Brendan Garrett was a Reporter at deBanked.
Articles by Brendan Garrett
Ocrolus Announces Premium Fintech Platform, Ocrolus+ at New York City Event
December 12, 2019
Last night Ocrolus, the New York-based fintech infrastructure company that specializes in document verification and cash-flow analytics, announced its latest product, the Ocrolus+ platform from Chelsea’s Glasshouses.
Following a series of testimonies from companies such as BlueVine, OnDeck, and Enova, Ocrolus’s CEO, Sam Bobley took to the stage to run through what the new platform means for customers before thanking everyone for coming out.
Speaking to deBanked earlier that day, Bobley explained that Ocrolus+ expands upon two of the services available to customers already, its Capture and Detect products. In their ‘+’ iterations these services will now offer the ability to upload documents and connect digital data sources to them as well as utilize advanced file tampering protection via their new partnerships with Plaid and SentiLink, respectively.
Bobley asserts that the development is partly due to Ocrolus’s customers and their evolving needs. “Our growth and our success is largely driven by our customers. We’re in the fortunate position where our customers have helped us build our product road map … They challenged us to improve our platform and provide additional services. And these were two areas that seemed absolutely critical.”
And looking forward, Ocrolus plans to continue to offer advanced services through their platform, with Bobley revealing that a third product is in the works, Analytics+, which will focus on cash flow. And as well as this, the CEO and Co-founder noted that additional digital data sources may be added in the long term.
“One thing we’re working on as a company is to transform from a company that analyzes financial documents to a company that provides fintech infrastructure, end-to-end fintech infrastructure, so by bolstering up our fraud detection capabilities and also including the ability to connect to bank accounts for confirmatory and ongoing monitoring, we’ve been able to solve additional problems that our customers are asking for.”
Merchant Growth Partners with goeasy to Provide Funding via Physical Branches
December 11, 2019
This month Merchant Growth, the Vancouver-based alternative finance company, announced its partnership with goeasy Ltd. that will see Merchant Growth’s services being offered in goeasy branches throughout Canada. Beginning with British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan in 2019, Merchant Growth aims to have expanded to the remaining provinces in the first quarter of 2020.
Under the partnership, goeasy will receive compensation from Merchant Growth for all loans made through them while Merchant Growth will provide the capital.
“goeasy is a unique Canadian success and they’ve done that by being disciplined managers, by putting their customers first, and by building a great reputation for themselves in the industry,” said David Gens, Merchant Growth’s President and CEO. “And what we see in them is an ideal partner in that they have the market reach in terms of brand recognition and locations around the country.”
It is the latter of these factors that make the deal stand out. Given the industry’s standard of digital applications, goeasy and Merchant Growth’s return to brick and mortar branches that offer live human managers, clerks, and even physical paper, marks a turn back towards more historical methods of doing business.
Gens commented on this, stating that “there’s something to be said for face-to-face interactions and for that reason I don’t think you’re ever going to go down to having no bank branches … Having a physical location where you can chat with people about your financial needs is something that will always exist as far as I can see.”
The Broker: How Gerald Watson Mixes Factoring with MCAs
December 3, 2019
Role?
I’m the owner of The Watson Group, a factoring broker company.
How did you end up in the industry?
I got started in what I call the contract financing industry about 35 years ago, kind of by accident. I had spent years working with a large management consulting company in Boston and we had some major contracts in the DC area. I was on an assignment there and my son was in school there with another kid, and I met the parents and the dad told me what he was doing and he said I needed to come by the offices to check it out.
I really had no intention of going at all, but finally to get this guy off my back, I went by one day and he showed me the business they were in. When I left I was totally on board. I had been working for several years in management consulting, but this was all new and I was excited because it was helping real businesses solve real problems and it was very hands-on.
I came on board and I’ll never forget my first day on the job: I didn’t know anything from anything – rights, factoring, contracts financing – this was years before the MCA industry even existed, and my boss said he just got a job, 911 call from a printer and they needed some funding help. “Can you help them? Why don’t you come ride with me? It’d be good on the job training for you.” And so we sat down with the guy and found a solution for him. And to this day he hasn’t had to close his business.
How were those early days?
Interesting because this was before the internet, almost before cell phones, in fact. I remember at one point when I was being hired, the Motorola flip phone was just coming out and they were like $1,500 around 25 years ago. And I said okay, I’ll take the job but you’ve got to give me one of these Motorola phones, so he did and it was great but this is before the internet and I didn’t really believe in traditional advertising or mailing out brochures, so the strategy I take is called “institutional referral-based marketing.”
In a nutshell, what that is, is working with various institutions that refer clients to use on a regular basis and as part of that process, I’d give talks or seminars and workshops and sit on panels and teach some of these referral groups how to assess deals and package them and get them ready for funding. You know, develop a pretty solid reputation in the industry for what we did and even today we’re 100% referral.
What can you tell me of the style in which you approach deals?
The approach that I’ve always taken is really a diagnostic approach, we kind of almost see ourselves as doctors. If you go to a doctor and you have pain, you may not know what’s causing that pain, you just want to feel better. And so what does the doctor do? They have to understand what’s going on in order to make you feel better.
Client’s got a pain: “I need money. I need working capital and I need it now.” And so we get a clear picture of what their objectives are and what they’re looking to accomplish: how much they need, what they need it for, timing, etc., and like a doctor, we go through a series of diagnostic tests, which can involve getting a list of documents – financials, bank statements, whatever it is – and going through them. You’re drilling down on where they’re at and coming up after that, coming up with what I call a treatment plan or funding strategy.
Here’s the key: you’ve got to ask the right questions, because if you don’t ask the right questions you’ll never get the right answer. All too often what a broker will do is they’ll get right into solutions and answers and talk about why what they offer is the best or why their funder is the best thing since sliced bread without having a picture of what their client’s true needs are in this situation. So I have a whole series of quizzes I’ve done a million times so I don’t need to write them down. I know what they are but I systematically go through ‘em, and we call that a preliminary underwriting interview.
What is the value of combining MCAs and factoring?
Funding solutions typically involve multi-funding products. And that’s where the advent of MCAs came in, and why they’re such a real asset. Because you meet a client today and it’s Wednesday, or Tuesday, hell maybe even Thursday, and the guy’s siting there with half a million dollars in receivables that we can convert into cash but we may need 3 days to do it, but he needs 2 days.
MCAs are a great product because we can step in, solve the problem, get him an immediate injection to stop the bleeding, and take it out from factoring proceeds a few days later. So it’s a great compliment and tool and this is something I’ve tried to educate on both sides. It’s not a threat it’s a complement. The key is how you use it. It’s like two medications. You go to a doctor, they’ll prescribe a list of meds, the key is to make sure they all complement each other.
Any advice for those looking to combine MCAs and factoring?
The first thing you want to do as an ISO who’s interested in developing a factoring brokering business is to understand the basics of factoring: what is factoring, how does it work, how do you qualify, how much does it cost?
The second thing you want to do is look internally to develop your customer base and the quickest customer base is what we call the low-hanging fruit. These are existing merchants that didn’t fund. Any merchant that is in B2B, whether they got funded or not, is a candidate for factoring. So go back through the files, look at the database and you may find out you probably have a lot more than what you ever imagined.
The third is to develop your database of funding resources – of funders.
And the last thing you want to have is a game plan. What’s your game plan and what’s your strategy for moving forward with your factoring broker business?
Clearbanc Offering Funding to Combat US-China Tariff Costs
November 16, 2019
Clearbanc, the Toronto-based funding company co-founded by Dragons’ Den’s Michele Romanow, has announced this month that it will be expanding its funding options to support those small businesses who need assistance purchasing inventory from Chinese suppliers.
Specializing in funding businesses who require capital for digital adverts, the Canadian firm decided to expand its offerings after Chinese suppliers started to require inventory payments upfront as a response to the pressure caused by President Trump’s trade war with China. “This isn’t really about the tariffs,” explained Romanow. “This is really about the fact that now all of the Chinese suppliers, because of the uncertainty, are asking for upfront payments for inventory.”
With the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend approaching, vendors are looking to be as well stocked as possible, especially when estimates are saying shoppers will spend more than $136 billion in Q4 2019. Most notably affected will be those merchants who deal in electronics. And with worries of the spending extravaganza weekend being affected by the tariffs having persisted for months, Clearbanc is aiming to step in and soothe some of the uncertainty.
Not being limited to goods coming from China, funding is also available to all businesses looking to secure capital for inventory purposes, regardless of the supplier’s location; with a charge of 9% of the total amount funded, and funds available being between $10,000 and $10 million.
Speaking on the company’s strategy, Romanow had to say that “every political change can certainly breed new business, but these are all fairly new so we’re just listening and figuring out what our founders are looking for.”
Google to Begin Offering Checking Accounts in 2020
November 16, 2019
This week Google announced that it plans to offer checking accounts to customers in 2020. The news comes after the release of the Apple Card, Apple and Goldman Sach’s controversial joint project, in August; this week’s release of Facebook Pay; and the mass exodus by payments companies from Facebook’s Libra Association last month.
Titled as Google’s ‘Cache’ project, the accounts will be the result of a partnership between the tech giant and a selection of banks and credit unions. Thus far, Citigroup and a credit union based in Stanford University have been confirmed as partners, with more to be announced. Speaking on the venture, Citigroup spokesperson Liz Fogarty said the “agreement has the potential to expand the reach and breadth of our customer base.” Whereas Joan Opp, President and CEO of Stanford Federal Credit Union, remarked that the deal would be “critical to remaining relevant and meeting customer expectations.”
As of yet, not much is known beyond these partners and that the checking accounts will be in some way “smart” according to Google spokesperson Craig Ewer. Whether or not there will be fees attached to the accounts, or who will be the target audience remain unsure. The latter especially given Google Pay’s poor take up in America.
As well as all this, it is equally unclear what exactly Google will be bringing to banking that is new. In his statement, Ewer said that “we’re exploring how we can partner with banks and credit unions in the US to offer smart checking accounts through Google Pay, helping their customers benefit from useful insights and budgeting tools while keeping their money in an FDIC or NCUA-insured accounts.” Such “insights” and “tools” are yet to be expanded upon and may give cause to alarm, as the company has recently come under fire for its questionable use of data after it was revealed that Google has secretly gathered the personal medical data of 50 million Americans from healthcare providers; and has recently been accused of using both human contractors and algorithms to tweak search engine results, potentially exhibiting favoritism as well as a willingness to change results related to at least one major advertiser.
When asked by CNBC about Google’s plans to enter finance, Senator Mark Warner (D) was apprehensive, remarking that “large platform companies have not had a very good record of protecting the data or being transparent with consumers.” Warner, who was a tech entrepreneur before entering politics, believes more regulation should be in place as the number of tech companies looking to enter finances continues to increase, saying, “once they get in, the ability to extract them out is going to be virtually impossible.”
Such comments come in the wake of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg’s testimony to Congress last month, in which he told the representatives: “I view the financial infrastructure in the United States as outdated.” Just how outdated Zuckerburg and his contemporaries believe it to be will become clearer as more of these Big Tech-Wall Street hybrids are released.
Apple Card Under Investigation by State Financial Regulator
November 14, 2019
Apple and Goldman Sachs came under fire this week after numerous users of the Apple Card, a joint venture by the two companies, took to social media claiming that the algorithm used to determine credit limits discriminated against women.
It began when Danish tech entrepreneur and racecar driver David Heinemeier Hansson wrote up an expletive-laden teardown of the card and the companies behind it after he discovered that he had access to twenty times more credit than his wife, despite the couple having filed joint tax returns. Following the twitter thread’s viral surge, other men came forward with similar stories, some noting that their wives had better credit scores than themselves.
Upon dealing with Apple’s customer service, who gave Hansson’s wife a “VIP bump” to her credit limit, raising it to match her husband’s, the entrepreneur lamented the giant’s response to his questions about the decision-making process behind Apple Card.
“Apple has handed the customer experience and their reputation as an inclusive organization over to a biased, sexist algorithm it does not understand, cannot reason with, and is unable to control,” Hansson wrote after being told by two Apple representatives that they were unable to explain the reasoning behind the inequity other than say that “it was just the algorithm.” Hansson went on later to criticize the implementations of algorithms that incorporate “biased historical training data, faulty but uncorrectable inputs, programming errors, or malicious intent” as a whole, pointing to Amazon’s recent use of an algorithmic hiring tool that taught itself to favor men.
And in a surprise twist, Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak weighed in, saying, “The same thing happened to us. I got 10x the credit limit. We have no separate bank or credit card accounts or any separate assets. Hard to get to a human for a correction though. It’s big tech in 2019.”
Over the weekend word came from the New York Department of Financial Services that it would be investigating the practices behind the Apple Card to determine whether or not such an algorithm discriminates on the basis of sex, which is prohibited by state law in New York. This is the second such investigation recently, with the NYDFS announcing last week an investigation into the healthcare company UnitedHealth Group and its use of an algorithm that allegedly led to white patients receiving better care than black patients.
“Financial service companies are responsible for ensuring the algorithms they use do not even unintentionally discriminate against protected groups,” wrote NYDFS Superintendent Linda Lacewell in a blog post that explained the decision to investigate and called for those who believed they were affected unfairly by Apple Card to reach out. “[T]his is not just about looking into one algorithm – DFS wants to work with the tech community to make sure consumers nationwide can have confidence that the algorithms that increasingly impact their ability to access financial services do not discriminate and instead treat all individuals equally and fairly no matter their sex, color of skin, or sexual orientation.”
In their response, the Goldman Sachs Bank Support twitter account posted a note listing various factors that come into consideration when determining a person’s credit limit, asserting that they “have not and will not make decisions based on factors like gender.”
And it would appear that this is correct, at least in the literal sense, as the application process for the Apple Card does not include any questions relating to gender.
Bruce Updin of Zest AI, a company that provides machine learning software for underwriters, said of the controversy that “there’s bias in all lending models, even human lenders … race, gender, and age are built into the system. It can show up just due to the nature of the credit scoring system as FICO scores at the end of the scale can correlate to race.”
Explaining that there are connections between identity and information many humans might never perceive without machine-learning algorithms, like Nevada license plates being an indicator of the likelihood of someone’s race, Updin asserts that such links need to be weighed, balanced, and supervised by those in the banks. For Updin, transparency and explainability are the real problems here rather than the algorithms themselves.
Software exists that can pinpoint which variables are producing results that, for example, skew to prefer women over men, and can remove such factors and run the tests again, probing for differences. The trouble arises when banks find themselves unable to communicate such details for whatever reason, be it an inherent misunderstanding of their own programs or an unwillingness to explain why some of their models prefer certain groups over others.
It’s really a case of “giving up a little bit of accuracy for a lot of fairness” when choosing to remove variables that are proxies for gender, race, age, or a variety of other identifying features, according to Updin. “It’s just a lot of math, it’s not magic. The more you automate the tools, the easier it is.
“I’m convinced in 5-10 years every bank will be using machine-learning for underwriting … we don’t need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
BFS Capital Hires New COO
November 12, 2019
BFS announced this morning that it has hired Brian Simmons as its new Chief Operating Officer. The news come as the company is preparing for the North American launch of its tech platform in December, a move that is part of BFS’s vision to become a more customer-focused business.
This planned “journey,” as CEO Mark Ruddock calls it, has been demonstrated in the past with the hiring of Fred Kauber as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer in May.
“If you’re going to be a successful venture-backed company,” Ruddock explains, “you need to think differently and act differently.” And this approach is manifested in Simmons’ history. Having worked in a diverse set of fields, the new COO has previously worked with Openlane, a B2B digital automotive marketplace; Wonga, the peer-to-peer lender where he was Head of Global Products and where he was introduced to Ruddock; and the IATF, or International Axe Throwing Federation, where he was a Co-founder and board member.
Together these experiences form a patchworked career, highlighting different skills and industries, but Simmons affirms that they’ve molded him to fit into BFS. “I think that the overarching theme has been that I’ve always been drawn by innovation,” Simmons explains, noting that his experience with Wonga provided him with a knowledge of financial services that is crucial to his role at BFS, while his time with the IATF benefitted him by endowing an intimate knowledge of the financial pressures small businesses face.
“What’s spoken to me at each turn is the opportunity to be involved with organizations who are at the bleeding edge of what they are doing and just incredibly innovative in their approach to doing business […] I’ve been really fortunate to work with a number of quite successful organizations at different phases in their life cycle and I think that’s given me an understanding of what works and what doesn’t.”
Going forward, Simmons will be managing the progress of transforming lead-loan operational processes and focusing on the company’s transition to a fully digital-enabled lending platform.
“To transform anything successfully is an exercise of effective change management, and there’s a real art to doing that right,” Simmons notes. “It’s not just doing things better, it’s how you communicate to people, how you do it in the right sequencing, how you get the right team together to affect things in the right way.”
Canadian Lender’s Association Awards Leading Executives and Companies
November 11, 2019
Today the CLA announced the winners for its 2019 Leaders in Lending Awards. Highlighting the efforts of exceptional players within the fintech and alternative finance fields, the awards seek to “celebrate the industry and celebrate all the cool fintech things happening in Canada,” according to the CLA’s Strategic Partnerships Director Tal Schwartz.
Now in its second year, the Leaders in Lending Awards are split into two categories, with one focusing on the efforts of companies in the industry and the other on individual executives. 2019 will be the first year that the latter of these categories is incorporated. The awards will be imparted to their new owners at the Canadian Lenders Summit later this month, where a special prize will also be given to one winner from each category.
Among the winners in the first category are Borrowell, IOU Financial, and Michele Romanow’s Clearbanc. While making an appearance in the second category are David Gens of Merchant Growth, Paul Pitcher from SharpShooter Funding, Smarter Loans’ Vlad Sherbatov, and Kevin Clark from Lendified.
The criteria for the awards were based upon three tenets, these being a commitment to the “use of advanced fintech solutions” to solve challenges in the lending process, the “implementation of new or innovating lending strategies or business models,” and evidence of successful outcomes following the implementation of new fintech or a new business model.
When asked about possible expansions to the awards in the future, Schwartz was receptive to the idea of covering more ground with the prizes, saying “I definitely think we’ll expand the categories.” Mentioning that there’s a host of niches that are worth highlighting, such as blockchain, psychographic credit scoring, and credit rebuilding, which deserve their day in the sun.
“We have a mandate as a trade group to celebrate the industry,” emphasized Schwartz. And that celebration will be taking place on November 20th at the Canadian Lenders Summit in Toronto.
