. Vail welcomes the regulatory attention this topic is receiving in Britain – especially given the importance of the decisions that clients could be making using the new technology. For example, the firm’s MyEva platform is designed to offer customized, AI-powered, online advice to the employees of large firms such as Unilever PLC.
The platform uses machine learning to offer advice tailored to individual users on matters such as company pensions, saving and borrowing and making the transition to retirement, at no cost to employees. Those who wish to follow up with a human advisor may pay a fee. On average, about 20 per cent of them choose to do so.
See: The research frontier: where next for AI and collective intelligence?
Mr. Vail says the FCA has encouraged his firm’s AI-driven innovation. Among other advantages, it has the potential to fill the so-called advice gap that has emerged in Britain after a decade of tighter regulation resulted in a sharp decline in the number of advisors. But he acknowledges that, as its use increases, more regulatory review is expected.
“Totally reasonably, [regulators have] to feel uncomfortable about something that is perceived to be, and is actually, a black box,” he says.
Cary List, president and chief executive officer of FP Canada, says there are many potential advantages of using AI to support financial planning. However, he notes that “every individual is different,” and that the quality of advice must be maintained, regardless of how it’s delivered.
Furthermore, the fact that AI is still a very new technology gives reason to be cautious, he says.
“Until there’s a sufficient repository of data in these systems, we are going to see a lot of room for error – and that causes a lot of challenges.”
Indeed, the quality of data collection and its application to individual situations should be a key concern for regulators, says Giulia Lupato, a lawyer and senior policy advisor with the Personal Investment Management & Financial Advice Association (PIMFA) in London, which represents most of Britain’s retail investment management firms.
See: Top 12 AI Use Cases: Artificial Intelligence in FinTech
One of the most concerning issues, she says, is data bias – problems that arise when huge amounts of data are drawn from many different sources and, over time, are applied without sufficient customization.
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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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4 Digital Transformation Lessons that Banks Need to Learn from Covid-19
Finextra | Leon Gauhman | May 20, 2020
When COVID-19 is finally brought under control, several key sectors will be remembered for the way they stepped up and took responsibility during the crisis. Healthcare is the most obvious, but supermarkets, corner shops, logistics companies and postal delivery networks have also played a critical role in preventing the country sliding into meltdown.
By contrast, British banks have done little to merit a spontaneous round of rainbows and applause. Branches up and down the country have been closed and banks were slow and seemingly reluctant to process SME loan applications under the government’s Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan scheme (CBILS). It’s a brutal indictment of the sector that the government has had to intervene with its 100% ‘bounce back’ loan guarantees to try and salvage the UK economy.
The key question now is whether traditional banks can learn lessons from Covid-19 that will help them establish any kind of status as a part of the SME life support system. In my opinion, they can – but only if they take their lead from the increasingly influential fintech sector. Here are four areas of digital innovation I believe banks should embrace in the post-pandemic era:
1. Greater openness to digital collaboration
Just as problematic as banks’ resistance to lending to SMEs has been the speed at which legacy lenders are processing applications. Weeks after the government’s Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan scheme (CBILS) opened – only 13% of companies which tried to access a loan had been successful. High volumes of enquiries go some way towards excusing this, but the problem also lies with the shortcomings in banks' internal digital processes.
See: NCFA Open Letter: Government should collaborate with Fintechs
Getting these digital processes right is not the equivalent of investing millions in R&D to find a Covid-19 vaccine. A skilled and well-resourced team could swiftly connect the software, algorithms, data and servers required to build a robust and secure digital platform. Companies like Onfido and Validis, and solutions such as Google Big Table and AWS EC2 are all waiting in the wings to help with various elements of this process.
The reason many banks haven’t done this is because they are not sufficiently agile to innovate at speed. Post Covid-19, a key challenge for banks will be to really collaborate with fintechs and third party vendors and allow their internal capabilities and culture to be challenged and improved so they can respond more quickly to emergencies like Covid-19. The partnership between Starling Bank and Funding Circle to offer an additional £300m of loans to SMEs under the CBILS scheme is a good example of the collaboration established banks need to embrace going forward.
2. Adopt digital solutions like Whatsapp queuing solutions
Banks can adopt digital solutions like WhatsApp queuing solutions by integrating the platform into their existing systems and processes. The bank can use WhatsApp's built-in features such as automated greetings and quick replies to streamline the customer service experience. Banks can also leverage the use of chatbots to assist with common inquiries and provide instant support 24/7. Implementing a WhatsApp queuing system can also help reduce the number of in-person interactions, which can help to reduce the spread of COVID-19.
3. Prioritising customer experience
Bank advertising talks a lot about being there ‘for the journey’, or ‘listening’, or ‘making it happen’. But that certainly hasn't been the experience for many SMEs facing collapse because of Covid-19. The reality is that part of the banks’ failure to react to the virus effectively is because they have not attempted to create a customer-centric model. When it comes to SME customer experience, banks fall down in a number of areas – including lack of personalisation, relevance and ongoing dialogue in their products and services.
See: How to create high-value customer interactions and win in the Low Touch Economy
Once again, it has been left to fintechs to fill the gaps. It is the fintechs, for example, that have devised products that most closely match the needs of businesses at specific moments in time. Good examples include invoice financing, provided by the likes of US fintech Bluevine, or loans that link directly to business performance (think PayPal Working Capital). It’s also the fintechs that have led the charge in providing added value to customers beyond lending. New players such as Coconut (which is just for sole traders) and German bank Penta have developed innovative solutions helping SMEs with the day-to-day business activities such as cash flow, tax management and incorporation, based on the nature of the individual business, rather than purely on turnover.
4. Smarter use of customer data
High street banks no longer resemble Gringotts in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter universe. But their inability to embrace data-powered banking solutions means they seem just as outdated. Fortunately, the introduction of Open Banking legislation changed the rules of the game, making it possible for fintechs to secure access to data and provide SMEs with support.
A key area of innovation has been faster and better credit scoring solutions. By accessing a wider range of data points than traditional banks, fintechs have found ways to lend to viable SMEs that are deemed uncreditworthy by legacy lenders including customer feedback and transaction history from online marketplaces.
See: With $73 million CAD, Symend closes one of the largest Series B rounds in recent Alberta history
While broadening the pool of data used to assess SME creditworthiness is important, the emergence of AI and Open Banking means there is a unique opportunity to build predictive elements into the SMEs customer experience. By taking a holistic view of a company’s business, it becomes possible to alert customers when there is a potential problem on the horizon – perhaps the order book in June is down 20% on the previous year. Take a lender like Kabbage as an example. By working with real-time banking and accounting data, the platform can spot when clients are at risk of default and offer solutions before trouble hits.
Imagine a world where this data is linked to wider developments in the SME sector – so these can also be factored into financial planning (for example, a fall in the price of a commodity, strike action affecting a key supply chain).
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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Tech has an ageism problem: 3 things to do if you’re over 40 and want to stay relevant
FastCompany | Lisa Smith | May 14, 020
Zapier’s engineering manager points out that unless you’re Gen Z, you’re closer than you think to being old—or you’re already there—and you need to have a plan.
I’m Lisa Smith, I’m an engineering manager for Zapier’s developer platform, and I’m an Old. I’ve been working in tech since before there was a Google. In a previous life, I was a librarian. The kind that touches actual hard-copy books.
I’ve been working on inclusion and diversity issues in tech for nearly as long as I’ve been working in tech, and—as an Old—I recognize that tech has an ageism problem. Much like sexism and racism in the workplace, ageism affects not only the person being discriminated against but also the larger company culture. It deprives the company of needed perspective and the tools and staff they need to innovate.
Before we go on, the sobering news: Old in tech is 41. A survey from Indeed indicates that 82% of the tech workforce is 40 and under. Nearly half (46%) is 35 and under.
See: Why Older Entrepreneurs Have the Edge
This means that, unless you’re Gen Z, you’re closer than you think to being old—or you’re already there—and you need to have a plan. While you can’t automate your future, I do have a three-step process to help you stay relevant and get all the jobs.
Learn things
The older you get, the more you might feel like you’ve learned everything you’re going to learn. Old horse, new tricks, all that. But especially in tech, a field is constantly changing, there’s always something more to learn.
So figure out what you want to learn, and there’s absolutely a way to learn it.
What should you learn? I’d ask you: What do you want to learn? What’s fun? And what can you learn while still doing your current job? Try asking a teammate what they’re working on and if you can shadow them a bit. Use any professional development funds you have for classes, books, and conferences. Out of budget? Apply for conference grants. Volunteer to be a TA or to help run a conference or mentor at a hackathon. Helping others learn is a great way to pick up new skills and reinforce skills you already have.
Meet people
Of course, you can’t do everything in a silo, or the skills you learn won’t add any value to your career. You have to meet people. You can do this in person or online—whatever is feasible for you. And the communities you join don’t have to be tech-focused: Just find a group that shares common interests and join them for events.
See: AI Will Transform 500 Million White-Collar Jobs In 5 Years; Silicon Valley Must Help
Yes, I’m describing networking. But wait! I know that networking gets a bad rap as a buzzword, but, really, it’s just meeting people and talking to them. If you’re introverted or don’t like talking to people, here’s a handy tip: Ask them a question about their work. They’ll do all the talking, and you can pick up lots of tips. Networking boils down to making connections—between people, between people and ideas, and between people and opportunities.
It might sound like random chance, and it sort of is: You happen to be in the right place at the right time. But as with all games of chance, you improve your odds by doing it a lot. So do everything you can to meet a lot of people.
Apply for jobs
If you’re old and in tech, you might be counting your blessings, thinking, “I’d never be able to get a job in tech if I applied today.” You look at job descriptions and think you’re missing loads of the skills that are listed. Now, I’m not saying to ignore job postings, but we all know that plenty of job descriptions are ridiculous laundry lists—nobody has 100% of the items in a job description. Those lists are aspirational. You can learn on the job. I’m working on getting companies to stop writing those kinds of postings, but in the meantime, I encourage you to apply to anything that looks interesting and/or challenging.
Example: I got a PHP job with no PHP experience because I built the sample app and crushed it. I got a React job without having written any React professionally because their requirement of three to five years experience wasn’t realistic—those folx would still be at Facebook and probably not interested in moving to North Carolina. After I showed them a JavaScript framework adoption and abandonment chart that looked like the Himalayas and leaned into the fact that I had a proven track record of language acquisition, they hired me.
See: The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity in Supporting Female Entrepreneurs
I’m a self-taught coder with a nonlinear career path. I started out at library school (yes, that’s a thing), and came out as a catalog librarian. I had always loved code and computers, so I taught myself HTML and landed my first job hand-coding HTML using tables without CSS (yes, that’s also a thing). I worked at a newspaper as the overnight news converter: I cut up production PDFs into JPEGs and made an online version of the newspaper. Then I became their online coordinator. I had a weekly column, I edited stories, and I managed the online community, where I picked up Drupal. When the paper folded, I worked as a UX developer for a cursed government project. And then I was a webmaster at a hospital, a full-stack LAMP developer, a front-end developer theming content management systems, a front-end engineer for a custom digital printing company, and now, here I am engineering manager.
Basically, I’ve had a thousand jobs. And that’s a feature—not a bug.
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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Crowdfunding Is Revolutionizing The Cannabis Industry. Here’s Why.
Green Entrepreneur | Chidike Samuelson | May 13, 2020
The cannabis industry has seen two major upward surges in the last 5 years, the first came with the national legalization of cannabis in Canada which was subsequently followed up by many states in the United States and the second has come during this COVID-19 pandemic.
While this time has been a hard time for the U.S. and all other countries currently impacted by it, cannabis has helped ease anxiety and stress for many people. The consistent affirmation of cannabis businesses as essential services during this era has done wonders for the industry.
The cannabis industry is not just enjoying the upsurge caused by the epidemic, it is also experiencing the proliferation of crowdfunding or crowdsourcing platforms internationally.
Here are 4 reasons why crowdsourcing has been and will continue to be great for the industry.
1. Crowdfunding is rapidly reducing the shortfall in supply
In the U.S. and most of Europe, the demand for cannabis products especially of medical cannabis is still way higher than the supply and the Covid-19 crisis has upped it even more. Even if demand were to fall post-COVID-19 (Which is highly unlikely) there will still be excess demand and a shortfall of supply.
See: How To Navigate Regulation Crowdfunding With Crypto And Blockchain
The typical way to tackle this is to grow more cannabis, but not every business green-agribusiness can grow more than their present capacities. The limits on a budget make it quite difficult for some to increase production significantly.
However, crowdsourcing is doing a great job of encouraging cultivators and cannabis producers to make more by giving them access to funds that they would have been unable to raise otherwise. This has already caused a slight increase in production but is predicted to cause a larger shift in the coming months as the world recovers from COVID-19.
2. Crowdsourcing can break monopolies in the growing sectors
Before the dawn of the widespread legalization of cannabis, at the time when growing marijuana was still dubious, to say the least. It was private cannabis growers who braved the consequences and weathered the unlicensed storm. To a large extent, these private growers have been left in the dust since legalization hit and as major agri-businesses swept in and took over the market, building huge monopolies in the sector.
However, the crowdsourcing innovation that has recently taken the industry by storm has given them a fighting chance. It is common knowledge that good amounts of competition are healthy for any industry to flourish. The kind of competition that crowdsourcing envisions is very beneficial for the cannabis industry; an industry that still has a massive margin for growth.
See: Crowdfunding: Fundamental Cases, Facts, and Insights
The potential for breaking these huge monopolies is exceedingly desirable in the industry at a time like this, to enable it to grow to potential.
Crowdsourcing also helps individual growers overcome the red tape that currently limits their abilities to grow and scale.
3. Cannabis enthusiasts can benefit
For a long time, the fight for the legalization of cannabis has been championed largely by common people, medical cannabis users, cannabis advocates, celebrities, and others who were on a mission to educate the relevant quarters about the value of cannabis.
It was these enthusiasts who championed enlightenment campaigns on the value of cannabis to our emotional stability as a de-stressor without the negative side effects like violence, aggression, hangovers, and potential for poisoning that exist with alcohol.
Some of these people have put their money where their mouth is. Notably, the American Hip Hop legend, Snoop Dogg started his Cannabis-based businesses in 2018, but not many others have had the opportunity to, until now.
See: Canadian securities regulators propose new nationally harmonized crowdfunding rules for comment by May 27
Crowdsourcing has opened a huge door for investment in the industry for enthusiasts who would love to make a little money from their loyalty to the cause or just for the business person who recognizes the huge opportunities in the market.
With crowdsourcing investments, investors are making investments in a sector that has not even approached the demand levels and that need funds to fulfill a constantly growing demand.
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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