If the potential of expanding your fintech startup’s vision to encompass the world was ever unclear, the $9 billion valuation of Stripe made it crystalline:

Massive Global Market Leads to High Valuation for Stripe

But how does a startup begin to think globally in the heavily-regulated financial arena? We asked MaRS Fintech Cluster director Dinaro Ly about the logistics of taking your fintech plans worldwide:

A “Global First Approach” For Growth Potential in Fintech

Rounding out our look at the worldwide market for fintech startups was our conversation with Tim Nixon of Payment Rails, which we started over on Facebook:

We concluded our Payment Rails conversation right here, finding out just how important partnerships with existing financial institutions worldwide are for a fintech startup:

Payment Rails Pushes Fintech Beyond Borders

Much of the coverage of Silicon Valley lately has focused on the gender gap in technology, and for good reason: The gap is growing, not shrinking, despite very public support of the issue by giants such as Intel.

Hiring practices are part of bridging this gap, but in an entrepreneur-driven industry, funding is another key part of the solution. According to Sahil Raina, assistant professor of finance at the University of Alberta School of Business, a deep-dive into the history of startup successes and failures reveals something of a surprise: The likelihood of female-led startups enjoying the same exit rates as that of male-led businesses is the same, but only when the female-led startup has been funded and guided by a VC with a female partner.

This isn’t news to Karla Friede, CEO of Nvoicepay.com, who recommends that fellow women entrepreneurs look for VCs with female partners: “The men at these firms are probably more comfortable working alongside women and their expectations for women’s roles are likely different,” she says. But Friede points out that women can tip the balance in their favour through other tactics too: 

• Make confident, not cautious statements in pitches
• Talk to VCs that already understand your niche
• Up the emotional connection by showing happy customers
• Show quantifiable results

The good news is that despite the ongoing gender gap problem, there are more supports for women-led tech companies than ever. “Nearly every week, there seems to be a new fund, a new network of innovative women, a new effort convening smart people to bring the venture world much needed diversity of thought,” says Joshua Henderson, an outspoken champion of women in the tech world. He has identified over 100 VCs, networks, and dedicated programs that exist specifically to help women entrepreneurs succeed.

Nuco co-founder and COO Kesem Frank and his team are passionate about blockchain’s potential: “We asked ourselves, do we believe this has the potential to change the world — spoiler alert, we do — and what do we want to do about it?”

Founded in mid-2016, Nuco is a Toronto-based startup that provides blockchain infrastructure for enterprise markets. The brainchild of three former Deloitte employees, Nuco is preparing to take on the international fintech scene.

We talked to Kesem Frank about Nuco’s roots and the company’s place in the future of digital infrastructure.

TechPORTFOLIO: Could you tell us a bit about how Nuco got started?

Kesem Frank: Nuco is actually the continuation of work we started over 24 months ago, with our other founders Matthew Spoke and Jin Tu. Pursuing the blockchain is a real opportunity domain for enterprise. But two years ago, it was much more focused around the community and public chains, stuff you would read about if you followed things like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But there was not a lot of consensus work — or even thought, to be honest — around distributed ledgers such as blockchain, and how they could play a more significant role in powering services and functionality in the enterprise sense.

That was the beginning of putting together the framework of why enterprise should care about this emerging domain.  

TechPORTFOLIO: If a layperson from outside of the fintech world asked you, “What is Nuco’s product?” how would you answer?

Kesem Frank: What Nuco does is significant — we believe even fundamental — but pretty simple. Our product is blockchain networks that are customized and dedicated per use case.

Nuco sets up a blockchain made for enterprise clients to be able to do truly peer-to-peer, transactions that don’t rely on intermediaries. Not just in the financial sense, but any interaction or communication between two stakeholders, and in real time.

As far as we’ve had a civilization, we’ve had a challenge as a species to be able to say who owns what. The approach for millennia has always been: write it down and put it somewhere secure.

The problem with databases in knowing who owns what — and you can put firewalls around them and try to segregate them from the outside world — is that it assumes we trust our counterparts. We’re forced to trust another party implicitly when we rely on their data.

Bitcoin is built on the blockchain. It answers how to move value from point A to point B without having to know my counterpart, without having to trust my counterpart, and without having to go through an intermediary. There’s no such thing as a Bitcoin bank, right? You can just move value directly.

TechPORTFOLIO: What’s your relationship to the London, Ontario startup scene?

Kesem Frank: We’re based in Toronto, but we have very good relations with Western University and the London region. We had a team of five MBAs from Western’s Ivey Business School who were part of a project with us for almost four months. We absolutely see London as a top-tier source of talent.