Podcast: Alicia Ismach On A $2.75-Billion Unicorn And Making Atlantic Canada A Fintech Powerhouse
Alicia Ismach was on the ground floor when Israel started building its now booming fintech sector. The entrepreneur-in-residence at Venn Innovation in Moncton sees the potential for the same kind of success here.
Alicia joins host Mark Leger to chat about her entrepreneurial and personal journey from Argentina to Israel and now Moncton. Alicia says the $2.75-billion Verafin deal puts the region on the global fintech map. Now she says we must leverage that success to help grow a sector that now includes more than 100 companies across the region.
As its core offering, the Newfoundland startup that sold to global firm Nasdaq offers fraud detection and mitigation services to more than 2,000 financial institutions in North America. Other companies in the fintech space are creating innovative products and services that make our day-to-day transactions easier and more secure, Alicia tells Mark.
“It’s a fascinating industry for me because it affects all aspects of your life all the time. You pay [for goods and services] and you have insurance and you may have investments. Everything that you do has financial services involved. And all of those technologies are part of what makes it better or more efficient, cheaper or relevant to you, more customized to your needs.”
Though there are huge global players in this space in countries like China and the United States, Alicia says the region has the companies, many of whom are leveraging the experience gained in learning the back-end operations of companies in the contact centre industry here, to build a sector much like the one that’s emerged in Israel over the last 30 years.
“Tel Aviv is the [centre] of the technology industry in Israel. Now what’s interesting for our region is that the city is the size, in terms of population, of Halifax,” says Alicia. “It’s not a city with 10,000,000 people. When I see Tel Aviv as an epicentre of technology…Atlantic Canada has no less potential in terms of becoming a power centre in technology. I’ve met founders here that have fantastic technologies that have solved real issues. They have clients not only in Canada but also globally.”
Listen to Mark’s conversation with Alicia in the player above, or on your preferred podcast platform.
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