How Kabbage Insights Seeks to Level Playing Field for Small Businesses

This week, Kabbage released its latest product, Kabbage Insights, to the public. Having been available privately since February 10th, the service is now free to all Kabbage customers. Released a month after Kabbage Payments, Insights adds to Kabbage’s ecosystem of products by helping small business owners identify and prepare for cash flow deficits.

Acting almost like a virtual assistant, Insights links to and analyzes a business’s financial data, serving up a report of how the company has performed historically, how it’s doing currently, and what the projections for its future are looking like. While this may sound like standard business planning and budgeting, the time and resources required to provide in-depth financial analyses are usually only in possession of larger companies. Insights, according to Kabbage’s Head of Income Products, Abraham Williams, is an attempt to bridge this gap between what larger businesses have traditionally had access to and what small business owners have been unable to claim.

“Kabbage has, for a number of years now, used data science, modeling, and machine learning to come up with financial decisions on whether to give someone a loan, and we’re right a lot of the time.” Williams told deBanked over the phone. “With this, we’re able to bring this modeling to our small business customers.”

As well as providing a breakdown of a company’s financial history and future, Insights offers a threshold alert system wherein customers can set a desired low-balance amount and receive notifications when they are nearing it. And by pairing Insights with Kabbage’s Small Business Revenue Index, users will be able to compare their company against those of a similar size/location, so long as these businesses are Kabbage customers. The data used to make these comparisons will be aggregated and anonymous.

The public launch of Kabbage is part of the company’s plan to create a fintech ecosystem that completely eliminates waiting times, and is the culmination of Kabbage’s ten years of collecting and analyzing small business financial data.

Or, as Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein said in a statement: “As a small business owner for many years, I spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out whether I’d have the cash to pay my various expenses, including payroll at the end of the month and it’s been a mission of mine to solve this ubiquitous problem for all small business owners ever since. Kabbage is pleased to launch Insights, taking on this burden for small business owners and providing them with cash flow analyses that large enterprises have at their fingertips. We will continue to level the playing field for the small business owner.”

Brendan Garrett was a Reporter at deBanked.