SideDrawer with Gaston Siri (CEO) & Jamie Wolkove (VPS) | E115
Collecting valuable information and facilitating professional collaboration.
Summary:
In this 115th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews J. Gaston Siri, Chief Executive Officer at SideDrawer and Jamie R. Wolkove, Vice President Sales & Marketing at SideDrawer. SideDrawer is an app and platform based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that allows you to store all the stuff in your life in one place, not just as pdf files, but with intelligence to drive action and support.
Episode Highlights:
● 00:56: – J. Gaston Siri and Jamie R. Wolkove define Sidedrawer and how it got started.
● 05:18: – What is SideDrawer doing to drive engagement with users?
● 07:38: – SideDrawer is implementing feedback that they are getting in the field from users.
● 08:59: – Jason Pereira defines ‘metadata’ and how it works with SideDrawer.
● 09:54: – What types of challenges and pushback have they gotten from people concerned about data security?
● 14:04: – How is the pricing model for SideDrawer laid out?
● 16:10: – How is SideDrawer tackling concerns about data security?
● 21:35: – J. Gaston Siri and Jamie R. Wolkove discuss the information acquisition side of SideDrawer.
● 23:43: – Is SideDrawer looking at using personal financial management tools?
● 28:48: – It is not just up to the end-user to upload all the data it is also on the professional service provider to do as well.
● 29:19: – How do executors get access to a deceased user’s SideDrawer?
● 31:27: – What would they change in their business or industry?
● 32:48: – What has been the biggest challenge to get the company where it is today?
● 33:51: – What is the most exciting thing that they are working on?
3 Key Points
1. Metadata is another point of data surrounding a digital file that is of relevance.
2. SideDrawer can help you save money and protect your assets and your entire portfolio.
3. SideDrawer’s entire production infrastructure online is serverless, making it less susceptible to hacking than other financial institutions.
Tweetable Quotes:
● (SideDrawer) “Now you have a place in which you can organize your entire life on a weekly basis, daily basis, monthly basis, whatever the timeframe would be.” – J. Gaston Siri
● “When you look at SideDrawer, not only do you have the organization guardrails that we are giving you to help you organize better. But on top of that, we’re essentially giving you all this ability to load that meta data.” – J. Gaston Siri
● “If we can actually help you identify where you should actually be in terms of the right size in your insurance policies, then that is a benefit that we can give you.” – J. Gaston Siri
Resources Mentioned:
● Facebook – Jason Pereira’s
● LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s
● FintechImpact.co – Fintech Impact
● JasonPereira.ca – Jason Pereira’s newsletter
● Linkedin – J. Gaston Siri’s
● Linkedin – Jamie R. Wolkove’s
● Sidedrawer – Website Sidedrawer
Full Transcript:
Jason Pereira: Hello and welcome to FinTech Impact. I'm your host Jason Pereira. As usual, a little bit of housekeeping. First off, be sure to sign up for a newsletter at jasonpereira.ca, where you get notifications of all updates and podcasts, and everything else I do. And the second piece is just a reminder that the 2020 IFAD Conference is happening in Burlington, Ontario in April. This year's topic is the value of financial advice. Space is limited. Please register as soon as you can.
Jason Pereira: On today's podcast ...
Jason Pereira: On today's podcast, I have Gaston Siri and Jamie Wolkove of SideDrawer. SideDrawer is an app and platform that allows you to store all the stuff in your life in one place and not just as PDFs with intelligence that can hopefully drive action and better support you going forward. With that, here's my interview with Gaston and Jamie.
Jason Pereira: All right gentlemen, thanks for taking time to come in today.
Gaston: Thank you for having us.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. So Gaston and Jamie of SideDrawer, tell us about SideDrawer.
Gaston: SideDrawer was initially conceived as a death file.
Jason Pereira: Sounds so, so optimistic and so good. A death file. Okay.
Gaston: Funny topic there. Funny story is that our buddy and the guy that initially came up with the idea was going on a trip and he was going to somewhere in the Middle East and he was afraid for his life and obviously he started thinking about, What happens if anything happens to me on this trip? My wife has no clue where my stuff will be?
Jason Pereira: Yeah, he's got a bigger risk crossing the street every day, just dodging cars, but continue on having traveled to the Middle East, I can say that.
Jamie: Depends on where.
Jason Pereira: I missed the Arab spring by this much in Cairo.
Gaston: Anyway the point is, after the trip and after about a month of research and online, he couldn't find anything that would serve his needs and his personal needs, which is easy to use, fast access to dumping all my content or my files, my records, my documents in general. And so we discussed at the time, looked into it and he went ahead and built it. The fact is that over the year of 2019 when the proof of concept came out, the business was not necessarily going like getting traction. At that point we kind of sat down and discussed what do we do now? That's when I actually was coming on board as CEO and we discussed and did a number of sessions. We realized that number one, a death file is never going to be used. People that [crosstalk 00:02:34]...
Jason Pereira: Not exactly sexy. I mean like you basically, you're marrying the concept of death and administration together. Like, I don't know what you add on top of that and to create the trifecta of, Oh God, don't let me touch this ever. But yeah, it's not the most, it's the responsible [inaudible 00:02:53] thing to do, but it's not the funnest thing to do.
Gaston: It's not fun and most people that use an app like that will use it twice. It's when they set it up and when they die. So right away it doesn't resonate as a product that you would want to use. It's not really going to help you much. And that was one point, one aspect. And then the other aspect is that in reality when you look at all your stuff, it's all over the place, right? You may have a [crosstalk 00:03:17]...
Jason Pereira: Oh yeah.
Gaston: ... Stuff in every single storage space that you may have, you're going to have something. So your information is completely fragmented.
Jason Pereira: Well, as I always say to people who argue about wanting to be an executor, my response is, Why? Why would you ever want this job? It is like, imagine how messed up your life is in terms of where everything is and imagine the person's as bad as you or worse, and then try to figure out how you're going to take care of all this.
Jamie: Liability.
Jason Pereira: And you're liable.
Jamie: Absolutely.
Jason Pereira: And you're liable. That's the take it all, the icing on the cake. Here's a job that is a massive pain in the butt and you're liable.
Jamie: She costs you money if you can't identify all the assets.
Jason Pereira: Oh it's a real honor, isn't it?
Jamie: It is.
Gaston: Total disaster. So it was at that point that we realized that, wait a minute, there's a much better angle here. If we consider SideDrawer more so because of the name as your life planning and organization tool. So from a point of view of an individual trying to use this product or this app platform in general, it's like now you have a place in which you can organize your entire life on a weekly basis, daily basis, monthly basis whatever the timeframe would be. So for example, if you take, get a new passport, you're going to update your passport once every five or 10 years. Not that often. Your driver's license will be every five years.
Jason Pereira: So stop there. So let me go back. I'll tell you, I think I mentioned this to you previously. When we first met, when we first talked, I had said, you know what, you mentioned not getting much traction. I wasn't really surprised because I've seen a number of trying to concepts like this in the past, right? And you're of course in competition with everything from Evernote to Dropbox, which you get X amount free. But it's all, that's a lot of heavy lifting because none of it is purpose built. Whereas you've done something purpose-built but even those who've done purpose-built, again have encountered this, the sandwich of the unfortunate of, this is death and this administration and that's not a fun sandwich, right? So basically you basically have said, okay, how do we grow engagement and keep people using this more frequently than just those two things. So, okay, so you talked about that example. Let's talk about what else you're going to do to drive engagement in this.
Gaston: We go back to that.
Jason Pereira: Yes. So go back to you mentioned the entire, you're updating these passports and everything like that. So I take it really, and I'm going to jump ahead here, part of the goal is if you have this information right, you know when the person's license and passport's expiring, right?
Gaston: Correct.
Jason Pereira: Which is also really handy if I'm ever planning on traveling. I can get a notice like nine months in advance when the thing is going to basically expire.
Gaston: Exactly, so there's number of benefits of changing the angle on our business. Now, if you're talking about a life planning application, then suddenly you have the ability to take advantage of all this metadata that we will be collecting. Most people will consider that if you use Dropbox or Google drive or any of the other storage facilities, the concept of metadata is really not there. The most [crosstalk 00:06:06]...
Jason Pereira: No they're dump files, rather than just basically sit there with a name on.
Gaston: The most that organization that you're going to have is your tree, your file tree and the file name. Whereas when you look at SideDrawer, the ability that you have is not only you have that organization guardrails that we're giving you to help you organize better, but on top of that we are essentially giving you all this ability to load metadata. It's all optional. It's all if you want to, but if you do, it's going to benefit you in the long run. For example, you just pointed out, you take a passport, your passport is, I don't know, six months away from expiring. If you travel to a country, say Brazil, you won't be able to go in because they will actually expect you to have more than six months of validity in your passport.
Gaston: Like that, there's a number of examples in your daily life, your payment due date on a credit card? Credit cards expect you to miss your payment due date [crosstalk 00:06:55]...
Jason Pereira: That's how they make money.
Gaston: But still pay within the period, the statement cycle, because those 10 days that you missed, that's when you get the interest. Now, if we can help you and remind you of those payment due dates, then suddenly now, not only you are using something on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Now you're starting to save money because you're using something like this.
Jason Pereira: Well, it flips it from a push, from a pull into a push, basically you have to basically get pulled into this data, right? You have to get, the app's got to pull you to collect all this stuff, but then it starts to push out that information, right? So it's a lot more valuable to me if it starts telling me what to do because, Oh, this is part of the thing I got to remember to do is in my everyday life.
Gaston: And some of these are essentially feedback that we're getting from the field. People that are telling us, well for example, When I was closing my condo a year ago, if I had SideDrawer, I could have basically handed over permission to my mortgage broker to download all my important files. Instead of me hunting through my email, I'm talking to three different professionals, accountants, lawyers, whatnot, just to get my condo closing in order and like that we have other cases and I can keep on talking about my kid. They were asking me for my personal vaccine records from ...
Jason Pereira: Oh God, don't get me started on that. This stupid little card I'm supposed to carry around.
Gaston: Well, you don't have to carry it. The point is, they need that information ...
Jason Pereira: I don't have to carry it. But then when they're like, What is your last vaccination for whatever? It's like, I don't know.
Gaston: Imagine if that was in your phone?
Jason Pereira: Or imagine if they actually had proper medical records and the entire history?
Jamie: And left arm [inaudible 00:08:32] right arm?
Jason Pereira: Still waiting for full digital medical records in this province, if not most countries. But anyway, that's, that's the case. So I mean what you're really talking about here at its core is something I termed previously as a personal data locker, personal digital locker where all your information goes in one place and then hopefully you can drive a lot of interactions from that. And this is one thing that I kind of really hope takes off in the future because God knows I need it. Let's talk about how we get some of that data.
Jason Pereira: You mentioned metadata. So metadata is for those lay people, it's other points of data surrounding a digital file that has a relevance. So the example you gave of the passport, my mind goes off and think, okay, so that makes sense. If I say I'm entering in a passport there's only so many formats for passports, you can very, I try not to save very easily when it comes to code. Relatively easily program it to recognize where certain information is on that and therefore an optical character recognition scanner could with a picture, Hey I took a picture and it's extracted my expiry date and the actual, the passport number, date of issue, all that stuff, all the stuff that's relevant that I would ever need to give to anyone else. Right?
Gaston: Correct.
Jason Pereira: Full name. And then that all goes into your metadata database and different triggers can be driven from that.
Gaston: Correct.
Jason Pereira: Fantastic. So when is this on the market?
Jamie: Three weeks.
Jason Pereira: Okay. Three weeks and for the record will be around the time this gets published so.
Jamie: Perfect.
Gaston: Funny enough, what you're mentioning triggers a number of things that I would call them objections from other individuals.
Jason Pereira: Did you get the creepy objection like, Oh this is creepy because I always...
Gaston: Creepy. What are you doing with my data? Et cetera, et cetera.
Jason Pereira: That's a valuable question to ask.
Gaston: Absolutely. That's why I'm bringing it up because the point that I wanted to make is, this is very sensitive information, not necessarily the kind of information that you will need for to apply for credit on behalf of someone.
Jason Pereira: But right for identity theft.
Gaston: But important. Yeah, very relevant. So which triggers the concept of security. We'll touch on that in a sec. The key for us is that this is something for you. This is a tool that we're building for you. If it doesn't work for you, then you're never going to use it. So, some tools out there will expect you to populate all the metadata. Quote, unquote mandatorily.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, which is a fail, right? Like I've got like 20 things to fill out, all these different stars. I'll start and be like, Okay, this is taking too long.
Jamie: All manual.
Jason Pereira: This is me talking like, I mean like other people give up on the first line.
Gaston: So for us, the idea behind this is this needs to work for you so we're not going to force you to enter all this information. If you want to enter it, you'll benefit from it and we're not going to essentially put it in your face so you even feel that that's a way that it has to be done. It is there in the background, if you want to use it, you just populate it and that you take the benefit of what we are going to [crosstalk 00:11:16]...
Jason Pereira: But here's the thing, I don't want to do it I want you to do it for me without looking at it.
Gaston: Exactly. That's the other angle which is most people will object. I don't want you to be reading my photo or [crosstalk 00:11:27]...
Jason Pereira: Correct. Medical records.
Gaston: OCRing my passport. Fact of the matter is, for us like I don't need to know what's your passport [crosstalk 00:11:34]...
Jason Pereira: Your passport's being OCR'd every time you go through security check these days.
Jamie: They want the information, they're going to get the information.
Jason Pereira: Exactly, right.
Gaston: We don't need your passport number. There's absolutely no value for anyone to know your passport number other than like you just said, identity theft or for you to keep it handy if you need to fill it out and you don't want to be chasing your passport.
Gaston: However, for example, in the long run for us to get a sense of the average individual estate will allow us to build this models that will allow us to help you get the right steps into building wealth. So for example, if you have been invested heavily in real estate, but your insurance package or your insurance portfolio is not properly sized, you're probably underinsured. You put at risk your entire asset base. So if we can actually help you identify where you should be in terms of your rightsizing your insurance policies, then that's a benefit that we can give you.
Jason Pereira: And that makes sense, right? If you're scanning in the insurance policy data, you're taking in the liability amounts of the coverage amounts. If you have a corresponding address, right? You can tie that into MLS data on price changes in regions, right? And yeah, maybe I bought this place for $400,000 a couple of years ago. It's, you know I live in Toronto, so that number could be anywhere between a million and five. Kidding.
Jamie: Close.
Jason Pereira: The point is that like now it's worth $600,000 whatever it is. And I never bothered changing my insurance, right? Now god forbid that place gets gutted by fire and, Oh no, I'm left holding the bag for the difference, right?
Gaston: On the flip side you are overpaying.
Jason Pereira: That's the other thing. Yeah, absolutely.
Gaston: And therefore that's where, what I feel in the long run, why people would actually use something like this because we can actually help you save money. So either we help you save money, we help you protect your assets or your entire portfolio and all of that will contribute to you essentially using an organization tool like this. That is, without even counting that you can actually start having SideDrawers for your family members. So I don't want my kids' records interfering with mine at home.
Jason Pereira: A separate identity. And when they get, come of age, Here kid, now you're in charge of it.
Jamie: You got it.
Jason Pereira: I'm no longer responsible for your data.
Gaston: Going back is the way that we envision SideDrawer is basically imagine that you're at home and you have multiple drawers, one for each one of your family members. Within that you have a number of color binders and then within that you have a number of infinite files. Yes, you got it right. Like I don't want my kids' stuff to be in my drawer. It would be on my kid's SideDrawer.
Gaston: The way that we are coming to the pricing structure or the pricing model, if you will, of the product is my daughter is what, seven, eight years old? She probably until she turns 30 she won't be able or willing to pay for something like this. Like me, when I was in my twenties my entire life fit in a shoebox. When I turned 30 got married, had a mortgage, had a kid, well I needed like an actual drawer or [crosstalk 00:14:37]...
Jason Pereira: When you realize what you've done to yourself.
Jamie: Or a bigger shoebox.
Gaston: Yeah. And now that I am over 40, I do need a lot more than just a couple of banker boxes. So what we have done is we model a person's life and that we kind of price accordingly. And that is from a point of view of an individual, which is, How are we going to make this work for the individual?
Jason Pereira: I'm 22 years old. The price I'm going to pay is a grand total of zero.
Gaston: Exactly, but for us the other angle that we see on this product is this is not just to help individuals, it's also to help the firms, accountants, lawyers.
Jason Pereira: Great. Exactly what I need.
Jamie: Financial advisors.
Gaston: Yeah. Any we call those professionals service providers and from now on in this recording we're going to refer to those as PSPs.
Jason Pereira: I mean I look at the, PSPs, okay fair enough, but I look at the PlayStation Portable analogy, but anyway, how old is that? I'm dating myself. Anyway, that being said, I look at my life trying to collect data from clients and think about how much easier it would be to have an onboarding situation where I ask my questions I need to ask, but then I also said by the way, tie in to say your SideDrawer app and then you're authorizing me to view XYZ. Right?
Jason Pereira: Like when I log in with Google on anything, it's like, you're allowing this other company to see this, see that, do that. Get it whatever, right? Like that's sort of permissioning with my entire life would be incredibly valuable to me.
Jamie: All consolidated, safely secured in one place, right?
Jason Pereira: Exactly.
Jamie: Accessible to you, any time, any place.
Jason Pereira: So yeah, look, there's a lot of dimensions of what we can talk about here. So let me kind of hit on some of the bigger ones I want to make sure we tackle. Let's talk about security first and foremost because that is the single most important piece of all of this.
Gaston: Absolutely.
Jason Pereira: Anytime you start basically dealing with people's personal data, security first and foremost has to be the most important thing. The last thing we need is another Facebook in this world. Or another fiasco like we had with Equifax where some genius decided to make admin admin the username and password. Which frankly there should be for the record, anyone who's designing systems out there, can you just automatically shock the user of the computer, if they ever try to do that? Like anyway, moving on. So security, how are you tackling the elephant in the room?
Gaston: A number of things. So first and foremost, I personally have about five years experience building a credit card platform from scratch.
Jason Pereira: So you know about security.
Gaston: I have a sense of what is required. The other thing that is very common and anyone that works in any IT department and any financial institution pretty much anywhere, one of the most important things that they do on a yearly basis is the typical gap analysis. That gap analysis is roughly assessing how far are you in your current practices to the best practices and how much money and how much time it will take you to get to those best practices.
Jason Pereira: And that's when companies decide whether or not they're going to bother. Right? Oh, that's a big price tag for it. We'll just roll the dice. No one will guess admin admin. That's ridiculous. They'll try password one, two, three first [crosstalk 00:17:34]...
Gaston: Anyway, for us for SideDrawer, from the get go, we started our architecture built using the best practices. So what I always tell everyone is our gap to the best practices is zero. So we're already using best practices around security. Everything that is recommended by the biggest authorities out there, DAISYs, Amazon, Microsoft [inaudible 00:18:02] and a whole bunch of other firms that are essentially publishing all their best practices. We are using those as the way that we are building our infrastructure. The number of individuals that are essentially authorized are all documented. It's all part of our processes. Data is always encrypted in transit [crosstalk 00:18:19]...
Jason Pereira: From the second it leaves my phone to the second arrives in and once sitting on your servers and I take it, you can't even get into these files if you wanted to.
Gaston: Yep. And there's something else that we kind of had a little bit of an aha moment when we were designing SideDrawer is that, say you're an accountant. Say you have a Dropbox account and say you are synchronizing your client's records with your Dropbox account. Now say you have, say for sake of argument, a thousand customers. Now...
Jason Pereira: Very easy to screw that up.
Gaston: Nobody assumes that that account or Dropbox will be hacked. Correct? Follow me. Humor me.
Jason Pereira: Fair enough. I'm humoring you.
Gaston: Humor me. However, if you're keeping a synchronized file of those 1000 customers in your computer, the weak link is not Dropbox.
Jason Pereira: It's the computer.
Gaston: It's your computer. So from the moment that we don't let you download the files into your computer and synchronize that way...
Jason Pereira: The desktop sync function may be a convenience, but it's also [crosstalk 00:19:14]...
Gaston: There you go. Our application, we call it platform, it's not just an app, it's a platform with it's multi- device, is any device, anywhere, any time. We have the desktop application, a web application, the mobile application, the tablet application. You can use the different tools for what they're for. So if you're going to create a little bit of a list, you're going to use your keyboard, your computer. You create your entire list, you save all those files, all those SideDrawer records, turn on your phone, you open SideDrawer, you have all that synchronized and then you started snapping photos. So instead of actually a synchronizing effort that back in the day you needed to do, like take a photo, you plug it, you download the photo...
Jason Pereira: It's all native.
Gaston: It's all native, it's all synchronized. And then going back to the security by offering things like MFA, offering like...
Jason Pereira: Multi-factor authentication for those who don't know.
Gaston: Thank you.
Jason Pereira: So let's be clear. So when we talk about that, we'll just do a split second on this. I got a griping thing about this. So when we're talking about that, I assume you're looking for something better than just getting a text message because that is the worst form of MFA imaginable.
Jason Pereira: If Jack Dorsey can get his phone spoof and his Twitter account taken over. First of all, what was Jack Dorsey using that type of MFA for in the first place? Secondly, it can happen to anyone so wherever possible, I mean I've talked about before, I'm a big proponent of authenticator apps and I'm just waiting for YubiKey to launch their compatible with iPhone and USBC and I will be on a YubiKey in no time.
Gaston: So the benefit for us is that all those are quite simple for us to integrate and implement.
Jason Pereira: And these are not difficult [inaudible 00:20:51].
Gaston: No they're not. They're not.
Jason Pereira: It's a lack of willpower more often than not to actually get them done.
Gaston: Red tape, willpower ...
Jason Pereira: Legacy systems.
Gaston: Legacy systems. Exactly. Whereas our infrastructure is all built essentially using Docker for crying out loud and those are not technical. Definitely want one, understand but it's like our entire infrastructure is redundant. We can redeploy new functionality in our Quantico servers within minutes. And one of the things that I'm not going to touch a lot, but our entire infrastructure online, our production infrastructure is serverless meaning that is less imperious to hacking than your typical server of any other financial institution.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. So let's talk about, so that's the security style. Let's talk about the acquisition side. We already talked about manual entry in photography. Any other forms you're trying to play at this time?
Gaston: Any document that you want to upload, PDF or whatever it's...
Jason Pereira: So, file direct upload. How about, for lack of a better term, scraping or pulling from other sites?
Gaston: There's one more that I just, you just reminded me. This is probably one of, for someone non-technical, it's wow, for someone technical it's like, Dude, what are you doing? Anyway, so one of the funny things that we have done is our main domain name, sidedrawer.com, we have reserved that for our customers. So very similar to...
Jason Pereira: You have a secret second domain?
Gaston: No, no, no, not really. But for example, Jamie would have his Jamie W at SideDrawer.com. So, anytime anyone sends him a file...
Jason Pereira: They have their own inbox. Yeah, fair enough. Okay.
Gaston: For example, traditional or let's say old-fashioned professionals, PSPs will not have the ability to integrate through our API. That's the other thing, we built a fully featured API to integrate with any other system. So if you have your own back office, you can integrate through an API. You push the file into your system, automatically gets into Jamie's SideDrawer.
Jason Pereira: Or Xavier could do it, but sure.
Gaston: Huh?
Jason Pereira: Or Xavier could do it.
Gaston: Then you can, if you're a little bit more old fashioned, you can email as you would do regularly to Jamie's Gmail. You would email to Jamie W at SideDrawer.com. Then Jamie gets straight into his SideDrawer the file and then can be essentially categorized the moment Jamie goes in and in that regard, obviously things like white labeling or co-branding, the application for easy use. Obviously we have the ability to synchronize using single sign on if need be. So, that's pretty much standard from the get go. I don't know, I'm going way more technical.
Jason Pereira: No, that's good. The reality is what you're basically saying is whatever way you can get, let people get it in there, you're going to let it get in there.
Gaston: Securely.
Jason Pereira: Securely. Right? So but how about where you pull that information? Is there an opportunity? Are you looking at things such as personal financial management type tools where you pull data feeds from banks? Or I've seen perfect example, Hubdoc where basically they log into your website for you and pull your statements for you on a monthly basis.
Gaston: So that is in our roadmap. Yeah, 100% now keep in mind that from our perspective, it's all based on permission. So if you as a user, permit us to do so, we'll do it.
Jason Pereira: And it makes sense this more of a roadmap because I mean other companies have gotten there first. So you have a unique value proposition. Focus on that and then build up from there. And when we start talking about metadata, you start thinking about the links that can happen between these things. Right? It's crazy. I mean like maybe I forgot to upload something, but wait a sec, there's new transaction here that corresponds to this insurance company or what's another example? A charity, right? I, Oh look, you donated money to a charity. Where's that receipt? I kind of need that.
Gaston: You want to know the simplest case that we got from another one of our testimonials is like imagine that you have a comprehensive insurance policy. In there you would have your primary home, your secondary home, your vehicles, your investment properties. Now how do you store that? How do you organize that? Because you're going to have for each property, on each vehicle, you're going to have a different file.
Jason Pereira: Yes.
Gaston: Well the ability that SideDrawer will allow you to actually link all those.
Jason Pereira: You can have a one to many type relationship where this one ...
Gaston: Many to many.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, many to many, exactly.
Gaston: And the best part is what you just touched on a little earlier, which is the SideDrawer history. Say for sake of argument, I have a cottage which I do not. I have a cottage, it's been in my family for let's say, 10 years. I've kept all the maintenance, tax records, everything. Now that file is my file, but then suddenly I need to give it away to my quote unquote son, let's say. Now I can essentially hand over the ownership of the cottage record in SideDrawer to my son to his SideDrawer and suddenly he takes over the entire record. And that way any transfer or any kind of asset you have that ability to transfer all the history of it as well.
Jason Pereira: What you're trying to accomplish is the, what I refer to is the, Why does it still have to be this way? problem that I keep encountering in my life, right? It's the, we have the ability to connect all this stuff, make it talk to each other and push out like actual valuable information. Yet it's like we're nowhere near it. Right? So I mean, what you guys are talking about is fantastic, but I'm not going to discount for one second the monumental effort it will take to get to the ultimate vision.
Jason Pereira: I think you're starting, you're clearly trying to eat the elephant one bite at a time, but yeah, the potential is limitless. Right? And I can see it's exciting. I do think that this will be a crowded space and there'll be other players in there. Rightly so, because what we're really talking about is the automation of every aspect of your life and that's something that is sorely needed.
Jason Pereira: Although of course I will, I'm assuming that a, you guys will not sell people's data, first off. Of course not. And secondly, you will also permit, you're not going to put up a bunch of roadblocks to leave and migrate out of something else.
Gaston: No, no, no.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. As I always say, if you want to create friction as a means of keeping your customer, you're just not doing that. You're just pissing them off.
Gaston: Case-in-point there's like that would happen. So let's touch on the migrating data. One of the things that every PSP will ask for is, I want to be able to actually get all this information at once. Not all of it. The information that I got permission from the customer and different PSPs will have different type of quote unquote templates and that's one thing right away. Your entire file is consolidated in this one report. You as a customer can get it any time. Let's say ...
Jason Pereira: So drawing the data can draw the metadata.
Gaston: Correct.
Jason Pereira: So basically, I jumped ahead. So just to explain what that means is that instead of saying, Hey I need all this information to your financial plan instead of just pulling the documents, I pull the actual data from the documents that we go hunting for anyway and yeah, maybe I still want to see the full document like the will like just to make sure it's written properly, but do I need to know, what's a good example? Anything beyond the price and the coverage amounts for the car insurance policy? No.
Jamie: No.
Gaston: No. Yeah. And then seldomly you will need the policy number.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, and that makes perfect sense because you start thinking about the ability for to tie-in the financial planning softwares in the future and just at a button click that's already basically built out and data I need is all built out and then it just becomes a button click to, Yes, I will give this permission. If they connect to each other, I suck up everything from SideDrawer and then the client has to answer the gaps.
Gaston: You got it. Obviously all based on permission.
Jason Pereira: Of course. Permission is first and foremost.
Gaston: And the customer always has the ultimate ability to give and revoke those permissions.
Jason Pereira: Yeah.
Gaston: And there's also the collaborated aspect of the platform which is I don't need to do all this by myself. Most likely I will not know where to find half of the information that I should be storing. However, my financial planner, my accountant, my estate lawyer, they will know better what information I should be storing. So by having this collaboration aspect to SideDrawer, then the PSPs now can work for me and actually show me that they're working for me. Even if they are, they typically are, they just don't have the ability to show me. Now with this, they would have the ability to do so.
Jamie: So it's not just on the end user to upload all the data or the files. It's also sort of the PSP, the professional service provider, to upload as well. So you can't put all the onus on one person because as you mentioned, you're not going to want to sit there and spend hours and hours uploading data.
Jamie: Now it's going to be pushed from your PSP and you can upload it on your end as well. [crosstalk 00:29:05]...
Jason Pereira: You're very optimistic about the state of our systems. Push anything that'd be hilarious. So, one day before I die, we'll get there. Anyways, so let's go back one last question before we wrap up with the final three questions. So let's go back to the death file concept. I die. How does my next of kin or the executor get access to the file?
Gaston: There are two ways. Let's do the simplest one first. If you actually use SideDrawer as you should, then you would have designated your executor or someone to have full access to your SideDrawer.
Jason Pereira: Immediately or depending what?
Gaston: However you want because one of the features that we are building in is that concept of no access. Meaning you know that the file is there, you just don't have access to the content. We've been hearing a lot from the field. What is it that different professionals need? And this came from some estate lawyers that they were saying, we want the kids of our customers to know that the will is there, but we don't want them to know the content.
Jason Pereira: Exactly.
Gaston: And that's a valid case. So at that point you can have the estate lawyer have access to the entire SideDrawer and have your quote unquote kids have access to the file without access to the contents. The famous, no access. And there's a fact that either your lawyer or your accountant, most likely will know everything about you. Very little you can hide from some professionals.
Gaston: So, if you did in life the assignment of permission, then the moment that you pass, those individuals still have access to your SideDrawer. So there's nothing hidden, everything's ready.
Jason Pereira: But if they don't have that access before?
Gaston: If they don't have that access, as long as you have a proper death certificate, properly certified and you follow certain processes in our SOPs, standard operating procedures, then we would be able to turn that on. Is no different from when someone dies and then the next of kin will ask for a credit card record or getting back the annual fees rebate, et cetera, et cetera. There are procedures in large institutions that follow customers and those procedures are embedded in our operation.
Jason Pereira: Fantastic. All right, so before we wrap up the final three questions I ask everybody and I'm also going to disclose something else. This is the second time we've done this interview. I lost the first recording. So this has been answered before, but I do not recall the answers to these questions, so let's go through them. So first off, whoever wants to go first, can go first. So if you had one wish for something you could change in your company or the industry as a whole, what would it be?
Jamie: Something about our company I don't think we can change anything because we're building from the ground up right now.
Jason Pereira: So everything's changed. Okay.
Jamie: It's all under our control and we're building it with best practices that Gaston mentioned earlier from the ground up. So our team is great, the opportunity is great. There's a need in the market for what we're providing and it provides a great moral value to could be millions of people.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. Potentially.
Gaston: It's a great point that you just brought up is like the one of our moral values is basically.
Jason Pereira: So for wish, Gaston?
Gaston: My wish?
Jason Pereira: Yeah.
Gaston: I don't know, it's like Jamie said, we're doing everything as we want.
Jamie: As we want.
Gaston: We wish something, we just get it done.
Jason Pereira: Fair enough.
Jamie: It's a good environment. It's flexible. Right? And it's, there's not a lot of political red tape that needs to be approved before you can move things forward.
Jason Pereira: Exactly. That's the good thing with starting from a clean slate and you're coding. So therefore you, you can basically build anything you want.
Gaston: But goes beyond is it's also like our company, the way that we're building our team, the way that we're building our culture is if there's something there that we don't like, we just basically don't even do it.
Jamie: Something that we do wish for is the adoption rate to be 100% when we role this out end of March.
Jason Pereira: One hundred percent market share's my wish. I wish for my wishes.
Jamie: Hey you asked, right?
Jason Pereira: That's the I wish for more wishes in this category.
Jason Pereira: All right, so second question. What has been the biggest challenge in getting the company to where it is today?
Gaston: I would say getting a proper understanding where the company was six months ago. Like ...
Jason Pereira: So the entire way we took the first crack at this, it ain't working. What are we getting wrong? What are we missing? Do we feel there's something here?
Gaston: Just for context, Jamie and I both started with the company in the last three months and that's basically, we completely refurbished the entire business. But knowing some aspects of the company we didn't know and that would be my opinion.
Jason Pereira: Fantastic. Jamie, biggest challenge in your mind?
Jamie: I guess it's once the product rolls out, what the appetite is going to be. The conversations we're having with all these PSPs has been fantastic. A lot of buy in.
Jason Pereira: Yes, but until they pull their credit cards out.
Jamie: That's the unknown, unknown, right? So that's I guess can be the biggest challenge. And then just pivoting ...
Jason Pereira: And that's a lot of people want to buy services but they don't actually ever pull their credit card out.
Jamie: Yes, that's a challenge right now. It's when we roll it out to see what the appetite is.
Jason Pereira: And so the looming challenge, we'll see what that looks like. Fair enough.
Jamie: Let's talk in a couple of months again.
Jason Pereira: Exactly. So last question is, what excites you the most about what you're working on and keeps you basically getting up to keep fighting the good fight and carry on?
Gaston: We're really doing something that will benefit people's lives. And I think that for me, that is something that I was craving that in my life. Not only that, is like everything is in our power. It's for us to make ...
Jamie: Or break.
Gaston: Or break.
Jason Pereira: Jamie, same answer? Or you going to go somewhere else?
Jamie: No, it's, I guess it's the same answer. Yeah, it's pretty aligned with my vision and that's why we make a good team.
Jason Pereira: Good. Well gentlemen, thank you very much. You have a tall order ahead of you because frankly digitizing my entire life is something that can be complex given how complex my life can be, but I hope you do it.
Gaston: Thanks.
Jamie: Thank you.
Jason Pereira: Thanks.
Jason Pereira: So I hope you enjoyed that interview with Gaston and Jamie of SideDrawer. As you can hear, they're trying to tackle a very big problem and hopefully they are successful because we can all use that kind of intelligent data storage. As always, if you enjoyed this podcast place a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, take care.
Speaker 4: This podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial, an award-winning financial planning firm catering to high net-worth individuals and their families. To learn more, go to woodgate.com. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play, or find more episodes at fintechimpact.co.