FFCON20 Week 8 Fintech Draft: Congratulations to the Winning Companies SolidBlock and DivDot!

FFCON20 Week 8 Wrap-Up: Fintech Draft

On August 27, the final week of FFCON20, a total of 8 pitching and demo finalists competed with each other to win the title of 2020 Fintech Draft champion.  Each presenting company delivered a short pitch (max 7mins) followed by answering 5mins of Q&A from prominent investor judges and a crowdvote.  Learn more about the finalists here: https://2021.fintechandfunding.com/fintech-draft-finalists/

Pitching Competition Finalists:             

• WALO App
• Trust Anchor Group
• Sneso.ai
• SolidBlock
• FundMore.ai

Demo Competition Finalists:

• Corl Financial Technologies Inc
• DivDot
• CycleBit

Congratulations to the Pitching Competition Winner!  SolidBlock

While most other markets have been digitized through modern technological platforms, the real estate market is undergoing a massive transformation. Currently, it lacks the advantage of liquidity and remained tedious, complex, slow-moving and costly. SolidBlock aims to build a new asset class based on real estate, combining the stability of the property market growth and efficiency of blockchain-based financial products.

SolidBlock offers a new platform that allows anybody to invest and benefit in the asset class of real estate and to enable them to protect and grow their wealth. As mentioned in her pitch for SolidBlock, CMO and Co-Founder Yael Tamar believes:

“A big part of why real estate is largely inaccessible to most people is that the field is closed by design.  The nature of the investments are highly illiquid and intensive capital is required that individuals don’t have.”

SolidBlock enables investors to buy and sell any property at any time anywhere and aims to function like a NASDAQ for real estate.

Their ideal scenario is to transform real estate into a tradeable financial product that gives asset owners and investors opportunities through a securitized token offering platform. The SolidBlock platform is fully operational with deals worth over $100 million and extensive pipeline of over $1 billion worth of projects. By using blockchain technology and global network, they’ve been able to offer a model that lowers capital requirement, attain global reach, and facilitate tradeability and liquidity.

On taxation from transactions, SolidBlock mentions that it is very similar to that of other financial products in which participating investors should expect a similar amount of taxation as typical financial portfolios in real estate. Taxation through the sale of real estate assets would most likely be categorized as capital gains tax, while receiving a dividend on an asset class would most likely be categorized as income tax.

SolidBlock differentiates themselves from competitors by focusing on providing financial solutions and a bridge into the world of DeFi. SolidBlock believes that now is the time to invest in tokenization with blockchain-based securitization providing infrastructure for trade as well as increased demand for liquid products as a result of COVID-19.

Congratulations to the Demo Competition Winner!  DivDot

Despite a clear transition in the North American payments environment towards electronic payments in the consumer realm, businesses are still heavily reliant on manual, paper-based processes. DivDot is a payment platform that aims to aid in the transition that enables businesses to send and receive no limit payments for a flat fee. It simplifies and automates businesses’ entire payment cycle from payment initiation to reconciliation.

DivDot CEO and Co-Founder Matthew Smith provided data showing that 668 million cheques were processed in Canada and 14.5 billion were processed in the US for 2018, which he believes is crazy in today’s modern digital age. The aim of DivDot is to help digitize business payments by providing a software to power a business’s payment operations. Users would be able to send payment to suppliers, receive payments from customers, move money between accountants, and set-up recurring payments.

The DivDot product demo showed how a transaction would work, both for walking through how a customer would send their payment to a business on the platform as well as how a business would pay suppliers. Both of these functions take place in a very straightforward and efficient process. The goal is to provide a simple and secure payment network for businesses to exchange funds while integrating with a large array of financial institutions to draw funds from.

Smith mentions that 70% of businesses today still use checks, partly due to a focus on how accounts want to solve problems rather than the businesses themselves.

Taking feedback from business owners, DivDot believes that business owners have different ideas and want to get paid efficiently and as soon as possible. DivDot is the perfect alternative for its target audience’s needs.

Missed FFCON20 RISE?  Checkout the Session Recordings

Co-hosted by NCFA Canada and TFI, below is a collection FFCON20 DIGITAL: RISE keynote talks, fireside interviews, and panels taking place every Thursday at 1:45PM EDT from July 9 - August 27, 2020 at the 6th Fintech & Financing Conference. View the full program

Attendees experience a curated 8 week online event series covering the latest topics in fintech and funding in 2020, and get access to virtual networking with participants, the opportunity to interact and ask questions with speakers and special workshops, virtual socials and surprise content and experiences that are not recorded. FFCON Experience

We encourage you to attend FFCON20 to experience the full show.  Having said that, the value and need for education has never been higher and FFCON20 organizers are happy to share this incredible content to advance dialogues and promote the development of the Canadian fintech industry.  Checkout what's on this week, or register now