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Related Headlines
| 10/19/2021 | Intuit Introduces Money by Quickbooks |
| 09/13/2021 | Intuit to acquire Mailchimp |
| 02/22/2021 | LoanMe,Liberty Tax to take on Enova, Intuit |
| 11/25/2020 | DOJ approves Credit Karma/Intuit deal |
| 08/25/2020 | Intuit revenue up 13% |
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Intuit and Prosper Marketplace - Ep. 75 |
Stories
Intuit Originated $933M in Small Business Loans in FY 2022
April 5, 2023Intuit, the software company often associated with Quickbooks, originated an astounding $933M in small business loans in its fiscal year 2022. That’s up substantially from the $232M it originated in FY 2021.
It’s important to note that the company’s fiscal year 2022 ended on July 31, 2022 which means more data exists beyond that time. From Aug 1, 2022 – October 31, 2022, the company originated $314M in business loans. In the quarter that followed (Nov 1, 2022 – Jan 31, 2023), Intuit renamed the easily identifiable line item from “originations and purchases of term loans to small businesses” to “originations and purchases of loans” which may bear some significance given that it indicates a steep increase to $701M for that quarter, a record for Intuit by far. If that was entirely business loans then it would place Intuit amongst the largest small business lenders in the country.
Intuit Originated $232M in Small Business Loans in Fiscal Year 2021
August 30, 2021Intuit, the producer of QuickBooks and owner of Credit Karma, originated $232M in small business loans for the fiscal year of 2021 that ended on July 31. That was slightly below fiscal year 2020’s $243M and down significantly from 2019’s $316M. Cumulatively, however, the company has originated approximately $928M since it started lending at the end of 2017.
QuickBooks Capital requires that applicants have their bank accounts connected to the QuickBooks software and revenue of at least $50,000 over the past 12 months. APRs can range anywhere from 9.99% APR to 34% APR.
Intuit completed its acquisition of Credit Karma at the end of last year. Credit Karma generated a quarterly record revenue of $405 million.
LoanMe, Liberty Tax Merger to Take on Intuit, Enova
February 22, 2021NextPoint Financial will combine LoanMe’s business, consumer, and mortgage lending with Liberty Tax’s tax preparation business, according to merger announced on Monday. Liberty’s “2,700+ locations in the US and Canada” will become consumer and SMB loan shops.
The new firm will also offer Merchant Cash Advances; LoanMe launched MCA funding in January and expects to fund $15 million in MCAs in 2021. Based on the acquisition prospectus, NextPoint will be a tax readiness firm, with the added suite of financial products as a value and growth builder.
Ramping up consumer, installment, and MCA lending, paired with the third-largest tax-prep business in the U.S, NextPoint expects to compete directly with Intuit, H&R Block, Enova, and Elevate.
Fintech firms are setting themselves apart from the competition as one-stop shops for everything a business needs, including MCA products. Why branch into financial services now? NextPoint found that this year alt lenders have outperformed the S&P500 three times over.
“We are a one-stop financial services destination empowering hardworking and credit-challenged consumers and small businesses,” the investor presentation reads. “To get to the next point in their financial futures.”
Intuit offers a variety of financial products, like business loans through Quickbooks Capital, alongside their popular, 60%+ market share of tax prep software. H&R began offering small $1,000 lines of credit this year, but not much more.
The team leading the new company, NextPoint Financial, will feature execs like Brent Turner as CEO, Mike Piper CFO, both keeping their previous Liberty Tax positions. Jonathan Williams, former president and founding shareholder of LoanMe, will become president of lending.
Square, Stripe, Intuit, Shopify, Talked SMB Lending at LendIt Fintech 2020
October 8, 2020
The LendIt Fintech digital conference last week was a sign of the times. This year, millions of average businesses and consumers have had to go virtual: they had no choice. 2020 has been a year of struggle and survival, and a time of great fintech adoption.
Some firms have been more successful than others. Going full digital, LendIt introduced virtual networking at the conference- the first day alone saw 2,171 meetings. Zoom meetings and virtual greetings took the place of handshakes and elevator pitches that would regularly accompany the convention.
On day three, LendIt hosted a panel of SMB lending leaders from Stripe, Shopify, Square, and Quickbooks Capital. Bryan Lee, Senior Director of Financial Services for Salesforce, served as moderator and he focused the discussion on “How the leading fintech brands are adapting.”
THE PIVOT
Lee began the talk by asking Eddie Serrill, Business Lead from Stripe Capital, about how the industry has pivoted.
Serrill talked about how Stripe was powering online interactions and saw an influx of traditionally offline businesses switching over to their platforms. Stripe also saw an increased demand for online purchases and payment.
“We’ve been trying to find that right balance between supporting users that have been doing incredibly well,” Serrill said. “While trying to support our users who are seeing a bit of a setback.”
Stripe introduced a lending product in September of last year and now SMBs can borrow from Stripe and pay back by diverting a percentage of their sales, much like the other panelists’ companies offer.
Jessica Jiang, Head of Capital Markets at Square Capital, talked about how her firm adjusted. Square reacted to fill the niche of their underserved customers by introducing a main street lending fund, serving industries hard hit by the pandemic, Jiang said. Small buinesess that relied on in-person action like coffee shops and retail community businesses were given preferential lending options.
Product Lead at Shopify, Richard Shaw, said that this year his firm learned to be prepared for anything. Everything that Shopify was potentially going to do or planning on implementing in the coming years suddenly became a here-and-now necessity.
“We tore up our existing plans,” Shaw said. “It was like the commerce world of 2030 turned up in 2020. You need to do ten years of work, but you need to do it today.”
Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce giant has doubled in value this year. The firm launched Shopify Capital in the US and Canada in 2016 and has originated $1.2 billion in funding to small businesses since that time.
Luke Voiles, the VP of Intuits QuickBooks Capital, talked about how his team handled pandemic conservatively.
“Five years of digital shift has happened instantaneously due to COVID,” Voiles said. “Intuit is pretty recession-resistant in the sense that you have to do taxes, you have to do your accounting, and the shift to digital helps a lot.”
Business lending was different, Voiles said, as soon as his team saw COVID coming, they battened down the hatches, slowed lending, and pivoted to facilitating PPP.
PPP
Voiles said the craziest thing he has seen in his career was what Quickbooks did to deploy PPP aid.
Within about two weeks, almost 500 people from across Intuit came together to shift all the data they carried on customers to aid applications.
“We were uniquely positioned to help solve and deploy that capital,” Voiles said. “We have a payroll business where 1.4 billion business use us, we have a tax business where we have Schedule C tax filings, and we have a lending business. We were able to pivot and put the pieces together quickly.”
QuickBooks Capital deployed $1.2 billion to 31,000 business in a process that Voiles said was 90% automated. Now customers are awaiting other rounds of government aid.
Square’s Jiang said the initial shutdown weeks in March and April saw hundreds of Square team members working on PPP facilitation through the night and weekends. As the funds dried up those first two weeks, it was clear to Jiang the program was favoring larger firms and higher loan amounts, leaving out small businesses.
“That’s typical of investment bankers, but not very typical of tech,” Jiang said. “PPP is a perfect example of how small businesses are continuing to be underserved by banks.”
THE SHAKEOUT AND THE FUTURE
2020 has been a major shock to the lending marketplace. Voiles from Quickbooks said the amount of work it took to make it through the first wave was a significant shakeout.
“You’ve seen what’s happening with Kabbage and OnDeck and other transactions with people getting sold; there is a shakeout happening in the space,” Voiles said. “The bigger players will make it through and will continue to help small businesses get access to capital that they need.”
When asked about the future roadmap of QuickBooks Capital, Voiles said it wasn’t just about automating banking. Using Intuit’s resources to build an automated system is only half of the picture- the firm believes in an expert-driven platform. After the automated process, customers will be able to talk to an expert to review the data, and “check their work.” Voiles said Quickbooks wants to offer a service that is equivalent to the replacement of a CFO.
“These small businesses that have less than ten employees, they can’t afford to hire a pro,” Voiles said. “They need automated support to show them the dashboard and picture of what their business is.”
Pointing to Stripe’s online infrastructure, Serrill exemplified what successful lenders will offer next year: a platform that combines many needs of SMBs in one place.
“I think it’s really about linking all of this data, making it super intuitive and anticipating the need for their users, so they don’t need a team of business school grads to manage their finances,” Serrill said. “So they can get back to building the core of their business, not figuring out whether they have enough cash flow tomorrow.”
Jiang said the future of small business would be written in data, contactless payments, and digital banking. She sees consolidation in the Fintech space and has a positive outlook on bank-fintech partnerships.
The FDIC granted Square a conditional approval for the issuance of an Industrial Loan Company ILC in March this year. Jiang outlined plans on launching an online SMB lending and banking service next year called Square Financial Services if the conditional charter remains in place.
For Shopify’s future, Shaw was excited to look forward to the launching of Shopify balance- a cash flow management system, and Shopify installment payments. He reiterated that the success of Shopify’s lending division was due in part because making loans was not the entire business.
“Shopify Capital is one piece of a wider ecosystem,” Shaw said. “All these things together are more powerful than individual parts.”
Intuit Agrees to Buy Credit Karma For $7.1 Billion
February 26, 2020
This week the news broke that a deal had been reached between Credit Karma and Intuit that will see the latter purchase Credit Karma for $7.1 billion, paid for with cash and stock. After rumors of the deal leaked over the weekend, the agreement was confirmed on Monday by chief executives from both companies.
Under the deal, Credit Karma will continue to operate as a stand-alone business and its CEO, Kenneth Lin, will stay on and run the company. Beyond that, some believe that the merger will see Intuit rise as a go-to platform for financial services. Owning TurboTax as well as Mint, tools for filing taxes and budgeting, respectively, the addition of Credit Karma, which allows customers to view their credit score for free, would advance Intuit’s product suite as well as bolster the data it already has on users.
“There hasn’t been that much innovation in the financial services world in the past two decades,” Credit Karma Founder and CEO Kenneth Lin said. “The combination of the two companies will really be able to move consumers forward.”
Credit Karma claims to have 100 million customers, with half of all American millennials being included within that number. It also states that it has over 2,600 data points on each customer, including their social security number as well as loan history. The company makes its money by selling customer information to third parties who advertise new credit cards and loans on the Credit Karma site. Credit Karma also receives a couple of hundred dollars for each card and loan that is acquired through ads on its site. Being one of the few tech startups that actually turn a profit, Credit Karma claimed to have received $1 billion in revenue in 2019.
Speaking on the deal, Intuit’s CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, said that “This is very core to what we’ve declared around helping our customers make ends meet and make smart money decisions.”
The Customer’s Past Due, What Do You Do?
December 12, 2022
There’s an old saying about it being easy to lend money, the hard part is getting it back. The implied lesson is that lenders need to be selective with who they lend money to, lest they be overrun with defaults. But perhaps the hard part is not entirely about whether or not the lender lends to the right borrowers but also about implementing a system that makes getting the money back from the people they believe are good candidates in a frictionless manner. Because more often than not, failing to make a payment is not actually caused by a shortage of funds.
“Two thirds [of the time it’s] non-monetary related reasons,” said Michael Pupil, VP of Sales at Lexop, to deBanked, “So like credit cards expiring, accounts switching over or they haven’t switched it into the right account, or the PAP [Pre-authorized Payment] expires, a wrong email address or a wrong mailing address, because they move; A ton of different reasons.”
For a company founded in 2016 and doing business throughout the US and Canada, this statistic was an ‘ah-ha’ moment to Lexop. Lexop’s goal is to improve the past-due payment process for lenders or any business that bills its customers. To do this, it communicates with customers by email and text message and provides a frictionless pathway to payment.
“We are payment gateway agnostic,” said Pupil, “and I think that’s the first place to start. Because how an organization collects those funds today doesn’t change. And I think that’s important from a stability and an ease of use standpoint for each customer that we work with.”
It’s also a white-label system so customers would never know that Lexop was involved in the process. There’s no phone call from a collections department or scary letter in the mail.
“The most important mission for Lexop, when we work with our customers, is to never make a customer’s customer feel like they are delinquent or late or ostracized like that, that emotional feeling of being late on a bill, if we can reduce that by a discreet easy tool to just kind of let it flow the way that they want when they want on the device that they want, I think they will appreciate that offer from their lender,” Pupil said.
It might seem intuitive, fine tuning the process for past-due customers to make payments, but Pupil shared that he’s seen a lot of tech and fintech players over the last decade focus the bulk of their efforts on the frontend of the user experience, to improve the application process or to make a loan in the most efficient way possible.
“That gap is again, is on the backend,” he said. “And when you say you’re investing all this money on developing security for an app or 3d technology or meeting customers in the metaverse and then you send a piece of paper to collect on the money, like it just doesn’t make sense. And there’s a gap there.”
Presumably, Lexop’s customers would already have some kind of process in place for borrowers that are past-due and so Lexop focuses on improving the outcomes for them in a manner consistent with their existing brand experiences.
“There is an easier, better way of just coordinating the technology stack as a whole to align the experience that you’re setting at the beginning of the customer journey to also include the backend and the continued management of that journey for the client,” Pupil said.
Cover Genius Raises $70M in Series D Funding Led by Dawn Capital
November 8, 2022
The insurtech company, Cover Genius raised $70 M in Series D funding led by Dawn Capital. Participants also included investors from New York-based Atlas Merchant Capital and existing investors including GSquared and King River Capital. The funding will be used to continue growth expansion for new global insurance distribution platform, XCover.
“XCover is our award-winning global distribution platform for any line of insurance or warranty, with an API for instant claims payments that holds an industry-leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +65,” said Angus McDonald CEO and Co-Founder of Cover Genius. “We work with our partners to co-create solutions that embed protection that’s licensed or authorized in over 60 countries and all 50 US states.”
This platform makes it simple for digital companies to offer tailored insurance policies directly to their customers and is trusted by some of the world’s largest companies including Booking Holdings (owner of Priceline, Kayak and Booking.com), Intuit, Hopper, Skyscanner, Ryanair, Turkish Airlines, Descartes ShipRush, Zip and SeatGeek. It’s also available at Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Wayfair, and SE Asia’s largest company, Shopee.
At the moment, Cover Genius is entirely focused on growth and expansion.
“We are a fast-growing, global market leader and this latest funding round will help us as we enter our next growth phase,” said McDonald.
Finance Isn’t the Only Thing Being Embedded, This ‘Embedded Insurance Technology’ Company is Genius
September 22, 2022Ever notice the check box to protect a flight? That’s Cover Genius! The New York-headquartered insurtech company is embedding insurance by providing protection directly to the user of a platform. This can be done at sign-up, checkout, or wherever the offer seems relevant to the user. Alex Sklar, VP of Strategic Partnerships, describes the process in numerous examples such as adding rental protection at the moment you’re paying a security deposit, adding car insurance at the time you’re buying your car, or adding any type of commercial insurance lines at the moments when you’re scaling up your business.
“And so, the new way of doing things when we think about embedded insurance, is customers get customized protection directly from their favorite apps, platforms and brands, at the same time that the major life events or transaction is happening,” said Sklar.
Their direct customers range from many well-known digital companies in the BNPL market as well as retail, travel, and bank partners. They work in a B2B2C and B2B2B fashion, internationally, not just in the U.S.
“So, we’re protecting the end use customers of our partners,” said Sklar. “You know, some of those partners are the Buy Now Pay Later, Zip, into Intuit QuickBooks, eBay Wayfair, Ryanair for booking holdings. So really, for us, we take an insurance agnostic approach. And it’s really a question of being able to pair that protection at the right moment when it’s relevant.”
With many events or natural disasters that could potentially put businesses out of business, Cover Genius ensures customers that they are protected. And for retail customers they offer product protection and product warranty.
“That’s where that being able to have that protection at that moment removes the trepidation from the customer making the purchase knowing that the product will be protected,” said Sklar. “So, there’s all different types of ways that we actually work with our partners to protect their end customers.”
Like any company, there’s always challenges to be faced, especially when introducing new ways to do things. And in the insurance industry there are rules and regulations to be complied with even when attempting to deliver it in a more efficient way.
“I think that there’s also, just in general, anytime you’re taking on a large legacy industry, you’re always going to have a little bit of challenges you know, of showing people that there are new ways to do things,” said Sklar. “But I think the size and breadth of the partners we work with show that we’re able to overcome these challenges.”
Finding more ways for their end users to add protection to purchases, Cover Genius recently launched a collaboration with Zip to allow customers to protect their purchase at checkout. They will also provide transaction monitoring that monitors the transactions recently made for the items post-purchase.
“So overall, the future will give Zip Pay and Zip Money customers the ability to add protection to their Zip purchases, either during checkout or after checkout on select purchases, making it an affordable and timely alternative,” said Sklar.
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See Post... intuit (owner of quickbooks) so it was great to help with the accounting side. you can integrate it with achworks as well. i send out the nacha files directly to the bank so i can notified of miss payments much quicker than using a 3rd party like achworks, , is this difficult to d... |
See Post... intuit (owner of quickbooks) so it was great to help with the accounting side. you can integrate it with achworks as well. i send out the nacha files directly to the bank so i can notified of miss payments much quicker than using a 3rd party like achworks... |
